An Outsider's Guide to Humans by Camilla Pang PhD

Author:Camilla Pang PhD [Pang, Camilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Throughout our lives, individuality and conformity exert equal and sometimes opposite forces on us. The desire to stand out, and the need to belong, exist as parallel urges in all of us. We are individuals who can only survive and thrive in the collective context.

Everything I have studied about crowds over twenty years has led me to a clear conclusion. This is a duality we should embrace rather than seeking to fight. There is never any ultimate victor in the tussle to create equilibrium between me and we. Both have an essential role to play in our lives, and both must be respected. Both have something important to offer us.

What’s more, neither is going away. Our individual personality and character will always be in us, however much we might try to alter it. At the same time, retreating into ourselves as individuals doesn’t make the world go away. However much you might try to live on your own private island, there is no such thing as the entirely independent life. We have emotional and practical needs that can only be satisfied by tapping into the collective. At some point, even those of us who embrace our solitude have to leave our own shore, otherwise we never have anything to compare our solitary endeavours to. (And if you don’t relish the departure, it’s much more likely that you will enjoy the destination.)

As a child, this was something I feared above all other things. My mum used to say that going out with me was like a circus act, as I contorted myself to avoid the touching, and the sounds, noises and smells that scared me. But even though crowds still make me anxious and afraid, studying them has been one of my most important and beneficial experiments. It has helped me to recognize that individuality isn’t everything, nor is it something that you should ever deny or feel ashamed of. I can remain myself and keep hold of my personality, at the same time as being part of a wider world that I both benefit from and contribute to. Participating in the collective doesn’t stop me from being myself – in fact it makes the most of who I am, my experiences and what I have to offer. A dash of conformity has not detracted from my individuality, but deepened it.

My attempt to analyse crowds was born out of a need to cope with large numbers of people. But in the process I learned that I can do more than survive among other people. I can also connect and offer something unique. And the same is true for all of us.

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