When I was a senior in high school, I worked at the movie theater at a nearby mall. As Christmas neared we had a special, advance private screening for the movie Hoffa which was released on Christmas Day, 1992. As a part of the screening the studio sent a bunch of replica buttons:
And by a bunch, I mean 4-500 or so. And the audience at the screening were not terribly interested in taking them, so we had a crap-ton left at the end of the night and nothing to do with them. So my friend Dave and I set out to perform a social experiment at school the next day, the last day before winter break. We decided to try and create an entire movement from nothing, by giving select popular students one of the pins to wear, and direct others to us to get their own just to see how long it would take to give them all away, or if we even could. At school the next day, we gave a few out to some popular friends of ours in different cliques. We told these folks that we were simply interested in who would come by to get one, and for what reason, depending on who they’d seen with one.
I don’t remember exactly when we ran out, but it was definitely before lunch, probably around 3rd or 4th period. And when we asked why people wanted them, it was the predictable mixture of those whose friends had them and wanted to fit in, lowerclassmen riding coattails to fit in, social misfits who wanted to wear them ironically (or maybe not), genuine movie buffs with no idea why any of this was happening, and people who saw a crowd standing around getting stuff and were curious as to what. It was pretty amazing to us; in just a few hours, with 5-minute passing periods, about 10 minutes for the first people to be wearing them before school started, and the class periods themselves, we created enough word-of-mouth to get literally hundreds of high school students to wear the same accessory; some prop from a Jack Nicholson film, no less. Honestly, I wish I knew how it worked because I’m terrible at marketing.
What I’m curious about, and never got a chance to test, was how it would work out if we did something in the other direction? Get some really cool-looking thing and only give it to the most introverted or socially awkward kids we could find? I guess it would have been a challenge for anyone to see them in the first place…
Anyway, we took some completely random historical recreation pin from a movie that hardly any of these people were ever going to watch and created a one-day movement. Absolutely non-scientific experimentation showed that high school kids just want to belong, and that symbols of that shared sense of belonging are important. If you want to argue that high school and the adult world are different I will simply point you to virtually any social media post or YouTube comment thread. Discounting the actual children there, it’s an undeniable shitshow of childishness and illogic. Some of us spend time only with above average intellects; most of us aren’t so lucky.
Everywhere. All the time.
I posit that actual human emotional development is complete in most people by the end of middle school, and my interactions with the population at large tend to bear me out, at least for the last 30 years or so. Our herd instincts and need to feel a tribal sense of belonging are frequently more than sufficient to override our higher reasoning if being in opposition means ostracization. And that’s why I think cancel culture, or the threat of it, is so successful. It’s more fulfilling to be a part of the crowd than to see things for how they really are. And with the range of acceptable opinions ever shrinking in online discourse (and the pushback against it), I think either it’s going to get really, really bad and we’re headed for another dark age within the next two or three generations or we’ll have a new renaissance of human progress and understanding. It really could go either way, I’m not placing any bets right now.
