How drastically we change when we're allowed to
Have you ever been to a stadium? Ever heard the raucous noise? The banners? The searing hot noise emanating from all over the stadium? It's frankly ridiculous, especially when compared next to societal norms. Because a normally calm, orderly human, who partakes in regular office activities, always greets his/her coworkers and works hard and humbly can go home, throw on a ridiculous garment to support a sports team, go to a stadium and lose it, drinking multiple pints of beer and shouting verbal insults as the opposition. Because in a stadium, societal norms don't apply. In real life, we are supposed to be orderly, friendly, hard-working and pleasant. In a stadium, we're supposed to be as loud as we can be, spitting insults at opposite fans-people we've never met before- and generally act as passionate as possible. This kind of reversal in expectations is strange. But it's clear that the fans revel in this freedom. We humans aren't always meant to be orderly, to act in the appropriate manner that society demands from us. Therefore, this is a rare opportunity for these impulses to be let loose. And they are let loose. Not despite their regular behavior, but because of it.
I recently went to a Warriors game with my family and the amount of insults and people were throwing at the players and the lack of respect for not only the players, but also their fans was astonishing. The yelling and booing while a player was free throwing disturbing. For me, these people were disrespecting the game and it honestly kinda ruined the whole experience. I wanted to watch a basketball game thinking that people would respect each other but after my experience, I'd rather watched the game from home and focus on the game rather than worry about if someone was going to throw a beer at my head because I wasn't supporting the same team as them.
ReplyDeleteThe mob mentality that is created in concentrated events like these is quite remarkable. Humans feed off of each others energy just as dogs react to ours. We tend to follow the pattern and norm around us following those social queues wether consciously or not and join. Just as how you described Julian with the office environment vs. the stadium rowdiness. We join the hype creating that adrenaline fueled relatively limitless to other events environment changing our actions and personalities to a certain extent.
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