I enjoy reading intellectual biographies – books dedicated to exploring how a particular person’s thinking evolved and developed through their lifetime. This, too, applies to intellectual autobiographies, where thinkers describe their own journey about how they came to believe what they believe. Of course, all such accounts should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s difficult to know how much of our explanations for our views are genuine accounts of how those views developed compared to post-hoc justifications for ideas that developed for unrelated reasons. Still, some of the attributions one makes seem plausible. The late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton attributed his embrace of conservative thinking to his horrified reaction to the 1968 riots carried out by the far-left in France. Asking a friend of his who participated in the riots for an explanation of the ideas motivating the activists, he was referred to Michael Foucault’s book The Order of Things. Scruton described his reaction to that book and its ideas as follows:
The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.
Seeing the deeds those ideas had wrought, Scruton was moved to craft his own philosophy as an opposition to such thinking.
Looking back at my own in life, I recall a strange but, I think, pivotal moment in my own development that probably contributed to my libertarian turn by making me very suspicious of group dynamics. And that event was the Jim Carrey movie The Cable Guy. On the off chance that the connection isn’t immediately obvious to you, let me explain.
The Cable Guy was released in 1996, which I was 13 years old. I was eager to watch it, having very much enjoyed The Mask when it was released two years earlier. One night, we rented the movie, and I watched it by myself. And I absolutely hated it. I thought it was dumb, too low-brow for even my 13 year old self, and it left me cringing and rolling my eyes rather than laughing.
Okay, so when I was 13 I was disappointed that a Jim Carrey movie wasn’t as funny as I had hoped, but that isn’t where the story ends. A few months later, I was over at a friend’s house – it was his birthday, and he was having a birthday party. There were about eight or ten of us over there, if memory serves. And the final activity of the birthday party was going to be everyone watching a movie together- specifically, The Cable Guy.
Even though I had already seen and hated that movie, I was determined to be a good sport and watch along with everyone else. And everyone else at that party loved it – they laughed hysterically throughout. But here’s the thing – I was laughing alongside them. And not because I was just playing along and trying to fit in. On this occasion, I really was finding the movie to be hilarious and my laughter was genuine. Simply by watching the movie along with a group of people, I was swept up in the energy of the group and was suddenly finding great amusement in something that, on my own, I found to be almost painfully stupid.
Later on, I looked back on that and felt genuinely horrified. Sure, I got some laughs I otherwise wouldn’t have had. But I also had a deep and abiding sense that in those moments when I was swept up in the energy of the group, I wasn’t myself anymore – I had, without intention or desire, become a different version of myself that I didn’t enjoy looking back on, and didn’t accord with how I wanted to be. And that gave me a very strong revulsion against collectivist mindsets, group identities, and moving in sync with a crowd.
In the classical liberal and libertarian tradition, I found an intellectual history that stressed the importance of thinking of one’s self – and for one’s self – as an individual, not as a member of an identity group, that stressed a suspicion of crowds and mobs, and encouraged that others be thought of and treated in the same way. And in that, I found a sort of intellectual vaccine to inoculate myself against the madness of crowds.
And though it may sound perplexing, that simple experience of laughing at a dumb movie in a basement that day also gave me a measure of sympathy for the kinds of rioters Scruton rightfully found so horrifying. When I see footage of people carrying out destructive acts as part of a mob, a small part of the back of my mind is keenly aware that I could have been such a person. If I had been more inclined to buy into an group-identity based worldview, if I had been encouraged to nurse a particular set of grievances, if I carried those ideas with me into that environment and was swept up in the energy of so many others – I could end up acting the same way. When I see a person drunk on the madness of a mob mentality, I see it the same way as if I see someone drunk in the more traditional sense – “That could be me, if I let myself drink that much of the Kool-Aid.”
