Ross Clark Ross Clark

The rise of crowd culture – a generation scared to do anything alone

Individualism is dead: we have succumbed to the lure of the crowd

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[/audioplayer]Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. As for the absolute pit, the eighth circle or however else you describe the geography of Beelzebub’s kingdom, that is being left alone without a 3G mobile phone signal.

Of all changes in British life over the past generation, nothing has been quite so as stark as the strange death of individualism. When in 1995 the then transport secretary Steven Norris told the Commons transport committee that the reason why many people preferred to travel by car than by bus was that they saw an advantage in ‘not having to put up with dreadful human beings sitting next to you’, he was of course barked at by the left for being a heartless Tory bastard who cared nothing for the poor. But even his critics acknowleged, as the Independent did in an editorial at the time, that he was nevertheless speaking for the misanthrope who lurks within us all.

Such a comment no longer really makes any sense; not when you hear of as  many as 200,000 people eschewing their home sound systems to squash together at Glastonbury, leaving aside all the other wannabe Glastos; not when you see every last pebble of Brighton beach covered with the backsides of day-trippers who could have gone to any beach in the South East — many of which actually have some sand — and yet chose here, where they must have known they would be unable to move. The inner misanthrope wasn’t much in evidence, either, among the six million people who last month lined the streets eight deep to watch the Tour de France.

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