- CINNA. Truly, my name is Cinna.
- FIRST CITIZEN. Tear him to pieces, he’s a conspirator.
- CINNA. I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
- FOURTH CITIZEN. Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.
- CINNA. I am not Cinna the conspirator.
- FOURTH CITIZEN. It is no matter, his name’s Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.
Julius Ceasar Act III, Scene 3
There’s no end to the good words being written about ‘community’ nowadays and while much of it needs to be blamed on the very same phenomenon that Shakespeare himself noticed–irrational hate and love bear little difference–I’d be an absolute pessimist if I didn’t admit to subscribing to some of this talk. In fact, making such blanket statements as ‘Community is good’ or ‘Community is bad’ may work for marketers and PR people, but for us human beings it is not that simple. For humans, the duality of crowds is our own dulaity: at once irrational and intelligent, scared but proud, remarkably generous and exceedingly cruel.
Although there’s a tiny segment of Shakespeare enthusiasts who will disagree with me, I’m going to say that %95 of all mankind’s great art was created by individuals and not communities. There’s a certain dictatorial necessity in art that doesn’t allow for democracy and is the antithesis of anarchy. Very often the artist must be a tyrant and a fascist. For this very reason, I’ve tended personally to avoid creative forums whose output reflects the will of the many. This is not some high-brow idea. How often has some mediocre performer been able to charm a crowd for a moment, for fifteen minutes, or for a career? Has the quantity of appeal ever had anything to do with the quality of the work?
But, likewise, society itself is built on community. Human beings, an animal with fairly unimpressive strength and agility, would not have survived very long without community. The tedium, repetitiveness, and ‘lack of originality’ that we blame on crowds is actually a very important mechanism for the clan to spread information to each other as quickly as possible. But the positiveness of ‘let’s save the children’ can be replaced by ‘let’s kill the Jews, etc.’ or ‘Let’s all buy this worthless piece of shit’. Again, every good, evil, despicable, and noble thought that average people have can be aggregated and maximized in crowds. We can all run into burning buildings or silently watch Kitty Genovese get butchered.
The dumbest and least culpable member of a crowd may be its rank-and-file, but its most dangerous member is its leader. We need to assume that he who wants to lead a crowd or to ’start the conversation’ has a certain inherent megalomania. Content neither to be a member or an individual; for whatever reason, he needs to control others. It could be a businessman (or a company), it could be a politician–left or right, it could be a drunken fool roaring up the townsfolk, but whoever it is, this demagogue is usually far more concerned with himself than any crowd or community. He offers an agenda, which crowds both lack and need, but at the end of the day, it’s still his agenda.
I’m not saying that crowds are bad. Or that all crowds are akin to Jonestown, but for the moment all the talk of ‘community’ is becoming the most irrational groupthink we have.
Let me suggest that there is more at work here than simply individual vs crowd. It’s not simply a duality but an interplay of three kinds of motivators.
According to David McClelland,the leader’s need for power and control is one of these three motivators that drive individuals. Some people just need to be in charge.
Your post covers the second motivator: the need to belong. Some people are primarily looking for the cozy feeling of acceptance, belonging, and affection from a group.
But there is a third motivator that drives creative individuals: a need to be admired. Artists, inventors, even advertising copywriters are looking for recognition. “Aren’t you clever?”
McClelland characterized these three motivators, respectively, as the need for power (N-Pow) and the need for affiliation (N-Aff) and the need for achievement (N-Ach). He built a very lucrative career in getting research grants to develop his thesis, and then consulting gigs to reveal to corporations what the taxpayers had paid him to discover, all the while serving as a tenured professor at Harvard. Nice work if you can get. And you can get it if you have the right motivators to try.
Michael, yes I agree wholeheartedly. The notion that only the “shallow” care about fame and crowd recognition is an absurd one that has no basis in human nature. Art, and all it’s various derivatives, are about connection, which can’t be done in absolute solitude.
That being said, I think that even if no one ever read my work I’d still write.
Steven, the writings–on here, anyway–that I rank as my best also rank as my least read, according to Google. But there’s still always that hope…
You’re right, of course; the hope is that everyone on the planet should take the time to read every word I’ve written, but that isn’t WHY I write. I write mostly because I need to make a relatively abstract idea concrete and coherent. That make any sense?