Super Bowl LIX and communitas. What 80,000 people together teaches children.

My daughter asked: 'Do they all know each other?' We were watching the Super Bowl pregame ...

My daughter asked: 'Do they all know each other?' We were watching the Super Bowl pregame — 80,000 people in the stadium visible in the wide shot. Do they all know each other? I said: no. Most of them have never met. She said: then why are they all doing the same thing?

This is the question that Victor Turner spent a career trying to answer. Turner called it communitas: the social bond that forms between people who don't know each other but are sharing the same experience at the same moment. It is the feeling in the stadium, at the concert, in the protest march. The person next to you is a stranger. They are also, for this moment, on your side.

The eighty-four delegations on the Seine. The answer to my daughter's question — 'why do they wave?' — is the answer that Victor Turner spent a career building toward: they wave because for this moment, they are all the same kind of thing. The wave is the recognition of sameness-within-difference. This is the specific thing that produces the change. The change comes from the practice. The practice comes from the decision to try it once, this week, in the ordinary moment that is already available.

The Super Bowl is one of the largest secular communitas events in the world. 80,000 people in the stadium. Over 100 million watching in the US. Millions more globally. They don't know each other. They are temporarily unified by the same game, the same moment, the same shared investment in the outcome.

What communitas produces — the research on crowd psychology and collective effervescence is specific — is a temporary dissolution of ordinary social boundaries. The person who would never speak to you in ordinary life is suddenly talking to you. The person next to you in the stadium is your ally. The experience of this dissolution is one of the most reliably pleasurable experiences available to humans. It is why concerts sell out, why protests draw people who are not usually activists, why the Super Bowl has 80,000 people willing to pay significant amounts of money to sit in an arena and watch other people play a game.

For children, the Super Bowl is a laboratory for understanding what collective experience does. The specific thing worth saying: 'These 80,000 people don't know each other. For the next four hours, they are all on the same side. That feeling — the feeling of being part of something larger — is what you're watching.' That is the lesson. The football is the occasion. The communitas is the point.

My daughter's question — 'do they all know each other?' — was the exactly right question. The exactly right answer is: no. And that is the interesting part.

For children, the Super Bowl is a laboratory for understanding what collective experience does to humans. The specific thing worth saying: 'These eighty thousand people don't know each other. For the next four hours, they are all on the same side. That feeling — the feeling of being part of something larger — is what you're watching.' That is the lesson.

When your family watches a large collective event — Super Bowl, Olympics, World Cup — do you watch together, or near each other but separately?

And: when was the last time your child experienced genuine communitas — the feeling of being part of something larger, with strangers?

This week: take one thing from this edition and put it into your week. One thing, done once. Notice what changes.

La semana que viene: Víctor sobre la vulnerabilidad y lo que el invierno hace a la apertura emocional de los niños.

Markus añade: Vi el Super Bowl en un bar el año pasado — no para ver el partido, porque no sé nada de fútbol americano. Vi a las personas viendo el partido. La comunitas en esa sala era visible. Extraños hablaban entre sí. Salí conociendo algo sobre la pertenencia que no había sabido antes. — Markus

Names of people and brands in these editions are changed. Whoever was there and reads this knows what we are talking about.

Cuando tu familia ve un gran evento colectivo — Super Bowl, Juegos Olímpicos, Mundial, concierto — ¿lo veis juntos, o cerca pero por separado?

¿Y cuándo fue la última vez que tu hijo experimentó comunitas genuina — la sensación de ser parte de algo más grande, con extraños?