Hive mind

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown Umenhofer’s whale-flattened Regency 98 In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

The theory of consciousness that asserts that a new personality emerges from the networked personalities of those in the organisation.

So, for example, the idea of displaying, in foot-high letters, “WINNING MINDSET” over the entrance to the ground floor lift lobby by way of clumsy neuro-linguistic programming of your worker-bees as they roll up for their daily toil is not a decision traceable to any particular individual (this is not to say that a single individual could not be so brazenly stupid, but that such a person wouldn’t admit to it without at least the diffusionary butt-covering afforded by the circle of escalation).

Rather, this springs fully formed out of the higher consciousness of the hive mind.

The exploding whale

Or, for a more distant example, the celebrated exploding whale of Lane County, Oregon, from 1970 — check it out for yourself .

What is most amazing here is not that onlookers, held behind barriers a quarter of a mile away, had to run for their lives while brick-sized lumps of stinking, fetid, whale flesh rained down on them from from the sky, but that no-one — not the highways authority, not the project manager, not the forklift driver, not the reporter, not the film crew, not the gelignite vendor, not the hundreds and hundreds of spectators — not a single one of them asked that most basic of questions: “you are proposing to detonate a rotting sperm whale with half a ton of dynamite. Have you completely lost your mind?”

Actually, one had, and this is where the irony gets positively Homeric. A certain Walter Umenhofer, a military veteran with explosives training who happened to be in the area to take advantage of a “Get a Whale of a Deal” promotion in a nearby car dealership, warned the crew that half a ton of dynamite was far too much. Umenhofer suggested 4 kg would be enough. His advice went unheeded.

Miraculously no-one was hurt during the blast. There was just one casualty: a brand new Oldsmobile Regency 98, flattened by a hunk of blubber the size of a truck tyre. It was Umenhofer’s new car. A whale of a deal, indeed.

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