There is no group. Not in the material sense. There is only the tendency to see abstractions as realities.
Yet the behaviors we must modify are the ones that generate attitudes toward an individual as an expressive part of a whole, even while the whole is a fantasy. "Group" is a meme.
When we walk down the street and approach a group of teenagers (a group that doesn't exist; they're all different) and they appear to be black (a group that doesn't exist) we might move to the other side of the street, unless our group (that doesn't exist) seems to be stronger (which exists only because we make it exist).
These tribal memes, living in our socially knit, but separate brains, manipulate us to the point that Muslim, Jew, Black, Fundamentalist, Old, Young memes overshadow our possible positive relations with individuals.
Hop the fold, each ONE of you...
When I talk about society (meme) and where I want it to go, and what I want it to stop doing (meme action), I am giving life and substance to a tendency for my mind to see things that aren't there.
There is a "group spot" in the brain, that constantly assesses collections for similarities. It doesn't seem to matter what elements are, the collection attains, eventually, the same sense of reality that concrete objects do. Then we treat these recently concretized collections as real objects, with characteristics, even though the characteristics might not exist.
It's been a useful tool, in some cases, to survive as gene carriers, but now we are being threatened by our tendency to group things, unaware that the negative outflow from that habit can destroy us as a species. I won't get into the effects on the planet.
Karl Popper, in his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, goes back to Plato and Socrates to show how this works. Poppers scorns Plato because Plato takes the side of the collective against Socrates' pristine individualism, even distorting Socrates' views to support Plato's own opinion on the ideal society.
An interesting read, because Popper decided to write the book in 1938, when fascism (a modern collectivism) was being hotly debated, and Austria had just been invaded. Popper finished the book in 1943, and revised it as late as 1965, a turbulent period in social philosophy, what structure a state should take, and the place and moral actions of an individual in it.
My recent insight came after rereading the book, and striving to find a synthesis of all the well-meant advocacies here, from anarchist to collectivist, along the lines from "no loyalty" to "family loyalty" to "constitutional loyalty."
All seem to be talking about the same thing: how should a person divide their emotional links among the various groups they tend to align themselves with?
Should ALL the loyalties align with one "group" (remembering the meme above) or is it possible to parcel them out without generating such an effort of compartmentalization or cognitive dissonance that the personality takes permanent damage or fails completely.
We are told to have loyalty to family (which is really a socially conditioned loyalty to similars), loyalty to groups we've been initiated into through acquaintance, (play, school, and teen peers, marriage, sexual play or even just orientation, work, hobbies) or groups we discover through intellectual resonance, (politics, religion)
Each has its way of working through our mind modules, conditioning us through chemical addictions to endorphins.
We decide all our rationalizations this way, unless we are adept at waylaying the memes as they modify our behavior. And that's where we switch now from analysis to action.
Very often here at DailyKos a discussion will coalesce around the idea that the only way humans are going to survive as a species is if we can change our reactions to our instincts. I strongly agree with this idea.
I'd like to point out what works against that solution in everyday life: our unawareness of what those reactions to instincts look like in conversation.
How often has someone plaintively posted a meta diary bemoaning the lack of civility in discussion, and how we will never solve anything if discussion turns to fighting? And then the comments chime in with all sorts of practical kumbaya about how to post, and the next day, or maybe later in the comments, the wars start again.
Here's my simple suggestion, after all that groundwork: stop presuming that a person is a member of a group. Presume instead that the person is just like you, one individual making their way slowly through endless thickets of confusion, sometimes helped and sometimes confused further by the calls and messages they get from other individuals working their way through the swamp of memes bequeathed to us by thousands of years of family, tribal, national, racial, cultural, religious and scientific interaction.
It's a wonder we can talk at all. It's easier if each person is just that, a fellow traveler on the road of life. And that's a group meme, too.
For an enlightening and tricky book on the subject of memes, and our complete subjugation to them, "The Meme Machine" by Susan Blackmore.