Does Yoko Ono make me more interesting?
I came home from the record shop with the vinyl disk, a sweaty handprint
on the paper bag. I slipped into my brothers’ room, set up the beige portable record player, and carefully—as carefully as a 13-year-old kid could be— set the needle on “Don’t Worry Kyoko.” Yoko Ono wailed and warbled, a desperate, wild, inhuman sound, raw, vulnerable, radical. I was alone with Yoko Ono for several beats, until the guitars and drums rescued me, gave me footing. But the warbling continued. I listened to the song all the way through, lifted the needle and played it again. And again.
I loved it. It’s been something like 50 years. I’ve never met another Yoko Ono fan face-to-face.
They’re out there. You can read the reviews. You can discover how significant Yoko Ono is in the history of rock and roll. But I’m part of a group of people who I’ve never met.
Does Yoko Ono make me more interesting? Do I have a larger claim to individuality than the Neil Diamond fans I went to school with? There were times in my life I wanted to think so. I would love to see myself as an independent mind, breaking free of the crowd, developing my own tastes, my own ideas.
But was the boy listening to Yoko Ono in 1973 really more free of groupthink than his middle school colleagues listening to top-40? Or was I just group-thinking with a different group?
The more I think about it, the harder it is for me to say what individualism means. Whatever it is, our sense of ourselves never really escapes from our sense of ourselves as a member of a group or groups. Even libertarians rarely define themselves according to their own accomplishments. Instead, they define themselves as “libertarians,” and test their sense-of-self with and against that of other libertarians.
I’m also not sure what Elias Canetti means by the word “crowd” in his book Crowds and Power. I’ve been substituting the word “mob” in my mind, and that seems to work so far. He talks about how crowds form. A small group attracts more and more people to it. A group of individuals densifies into an inkblot at the center of a square or street.
To Canetti, what is attractive about that inkblot is a release of individuality. He doesn’t use the word “individuality.” He uses the word “distinction.” He talks of the “moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.” All the qualities that distinguish us as separate are suddenly seen as a burden we would like to shed. Mob acts feel like freedom. But the freedom is authoritarian. The freedom is freedom from the burden of our own separate identity.
That thought is new to me—that individualism (whatever the word means) becomes a burden, and the crowd, the mob, becomes a release from that burden. Maybe that’s one of the foundations of racism, not to mention anti-LGBTQ+ animus. Maybe confronting difference in others accentuates the hard work of writing our own individual selves. And individuality is too burdensome for some of us.
Bellingcat, the open-source investigative journalism site, posted a disturbing story about how extreme right-wing groups are converging around combat sports events. Neo-Nazi groups are using games to prepare themselves for some imaginary apocalypse when they can emerge and clean the world of uncomfortable differences.
All that training and sweat. Their sense of self can’t survive in a world of diversity. Their sense of self cannot bend, so they live in fear that it might break.