I want to nail this down early because I’ll be using it often. Always keep in mind that nails aren’t permanent and to use context when making your judgement. Assume the worst of what I say — fine — but then admit you’re arguing against assumptions.
-
The Audience is not the same as the Crowd.
The Audience: doesn’t actually exist. It is the perceived collection of judgements you think others are making from an outside perspective, like you are the main character in a movie. In the future perspective, you consider the audience to be your children and the memories of you — the stories about you are the film of your life, so those that tell it to each other are the audience. Maybe you aspire to win a Nobel prize so the story makes the official books and the audience gets a little bigger. But futures aren’t real, only accumulated todays count. When it manifests in the today where it matters, the audience can’t be made up people — you don’t have kids to tell your story to and if you do then you know they don’t care stop caring quickly — the audience has to become abstract, it has to become the film itself. The viewfinder assigns the roles of life: when you imagine yourself, is it in 4:3 or 16:9? Guess it depends on your childhood.
The Crowd: real. When you go outside and someone bumps into you: you’ve been hit by the crowd. When your sister shows up at your house with her two kids and all their belongings in a single Glad garbage bag: you’ve been hit by the crowd. When you go to a public high school in America, because it’s the law, and you get a poor education: you’ve been hit by the crowd too. The crowd are the people that actually do affect your life, the real ones, and it turns out the crowd is a lot harsher to you and easier on others than you would think. Meth heads smoke up in public and you got a ticket for going 9 over the speed limit once.
You feel more comfortable when the crowd and the audience have the same opinion. When you call someone crazy you are saying that the crowd hasn’t rounded them out properly; the audience demands that wrongs be righted before the film ends and calling them wrong is enough for their actions to feel right to you (“I hope it was worth it, because they are going to hell” or “that person is so toxic and karma will come back to bite them” …depending on your childhood).