Why Your Group Isn't as Healthy as You Think it Is

Audit your group before someone else exploits it.

I woke up this morning to find that The Shepard Scale is #64 in Education here on Substack, and rising! Thank you to all of the readers, subscribers (and yes, even the detractors) for making that possible. Now, on to today’s content.

---

Your group feels tight-knit, principled, and aligned. You’ve been a reader here for a while, and you’ve incorporated some of the doctrine. Not all of it, because you didn’t need all of it, but you picked out the stuff that applied. The group is pretty solid on the brotherhood aspect, and you have trust in your members.

Why do you still struggle to feel like you’re making a difference?

Why do you still feel stuck?

The answer is that cohesion is not health, and lack of conflict doesn’t mean functionality.

Most activists and militias tend to mistake comfort and familiarity for operational integrity. In reality, dysfunction can camouflage itself in the very language of consensus.

Sabotage isn’t always something done with malice or premeditation. It’s often built into the structure of the group with the best of intent. All it requires is for a group to ignore hard truths or cherry-pick pieces of doctrine they like or agree with, while discarding the parts that feel uncomfortable.

The 4 Silent Signals of Dysfunction

When your group is ‘getting along,’ everyone is agreeable, and everything seems great, these red flags are almost invisible. The problem is that they’re just as corrosive as open infighting.

1. Consensus Fatigue Everyone agrees publicly, but conversations are filled with caveats, hesitations, or private pushback. It’s called “social masking,” and Janis’ work on groupthink identified this as a feature: self-censorship paired with the illusion of unanimous agreement.

2. Rotating Scapegoats There’s always a “difficult” member in the hot seat. One leaves, another takes their place. Dysfunction is projected onto individuals so the system never gets questioned. Janis talks about this too.

3. Ideological Echo Chambers Dissent is allowed until it threatens someone’s unprocessed trauma or status within the group. Moussaïd’s work on peer pressure and social influence shows that perceived agreement often overrides accuracy. In other words, “If you agree with me, we’re good to go.”

4. Safety Culture as Control "Creating a safe space" becomes a tool to suppress disagreement or urgency. Emotional safety is weaponized to halt accountability.

That’s a textbook Orientation failure; you don’t see what is, because you’re blinded by what you insist on believing.

The Psychology of Group Self-Deception

Human systems tend toward equilibrium, even if the perceived balance is dysfunctional. In a resistance environment, group identity and survival often override honest feedback. As a result of the distorted priorities, the group will start filtering out inconvenient or uncomfortable data. Boyd called that a collapse in Orientation.

Orientation isn’t just one step in a loop. It’s the entire operating system that you use to interpret everything, and it should be continually being refined and grown—not just as you get more information, but as you grow in emotional and psychological maturity. If you’re not growing, or if your Orientation is corrupted through trauma, ideology, or fear, your decisions become reactions.

That means you will always be behind, and will usually be wrong.

In a group that’s using unmet psychological and emotional needs through participation, you get a group organized around emotional management rather than the success of your goals.

We saw this in the AP3 case study, as well as the Lightfoot Militia. In both cases, there is evidence of individual identity being tied to emotional validation and personal meaning. This breeds a dysfunction that is mischaracterized as loyalty; what is perceived as a good and positive thing is actually sabotage in disguise.

Dysfunction Profile Types

As we’ve discussed, dysfunction doesn’t have to be malicious; in fact, it’s often done with no understanding that it’s even happening. These types are often found in incredibly sincere people who truly believe they are doing good things. Without realizing it, however, they’re destroying group cohesion.

• The Trauma Translator – Uses therapeutic language to deflect accountability for their actions (such as using ADHD to excuse being flaky or sloppy, or blaming trauma for inability to perform).

• The Consensus Dictator – Frames control as collective agreement.

• The Integrity Martyr – Threatens to quit unless ideological purity is upheld. People who have concerns are framed as problem children who pose a threat.

• The Emotional Floodgate – Derails focus through uncontained emotion and the need for others to constantly manage their reactions. While this might conjure up images of overly emotional females, in resistance groups it often manifests in males with anger and impulse control issues. Do you have a hothead in your group that you’ve been covering for? That’s this guy.

These roles align with what Janis described as mindguards, self-censorship, and rationalization. Those are all defense mechanisms meant to protect the group’s dysfunction.

The Strategic Cost of Avoidance

Whether we choose to be honest about it or not, dysfunction is a form of strategic vulnerability. Groups that ignore the patterns collapse long before some fed comes along to infiltrate them.

In terms of Boyd’s OODA loop, dysfunctional groups never get to an effective Act point, because they’re constantly misinterpreting the world. Essentially, corrupted Orientation means everything that comes after it is also corrupted, ineffective, or simply doesn’t happen at all.

Premium Content: The Group Culture Audit

This 15-question audit will help you:

• Identify red flags in your decision-making, emotional regulation, and leadership patterns.

• Spot the presence of profile types.

• Assess your group integrity

• Generate a map to get out of the dysfunction

These questions will find the dysfunction so that you can get it fixed. Do you want to know if your group can survive external pressure? See if it can survive internal auditing first.