Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square, gather the people together there, and you’ll have a festival. Do better: let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors . . . This way each one sees and loves himself in the others; and all will be better united.

 — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Some great things look suspect from the outside; many mediocre things look great.

When images of chanting crowds are invoked, it’s easy to think of the Nazi spectacle — unthinking, ecstatic people manipulated by crude, irrational forces. But that probably says more about the poverty of our experience with large crowds than the nature of crowds themselves.