When I think I am at risk of being attacked, I sometimes want to forefend the attack by imposing a rule.
In attempting to impose the rule, I am making the attack ‘real’ in my perception, even if it hasn’t happened. The fact it has not happened or may not happen then becomes irrelevant: once it’s real in perception, the facts cease to matter.
Almost every ‘idea’ in a business meeting or group conscience meeting is an attempt to control others’ behaviour in the group, because that behaviour is seen as hostile. Even the having of the ‘idea’ makes such fancied attacks ‘real’: the idea is predicated on the supposed reality of the attack. Group psychology can thus mirror individual psychology.
Cue the endless expansion of meeting scripts with little directions, admonitions, warnings, chidings, notices of what is ‘not acceptable’ to the group, the escalating tree-diagram of sanctions that follow disobedience, the little yellow, white, and blue cards telling us what to think, say, and do, even beyond the hour of the meeting, repeated endlessly on the assumption that we are too stupid, rebellious, or malevolent to digest and assimilate the idea in any effective or lasting way.
The psychology of imagined vulnerability, surveillance of others, paranoia, and efforts to control thus migrates from the individual to the group, and the group becomes an oppressive entity.
The attempts to make the meeting a ‘safe space’ are the very thing that turn the space into a venue for surveillance, monitoring, and group-authorised ‘calling-out’, intervention, reporting to intergroup, involvement of the police or other authorities, and other control measures.
The attempts to produce safety produce the opposite. All defences create that which they seek to defend against.