My Relationship with Crowds

Wisdom, Madness, Tension

Crowds display a singularly inferior mentality; yet there are other acts in which they appear to be guided by those mysterious forces which the ancients denominated destiny, nature, or providence, which we call the voices of the dead, and whose power it is impossible to overlook, although we ignore their essence. It would seem, at times, as if there were latent forces in the inner being of nations which serve to guide them.
—Gustave Le Bon

There have been bestselling books in recent years titled The Wisdom of Crowds and The Madness of Crowds. But my experience with them has been characterized by something else: tension.

At least when I have a healthy relationship with them.

The Self and the Multitude

It was an odd sensation tuning into the RNC and DNC for even a few minutes this summer and seeing levels of collective excitement that I have never in my life approached except maybe for the time my mom endured an entire LL Cool J concert with my friends and me in the ninth grade. I always wondered what she felt like that evening. (And in about 14 years, I will no longer have to wonder. Whatever the next iteration of Taylor Swift is, I suspect that there is a good chance I’ll be standing in a stadium somewhere letting my daughter go wild with her friends.)

But even at that concert, I remember being inside of my head, analyzing everything that was happening, wondering how much the giant speakers cost or where LL Cool J was staying while he was in town. Of course, at that time we did not have alcohol flowing through our veins as a social lubricant to pull us out of our heads and help us tap into the energy of the crowd. We had teenage hormones to do that, but they proved to be less effective; the social inhibitors were still intact.

I’ve spent most of my adult life thinking seriously about what a healthy relationship to crowds looks and feels like—in part because I’ve never been sure if I’m doing it right, and in part because I have seen a darkness take hold of several of my good friends and pull them into movements that have alienated them from their families, and even from themselves. I have seen people I love lose not only the ability to think for themselves, but also to act for themselves: to act with intentionality.

I think it all started in high school for me. Our high school pep rallies—my first experience with seeing people change so rapidly—were when I first noticed the deep tension that crowds provoked in me.

I’d walk into the gymnasium, fresh out of calculus where we’d all just taken a difficult test, and within five minutes, my fellow football teammates would be ripping their shirts off and screaming.

Kids would behave in ways that I never even realized they were capable of. And they were probably not, were it not for the eyes and the energy of the crowd.

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At that time in high school, I would feel a subtle, invisible tug in my chest to join in the fun, wondering if something was wrong with me—but I was rarely able to let go.

I never attended a high school prom. Not because I didn’t have a date, but because it seemed to me like an empty ritual, a charade, that I never had the ability to enter into.

I would not classify this as agoraphobia; it’s something else. Is there a word for the uneasiness I felt? I don’t know. If there is, I haven’t found it yet.

In one sense, I thought that my classmates at these pep rallies were silly—lame, even—puppets of whatever scheme the administration had devised to make us feel school spirit, of which I had none. I had no family history at the school, no serious pride in its name for whatever reason. On the other hand, I envied them. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be that excited?” I often wondered.

Today, my relationship with crowds remains much like it was back then. I live in Washington, DC. There are marches and rallies for all sorts of things, and I rarely get asked to join. Most of my friends know me well enough not to even bother. They know that if there were a rally for one of the things I get most excited about—for instance, if there were a gathering on the mall for lovers of Tomahawk steaks—I still wouldn’t participate. It would feel too weird. I’d show up loving Tomahawk steaks and go home thinking to myself that I was part of a cult.

The question I’d like to pose is: are there certain types of experiences in which you like to lose yourself, and others in which you do not? And how do you discern between the two?

Now I’ve been to some great concerts (I am not including LL Cool J in that list), and I also love sports. If the Detroit Lions make a deep playoff run this year, I may try to get tickets to a home game and find the rowdiest section of Lions fans to embed myself in. And I will enjoy it. It’s visceral. Yes, I have been in a bar watching a last-minute touchdown drive, high-fiving a complete stranger, and maybe even hugging.

So there is a funny dynamic, isn’t there? When we stand at a distance and watch people whipped into an effervescent, Durkheimian frenzy about something we care little about, or from which we’re totally detached, everyone appears out of their minds. But put us in the middle of a crowd gathered for something that we have some emotional attachment to and we can turn into crazed lunatics in a matter of moments. As I’ve grown older and reflected more on this dynamic, I’ve wondered if the indicator of health in our relationship with crowds is not simply tension. If you don’t feel any at all, at any point, you have lost yourself in the crowd dynamic. If you feel no tension at all, then what have you given yourself over to?

I believe there is a “mimetic moment” when you have experienced the tension, and perhaps made the intentional decision to ‘let yourself go’ and immerse yourself totally in the crowd. But that is a very different thing than never having experienced the tension of choosing your mode of participation in the first place. That is different than showing up at the mercy of whatever happens.

Everyone shows up to a party with greater or lesser degrees of agency, and that level of agency is usually different by the end of the night than at the beginning of the night. So you had better be sure that the level at which you are showing up is not below your tipping point.

There is something sexual about the relationship between crowds and individuals. Sexual tension is released at the moment when a person, or people, go beyond the friction or lubricants that were holding them in the “Who knows what’s going to happen?” pattern. They give themselves over to the process through which they bodies become joined. And once the process starts, once the tension has been lifted, it’s difficult to halt it. Likewise with the emotional contagion in a crowd.

Dionysian rituals, rooted in ancient Greek tradition, were known for their wild, ecstatic celebrations, where participants would lose themselves in the collective frenzy, much like the way people might immerse themselves in a crowd today. These rituals often involved a release of inhibitions and a surrender to primal instincts, paralleling the way sexual encounters can lead to a similar relinquishing of control.

Just as in those rituals, where individuals were swept up in the collective euphoria, there’s a fine line between participating intentionally and being overtaken by the moment. This dynamic underscores the importance of awareness and agency in both our interactions with crowds and in intimate experiences, reminding us that surrendering to the moment should be a choice, not a default.

If you don’t want to go to Pittsburgh, don’t get on a train to Pittsburgh.

Each of us has an opportunity to learn about and forge a solid Self in smaller settings, like our own families. It’s the best training ground. They say that even three is a crowd. And if you can’t resist the mimesis of two, you certainly won’t be able to resist the mimetic of two thousand.

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What is your relationship with crowds like? Comments open.