Belonging to groups

It seems that a fundamental human desire is to belong to groups. My mother is always advising me to join societies or clubs; I may socialise she says. If I join a club I always tell her it is to engage in the activity of the club from which socialisation may or may not arise; joining a club just to be part of a group seems absurd. But, maybe she is right; humans have a deep need to belong to groups so it seems.

In politics we take sides. I always thought politics was based upon policy: but when you meet life long Conservative Party members you realise it is group based rather than policy based. If the Conservatives have absurd policies, the members would rather change the party policy than support an alternative party with those policies. So much for the "vote".

It seems that groups exist as much for their own sake as for the purposes that they were created. This had certainly occurred in the company I last worked for. The company made (and tried to design) medical coatings. You would have thought that decisions in the company would be to that end. Not so. More and more desicions were made as a means of defining the role of management. Whether the decisions were good was of no interest, just that they were made and became effective. I doubt after considerable examing of the process over the years that this is a rarity of the bosses there. It seems deeper.

While the police may have been designed to protect the interests of the ruling classes, and gradually expanded to try and become a group acceptable by "all" people (except those who disagree with the ruling classes), one can see that even in a completely good society the police might become officious or antagonistic on occasion simply to feel their own presence. Without crimes to solve and people to arrest the integrity of the group of people who call themselves police would weaken.

Just linking to the post 2 ago on rules: when a child says they want to be a Policeman do they really know what that entails when the decide? Or are they interested in the uniform and the membership of the group? I don't know just a question.

I first became aware of this in a temple. While there was a clear manifesto and reason for the temple's creation it became more and more obvious that membership of the temple was more important than what it did. I imagine this is common. How many Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Conservatives, Labour etc really have any idea what they are doing. I called myself Buddhist for a while and I don't so that is 1 at least.

Is human group membership really this important to life. Human society is without question this I grant, but is membership? My argument regarding this is that the harder it is to enter a group the more it means, and the more it means to not be a member. Like being rejected from an exclusive night club we only want to get in more. However once in we realise it is just a night club like any other and the only thing special about it is that the other people had to get in as well. How self-generating. Thus exclusivity becomes its own attraction in the end and you get a speculative bubble like the stock markets - but there is nothing there just speculation.

One of the biggest clubs of all is not exclusive at all and so most people don't even notice it: it is the club called Humanity. We are all members already. Given that everyone belongs to this club already why do we need to join any others? Is membership of 10 exclusive clubs better than 1 to which everyone joins?

You decide, but membership to me is a name for nothing, and the more time spent preparing omeself for memberships the more time is wasted. And to add insult to injury if we join a club for memberships sake we had better hope that no-one else has done so because otherwise the people we meet would be equally misguided.