“Always remember that you’re unique, just like everyone else,” said Brother Patricius, my high school religion teacher.

The paradox inherent in what he said didn’t dawn on me until much later. I think he was waiting for one of us to pick up on it, but as far as I know, nobody did.

He was right, of course, on both counts. Each of us is special in some way, even when we’re all together. To the extent we preserve and exercise our exceptional individuality, we benefit the group. There really is strength in diversity – diversity of thought and ideas, not skin color, gender or ethnicity. A group of people who look different from one another is not diverse if they all think alike.

Americans codified our individual rights into law, and we guard them jealously. One of those, “freedom of speech and of the press,” we exercise regularly, so it stays vital. That, together with our fierce individuality, makes our country unusually strong – the strongest the world has ever known. We’re powerful because each of us can think for ourself, and we can communicate with one another, too, whenever we wish.

I’m reminded lately of the first time I became aware of this special American characteristic as the federal government prepares to ship high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Back in 1987, Maine was considered as a site along with Nevada. The Department of Energy notified towns from Lovell to Westbrook that granite bedrock beneath us was a good place to “dispose of” the nation’s spent-fuel rods from nuclear power plants.

As a selectman in Lovell, I scanned the voluminous material the DOE sent as best I could, and then attended a hastily called meeting at Lake Region High School in Naples. Ordinary citizens lined up behind microphones in the aisles to comment and offer insight. Some had nuclear training in the military and were willing to translate technical DOE jargon into language everyone could understand. Others reasoned that the “batholith” – the 1,500-foot-thick slab of granite the DOE considered solid – was, in fact, filled with cracks. Well drillers lined up to comment on how they’d bored into it many times and found fissures through which water flowed. The community spontaneously mobilized and after just a few months, it was all over – the DOE decided to look elsewhere. The collective wisdom of ordinary people in southern Maine was daunting.

“The Wisdom of Crowds,” a book published last year by James Surowiecki argues that a given group of considered experts in a particular field doesn’t know as much as a larger crowd of ordinary, seemingly unremarkable people. The key is that the larger crowd must be comprised of at least some independent thinkers. And they should have only occasional contact with one another. Counterintuitively, Surowiecki even argues that groups are made smarter when they have a few dummies among them, and that such crowds outperform experts nearly every time.

No surprise that, during the past century, it’s been people in the United States who constantly invent and improve communication technology to facilitate discussion within the larger American multitude – most recently the Internet. The collective wisdom of the United States is unmatched anywhere because of our unique heritage. The Internet enhances and spotlights that wisdom.

CBS News discovered this last summer the hard way, when Dan Rather used forged documents to try smearing President Bush during his re-election campaign. Among the millions who watched Rather’s “60 Minutes” broadcast were average citizens who knew something about fonts, typewriters and word-processing software. They connected via the Internet and consolidated their knowledge on Weblogs, or “blogs” – unique forums for online crowds whose collective wisdom proved far superior to whatever experts CBS could gather up.

Jim Hindraker of powerlineblog.com commented recently: “… a number of different issues that were raised with respect to the authenticity of those documents, but none of them were areas in which any of us [the three guys who run Powerline] were experts. All of the information came from our readers, and our role was to assemble it, review it, select what seemed to be the most interesting, point out conflicts where there were conflicts and publish it to an audience that within a matter of hours was numbering in the millions. That goes back to the point about our readers knowing a lot more than we do. The world is full of smart people, and what the Internet gives us is the opportunity to pull together thousands of little bits of information that those people have in a widely scattered way.”

Thus was Dan Rather forced into retirement after being publicly embarrassed by the wisdom of crowds. As Brother Patricius said 40 years ago, each of us is unique, just like everyone else. Together, we’re a powerful force.

Tom McLaughlin, a teacher and columnist, lives in Lovell. His e-mail address is [email protected].