I cannot tell you how much joy washed over my city as we watched our Knicks basketball team march to the championship win last Saturday night. Watch parties all over the city, in restaurants and bars, on sidewalks and in parks, on rooftops and in backyards and living rooms, block party cookouts with everyone invited, music blaring, people dancing, everyone sharing in the same euphoria, differences erased, and in between games, we met each other as members of one tribe, regardless of outward appearance, background, circumstance, we shared this beautiful possibility, with our wonderful young mayor as the cheerleader in chief, reminding us that we are indeed one, all of us making up the whole magical idea that is New York City. God, we needed this joy. We needed to come together like this. We needed to remember that, as one Luis Jonathan Hernandez put it in a post on instagram, "Joy is not a break from the work. Joy is the work."
It was incandescent, what New Yorkers experienced en masse as we watched Jalen Brunson, Karl Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, and all the rest never give up, even when the situation looked hopeless, watched them be mentally tough enough to scrap their way to victory, coming back from a 29-point deficit in one game to win by one point with one second to go! New York just about fell ouuuut! Good God it was magnificent! The whole city roared!
Apparently, there's a name for what just happened here. It's called Collective Effervescence. Here's the science, from sociologist Emile Durkheim, as explained by a trauma therapist named Susan Zinn on social media—I'm quoting her because she explains it better than I can right now—"When thousands of people feel the same emotion at the same time—joy, hope, belonging—something extraordinary happens inside your body. Your heart rhythms synchronize with strangers. Your nervous system wakes up. You feel alive in a way you forgot was possible. Sociologist Émile Durkheim named this in 1912. He noticed that humans are fundamentally transformed when they gather around something larger than themselves. A ritual. A belief. A shared purpose."
She points out that New Yorkers haven't had a Knicks championship win since 1973, and now, it's happened. "Fifty-three years of waiting. And then—the thaw. Most of us have been living in Functional Freeze. Functioning perfectly and managing everything, and feeling almost nothing. Last night, New York reminded us what we’ve been starving for."
