When norms breakdown
Are we in an era where a new, harder social contract is emerging?
At the Ryder Cup golf competition in the US, player Rory McIlroy became a lightning rod for the crowd, pushing well beyond the sport’s usual boundaries of civility. From the very first tee, the official MC whipped the audience into chanting “fuck you Rory!”, with spectators hurling homophobic abuse, and his wife being pelted with a beer cup.
Was this an unusual lapse in etiquette, or is it a marker of something more significant? Some commentators are suggesting that what we saw was, in fact, a crack in the fragile infrastructure of norms that determine how we behave in public, what is permitted, and what is beyond the pale. So, the deeper question is less about whether fans went “too far’ and more about what today counts as acceptable behaviour in public life? And if more people feel emboldened to cross those lines, whether on golf courses, in theatres, and in politics, what does that reveal about our shared social contract?
Fear of the crowd
Concerns about today’s Ryder Cup crowd are not new. In 1895, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind defined crowds as irrational mobs, driven by unconscious forces and stripped of individual reason. Despite evidence to the contrary, this view has persisted, resulting in a century of widespread suspicion about mass gatherings. More recent readings suggest that Le Bon’s theory reflected his time: the upheaval of post-1871 Paris, class conflict, and the fear of a socialist uprising. As crowds expert Fergus Neville argues, calling crowds irrational was also a way of delegitimising dissent that concerned the wealthy classes:
“By a priori pathologising alternative visions of society as irrational, any challenge to the hierarchical social and political status quo was rendered mindless”
Of course, this framing is a familiar one even today, where any crowd, from protest to football terraces, is readily cast as a threat to order, as if any gathering is always dangerous.
The crowd as a place where social norms are enacted
Other thinkers saw crowds differently than Le Bon. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich pointed to medieval carnivals, occasions when authority was inverted, with peasants mocking priests and slaves serving their masters. She set out how these events were often politically ambiguous, acting as both a challenge to hierarchy and a safety valve for discontent. In one sense, perhaps the rowdy golf crowd had a similar air of inversion, albeit not in a carnivalesque way; nevertheless, etiquette was mocked, order turned upside down.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim famously suggested that crowds generate a ‘collective effervescence’: shared emotion that binds individuals into belonging. Stephen Reicher, builds on this, suggesting that crowds involve a cognitive transformation from personal to social level identification. It is through this that crowd members act meaningfully, reflecting the norms of their salient shared (social) identity. On this basis, studies of riots and protests have long shown that crowd actions are patterned and intelligible, not indiscriminate.
The question then is not whether crowds are rational or irrational, but which norms are being enacted, and who defines them.
Seen this way, the Ryder Cup crowd wasn’t losing a wild crowd out of control but instead was performing a script: triumphalism, masculinity, domination. In this distorted world, booing McIlroy was arguably a perverse act of solidarity to a set of shared norms.
How this reflects a new window of permission
The same apparent shift in norms is visible beyond sport and entertainment. In Manchester earlier this year, a Dolly Parton-themed musical was suspended after audience members shouted homophobic abuse at the stage. And the pattern stretches wider. NHS staff report unprecedented levels of aggression: attacks on A&E nurses in England have nearly doubled in six years, with staff describing being punched, spat on, and even threatened with acid. Nor is politics immune: more than half of UK MPs now say they feel unsafe because of threats from the public.
Cultural theorist Kirsty Sedgman explains this with the concept of a “window of permission.” She suggests that social norms are never fixed; they widen or shrink depending on what dominant cultural figures signal as acceptable. “As we see more politicians and public figures voicing these views,” she notes, “the window of what is acceptable is widened to encompass these abhorrent ideas”.
This helps explain why behaviours that once would have been unthinkable might now be experienced by perpetrators not as disruption but as righteousness. Like the Ryder Cup crowd, theatregoers, patients, or those challenging elected representatives may not see themselves as abandoning norms, but rather as enacting newly licensed ones.
Shitposting as statecraft
In late September, the White House circulated a video of its new presidential “Walk of Fame.” As the video moves along a sequence of portraits, it arrives at a framed photograph of an autopen signing Joe Biden’s name, an allusion to conspiracy theories about his supposed incapacity. Media scholar Robert Topinka suggests the clip is designed to elicit a dual response: amusement among supporters and indignation among critics. Crucially, it was this very polarity that constituted the communicative strategy. This is recognisable as a shitpost: low-effort content, deliberately provocative, structured to foreclose the possibility of good-faith engagement. Nor was this an isolated gesture. The Department of Homeland Security subsequently released deportation videos edited to the Pokémon theme song (“Gotta Catch ’Em All”), and another styled in the manner of a Jet2 holiday advert.
The outrage these posts provoked was not incidental; it was integral to the narrative. As Topinka observes, the communicative cycle is straightforward: a meme is released, critics denounce it, supporters take pleasure in their anger, and the clip circulates far more widely than it otherwise would. Outrage generates visibility, and visibility becomes a measure of success. In this logic, the reaction is the mechanism.
Topinka argues that Trump has elevated shitposting into a mode of governance. These artefacts are not designed to communicate policy detail but to define political belonging through ridicule. The more opponents protest, the more the content is judged to have succeeded.
Here, too, Stephen Reicher’s insight applies: if crowds enact the norms they see modelled by dominant cultural figures, then when government embraces trolling and mockery, a new set of behaviours becomes the collective script.
The psychology of norm breakdown
Social norms are best understood as fragile, contingent agreements that enable cooperation in collective life. At the Ryder Cup, verbal abuse directed at McIlroy was perhaps interpreted by participants not as transgression but as an affirmation of loyalty to the in-group, where hostility toward McIlroy marked belonging within the American crowd. In Manchester, homophobic heckling is reframed by some audience members not as disruption but as a form of moral self-assertion, an expression of virtue framed as defending traditional values against what they perceived as progressive overreach.
Sedgman shows how these social norms are never static, but shift as the “window of permission” expands, especially when political and cultural elites signal that once-taboo forms of hostility are acceptable, even virtuous. Topinka takes this further, demonstrating how political communication itself has begun to model trolling and shitposting as legitimate forms of statecraft.
Seen together, these perspectives reveal not a breakdown of order but a redrawing of its boundaries: as Reicher shows, crowds are not simply losing control; they are following new scripts written by the dominant figures.
Why this matters
To be sure, every generation has worried about declining standards. Plato lamented the volatility of the Athenian mob; Victorian critics fretted about disorderly theatres. Such anxieties often reflect a misplaced sense of cultural nostalgia as much as they do reality.
However, the present moment may not be reduced to a mere notion of historical cycle. What marks out the present moment is not simply lapses in civility, but the way hostility is being normalised as a legitimate form of participation. From stadium chants to theatre heckles to White House memes, behaviours once marginal are increasingly reframed as loyalty, righteousness, even patriotism. Sedgman warns that once the window of permission shifts, it is rarely restored to its earlier boundaries.