My recent post on Coriolanus had me diving back into some of my favorite commentary, both philosophical and artistic, on crowds. In the post, I suggested:

The fault, it seems, is not in the forces acting on the crowd but rather in the crowd as such.

What did I mean by that? I let the experts speak below:

An excellent monologue by Adam Driver in White Noise (movie clip)

Kierkegaard: The Crowd is Untruth (excerpt)

Chapter 22 of Huckleberry Finn (it is Huckleberry Finn, so please do not read if you do not want to see words and themes that everyone knows are used in the book)

Freddie Mercury and the greatest one-word speech of all time

Andreas Gursky’s photography of Arirang, a North Korean rhythmic gymnastics pageant, with excellent writing about the aesthetics of coordination (toward the end)