Let’s imagine Elias Canetti giving a TED Talk about his book, Crowds and Power. He’s standing on a round stage, wearing a lightly-floral-colored headset, the big, red, blocky TED brand to his left. The camera cuts to a different angle every 3 to 6 seconds. Now the camera is at his profile from the front. Now the camera is a different profile, from the rear, and we can just make out that there’s an audience. We can’t see their faces, but something about knowing that the audience is there makes us feel more connected to the talk. When the camera switches to the front view, we feel like we are sitting with the crowd—a part of a very special group. We are of the TED-talk community listening to a great mind speak.
So, in our imaginary TED Talk, Elias Canetti speaks to the camera—to us:
A man attending a sermon honestly believed that it was the sermon which mattered to him, and he would have felt astonished or even indignant had it been explained to him that the large number of listeners present gave him more satisfaction than the sermon itself.
TED Talk producers are savvy people. They know that interesting ideas are not enough to hold an audience. The viewer needs more: the viewer needs to belong to something. The TED Talk people bring that something to the event through smart camera angles and through smart branding.
A brand is a visual element that latches on to a crowd, a gesture that evokes an emotional attachment to it. When branding is successful, we give a piece of ourselves to the brand, and in turn, the brand becomes a part of our identity. I wonder what Elias Canetti would have thought about branding as a part of crowd formation. I don’t think people were talking much about branding when he published the book in 1962. But maybe he’ll say more about it as I get on with my slow-read of the book.
To me the most troubling part of what I’m reading is his idea that crowds are content-neutral. Or rather, the real content is the crowd, not the ideas. We don’t attend a sermon because we agree with it, he says—or because it enriches us. (And wouldn’t he say the same thing about a TED Talk?) We don’t think thoughts; we join them—and we join them, Canetti seems to be saying, because they meet some kind of psychic need. Our thoughts are not our own thoughts. They are the crowd’s thoughts. Worse than that: all thoughts are after-thoughts, appendages.
I don’t want to believe any of that.
One fuel that feeds Canetti’s crowds—and this is a fuel that TED Talks don’t have—is a sense of persecution. As individuals, we avoid persecution, but for a crowd to grow, there must be a sense of persecution, Canetti says. Certain crowds thrive on that. Every attempt to argue with a crowd, every attempt to analyze it, every attempt to contradict it feels like persecution. It’s as if the crowd was bounded by a self-tightening knot. You can try to shake it, but the knot just gets tighter.
So, the Qanon crowd believes that Democrats are a part of a cabal of child molesters who have taken over the government. The Incel (the so-called “Involuntary Celibate) crowd believes that men have a divine right to sex, and feminists have ruined it for them. The White supremacy crowd believes that people of color are conspiring to “replace” White people in some topsy-turvy vision of genocide.
Something has to be broken inside to believe these things. But which came first, the ideology, or the crowd?
And are all crowds bad? Don’t some crowds form to create rather than destruct? Do constructive crowds form from different seeds than destructive crowds? Or are they the same seeds falling on different land? Maybe there’s a TED Talk about that.