Mass Mourning for People Nobody Knew

When a head of state dies, a particular thing happens. Broadcasting is suspended, schedules are cleared, and a large number of people report genuine grief for someone they never met.

I want to write about the phenomenon rather than about any particular death, because the phenomenon is what interests me and because being rude about a specific person would obscure the point.

The Thing That Needs Explaining

People did not know this person. They saw them occasionally on television, in ceremonial contexts, performing a role.

And the grief is not fake. That is what makes it worth examining. If it were mere social performance — everyone pretending because everyone else is — it would be a minor curiosity about conformity. But people report real feeling, and I believe them.

So a large population experiences authentic bereavement for a stranger. That is a strange fact about human psychology and it deserves an explanation rather than either mockery or participation.

The Explanation I Favour

Our equipment for grief was built for small groups where everyone you saw regularly was someone you actually knew. Repeated exposure to a face was reliable evidence of a genuine relationship, because in that environment there was no other way to repeatedly see a face.

Broadcast media breaks that assumption comprehensively. You can now see someone weekly for forty years and have no relationship with them whatsoever. The machinery cannot tell the difference — it registers familiarity and produces attachment, because for the whole of our evolutionary history familiarity was attachment.

This is the same mechanism that produces parasocial relationships with presenters, actors, and podcasters. The public mourning of a monarch is that effect at national scale, with institutional reinforcement.

What I Object To

Not the feeling. The feeling is involuntary and there is no sense in condemning people for it.

What I object to is the machinery around it. Every broadcaster clears its schedule, not primarily out of respect but because the audience numbers are enormous and the advertising is priced accordingly. A death becomes a product, and the grief is the raw material.

And there is the question underneath, which is the one that actually bothers me: the arrangement by which one family's private events become a national occasion is not natural or inevitable. It is maintained deliberately, at considerable expense, and it works — the attachment is real, and the institution depends on its being real.

The institution is redundant and the emotion is manufactured for it. Not fabricated — manufactured, in the way that any reliable industrial output is manufactured.

The Part I Am Least Sure About

I should admit that I find this easier to see from outside than people find it from inside, and that this is exactly what someone would say who was simply insensitive to a shared social good.

The strongest case against me is that collective mourning does real work — it synchronises a population, marks time, and provides an occasion for grief that people are carrying anyway and have nowhere else to put. Perhaps the stranger is a socially licensed proxy for losses that have no ceremony of their own.

If that is right, the object of the grief hardly matters and my objection is beside the point. I do not think it is entirely right. But I hold the position more loosely than the tone of this post suggests.