I’ve been look­ing into crowds and mobs, seek­ing to iden­tify ele­ments com­mon to pos­i­tive large-group expe­ri­ences. This week, I picked up Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy,” look­ing for answers.

During truly ecsta­tic events, par­tic­i­pants have the sen­sa­tion of merg­ing with the group, becom­ing part of a larger whole, and hav­ing the “expe­ri­ence of self-loss in the crowd.” With the tem­po­rary loss of indi­vid­ual iden­tity comes the tem­po­rary loss of indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­ity. Inhibitions are low­ered and moral judge­ment may be impaired, since “the crowd” acts as one force. This explains how ordi­nary, gen­er­ally moral peo­ple can riot, and how straight-laced con­ser­v­a­tives can let it all hang out at Mardi Gras. (Yes, alco­hol plays a role, too, accel­er­at­ing the low­er­ing of inhi­bi­tions and an increased sense of con­nec­tion with others.)

Ehrenreich observes that instances of col­lec­tive ecstasy are very much non-hierarchical:

Hierarchy, by its nature, estab­lishes bound­aries between people--who can go where, who can approach whom, who is wel­come, and who is not. Festivity breaks the bound­aries down. …

While hier­ar­chy is about exclu­sion, fes­tiv­ity gen­er­ates inclu­sive­ness. The music invites every­one to dance; shared food briefly under­mines the priv­i­lege of class. … At the height of the fes­tiv­ity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses--of gen­der, eth­nic­ity, tribe, and rank--and into a brief utopia defined by egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, cre­ativ­ity, and mutual love.

Ehrenreich refers to our mod­ern era as the “post­fes­tive” era, since cen­turies of hier­ar­chi­cal civ­i­liza­tion have all but elim­i­nated the class-undermining expres­sions of par­tic­i­pa­tory joy that threaten it.

Given that, how can we design expe­ri­ences of col­lec­tive joy for a post­fes­tive people?