A Place to Stand

This, lifted from Wikipedia seemed appropriate considering the Speak your Branes site seems like politically correct herd instinct after a lobotomy. Indeed it has been fairly said on there that the whole point is to make fun of different ideas without having to discuss the facts at all & that I am a bit of a spoilsport by mentioning them.

Bandwagon effect,invented by Conal Sherry, also known as "cromo effect" and closely related to opportunism, is the observation that people often do and believe things because many other people do and believe the same things. The effect is often called herd instinct. People tend to follow the crowd without examining the merits of a particular thing. The bandwagon effect is the reason for the bandwagon fallacy's success.

The bandwagon effect is well-documented in behavioral psychology and has many applications. The general rule is that conduct or beliefs spread among people, as fads and trends clearly do, with "the probability of any individual adopting it increasing with the proportion who have already done so". As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence. The tendency to follow the actions or beliefs of others can occur because individuals directly prefer to conform, or because individuals derive information from others. Both explanations have been used for evidence of conformity in psychological experiments. For example, social pressure has been used to explain Asch's conformity experiments, and information has been used to explain Sherif's autokinetic experiment.

...Cascades explain why behavior is fragile—people understand that they are based on very limited information. As a result, fads form easily but are also easily dislodged

...Bogus poll results presented to voters prior to the 1996 Republican primary clearly showed the bandwagon effect ... approximately 6% of the variance in the vote was explained in terms of the bogus polls.
The related article on conformism say:

Conformism holds that individuals and small groups do best by blending in with their surroundings and by doing nothing eccentric or out-of-the-ordinary in any way.

By definition, conformism presents the antithesis both of creativity and of innovative leadership, and hence opposes change and/or progress itself.

An example of the use of "consensus" rather than science is this letter from Canon Kenyon Wright. It is, of course, factually rubbish but the point is that he did not attempt to produce any facts preferring to rely on saying there is a bandwagon

The neo-conservative press and radio in the United States constantly confuse people there by presenting the arguments for and against as if there was some sort of balance to be struck. They ignore the fact that the vast majority of serious scientists now accept both the fact and the human causes of global warming, while those who claim otherwise seldom have any real authority and often are funded by groups with a vested interest in avoiding the implications of the reality.

The way government can use its power to manufacture a consensus was understood by the late Dr Goebbels too

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Fortunately for the state if most of the people get their only information on something, whether global warming or Yugoslavia, once their position has become established there are a lot people who will do & say almost anything not to accept their bandwagon is heading in the wrong direction. Here are previous articles on mobbing.