The group, or the collective, is the breeding-ground of inanity. Ideas, art, beauty - they are all negated by the lowest common-denominator, the standard around which the group transfixes itself. Words ravish each other before they're spoken. It is the burden of those who think, those for whom life is a dour springboard for the wonder of thought, rather than a wonderful thought bound by dour preservation, to carry; to be forever gagged by the cackle of ignorance and desperation and to be accused, in many quarters, of medicority for stubbornly refusing to submit to it.

Is it not true that a group contradicts its own noise? For all the natter, one cannot hear a single word. Such is our need to be heard in the herd that we abandon thought to the abyss, cast off any semblance of logic and toss words at each other like tomatoes at the Tomatina. We lock ourselves up in our own little festival of forced conversation, of stinking beer breath and sore throats.

We truly are the most absurd species to have ever insulted this planet with its presence. Some would blame Catholicism, but I would go further and suggest that our entire evolutionary process, that apparently beautiful, logical series of steps which led us from caves to bedsits has bestowed upon us a sort of gag reflex, a sense of shame in our own sensibility which causes us to behave more irrationally than any 'animal'. We are petrified of thought and will go to the most obscene lengths to avoid its glare. Rather than form connections with each other, we dilute the fabric of our co-existence with...each other. No authority, no oppressive government, no tyrannical monarch, has ever forced its citizens to huddle together in places where they cannot hear each other in order to express joy. Nobody ever told us we were not allowed to be social animals anymore. We simply convinced ourselves that we evolved out of it.

We evolved the 'group'. The group knaws away at thought in that its exclusivity is self-perpetuating. Contributions must be made to it in order to guarantee an individual's presence; to ignore the concept of the group, to behave as though it were not there, is tantamount to treason. It is, essentially, a horrific form of Communism in which need can be substituted for kinship, shouting for talking, speaking for listening, prose for poetry. In the group, the purpose of speech becomes to take, rather than to give, as the frenetic need for self-preservation becomes all-consuming and individuals realise their value is exceeded by their place within the group. The group is what is wrong with all ideology.

Such is our burning shame and fear of thought that we will undergo the most frightfully dull social procedures in order to avoid it. Drugs and, ultimately, mobile phones, were invented in order to make our sense of timing, our delivery of speech and our style of listening so impeccable that all but the most rigid of group members ultimately drop out.

Result: where once the great seducer was Byron, we now have the man of patience. The man of patience will behave impeccably. He will contribute to the group and he will sip his drink at the most opportune of moments. He will, of course, be endowed with a heroic capacity to engage the group as a whole, as well as its individual members, on a variety of levels, predominantly those generic ones which are acceptable to almost anybody. The man of patience will have no virtues as virtue, in the group, expresses invidiuality without individuality itself becoming a chief concern; it marks the individual out as a threat to the stability of the group. No, the man of patience will be bland. The blank canvas of modernity: everyman. The hero of Eliot, of Joyce, and of the greatest romantic comedies. Dour as dishwater.

Result: where once the great leader will have been a master of oratory, an individual with aura, presence and, crucially, thought, the leader of the group is precisely the opposite: mundaneity. And before the socialists get angry, I am not attempting to suggest that we, as humans, function better when lead; I am suggesting that the group leads itself - not as Marx may have had it. No self-determinism. No freedom. No. The group is personified by the everyman alluded to above. The will of the everyman represents no individual member of the group. It is simply the compromise each individual member accepts as the replacement for true thought.

Were we able to think, we would speak much less. Were we to speak less, we would love more.