Creativity Quote by Robyn Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s line lands like a rueful aside from someone who’s spent years watching crowds turn complicated feelings into blunt noise. It’s not a scientific claim so much as a musician’s field report: the more bodies in the room, the more the room behaves like a single organism, and that organism isn’t here for nuance. A concert audience can be generous, ecstatic, even reverent, but it can also be impatient, suggestible, and weirdly hungry for permission to react. Hitchcock points at that slide from personhood to pack.

The intent is lightly accusatory but mostly protective. He’s defending the small-scale intelligence of individuals - curiosity, empathy, the ability to hold two thoughts at once - against the social pressure to simplify. Bigger groups reward the clean, chantable idea; they punish hesitation. Your smartest friend, placed in a crowd, doesn’t become dumber exactly; they become quieter, or they outsource judgment to whatever the group seems to want. “Inverse proportion” is a neat, almost mathematical phrasing that mocks how quickly we dress up this phenomenon as rational.

The subtext is also about performance itself. Musicians rely on crowds, yet crowds can flatten the artist into a jukebox for collective desire: play the hit, repeat the chorus, give us the version of you we already agree on. Hitchcock, a career-long patron saint of the idiosyncratic, is warning that mass agreement is rarely a synonym for insight. In an era of viral consensus and algorithmic pile-ons, the joke turns colder: scale doesn’t just amplify voices; it sands them down.