I like reading intellectual biographies. This is a book dedicated to exploring how a particular person’s thinking evolved and developed over their lifetime. This also applies to intellectual autobiography, where a thinker describes his or her own journey as to how he came to believe what he believes. Of course, all such explanations should be taken with a bit of a grain of salt. How much of our explanations for our views are genuine explanations of how those views developed, compared to post hoc justifications for ideas developed for unrelated reasons. It is difficult to know. Still, some of the attributions seem plausible. The late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton attributed the acceptance of conservative ideas to the fearful reaction to the 1968 far-left riots in France. When I asked a friend who had participated in the riots to explain the ideas that motivated the activists, he introduced me to Michael Foucault’s book The Order of Things. Scruton described his reaction to the book and its ideas:
This book is not a philosophy book, but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is not truth but subversion, “truth” requires an inverted comma, it changes from era to era, and what is true is carefully crafted by the old nominalist sleight of hand that the father of lies was sure to invent. are discussing. It is tied to an “episteme”, a form of consciousness imposed by the classes that profit from the propagation of consciousness. The revolutionary spirit, searching all over the world for what it abhors, found in Foucault a new literary formula. He tells his readers to look for power everywhere and you will find it. Where there is power, there is oppression. And where there is oppression, there is a right to destruction. On the street below my window, that message was translated into action.
Seeing the deeds these ideas led to, Scruton was moved to create his own philosophy as a counterpoint to such ideas.
Looking back on my own life, I think it was a strange but pivotal moment in my own development, but it probably made me very skeptical of group dynamics, making me a libertarian. I remember being instrumental in the transition to . And that event was the Jim Carrey movie “The Cable Guy.” This relationship may not be immediately obvious, so let me explain.
The Cable Guy was released in 1996, when I was 13 years old. I really enjoyed The Mask when it came out two years ago, so I really wanted to see it. One night I rented a movie and watched it by myself. And I absolutely hated it. Even for my 13-year-old self, I thought that was too stupid and low-brow, and instead of laughing, I cringed and rolled my eyes.
Now, when I was 13 years old, I was disappointed that a Jim Carrey movie wasn’t as interesting as I had hoped, but the story doesn’t end there. A few months later, I was staying at a friend’s house. It was his birthday and we were having a birthday party. If I remember correctly, there were about 8 or 10 of us there. And the final activity of the birthday party was to watch a movie together. Specifically, “The Cable Guy.”
I had already seen the movie and hated it, but I decided to be a good sport and watch it with others. And everyone else at the party loved it – they laughed hysterically the whole time. But the thing is, I was laughing along with them. It wasn’t because I was just playing along and trying to fit in. At this moment, I felt that this movie was really funny and the laughter was genuine. Just by watching a movie with a group of people, I was swept up in the group’s energy and suddenly found great joy in things that would have felt painfully stupid on my own.
When I looked back on it later, I was truly horrified. Of course, I got some laughs that I wouldn’t normally get. But I also had a deep and lasting sense that the moment I got sucked into the group’s energy, I wasn’t myself anymore. I ended up becoming a different version of myself without any intention or desire. I didn’t enjoy looking back and didn’t agree with who I wanted to be. And that gave me a very strong aversion to collectivistic thinking, group identity, and working with the crowd.
In the classical liberal and libertarian tradition, I emphasize the importance of thinking of oneself, and for oneself, as an individual rather than as a member of an identity group, and emphasize suspicion of crowds and mobs. I found an intellectual history to do. and encouraged others to be thought of and treated the same way. And in it I found a kind of intellectual vaccine against the madness of the crowd.
And, as disconcerting as it may sound, the simple experience of laughing while watching a stupid movie in the basement that day gave me a degree of sympathy for the kinds of mobs that Scruton rightly found horrifying. It was given to me. When I see footage of people committing acts of vandalism as part of a mob, I feel, in the back of my mind, that I might have been one of those people. If I had been more inclined to subscribe to a worldview based on group identity, if I had been encouraged to allay certain grievances, I would have brought those ideas into that environment and absorbed them into the energy of many other people. If only it had been. – I might end up doing the same thing. Seeing someone drunk in the madness of mass psychology is similar to seeing someone drunk in a more traditional sense. ”
