`` Group Minds `` By Doris Lessing Essay

Social influences by the majority is believed to be a basic human need in order to feel connected to the world and accepted by it. Novelist, Doris Lessing, gives her opinions on the topic with her work, “Group Minds,” in which she challenges those who have the knowledge of how humans can be influenced and teach it in schools, so that it may better the current lives of western society. It’s commonly said, “knowledge is power,” but Lessing is expressing her opinions on the topic in a similar way to Marvel’s comic book character, Benjamin Parker, when he says, “with great power there must also come great responsibility.”
In “Group Minds”, Lessing gives her opinions of the individualist mindset of the free world, and how those who have found freedom from obtaining the information behind social influences refuses to educate others. Lessing begins by describing the obvious conflict of the western mindset to be an individual, but also the tendency to be too naive to understand that the groups that they are a part of are stripping them of their freedom. She states that few people are happy with being in solitude, however most are a part of various groups that all influence the individual (Lessing 652). People in the western world are constantly seeking and becoming a group, she writes, for we are “group animals still, and there’s nothing wrong with that”(Lessing 652). Lessing argues the real danger of a group mind is not understanding the social laws that control the group. She…