If I had my life again and was asked to choose a superpower, I’d like to come back as one of those people who can enjoy crowds. As superpowers go, I acknowledge this isn’t all that rare, given the bizarre popularity of events such as Glastonbury, or the widespread compulsion to buy Oasis tickets. But what qualifies it as a superpower for me is that I cannot imagine myself enjoying being in a crowd any more than I can envisage having the power of telekinesis or levitation. I don’t really understand why people pay huge amounts of money to watch live sporting events when you can watch them on television for free.
I’d choose staying at home stabbing my hand with a fork over joining a demonstration
Is this a genetic thing? Obviously there is no single gene for intelligence, say, or for height, but there are some human proclivities which seem very binary, which may be determined by a small group of genes: whether you dislike the smell of garlic on people’s breath, for instance, or whether or not asparagus makes your pee smell. Is there a gene for the obsession with attending crowd events? The people who failed to buy Oasis tickets were not merely disappointed, they seemed bereft, as though there was nothing else worth £300 which could match the value of seeing Oasis live. I don’t understand this mentality at all.
I’m not remotely bothered if other people want to join crowds, but one thing strikes me as unfair. One small crowd-loving segment of the population gains disproportionate media attention by participating in marches and demonstrations. The rest of us simply cannot do this. If you asked me to choose between either standing in a crowd repeating words shouted through a megaphone or staying at home while repeatedly stabbing my hand with a fork, I’d choose the second every time.
But it is perfectly evident that there is a subgroup of people who enjoy marching and demonstrating. We agonise about the importance of inclusion and diversity, and debate the disparities caused by the first-past-the-post electoral system, but we happily attach huge significance – and TV coverage – to that tiny subset of mainly Londoners who are happy to spend their precious leisure time wandering through the streets shouting things. Such people are not remotely representative of the population. Northerners would have to set their own houses on fire to gain the same TV coverage as a few thousand Londoners can enjoy by wandering aimlessly along some street. Such people who love to protest patently belong to a recognisable type.
That raises an interesting question. Are the majority of these protests hence counterproductive? Looking back to my childhood, I now realise that the anti-nuclear movement had some rather good arguments. Whereas I wouldn’t have supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, the risk of a nuclear accident was and remains immense. In fact on several occasions in the 1950s, in the UK alone, we came within a whisker of losing a swath of eastern England to a nuclear accident.
But the people who constituted the typical CND demonstration were of such an outlandish type, I’m not sure the rest of us much bothered to engage with this. In marketing this is known as a user-imagery problem. If your brand becomes overly associated with a particular type of person, almost every-one else will find it easy to reject it wholesale. This famously happened with Google Glass (‘Glassholes’), and is a huge risk with the Apple Vision Pro. It is worth remembering that we are all heavily inclined to dislike any tribe of which we are not a part.
Demonstrators are always prone to what has become known as the Neil Kinnock ‘All right!’ problem. What is appealing to those present in the hall may be repellent to everyone watching on television. And there are far more of the latter than the former.
Comments
Comment section temporarily unavailable for maintenance.