Groupthink: a feature and a bug. I think the main role of human consciousness is to take data ingested through sense organs, highly filtered and collated by unconscious processes before being presented so that consciousness can create a story that guides future survival and spreading in the most resource efficient manner. The data is manipulated and imperfect, so the stories are also. Sharing stories allows us to bypass the glacial process of physical evolution, and underpins the ability to live in societies by weaving larger stories into our first person stories to create an identity within a group.

We are born needing to adapt and assimilate the stories of our caregivers to survive, and the strategy for survival might evolve stepwise from feeling an internal need, crying, getting food to feeling an internal need, sending out resumes, going through many rounds of job interviews, getting a job, and buying food. In order to make that jump, we had to weave in an awful lot of societal stories, and create shortcuts with white matter to access them quickly. If the stories present a decent strategy for survival, which gets solidified by emotions created around directionally valent internal sensations, we stick with them. The more emotion associated with a story, the harder it sticks. When societal stories start diverging too much from predicting the best survival strategies for the members of a society, the dissonance causes mental health issues and and if that happens on a large enough scale, shit starts to crumble. It's hard to create stories that bind and work for an entire planet.