We are living in a historical period in which our emotions are highly stimulated. Emotions—including those related to the social, political, and moral spheres, such as admiration, indignation, or envy—are not merely reactions, but actual lenses through which we interpret reality. They are profound cognitive processes, loaded with information, which give immediate value to what we experience. An emotion experienced individually is different from a collective emotion, which typically manifests within a group, in response to public events and as a result of group norms.
Sociological studies demonstrate how what we feel, how we name it, and how we choose to express it, is profoundly shaped by the social structures and culture in which we are immersed.
Let us now get down to business and consider thoughts developed by great thinkers and scholars.
The crowd and emotional contagion
For sociologist and psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), collective actions and emotions “combine exactly like the cells that constitute a living body, and form, by coming together, a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each cell individually.” He wrote this in his influential work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mentality (1895), adding: “There are certain ideas and sentiments which do not arise, or are not transformed into action, except in the case of individuals forming a crowd.” A psychologically united crowd became a single collective mind, driven by emotion, which took over at the expense of reason. He viewed crowds as manipulable by a leader who could tame their will, their irrationality, their feelings and thoughts.
This contrasted with the view of the founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), according to which social structures are separate from individuals, and a group can be a force for good. When we come together as a group in a shared ritual, our attention becomes synchronized. In “ The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ” (1912), Durkheim called the resulting intense emotions “collective effervescence”: a meaningful emotional state that belongs to the collective and strengthens the cohesion and solidarity of the group. For him, society and group membership are the very source of morality, civilization, and order. The group protects the individual from anomie (the lack of rules and the resulting emotional disintegration). Collective emotions can therefore have both positive and negative valences.
This vision was shared by sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), for whom the public shapes society, giving rise to positive collective action. In " Opinion and the Crowd " (1901), Tarde explained that thanks to the spread of the press (and today we would say TV and social networks), people could be mentally united and influenced, even when geographically separated. The public is a purely spiritual collectivity, in which cohesion is maintained by sharing the same news and ideas across distances. Tarde therefore spoke of "the public" as an evolution of the crowd: individuals separated by space but mentally united by a medium.
The contemporary drift
Let's return to the initial question: private life has always been influenced by political, economic, and social conditions. There is no subject without a collective context, without others . We are intrinsically intersubjective: the concept, first coined in the 1910s by the founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and his student Edith Stein (1891–1942), has become central in recent decades in social and affective neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and sociology.
Husserl argues that the self is not a closed island: I discover myself only by discovering the other. The world is not "mine," it is "ours"; it is objective precisely because it is shareable. Our emotional life, therefore, does not arise in an internal biological void, but is constructed in the space between people.
Byung-Chul Han , a Korean philosopher and sociologist, one of the most astute analysts of digital society, accurately echoes Le Bon and Tarde's concept of the "crowd," but explains that today we are no longer an "organized crowd" or a compact "public." We are a digital swarm. The swarm is capable of mobilizing in a short time, but lacks stability, a leader, and a long-term political project. It coalesces around a fleeting emotion or a current controversy (think of a wave of indignation), generates an industrial amount of noise, but then disperses as quickly as it formed. Therefore, we are united by technology, but fundamentally isolated in space.
Richard Sennett , an American sociologist, reiterates the idea that our identity and emotions arise only in empathetic and intersubjective relationships with others. He explains in his book The Decline of Public Man that digital culture and modern individualism are weakening our intersubjective skills. Modern society suffers from an expansion of private life that has progressively reduced public life and collective space. If we are no longer accustomed to cooperating with those different from us, our own emotional life becomes impoverished, becoming more fragile and narcissistic.
In conclusion...
Our very subjectivity is formed, from birth, in relation to others with whom we share an environment. In short, our emotional life is a synthesis. It begins as potential within us, but takes shape, color, and direction only through the mirror of the culture that surrounds us. Biology draws the blueprint, but it is the world that paints who we are.
Giuseppe Santoro
References
- Le Bon G. (2004) Crowd Psychology, Tea Ed.
- Durkheim É. (2013) The elementary forms of religious life, Mimesis Ed.
- Tarde G. (2022) Opinion and the crowd, Meltemi Ed.
- Husserl E. (2017) Cartesian Meditations, Orthotes Ed.
- Han B. (2024) Infocracy. Our Lives Manipulated by the Web, Einaudi Ed.
- Sennett R. (2006) The Decline of Public Man, Mondadori Ed.
