[threads2]

This reminds me of a part of In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck where Doc Burton talks about large groups, the "group-man".

> ...they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn't himself at all; he's a cell in an organism that isn't like him any more than the cells in your body are like you. People have said, 'mobs are crazy, you can't tell what they'll do.' Why don't people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.

... when group-man wants to move, he makes a standard. 'God wills that we recapture the Holy-Land'; or he says, 'We fight to make the world safe for democracy' ... But the group doesn't care about the Holy Land, or Democracy ... Maybe the group simply wants to move, to fight, and uses these words simply to reassure the brains of individual men. ... You might be an effect as well as a cause, Mac.