The Group: Why Every Organization Becomes the Thing It Was Built to Fight
A Treatise on Cognitive Conscription and the Courage to Think Alone — Part III of The Screen Series
I. The Opening Insult
Allow me to open by saying: I intend to insult and offend EVERYONE.
Not some of you. Not the other side. Not the people you already disagree with, so you can sit back comfortably and nod along while I take shots at your ideological opponents. No. Everyone. You, specifically. Whatever group you belong to, whatever banner you march under, whatever acronym you've stitched onto your identity — I'm coming for it. And I'm coming for it not because I hate you, but because I respect you enough to tell you something that your group never will: the group does not care about you.
If that stings, good. Sit with it. We'll get to the balm, but the sting comes first.
In Part I of this series, we named the play — the screen, the mechanism by which power brokers manufacture conflict between ordinary people to advance their own agendas. In Part II, we explored the fuss itself — the yelling, the volume, the Yelling-Industrial Complex that monetizes our outrage and ensures that debate never matures into dialectic. We talked about how to stop being Scotty and Isaiah. We talked about how to stop fussing. We talked about how to lower the register so that ideas, rather than noise, could be heard.
Now, in this final installment, we have to talk about the thing that makes the screen possible in the first place. Not the power brokers. Not the media. Not the algorithms. Those are mechanisms. The thing that makes all of them work — the raw material, the fuel, the foundational infrastructure of the entire apparatus — is the Group.
The Group is where they recruit Scotty and Isaiah. The Group is where the volume gets calibrated. The Group is where your cognitive sovereignty goes to die.
I despise groups. And before you decide what kind of person that makes me, let me show you what kind of entities groups are.
II. The Universal Diagnosis
Political Parties care about power, not progress. Citizen groups care about power, not progress. Unions care about power, not progress.
And so on.
And on.
And on.
Corporations care about power, not progress. Religious institutions care about power, not progress. Advocacy organizations care about power, not progress. Professional associations care about power, not progress. Fraternal orders, alumni networks, ideological movements, fan bases, online communities — power, power, power, power, power. Not progress.
The theme is clear. And the theme is clear not because I am cynical, but because organizational dynamics are as predictable as gravity, and just as indifferent to your feelings about them.
Here is what happens to every group that has ever existed, exists now, or will ever exist. It follows a trajectory so reliable you could set your watch by it, and it goes like this:
Stage One: The Cause. A group forms around a legitimate grievance, a genuine need, a real problem that demands collective action. The founders are sincere. The energy is pure. The mission is clear. At this stage, the group is a tool — a means to an end, a vehicle for the cause. The people in the group care about the cause more than they care about the group.
Stage Two: The Structure. As the group grows, it needs infrastructure. It needs leadership, funding, communications, strategy, logistics. It needs an office. It needs a website. It needs a budget. It needs people whose full-time job is running the group. Reasonable. Necessary. And the beginning of the end.
Stage Three: The Inversion. At some point — and this point arrives with the quiet inevitability of a Tuesday — the group stops being a tool in service of the cause and becomes a cause in service of itself. The mission statement stays on the wall, but the actual operating priorities shift. The first question is no longer "How do we advance the cause?" The first question becomes "How do we sustain the group?" How do we maintain funding? How do we retain members? How do we stay relevant? How do we justify our existence for another fiscal year?
This is the inversion. And once it happens, the group's relationship with its stated mission becomes decorative rather than functional. The mission is the logo on the jersey. It's the branding. It's the story the group tells the world — and tells itself — to justify the continued accumulation and exercise of power. But the power is no longer in service of the mission. The mission is in service of the power.
Stage Four: The Conscription. This is where you come in. Because a group that exists to sustain itself needs soldiers. It needs people who will donate, who will volunteer, who will march, who will post, who will argue, who will fuss. It needs Scotty and Isaiah. And to recruit them, it needs to do one thing above all else: it needs to make you feel that the group is the cause. That to question the group is to betray the cause. That your loyalty to the organization is the same thing as your commitment to the principle.
This is cognitive conscription. And many of us have been cognitively conscripted to fight in a battle of someone else's choosing. Not a battle for the cause we believe in, but a battle for the continued power and relevance of the organization that has branded itself as the cause's sole legitimate representative.
When we step back from our emotional and financial investments in groups, we can process their manipulations for what they are, and not what they portray them to be.
III. The Hardest Case Study — And Why I Chose It
I could illustrate the dynamics of cognitive conscription with easy examples. I could talk about political parties — everyone already suspects those are corrupt. I could talk about corporations — nobody's going to fight me on the proposition that Monsanto cares more about shareholder value than about farmers. I could pick soft targets and make comfortable points, and you'd nod along and share this essay and feel very smart.
But that would make me a coward. And worse, it would make me a hypocrite — because the entire thesis of this series is that the power brokers use comfort and tribal allegiance to prevent you from thinking clearly. If I only challenge the groups you already distrust, I'm setting a screen of my own.
So let's talk about Black Lives Matter.
Let me be precise about what I mean, because the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has become one of the most semantically overloaded expressions in the English language, and precision matters when you're walking through a minefield.
There is the statement "Black lives matter" — a moral proposition that should be as uncontroversial as "water is wet." There is the movement — a broad, decentralized, multi-generational struggle for racial justice that long predates any organization and that encompasses millions of people who have never attended a meeting or paid a membership fee. And there is the organization — a specific institutional entity with leadership, structure, funding, and all the organizational dynamics I described in the previous section.
These three things are not the same. The conflation of them — the deliberate, strategic, weaponized conflation of them — is one of the most effective screens operating in American life today. And it is being run by both sides simultaneously.
IV. The Foolishness Over Which Lives Matter
Let's walk into the minefield.
The foolishness over which lives matter is perhaps the most perfectly engineered piece of cognitive conscription in modern American discourse. And I call it foolishness not because the underlying issues are foolish — they are deadly serious — but because the framing of the debate has been designed, from both directions, to ensure that no productive conversation ever occurs. The framing is the screen. The framing is the fuss. The framing is MJ's path to the hoop.
Here is how the screen works:
The person who hears that one adjective of life matters "more" than another is the goal of the power brokers. Read that carefully. The person who hears the word "Black" in "Black Lives Matter" and processes it as a comparative claim — as a statement that Black lives matter more than other lives — is not arriving at that interpretation independently. That interpretation is being fed to them. By pundits. By memes. By algorithms. By the entire machinery of the fuss that we've spent two essays dissecting.
"Black Lives Matter" is, grammatically and logically, a statement of emphasis, not exclusivity. It is the rhetorical equivalent of saying "Save the Rainforests" — a statement that does not imply "and burn every other forest." It is the equivalent of a doctor running into a waiting room and saying "This patient needs help" — a statement that does not imply that no other patients matter. It is a statement of triage, of priority, of urgent focus on the part of the body that is currently bleeding.
But the power brokers don't want you to hear it that way. They want you to hear it as a ranking. Because a ranking creates a competition. And a competition creates a fuss. And a fuss creates a screen. And a screen lets MJ score.
Now — and here is where I offend the other side of the room — could the originators of this organization have used more persuasive, rather than antagonistic, terms for the movement? Absolutely. The principles of Part II of this series apply here with full force. If the goal is persuasion — if the goal is to change minds, to build coalitions, to move the needle — then the register matters. The framing matters. And a framing that requires a footnote to explain what it doesn't mean is a framing that has handed the opposition a weapon.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a strategic observation. And it is one that the movement's own evolution has ratified, as we'll discuss shortly. The point is not that the founders were wrong to be angry. The point is that anger, however righteous, is not a communication strategy. It is an emotion. And emotions, untempered by strategic thinking, are the raw material of the screen.
Could those opposing them think before they criticize? They absolutely can and should. The reflexive leap from "Black Lives Matter" to "they think they're better than us" is not a thought. It is a reaction. It is the amygdala firing, not the prefrontal cortex processing. And it is exactly the reaction the power brokers need, because once you're reacting, you're not thinking, and once you're not thinking, you're fussing, and once you're fussing, MJ is halfway to the hoop.
Both sides of this particular fuss have been conscripted. Both sides are fighting a battle that serves the power brokers more than it serves either side's stated values. Both sides have allowed the organizational framing to override the moral substance. And both sides would benefit enormously from lowering their registers and asking a simple question: "Wait — what do we actually want here?"
Because what both sides actually want, if you strip away the jerseys and the slogans and the organizational branding, is remarkably similar: a society in which the circumstances of your birth do not determine the arc of your life. That's it. That's the common ground. It was always there. But you can't see it through the screen.
V. The Maturation — And What It Teaches
Now here is where I give grace, because grace is owed.
The Black Lives Matter organization has been transformed in the same manner as the great Revolutions of the past: from the inside.
This is a crucial point, and it is one that both the organization's defenders and its critics tend to overlook, for opposite reasons.
The defenders don't want to acknowledge that transformation was needed, because acknowledging it means admitting that the earlier version was flawed. The critics don't want to acknowledge that transformation occurred, because acknowledging it means updating their position, and updating a position requires the kind of intellectual honesty that the Yelling-Industrial Complex actively punishes.
But the transformation happened. And it happened in a way that is both historically predictable and genuinely admirable.
Every major social movement in history has followed the same arc: ignition, radicalization, internal conflict, maturation. The American Revolution began with pamphleteers and ended with a constitutional convention. The labor movement began with wildcat strikes and ended with collective bargaining frameworks. The civil rights movement began with bus boycotts and ended with legislation. In each case, the agitators who lit the fire were eventually succeeded — sometimes willingly, sometimes not — by the builders who shaped the flame into something sustainable.
This is not a criticism of the agitators. The fire needed to be lit. The grievance was real. The urgency was real. The anger was real. But fire, left unstructured, consumes the house it was trying to illuminate. The agitators do the necessary work of saying "this is intolerable." The builders do the necessary work of saying "here is what we build instead."
For the most part, the agitators that sought division within the Black Lives Matter organization are gone and have been replaced by seekers of change. People who understand that lasting transformation requires coalition, not confrontation. People who have learned — through trial, through error, through the hard education that only organizational growing pains can provide — that the soft register is more powerful than the loud one. People who have matured from yelling to speaking, from debating to engaging in dialectic, from screening to building.
I'm sure to have offended many with that. But hush, child. The truth will set you free.
And the truth is this: the ability of an organization to recognize its own failures, to evolve beyond its founding excesses, to replace its agitators with its builders — this is not a weakness. It is the single rarest and most valuable thing an organization can do. Most groups never manage it. Most groups calcify around their founding energy, defending their original posture long past the point of strategic relevance, because the cognitive conscription of their members won't permit self-criticism. The members have fused their identity with the group, and so the group's evolution feels like a personal betrayal.
The fact that BLM has undergone this transformation — imperfectly, incompletely, but genuinely — is something that both its supporters and its critics should study carefully. Supporters should study it because it demonstrates that loyalty to the cause and loyalty to the organization are not the same thing, and that the cause is better served by an organization willing to shed its earlier skin. Critics should study it because it demolishes the lazy narrative that the organization is forever defined by its most provocative moments, and it demands the intellectual honesty of engaging with what the organization is now, not what it was then.
VI. The Other Offenses — All Lives Matter and the Meme Trap
Let's offend the other side of the room now. Equal-opportunity offense, as promised.
Those hearing "Black Lives Matter" and reflexively shushing the speaker with "All Lives Matter" — you are being manipulated with memes and false syllogisms.
Let me be specific about how.
"All Lives Matter" is, on its surface, an unimpeachable moral statement. Of course all lives matter. No sane person disputes this. And that is precisely what makes it such an effective weapon — not an effective argument, mind you, but an effective weapon. There is a difference. An argument engages with the substance of the opposing position. A weapon neutralizes the opposing position without engaging with it. "All Lives Matter" is a weapon disguised as an argument.
Here is the false syllogism, laid bare:
Premise 1: All lives matter. (True.) Premise 2: "Black Lives Matter" implies that only Black lives matter. (False.) Conclusion: Therefore, "Black Lives Matter" is a statement of supremacy that must be corrected. (Invalid.)
The entire logical structure collapses at Premise 2, which is a misreading so fundamental that it can only be sustained by one of two conditions: genuine misunderstanding, or deliberate distortion. And after years of the phrase being explained, contextualized, analogized, memed, debated, and dissected in every conceivable forum, the "genuine misunderstanding" explanation has worn thin. What remains is deliberate distortion — or, more charitably, the kind of willful non-engagement that happens when your team's talking points have become more real to you than the words coming out of the other person's mouth.
This is the meme trap. A meme, in the Dawkinsian sense, is a unit of cultural information that replicates itself through imitation. "All Lives Matter" is a meme — not in the internet-joke sense, but in the original sense: a self-replicating idea that spreads because it is catchy, because it is emotionally satisfying, and because it provides its host with a feeling of moral righteousness that is more rewarding than the cognitive effort of actually engaging with the opposing position.
When you say "All Lives Matter" in response to "Black Lives Matter," you are not making an argument. You are running a meme. You are executing a line of code that was written for you by someone else and installed in your cognitive operating system through repetition. You feel like you're thinking. You're not. You're processing. There is a difference.
And the people who wrote that code? The pundits, the politicians, the social media strategists who packaged "All Lives Matter" as a response? They don't care about all lives. They care about the screen. They care about keeping Scotty and Isaiah fussing. They care about ensuring that the conversation about racial justice never matures beyond the slogan stage, because a mature conversation about racial justice would require examining systems and structures and power dynamics that the power brokers have a vested interest in keeping invisible.
VII. The Uncomfortable Truth — You Are ALL Wrong
Truth be told, you are ALL wrong.
Not half of you. Not the other side. All of you. Everyone who has reduced the most profound moral question of our time — the question of whose suffering we attend to and how — to a battle between three-word slogans. Everyone who has allowed organizational branding to substitute for moral reasoning. Everyone who has chosen a team in a game that was designed so that the only winner is the person who isn't playing.
You're wrong because you've accepted the frame. You've accepted that this is a competition between "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter," and you've picked your side, and you're fussing, and meanwhile — meanwhile — MJ is driving to the hoop.
Here is what neither slogan captures, and what both sides would understand if they lowered their registers long enough to hear each other:
Life matters.
Not as a slogan. Not as a bumper sticker. Not as a clever reframe designed to split the difference and make everyone feel included. As a foundational, non-negotiable, axiomatic moral principle from which all policy, all advocacy, all collective action should derive.
Life matters. Human life matters. Animal life matters. Every form of sentient existence that draws breath or grows toward light or navigates this improbable cosmos on whatever terms it was given — it matters. Not because a group told you so. Not because an organization branded it. Because it is the bedrock truth beneath all other truths, and if you need a three-word slogan to remind you of it, something has gone very wrong with your moral architecture.
But — and here is where the principle meets the practice, where the philosophy meets the pavement — the lives that need help THE MOST RIGHT NOW are the ones requiring our laser-focus.
This is not a contradiction. This is triage. This is the doctor in the emergency room who treats the patient who is bleeding out before she treats the patient with a broken finger. Not because the broken finger doesn't matter. Not because the broken finger's pain is invalid. But because triage demands prioritization, and prioritization demands the courage to say: this, here, now, is where the bleeding is.
And if you cannot look at the data — the incarceration rates, the wealth gaps, the health outcomes, the educational disparities, the use-of-force statistics, the housing discrimination, the lending discrimination, the employment discrimination, the environmental racism, the maternal mortality rates — if you cannot look at that data and identify where the bleeding is, then your slogan, whichever one it is, is not a moral position. It is a costume. It is the jersey of a team that you wear to feel like you're in the game while the power brokers score.
VIII. The Group Problem — Revisited
Let's return to the thesis, because the BLM case study is not the point. It is the illustration. The point is the Group, and the Group's relationship with the individual human beings it claims to serve.
Here is the deepest, most uncomfortable truth this essay has to offer, and I need you to hear it at the softest possible register, because it is going to feel like an attack on something you hold dear:
No group has ever loved you.
Your political party does not love you. It needs your vote. Your union does not love you. It needs your dues. Your advocacy organization does not love you. It needs your donation. Your social media tribe does not love you. It needs your engagement. Every group you have ever belonged to has valued you precisely to the extent that you are useful to the group's continued existence, and not one inch further.
This is not because the people in these groups are bad people. Many of them are wonderful people. Many of them care deeply, personally, genuinely about the causes they serve. But the group is not the people. The group is the structure. And structures do not love. Structures optimize. They optimize for survival, for growth, for power, for relevance. And they will optimize right over the top of you the moment your individual interests diverge from the group's institutional interests.
This is why cognitive conscription is possible. Because the group has convinced you that your interests and its interests are identical. That what's good for the group is good for you. That your loyalty to the group is the purest expression of your commitment to the cause. And as long as you believe this, you will march when the group says march, donate when the group says donate, fuss when the group says fuss, and never once ask the question that the group cannot survive: "Is this actually working? Not for the group. For the cause."
The cause is not the group. The cause existed before the group, and it will exist after the group dissolves or transforms or implodes under the weight of its own organizational inertia. The cause is bigger than any group. The cause is bigger than any slogan. The cause is the thing that made you care in the first place, before the group got its hands on your caring and shaped it into something useful for the group's purposes.
And the cause — every cause, every legitimate grievance, every genuine moral imperative — is better served by individuals who think clearly than by groups that think collectively. Because collective thinking is not thinking at all. It is consensus. And consensus is not the product of rigorous inquiry; it is the product of social pressure, emotional contagion, and the very human desire to belong.
IX. The Individual as the Unit of Change
If groups inevitably become self-serving, and if cognitive conscription is the mechanism by which groups maintain their power, then what is the alternative? Isolation? Disengagement? Every person for themselves?
No. The alternative is something much harder and much more powerful: voluntary, temporary, purpose-driven collaboration between sovereign individuals.
Let me unpack that, because every word matters.
Voluntary: You choose to participate. Not because you were born into it, not because your identity demands it, not because the social cost of leaving is too high. Because you evaluated the collaboration on its merits and decided, with your own mind, that it serves the cause you care about.
Temporary: You participate for as long as the collaboration serves the cause, and you leave when it doesn't. No guilt. No accusations of betrayal. No identity crisis. You are not the group. The group is a tool. When the tool stops working, you put it down and pick up a different one.
Purpose-driven: The collaboration exists to accomplish something specific. Not to perpetuate itself. Not to grow its membership. Not to build an empire. To solve a problem. And when the problem is solved — or when the collaboration's approach to the problem has proven ineffective — it dissolves, and the individuals who composed it are free to form new collaborations around new approaches.
Between sovereign individuals: People who have not been cognitively conscripted. People who retain the right to question, to dissent, to disagree with the group without being branded as traitors. People who understand that their loyalty is to the cause, not to the organization, and who are prepared to hold the organization accountable to the cause even when the organization would prefer not to be held accountable.
This is what the great Revolutions looked like at their best. Not the institutionalized phase — the ignition phase. The phase where individuals who cared about something came together, accomplished something, and then dispersed back into their lives, carrying the change with them. The problem is not collaboration. The problem is permanent collaboration — the group that outlives its purpose and becomes its own purpose.
X. The Laser-Focus
We've been in the weeds. Let's come back to the surface. Let's come back to the thing that actually matters, the thing that got lost in the fussing and the yelling and the group dynamics and the organizational politics and the slogan wars:
People are suffering. Right now. Today. Not in the abstract. Not as a talking point. Not as a fundraising appeal. Actual human beings, and actual living creatures, are experiencing actual suffering that could be reduced by actual action.
And the question — the only question that matters, the question that cuts through every screen and every slogan and every organizational agenda — is: Where is the bleeding?
Not "whose team identified the bleeding first." Not "which group gets credit for bandaging the wound." Not "what do we call the patient." Where is the bleeding, and how do we stop it?
The lives that need help the most right now are the ones requiring our laser-focus. This is not a political statement. It is a medical one. Triage is not ideology; it is the most rational, most compassionate, most effective framework for allocating limited resources in the face of unlimited need.
And triage requires something that no group will ever ask of you, because it threatens the group's existence: triage requires that you look at the evidence with your own eyes, evaluate it with your own mind, and direct your energy where it is needed most — not where the group tells you it's needed, not where the slogan points, not where the algorithm leads, but where the actual, documented, verifiable suffering is greatest.
Sometimes that will align with your group's priorities. Sometimes it won't. And the willingness to follow the evidence even when it diverges from the group's narrative — that willingness is the difference between a conscript and a sovereign individual. Between Scotty running someone else's play and a person who has stopped fussing long enough to look at the scoreboard and ask: "Who's actually winning this game, and is it any of us?"
XI. The Synthesis — Bringing the Series Home
In Part I, we named the play: the screen. The manufactured conflict between ordinary people that allows power brokers to legislate, consolidate, and score unopposed. We learned to ask: Is subterfuge present? If yes, you are being screened.
In Part II, we addressed the fuss: the yelling. The industrialized outrage that ensures debate never becomes dialectic. We learned to lower our register, to speak softly, to create the conditions for hearing and being heard. We learned that the softest voice in the room is the one the room will strain to hear.
Here in Part III, we've confronted the machinery of conscription itself: the Group. The entity that recruits Scotty and Isaiah, assigns them their positions, tells them who to fight, and calls it a cause. We've learned that the group is not the cause, the cause is not the group, and your loyalty belongs to the principle, not the organization.
And now, standing at the end of this series, let me offer a synthesis — a single framework that weaves all three threads together:
The power brokers set the screen. The media amplifies the fuss. The groups conscript the soldiers. And the individual — the thinking, sovereign, uncaptured individual — is the only force in the entire system capable of breaking the cycle.
Not the individual acting alone. The individual thinking alone. There is a difference. You can collaborate without being conscripted. You can join a cause without joining a group. You can fight for justice without wearing a jersey. You can care deeply about Black lives, about all lives, about life itself, without reducing that care to a slogan that someone else wrote for purposes that may not align with your own.
The screen only works if Scotty and Isaiah agree to fuss. The yelling only continues if both parties keep their registers high. The group only has power if you give it your cognitive sovereignty.
Refuse all three.
See the screen. Lower your register. Think for yourself. And then — only then, with clear eyes and a quiet voice and a mind that belongs to you and not to any organization — look at the world and ask: where is the bleeding?
Go there.
Not because a group told you to. Because you saw it yourself.
XII. The Final Word
I promised at the top of this essay that I would insult and offend everyone. I hope I have delivered. I hope the people who champion BLM are uncomfortable with my analysis of the organization's early framing. I hope the people who champion All Lives Matter are uncomfortable with my dissection of their false syllogism. I hope the partisans on both sides are uncomfortable with the suggestion that their group does not love them. I hope everyone is uncomfortable.
Because comfort is the screen's greatest ally. Comfort is what keeps you in your seat at the arena, wearing the jersey, cheering for a team that doesn't know your name. Comfort is what keeps you fussing with Isaiah while MJ scores. Comfort is what keeps your register high and your thinking low and your cognitive sovereignty in someone else's pocket.
Discomfort is where growth happens. Discomfort is where the screen becomes visible. Discomfort is where the yelling starts to sound foolish. Discomfort is where the group's grip loosens and the individual's vision clears.
I didn't write this series to make you agree with me. I wrote it to make you uncomfortable enough to think. If you've read all three parts and you're angry at me, that's fine — as long as the anger is yours and not borrowed from a group. If you've read all three parts and you disagree with me, that's better — as long as the disagreement is the product of your own reasoning and not a reflex installed by a pundit. If you've read all three parts and you want to argue, that's best of all — as long as you're willing to do it at a low register, with your own mind, outside the screen, in the spirit of dialectic rather than debate.
Life matters. All of it. And the part of it that is bleeding the most is the part that deserves your attention the most. Not your group's attention. Not your party's attention. Not your slogan's attention.
Yours.
Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge. Were the game fair, they would not need the screen. Were the truth on their side, they would not need the volume. Were the cause their real concern, they would not need the group.
Stop being conscripted. Start being sovereign.
Stop grouping. Start thinking.
F. Tronboll III
Share