Losing my Mind

It was November 14, 2018. I was offered a free ticket to a Sam Smith concert with my best friend. If I was being completely honest, I was not a huge fan of Sam Smith. I appreciated the talent he possessed, but never actively seeked out his music. I was immersed in a swarming sea of fans, and I felt guilty being there as I didn’t consider myself half the fan that others were. My best friend, Courtney was buzzing and was rabbiting on and on about Sam Smith. I knew a few of his songs but even then wasn’t 100% of the words. Sam Smith emerged on stage, with the whole “shabang”. A floating staircase. A fancy light display and the blood curdling screams of the crowd.  My ears drums rattled in my ears and I scrunched up my nose with the sheer noise until...

He started to sing. 

I was mesmerized. 

He sounded better than he did on Spotify and before I knew it I was overcome with a strong surge of emotion. I began to get teary and yell all of the words that I didn’t even know I knew. I stood there completely oblivious to my own actions. Any distant feeling of insecurity and awareness left my body in one swift motion. I felt the energy around me and knew without asking that everyone else there felt it too, and I felt myself become one with the strangers around me. 

In our lecture this week, we discussed the ideas around what it is to be an audience member and crows psychology. In Revisiting Gustave Le Bon's crowd theory in light of present-day critique, Gustave Le Bon’s theories about mass crowds and their effect on the individual are explored. He believed that every feeling and action when in a crowd becomes, “contagious to such a degree” and that, “an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest”. This made me wonder why do we as an audience act this way? In Le Bon’s The Crowd: A study of Popular Mind he investigates how when part of an audience or in a crowd, individuals feel a strong sense of anonymity. As though they are not recognised by their peers which gives the individual a feeling of power, allowing them to be different compared to if they were alone and would’ve shown restraint. LeBon said that an‘ ‘individual is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will’ (Le Bon 1895, 19). When describing an individual’s behaviour when immersed into a crowd, one’s own personal consciousness will be replaced by a collective mind. The new mind forms a new creature with different characteristics which differ from the individual’s own. This allows a mass of individuals to think and feel and behave differently to what they would’ve done on their own. It is this collective mind that led me to cry and yell and jump and scream. 

That day we were all actively engaged in the concert, so much so that we became a collective mind and acted in ways that as individuals we never would’ve done. Standing there at that Sam Smith concert swaying steadily to the music, I felt something amazing happening and I know I’m not the only one…