Silence of the fans
You can judge a society by its attitude to crowds. In the mid-twentieth century they invoked fear of fascism, communism and collective hysteria. Fascist crowds were so “merciless”, wrote Theodor Adorno in 1951, because in their hearts they knew their ideas were false. “If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.”
With the neo-liberal world triumphant at the millennium, the very notion of the to take the title of a popular book from 2004, could be seen in the success of markets over central planners and in the triumph of democracy itself. Diverse groups of people were likely to make better decisions collectively than a single expert. Weren’t they?
