What We Can Learn from a Shirtless Guy Dancing at a Concert

In the summer of 2009, an outdoor music festival suddenly became a psychology experiment.

A crowd of people on a grassy slope was listening to a concert down below. Most of them were sprawled out on the ground or on picnic blankets, but one shirtless man was dancing intensely to the music. He paid no attention to the people around him.

All over the hill, concertgoers recorded the dancing guy on their phones and giggled about him. Every now and then, someone would walk up beside him and join in as a joke. But the stares were obviously uncomfortable for the newcomers. They kept glancing back at their friends to make sure it was still funny, and they quickly left.

Finally, someone more persistent joined in. He swayed and waved his arms with the dancing guy for what felt like minutes, mimicking his moves and drawing even more eyes to the area. Then another dancer appeared. People turned and laughed and watched the three of them. It was another twenty seconds before two more arrived.

After that, the hill seemed to melt as people ran down it from all directions. Almost immediately, the dance party was huge. It swallowed some of the people still sitting, who just moments before had been joking with each other about how ridiculous the dancing guy looked. Some of them seemed like they wanted to stay sitting, but they must have felt awkward and out of place among so many people standing, so they reluctantly got to their feet.

If you haven’t seen a video of this, you’ve got to go watch one. Here’s a link to the best angle.

The YouTube comments on that video are fascinating in themselves. Most of them said they had just witnessed a beautiful moment and their faith in humanity had soared. But several said they were disgusted. It’s as if some of the commenters watched a different video.

I can see why most of them thought the video was inspiring. We all felt a flash of triumph as the dancers went from the minority to the majority, and the shirtless guy went from crazy to genius.

But ultimately, I side with the viewers who left that video shaken and disturbed. I was unsettled at the number of people who mocked the lone dancer but rushed to join ten, whose opinions changed in an instant to align with those of the crowd.

And those aspects of human nature extend far beyond dance parties and music festivals.

The Gay Marriage Reversal

If you took a chart of Americans’ support for legalizing gay marriage over time and covered up the labels, it would look like a plot of the percent of people dancing in that 2009 video. It would start off flat at a low percentage and then skyrocket to well over fifty.

To the people who lived through the massive shift in opinion on gay marriage, it seemed to happen overnight.

There were anti-sodomy laws on the books in fourteen U.S. states as recently as 2003. In 2008, fewer than ten of the one hundred U.S. senators publicly supported legalizing same-sex marriage. And in 2012, surveys show that still less than half the country would admit to favoring legalization.

Now, same-sex marriage is recognized in all fifty states. It’s celebrated in movies and TV shows. It has become socially risky to suggest that the change was for the worse. And even the religious, some of the staunchest enemies of the policy just a decade ago, are going soft on the issue. You can’t sit through a Catholic mass anymore without the priest subtly implying that same-sex unions are a minor or irrelevant sin, in direct contradiction to the teachings of the Vatican and the words of the Bible.

What caused this tidal wave of change? No new facts came to light. God didn’t descend and edit the scriptures. None of the reasons for opposing same-sex marriage were invalidated or weakened. All we can say is that Americans were morally appalled by homosexuality one decade, and they embraced it the next. They discarded their convictions as quickly and carelessly as one throws out a piece of trash, as soon as it was fashionable to do so.

To be clear, I support gay marriage. I think it’s a positive move towards the separation of church and state. But it annoys me that people instantly gave up their opinions when they became unpopular. I can’t respect the millions of Americans who came to my side all at once. Like the wave of late-arriving dancers at that concert, they changed their minds only in response to the crowd around them.

On the other hand, I have total respect for the people who opposed gay marriage when they were commended for it and continue to now that they’re called bigots. They are like the concert attendees who forced themselves to stay sitting as the dance party materialized around them because they had too much dignity to follow the guy they had just laughed at.

But the people who stayed sitting when everyone else got up were few and far between—as uncommon as the people who danced when everyone else was sitting. Instead, most of the concertgoers followed a simple formula. They sat when the majority were sitting, danced when the majority were dancing, and looked strangely at anyone who bucked the trend.

While that approach to dancing leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it was downright jarring to watch politicians, celebrities, and our own grandparents apply the same technique to their personal values.

Would You Really Have Hated Slavery?

Not only can the pressure of majority opinion break deeply held convictions about gay marriage; it can even convince reasonable people to support truly brutal ideas.

Today, a lot of people say they would have fought slavery if they had lived in the American South while it was still legal. When I hear that, I usually shake my head.

Really? You would have been a radical abolitionist? You would have faced mockery and insults from your neighbors? You would have been the one person in your peer group who was always on about a stupid, slightly dangerous theory? If you’re so unconcerned with looking crazy, then why don’t you stand on that table for a couple minutes and tap dance?

Then there are those who say they wouldn’t actively oppose slavery, but they would be internally horrified by it.

Again, really? You’re the type of person who disagrees with almost everyone you know about major pillars of society? Please, share with us some of the views you hold that less than a tenth of your city would agree with.

I don’t buy that many of the people alive today would dislike slavery if they were born into a society where it was normal. In fact, we saw how many people spoke up against it when they were born into that society: vanishingly few.

And I’ll go even further. Drop the average 2018 American into 1820 Alabama with all their memories intact, and they’ll lose their antislavery attitudes within a year.

Here’s how they’ll justify it:

“The slave owners I’ve met aren’t cruel like I thought they’d be. They’re just farmers trying to make a living. They genuinely care about their slaves. I’ve heard about some isolated acts of abuse, and those should be stopped of course, but the slaves who are treated well seem content…”

Dance Revolution

Most people only dance when others do, only support gay marriage when others do, and only reject slavery when others do. They like to think they’re arriving at opinions on their own, but really, their opinions are reflections of the sentiments around them. They don’t realize it, but when you ask them what they believe, they just measure the group consensus and report it.

I’ve thought about what I would have done if I were at that festival, and honestly, I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t have been the first or second person to join the dancing guy, but I might have been the third. Or I might have rushed in when there were already twenty and hated myself for it later. I might really have stayed sitting, plastered to my picnic blanket as the party ballooned around me, looking down at my phone to fight the awkwardness. Or, realizing I had missed my chance to support the dancing guy when he needed it, I might have just walked away.

I don’t know which person I would have been at that concert in 2009, but I know who we all should aspire to be. We should aspire to be like the hero of that YouTube video—focused on the music, oblivious to the stares, optionally shirtless, and dancing where no one else will.