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

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_31_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Ross Clark and Lara Prendergast discuss the demise of individualism”]

Listen

[/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.