The first really huge concert I attended was a Grateful Dead concert at Englishtown, NJ, when I was 23. (Labor Day weekend, 1977.) 125,000 people attended. It’s completely true that the safest place one can ever be in a crowd, is at a Grateful Dead concert; people are universally helpful and supportive. And of course, we were all there to hear the Dead, so it was like one huge neighborhood bar scene while we were listening. However, it was one thing to be stationary in that sea of 125,000 people, and quite another to be moving together once the music stopped. As we all began moving towards the parking lot to begin heading home, I clutched the hem of my friend’s t-shirt for dear life, terrified that we’d get separated and I’d get lost in the crowd.
You are right about the tension when the crowd disperses. One rainy year at Glastonbury, after Coldplay had finished at the Pyramid stage, the packed crowd left in darkness along deep muddy paths. The crowd began to sing a reframe from a Coldplay song, over and over, to keep everyone calm and moving together along the path. And yeah, we were holding on to each other's shirts.
A few years ago a young man who had sought me out as a mentor came to me to discuss a business opportunity. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation he began to share an experience he had while talking to a prospective client. He explained the two were discussing the scope of a project, and the price and so forth. On the surface he said everything was normal. But in his thoughts were these urges to punch the other man in the face...to become violent, but with absolutely no provocation. I looked at him for a moment, then told him that occasionally when I am driving down the road I experience an urge to swerve into oncoming traffic. He said 'you do?' He was so relieved. He thought he was alone in his weirdness. I told him that for me this kind of thing happens frequently. It was actually normal. I went on to share my opinion that we are all beasts at our core, with a spark of divinity. That we are still in the process of becoming human. That our challenge is to learn to live in harmony with the beast within, to take that primal energy and give it a purpose, guide it, shape it, control it. That that was our purpose as humans. To confirm your point, this process is one best practiced at home before testing your skills in a large crowd. Great article sir, as always.
I resonated with much of your relationship to crowds when I am in them Luke, especially the way you described your lack of desire to join the stream of high school experiences manufactured by administrative and cultural scripts. As an lifelong socially anxious introvert I resolved my relationships to crowds in a weird way. I went on stage. I've been a closeted introvert who makes his living as a speaker and entertainer, and at this point I've stood, face to face, in front of more than 1 million people—in front of crowds. It's been a very round method of being able to bear a proximity to crowds, by leading them. But I'm still just as uncomfortable once I'm embedded as a spectator or cell in the group organism. There I feel powerless, much like you described, at the effect of the tension of what could happen next that I would not be in control of.
Introvert here too, have given speeches as well. I think that works because the audience, especially large ones, become just a blob. Whereas one-on-one conversations require direct eye contact.
Had the same relationship with high school pep rallies: “why are they so excited?”
I was never athletic, but I was smart. So I treasured my mind, and avoided anything that would alter my one strength. Thus I never did any drugs nor ever got drunk, and I have never found myself given over to a crowd mentality. I can enjoy a shared laugh at a play or movie, but I have never lost my mind to a group emotion as you described it.
Sounds too much like Invasion of the Body Snatchers to my mind.
Thank you for this thoughtful post. It resonated with me, as I suspect it did with many others. Like you, I feel little or no pull toward crowds, not only the physically congregated ones, but also the more dispersed ones who share thoughts and opinions. I respect other individual opinions (such as yours and those of others who write books and articles), and I even think there may be something to "The Wisdom of Crowds." (I've read that book, in fact.) Still, I find the thought of "going along with the crowd" repulsive. I might have attributed this attitude to being an only child, but my wife, who is one of 17 children, is exactly the same way. I have no extensive evidence of this idea, but I think most people lean one way or the other. A crowd is like a powerful magnet, attracting some and repelling others. I suppose there are many ways of measuring this kind of thing, but one particularly helpful one, I think, is a person's attitude toward music. When I was a teenager, I abhorred Top 40 music (and still do). Obviously, lots of people like this music--that's how it gets to be in the Top 40--but some of us turn the other way. One result is the aptly named "alternative music." I will admit that automatically rejecting the crowd has its costs and is not entirely rationale. I probably missed out on some good tunes! Today, I may risk dismissing some books, movies, or even ideas just because they're popular. We all should keep open minds and evaluate things on the basis of their merits, not on the basis of their popularity. A healthy skepticism toward crowds of all kinds, however, is a good place to start. I like the word you used: "tension." This subject reminds me of one of my favorite essays, Emerson's "Self-Reliance." Emerson takes an extreme position on the independence of the individual, one I don't entirely accept--I guess I'm exercising some independent thought there--but he also makes a strong case against giving oneself over to crowds, such as political parties. This subject also reminds me of a few lines in a coming-of-age novel I wrote, but have not published (yet). The main character, a teenager going on a run through a neighborhood where he doesn't live, thinks of the people who live there and observes, "They think I’m one of them. . . . I’m one, but not of them."
I just went to free monthly yoga class this morning. It's a different kind of crowd. It's about dissolving your sense of self and ego, and being in one spiritual collective. You follow the instructor and you follow the crowd. Yet there is no tension. You feel at ease and surrender to the spiritual collective. I've been doing yoga for the past few months and I always feel a clearness of mind after the session. Yoga is an inherently spiritual practice, one of the things that make it different from any other experience in the gym.
I hated football, and hated the idea of school spirit as a surly teenage nerd. But I was also in band, and we marched down the hall to the auditorium, blasting our school song for our pep rallies. That distinct part of it was a multi-person flow state, as we all marched together in sync and made music. We were in the moment of creating music, together.
I can understand the ease of getting into a multi-person flow state if you’re a musician or an athlete on a team, but I have never experienced flow as a spectator in crowd.
Maybe dancing gets some people there, and chanting and cheering, and that’s why some people can lose themselves to it.
A multi person flow state is a pretty cool experience, different from an individual flow state because you’re part of something bigger and are all simultaneously making something happen that can’t happen individually.
I’m sure actors get it too working together, and that’s part of the draw.
Elias Canetti is fascinating in Crowds and Power on the paradoxical psychology of crowds - for him it's about our aversion to being touched, which is best alleviated, it seems, by surrendering to it:
'There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange… All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear.'
But then:
'It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.'
How could Tomahawk steak gourmets *be* a crowd with no principle of unanimity? Unless victimised by ‘save the planet’ militants perhaps what could constitute them *as* a crowd?
Our joy at our team’s victory is at the expense of a shared foe/victim. Is there not some victim/sacrificial principle in *all* crowds? If our team or pop idol fail to perform we soon turn on them. That ambivalence seems to be a mark of crowds.
Unless at mass or funerals where all antagonisms are relinquished before God. People congregating to see the Queen in England used to be similar. That institution is regarded as partisan by too many now for that peaceful unanimity to obtain as it once did. The ‘divine’ aspect of monarchy exhausted.
One can’t help thinking of Peter’s denial where he follows the crowd in spite of himself and in spite of Jesus having told him he would. The crowd dilemma crystallised.
I was involved in student council in high school and our job was to put on pep assemblies. I also played football so was involved in that capacity.
Kind of hard to explain my relationship to them. While I was part of the "machine" of high school, my friends were typically the misfit types who thought all that stuff was silly. So in typical rebellious high school fashion we'd try to find ways to subvert the pep rallies while still maintaining the appearance that we were going along with it to the administration.
One moment comes to mind. It was January 2000. My best friend and I were in charge of the winter sports assembly. We had two days to plan it because the usual chair of the pep assemblies had been sick or something. Around this time, Conan O'Brian had his "In the Year 2000" skit going on and he even published a book with his best quips about his out of pocket predictions for the year 2000.
So we decided to make the assembly "In the Year 2000" assembly.
We spent a few hundred dollars on foil and black lights and glow sticks. We dressed a friend in a toga and put spotlight on him to shrilly shout out in the microphone "In the year two thoussaaaannnnd..." just like on Conan O'Brian. And then another friend would read things from the Conan book like "In the year two thousand, scientists will discover the reason moths are attracted to light is because they're looking at their moth porn."
We thought it was hilarious because it was so absurd. Like we were sticking it to the man with our suburban Dadaism. No one else laughed. We actually got a "Boooooo!!! This sucks!" from the crowd, which, to us made it more funny.
Don't know what this says about me. Probably that I was just a dumb teenager.
Was chewing on this more when I was out running errands...
I think I still take the same approach to "crowds" and group activities as an adult.
I do find value in group rituals. I think they can bind people together and can be a source of meaning and transcendence.
But I'm aware of that tension you describe where you get to the point where you feel like you're about to be subsumed into the group.
I deal with the tension by joking about it. Maybe not in the moment. It depends on the situation. Like I wouldn't crack a joke in the middle of religious ritual. But maybe later on. And the joking would never cross over into blasphemy. Wouldn't even get close to any line. But I'm sure I can find something funny to quip about it.
If it was the wave at a baseball game, I might crack a joke about it in the moment. It's a way to say "Man, look how weird this is. Aren't us humans weird?"
I'd describe my joke cracking about crowd activities that I find valuable and affirming as loving teasing. Just like I tease the people I really care about, I gently tease the group rituals that I love. The group rituals that are important to me are too important to take too seriously. Once you start taking them too serious, there's a tendency to lose sight of why you do them in the first place.
It's been a way for me to mediate the tension between self and group. Might not be the best way. It might be immature. But it's worked for me so far.
This favorite quote about rituals--whether a concert, wedding, bday party, or any public gathering that matters to us--came to mind in response to the dynamic tension of living a full life in communion with our fellow travelers:
“A public celebration is a rope bridge of knotted symbols strung across an abyss.
We make our crossings hoping the chasm will echo our festive sounds for a moment,
as the bridge begins to sway from the rhythms of our dance.”
I think there’s a difference between the crowd as in “the wisdom of the crowd” and a crowd that is a bunch of people crammed together for a very specific purpose.
In the Bible, “the crowd” is often referred to and serves a very interesting purpose. Sometimes the crowd means the ordinary people as opposed to elites or leaders. Sometimes a crowd is the rabble.
There’s something exhilarating and also scary about a giant crowd. People get trampled to death in them sometimes.
My son goes to the University of Michigan and their football games often have 100,000 fans. I’ve been a couple of times. It feels really weird. The chants seem religious almost.
You can get lost in a crowd, feel alone in a crowd, seek to get away from the maddening crowd, or follow the crowd.
Sometimes I think a crowd is just a concentrated version of a culture. Aren’t we all, in some way, always in a crowd?
Like many of those who have commented, I hsbe an instinctive sympathy for the argument that one should at least feel some conscious tension before allowing himself drift with the crowd. I suspect that the argument may resonate more strongly with introverted types. In this connection, I have a moderately more positive view than others he role of alcohol in allowing the tension occasionally be solved in favour of drifting with the collective, as the Greeks would have understood.
I have however a different question.
In connection with the behaviour of the crowds the author speaks of mimetic behaviour. This sounds intuitive. I wonder however how the author reconciles the intuitive definition of mimetic behaviour that he uses with the technical - Girardian - definition of mimetic behaviour he often evokes in his writings. As I understand it, mimetic behaviour according to Girard is inextricably linked to rivalry. The tensions it generates may eventually find their resolution in the victimisation of an ‘other,’ who fulfils the function of a cathartic scapegoat. I find it difficult to apply this concept to the reality that the author describes: Taylor Swift may, at a stretch, be characterised as a Girardian ‘model’, before which her fans diminish themselves and their individualities. But where is the scapegoat?
What sorts of people like to lose themselves in crowds? How does that overlap with people who like to lose themselves in alcohol or drugs or religious or ideological fervor of any sort? I've always been averse to losing myself in those ways, so I cannot speak for people who do.
The first really huge concert I attended was a Grateful Dead concert at Englishtown, NJ, when I was 23. (Labor Day weekend, 1977.) 125,000 people attended. It’s completely true that the safest place one can ever be in a crowd, is at a Grateful Dead concert; people are universally helpful and supportive. And of course, we were all there to hear the Dead, so it was like one huge neighborhood bar scene while we were listening. However, it was one thing to be stationary in that sea of 125,000 people, and quite another to be moving together once the music stopped. As we all began moving towards the parking lot to begin heading home, I clutched the hem of my friend’s t-shirt for dear life, terrified that we’d get separated and I’d get lost in the crowd.
You are right about the tension when the crowd disperses. One rainy year at Glastonbury, after Coldplay had finished at the Pyramid stage, the packed crowd left in darkness along deep muddy paths. The crowd began to sing a reframe from a Coldplay song, over and over, to keep everyone calm and moving together along the path. And yeah, we were holding on to each other's shirts.
Would have really liked to have seen a Simon Le Bon quote as a rebuttal to the opening quote.
A few years ago a young man who had sought me out as a mentor came to me to discuss a business opportunity. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation he began to share an experience he had while talking to a prospective client. He explained the two were discussing the scope of a project, and the price and so forth. On the surface he said everything was normal. But in his thoughts were these urges to punch the other man in the face...to become violent, but with absolutely no provocation. I looked at him for a moment, then told him that occasionally when I am driving down the road I experience an urge to swerve into oncoming traffic. He said 'you do?' He was so relieved. He thought he was alone in his weirdness. I told him that for me this kind of thing happens frequently. It was actually normal. I went on to share my opinion that we are all beasts at our core, with a spark of divinity. That we are still in the process of becoming human. That our challenge is to learn to live in harmony with the beast within, to take that primal energy and give it a purpose, guide it, shape it, control it. That that was our purpose as humans. To confirm your point, this process is one best practiced at home before testing your skills in a large crowd. Great article sir, as always.
I resonated with much of your relationship to crowds when I am in them Luke, especially the way you described your lack of desire to join the stream of high school experiences manufactured by administrative and cultural scripts. As an lifelong socially anxious introvert I resolved my relationships to crowds in a weird way. I went on stage. I've been a closeted introvert who makes his living as a speaker and entertainer, and at this point I've stood, face to face, in front of more than 1 million people—in front of crowds. It's been a very round method of being able to bear a proximity to crowds, by leading them. But I'm still just as uncomfortable once I'm embedded as a spectator or cell in the group organism. There I feel powerless, much like you described, at the effect of the tension of what could happen next that I would not be in control of.
Introvert here too, have given speeches as well. I think that works because the audience, especially large ones, become just a blob. Whereas one-on-one conversations require direct eye contact.
👀 🙂
Had the same relationship with high school pep rallies: “why are they so excited?”
I was never athletic, but I was smart. So I treasured my mind, and avoided anything that would alter my one strength. Thus I never did any drugs nor ever got drunk, and I have never found myself given over to a crowd mentality. I can enjoy a shared laugh at a play or movie, but I have never lost my mind to a group emotion as you described it.
Sounds too much like Invasion of the Body Snatchers to my mind.
Thank you for this thoughtful post. It resonated with me, as I suspect it did with many others. Like you, I feel little or no pull toward crowds, not only the physically congregated ones, but also the more dispersed ones who share thoughts and opinions. I respect other individual opinions (such as yours and those of others who write books and articles), and I even think there may be something to "The Wisdom of Crowds." (I've read that book, in fact.) Still, I find the thought of "going along with the crowd" repulsive. I might have attributed this attitude to being an only child, but my wife, who is one of 17 children, is exactly the same way. I have no extensive evidence of this idea, but I think most people lean one way or the other. A crowd is like a powerful magnet, attracting some and repelling others. I suppose there are many ways of measuring this kind of thing, but one particularly helpful one, I think, is a person's attitude toward music. When I was a teenager, I abhorred Top 40 music (and still do). Obviously, lots of people like this music--that's how it gets to be in the Top 40--but some of us turn the other way. One result is the aptly named "alternative music." I will admit that automatically rejecting the crowd has its costs and is not entirely rationale. I probably missed out on some good tunes! Today, I may risk dismissing some books, movies, or even ideas just because they're popular. We all should keep open minds and evaluate things on the basis of their merits, not on the basis of their popularity. A healthy skepticism toward crowds of all kinds, however, is a good place to start. I like the word you used: "tension." This subject reminds me of one of my favorite essays, Emerson's "Self-Reliance." Emerson takes an extreme position on the independence of the individual, one I don't entirely accept--I guess I'm exercising some independent thought there--but he also makes a strong case against giving oneself over to crowds, such as political parties. This subject also reminds me of a few lines in a coming-of-age novel I wrote, but have not published (yet). The main character, a teenager going on a run through a neighborhood where he doesn't live, thinks of the people who live there and observes, "They think I’m one of them. . . . I’m one, but not of them."
I just went to free monthly yoga class this morning. It's a different kind of crowd. It's about dissolving your sense of self and ego, and being in one spiritual collective. You follow the instructor and you follow the crowd. Yet there is no tension. You feel at ease and surrender to the spiritual collective. I've been doing yoga for the past few months and I always feel a clearness of mind after the session. Yoga is an inherently spiritual practice, one of the things that make it different from any other experience in the gym.
I hated football, and hated the idea of school spirit as a surly teenage nerd. But I was also in band, and we marched down the hall to the auditorium, blasting our school song for our pep rallies. That distinct part of it was a multi-person flow state, as we all marched together in sync and made music. We were in the moment of creating music, together.
I can understand the ease of getting into a multi-person flow state if you’re a musician or an athlete on a team, but I have never experienced flow as a spectator in crowd.
Maybe dancing gets some people there, and chanting and cheering, and that’s why some people can lose themselves to it.
A multi person flow state is a pretty cool experience, different from an individual flow state because you’re part of something bigger and are all simultaneously making something happen that can’t happen individually.
I’m sure actors get it too working together, and that’s part of the draw.
Elias Canetti is fascinating in Crowds and Power on the paradoxical psychology of crowds - for him it's about our aversion to being touched, which is best alleviated, it seems, by surrendering to it:
'There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange… All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear.'
But then:
'It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.'
How could Tomahawk steak gourmets *be* a crowd with no principle of unanimity? Unless victimised by ‘save the planet’ militants perhaps what could constitute them *as* a crowd?
Our joy at our team’s victory is at the expense of a shared foe/victim. Is there not some victim/sacrificial principle in *all* crowds? If our team or pop idol fail to perform we soon turn on them. That ambivalence seems to be a mark of crowds.
Unless at mass or funerals where all antagonisms are relinquished before God. People congregating to see the Queen in England used to be similar. That institution is regarded as partisan by too many now for that peaceful unanimity to obtain as it once did. The ‘divine’ aspect of monarchy exhausted.
One can’t help thinking of Peter’s denial where he follows the crowd in spite of himself and in spite of Jesus having told him he would. The crowd dilemma crystallised.
Wisdom and madness is seperated (if not conjoined) by a fine line.
I was involved in student council in high school and our job was to put on pep assemblies. I also played football so was involved in that capacity.
Kind of hard to explain my relationship to them. While I was part of the "machine" of high school, my friends were typically the misfit types who thought all that stuff was silly. So in typical rebellious high school fashion we'd try to find ways to subvert the pep rallies while still maintaining the appearance that we were going along with it to the administration.
One moment comes to mind. It was January 2000. My best friend and I were in charge of the winter sports assembly. We had two days to plan it because the usual chair of the pep assemblies had been sick or something. Around this time, Conan O'Brian had his "In the Year 2000" skit going on and he even published a book with his best quips about his out of pocket predictions for the year 2000.
So we decided to make the assembly "In the Year 2000" assembly.
We spent a few hundred dollars on foil and black lights and glow sticks. We dressed a friend in a toga and put spotlight on him to shrilly shout out in the microphone "In the year two thoussaaaannnnd..." just like on Conan O'Brian. And then another friend would read things from the Conan book like "In the year two thousand, scientists will discover the reason moths are attracted to light is because they're looking at their moth porn."
We thought it was hilarious because it was so absurd. Like we were sticking it to the man with our suburban Dadaism. No one else laughed. We actually got a "Boooooo!!! This sucks!" from the crowd, which, to us made it more funny.
Don't know what this says about me. Probably that I was just a dumb teenager.
Was chewing on this more when I was out running errands...
I think I still take the same approach to "crowds" and group activities as an adult.
I do find value in group rituals. I think they can bind people together and can be a source of meaning and transcendence.
But I'm aware of that tension you describe where you get to the point where you feel like you're about to be subsumed into the group.
I deal with the tension by joking about it. Maybe not in the moment. It depends on the situation. Like I wouldn't crack a joke in the middle of religious ritual. But maybe later on. And the joking would never cross over into blasphemy. Wouldn't even get close to any line. But I'm sure I can find something funny to quip about it.
If it was the wave at a baseball game, I might crack a joke about it in the moment. It's a way to say "Man, look how weird this is. Aren't us humans weird?"
I'd describe my joke cracking about crowd activities that I find valuable and affirming as loving teasing. Just like I tease the people I really care about, I gently tease the group rituals that I love. The group rituals that are important to me are too important to take too seriously. Once you start taking them too serious, there's a tendency to lose sight of why you do them in the first place.
It's been a way for me to mediate the tension between self and group. Might not be the best way. It might be immature. But it's worked for me so far.
This favorite quote about rituals--whether a concert, wedding, bday party, or any public gathering that matters to us--came to mind in response to the dynamic tension of living a full life in communion with our fellow travelers:
“A public celebration is a rope bridge of knotted symbols strung across an abyss.
We make our crossings hoping the chasm will echo our festive sounds for a moment,
as the bridge begins to sway from the rhythms of our dance.”
Ronald Grimes, The Lifeblood of Public Ritual
I think there’s a difference between the crowd as in “the wisdom of the crowd” and a crowd that is a bunch of people crammed together for a very specific purpose.
In the Bible, “the crowd” is often referred to and serves a very interesting purpose. Sometimes the crowd means the ordinary people as opposed to elites or leaders. Sometimes a crowd is the rabble.
There’s something exhilarating and also scary about a giant crowd. People get trampled to death in them sometimes.
My son goes to the University of Michigan and their football games often have 100,000 fans. I’ve been a couple of times. It feels really weird. The chants seem religious almost.
You can get lost in a crowd, feel alone in a crowd, seek to get away from the maddening crowd, or follow the crowd.
Sometimes I think a crowd is just a concentrated version of a culture. Aren’t we all, in some way, always in a crowd?
Like many of those who have commented, I hsbe an instinctive sympathy for the argument that one should at least feel some conscious tension before allowing himself drift with the crowd. I suspect that the argument may resonate more strongly with introverted types. In this connection, I have a moderately more positive view than others he role of alcohol in allowing the tension occasionally be solved in favour of drifting with the collective, as the Greeks would have understood.
I have however a different question.
In connection with the behaviour of the crowds the author speaks of mimetic behaviour. This sounds intuitive. I wonder however how the author reconciles the intuitive definition of mimetic behaviour that he uses with the technical - Girardian - definition of mimetic behaviour he often evokes in his writings. As I understand it, mimetic behaviour according to Girard is inextricably linked to rivalry. The tensions it generates may eventually find their resolution in the victimisation of an ‘other,’ who fulfils the function of a cathartic scapegoat. I find it difficult to apply this concept to the reality that the author describes: Taylor Swift may, at a stretch, be characterised as a Girardian ‘model’, before which her fans diminish themselves and their individualities. But where is the scapegoat?
The “scapegoat”/idol is on stage.
The scapegoat is always just off-stage awaiting sniffing the air for the hormonal change (or mood change) that is always just a turn away.
A crowd can turn in a heartbeat. The individual gets lost.
What sorts of people like to lose themselves in crowds? How does that overlap with people who like to lose themselves in alcohol or drugs or religious or ideological fervor of any sort? I've always been averse to losing myself in those ways, so I cannot speak for people who do.