I enjoy reading intellectual biographies – books devoted to exploring how a particular person’s thinking has evolved and evolved over their lifetime. This also applies to intellectual autobiographies, in which thinkers describe their own journey of how they came to believe what they believe. Of course, all these accounts should be taken with a grain of salt. It is difficult to know to what extent our explanations for our beliefs are real stories about how those beliefs developed, compared to post-hoc justifications for ideas that developed for unrelated reasons. Still, some of the attributions seem plausible. The late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton attributed his embrace of conservative thinking to his shocked reaction to the 1968 riots carried out by the far left in France. When he asked a friend of his who had participated in the riots to explain the ideas that motivated 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 philosophical work, but an exercise in rhetoric. Its purpose is subversion, not truth, and it is carefully argued – with the old sleight of hand devised by the Father of Lies – that ‘truth’ requires quotation marks, changes from age to age, and is bound to the form of consciousness, the “episteme”, imposed by the class that benefits from its spread. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found a new literary formula in Foucault. Look for power everywhere, 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 action.
Seeing the actions these ideas had wrought, Scruton was moved to develop his own philosophy in opposition to such thinking.
As I look back on my own life, I remember a strange but, I think, pivotal moment in my own development that probably contributed to my libertarian turn by making me deeply suspicious of group dynamics. And that event was the Jim Carrey movie The cable guy. If the connection isn’t immediately clear to you, let me explain.
The cable guy was released in 1996, when I was 13 years old. I was eager to watch it and really enjoyed it The mask when it was released two years earlier. One night we rented the movie and I watched it alone. And I absolutely hated it. I thought it was stupid and too low for my 13 year old self, and I cringed and rolled my eyes instead of laughing.
Okay, so when I was 13 I was disappointed that a Jim Carrey movie wasn’t as funny as I had hoped, but the story doesn’t end there. A few months later I was at a friend’s house – it was his birthday and he was having a birthday party. There were about eight or ten of us there, if I remember correctly. And the last activity of the birthday party was everyone watching a movie together, specifically: The cable guy.
Even though I had already seen that movie and hated it, I was determined to be a good sport and watch it along with everyone else. And everyone else at that party loved it – they were laughing hysterically the whole time. But the thing is, I was laughing right next to them. And not because I was just playing along and trying to fit in. On this occasion I really did it was I thought the movie was hilarious and my laugh was genuine. By simply watching the film with a group of people, I was swept up in the energy of the group and suddenly found great enjoyment in something that I found almost painfully stupid on my own.
Later I looked back on it and felt genuinely shocked. Of course I had some laughs that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But I also had the deep and abiding feeling that in those moments when I was carried away by the energy of the group, I was not myself more – I had, without intention or desire, become another version of myself that I don’t like to look back on, and that didn’t align with who I wanted to be. And that gave me a very strong aversion to collectivist ways of thinking, group identities and moving in sync with a crowd.
In the classical liberal and libertarian tradition, I found an intellectual history that emphasized the importance of thinking about oneself – and for itself – as an individual, not as a member of an identity group, which emphasized distrust of crowds and gangs and encouraged others to be thought of and treated in the same way. And in it I found a kind of intellectual vaccine to inoculate myself against the madness of the crowd.
And while it may sound confusing, that simple experience of laughing at a stupid movie in a basement that day also gave me a degree of sympathy for the kind of rioters that Scruton rightly found so heinous. When I see images of people performing destructive acts as part of a gang, a small part of the back of my mind is acutely aware that I such a person could be. If I had been more inclined to accept a group identity-based worldview, if I had been encouraged to harbor a certain set of grievances, if I had brought those ideas with me into that environment and been swept up in its energy from so many others – I could eventually do the same. When I see a person drunk on the madness of a mob mentality, I see it the same way I see someone drunk in the more traditional sense: “That could be me, if I let myself drink so much of the Kool -Aid lets drink .”