A Mob from Afar, People Up Close

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The essay explores the contrast between disappointment in society at large and the kindness found in everyday encounters. Groups have patterns of their own: identity, interests, pressure and emotion can lead decent individuals to produce absurd collective outcomes. Information amplifies extremes, while personal relationships have selection biases too. People can be dogmatic on public issues yet kind and dependable in daily life, and we are no exception. The author argues for keeping both a critical eye on institutions and group dynamics and the patience to understand individuals, remaining sceptical of crowds while valuing the kindness of real encounters.

I’ve noticed that observing human society can sometimes feel like studying physics.

The patterns we find at the macroscopic and microscopic scales can be strikingly different. Society seems to be much the same.

When I look at the world on a large scale, I often feel disappointed. Ignorance, conformity, prejudice and short-sightedness seem to be everywhere. Public opinion is so easily swept along by emotion. People are eager to take sides, yet reluctant to think; quick to voice an opinion, yet rarely willing to admit what they do not know. Sometimes I even wonder whether the unthinking crowd is, after all, the greater part of society.

Strangely, though, when I turn away from society as an abstraction and return to the individual people I encounter in everyday life, I come away with a very different feeling.

Many of the people I meet are actually quite decent.

The sincerity of friends, a stranger’s casual kindness, the care ordinary people put into their lives, and those small but unmistakable moments of warmth between us all make me feel that the world is perhaps less bleak than it appears from a distance.

That leaves an interesting question:

Why does a society made up of so many decent individuals so often present such a disappointing face as a whole?

Perhaps it is because we tend to see society as nothing more than the sum of its individuals, overlooking the fact that groups have patterns of their own.

Alone, a person may be rational, gentle, even deeply kind. Yet within a group, their behaviour can change considerably under the influence of identity, competing interests, social pressure and the emotions of those around them.

Often, people do know what is right. It is simply that, in certain circumstances, doing the right thing comes at a greater cost.

Everyone wants to reach their destination a little sooner, and together they may create a traffic jam in which no one can move. Everyone thinks they are merely letting off a little frustration, yet those feelings can gather into an online attack that spirals out of control.

Individual reason does not necessarily add up to collective reason. Individual kindness does not necessarily produce a kind society.

There is another reason that is easy to overlook: the society we see from a distance has already been filtered and amplified.

As information circulates, extreme views often attract more attention than moderate ones. Anger finds a readier response than reason, and crude, simple judgements travel faster than careful, nuanced analysis.

A quiet, kind person who takes their life seriously may never enter the public eye. An absurd opinion or a foolish argument, meanwhile, can spread across the internet in a single day.

Over time, what we see is no longer society as it is, but society reshaped by emotion, algorithms and the ways information spreads.

Then again, our everyday observations are not necessarily objective either. The people who become part of our lives have usually passed through a filter of their own. We are more likely to form relationships with people who share our values and whose company puts us at ease. The kindness around us may therefore be no more representative of society as a whole.

Both the distant view and the close one can have their own observational biases.

More intriguing still, the person who seems ignorant and dogmatic on public issues may be the very same person who is kind, responsible and dependable in everyday life.

Someone can be profoundly uninformed about certain things and show uncommon wisdom in others. They can hold prejudices against unfamiliar groups while treating the people around them with great kindness.

That is part of what makes people so complicated.

We are always tempted to define a person’s entire character by one opinion or one act. In reality, very few people fit neatly into categories of clever or foolish, good or evil.

And aren’t we much the same ourselves?

Perhaps we consider ourselves clear-sighted on one issue while, in some other area we have yet to recognise, we are simply another member of the unthinking crowd.

Thinking about this, I began to feel that disappointment at a distance and kindness up close are not really contradictory.

They are different faces of the same world, seen at different scales.

I have also gradually come to realise that understanding the absurdities of society and understanding individual people are two different abilities.

The first asks us to remain critical: to examine institutions, incentives, group psychology and the mechanisms through which ordinary people collectively bring about absurd outcomes.

The second asks us to remain patient: to set our labels aside for a while and try to understand someone’s actual circumstances, experiences and feelings.

We need not turn a blind eye to society’s problems because most of the people around us are decent. Nor must we assume ill intent in every stranger because we have seen how foolish a crowd can be.

After all, society is an abstract idea. Life is always lived between individual people.

The world at the largest scale may follow impersonal statistical patterns. Up close, though, understanding, kindness and affection between people still have a value that nothing else can replace.

I may continue to feel disappointed in human society. I may still struggle to understand much of its collective behaviour, and still find far too many absurd people and situations in the world.

But none of that prevents me from appreciating a kind stranger, cherishing a sincere friendship, or offering basic goodwill to someone I happen to meet.

I can remain sceptical of crowds and still be willing to trust individual people.

Because the world we actually inhabit has never been only that vast, abstract society. It is also the human world made of countless small, real encounters.