There are some activities which only groups of people can perform, because we have finite bodies. Examples: the Wave. An around-the-horn double play. Synchronized swimming. A sensual tango. And so on.

And there are some activities only a single person can do, because we have unconnected minds. Examples: meditation. Understanding a proof. Remembering a departed ancestor at a particular moment. You get the picture.

However, there are also a good number of activities which, theoretically, both a group and an individual could do — and yet only groups seem to do them. Examples: cheering while clapping. Going to church. Starting a riot. Lynching.

Why? Apart from the obvious safety in numbers, and allowing for a few copycats, why do groups of humans behave so differently from individuals?

I do not know if the following model is correct, but if it is, the evidence awaits us within the brain — and it would explain why groups are, almost without fail, far stupider than a typical stupid human, and far more volatile than the most unstable psychopath. First, a little physics lesson:

Setting aside short-range nuclear interactions, there are only two fundamental forces in nature: gravity and electromagnetism. Now, in terms of relative strength, the electromagnetic force is gazillions of times more powerful, and it weakens with distance in exactly the same fashion as gravity. In our everyday lives both forces nevertheless play a major role. And if we confine our attention to the really big show, the interactions between stars and planets and galaxies, gravity is the clear winner. Sure, stars give off a lot of electromagnetic radiation, but the way in which they actually interact with each other is entirely gravitational. How can this be? Why does the underdog win?

Simple. Electric charge can be positive or negative. Magnets have both north and south poles. Throw a bunch of charged particles together, and their total charge is quite likely near zero. When they accumulate into large groups, electromagnetic forces tend to cancel one another out.

Gravity, on the other hand, is always attractive. It builds and builds as the amount of matter grows, so that truly massive objects only answer to one force. Gravity, then, is nature’s groupthink.

Now I start to speculate. Suppose that each individual human being possesses two distinct personalities. I’m going to call them Charisma and Machismo, because these words vaguely resemble Charge and Mass (note that even though the term “machismo” has masculine connotations, every human possesses what I’m calling Machismo). Let me define these personalities a little better: Charisma is dominant, Machismo is recessive. Charisma is what you see when you interact with a person one-on-one. Machismo lurks beneath the surface; you rarely even catch a glimpse of your own.

Charisma varies widely from person to person. Nobody’s going to argue that Carl Sagan had the same type of Charisma as did Benito Mussolini, or that Kamala Harris has the same type of Charisma as does Donald Trump. Indeed, some types of Charisma seem to cancel each other out.

But – so I’m positing – everyone has the same Machismo, and this personality is a thoroughgoing psychopath.

Where did our twin personalities come from? My guess is that Machismo is tied to the so-called reptilian brain, the part that evolved before humans had any sort of social contract. Operating as feral primates, each individual’s best chance to survive was quite likely to behave as psychopathically as possible. The need for this sort of skill has passed, but it makes sense that we all still carry it around, much like our appendix, as evolutionary baggage.

As for Charisma, there are already plenty of theories of personality floating around; take your pick! For a guide to what the various flavors of Charisma might look like, I suggest the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, enneagrams, or some combination of the two.

One further hypothesis: different humans have different relative levels of Charisma and Machismo. Fred, for example, might have a personality that’s 70% Charisma, while Albert’s split is more like 85/15. And of course a few unfortunates have more than 50% Machismo; they tend to get noticed more often but are comparatively rare. This is necessary to explain why the yuckiness of a group is not a pure function of its size, as well as why some people seem to have personalities that “fit in” to a group dynamic more easily — they have more innate Machismo.

If my guesses are true, what would it mean? Well, for a start, it would explain why humans tend to pair-bond: the added security of more and more significant others quickly gets offset by the cancellative nature of Charisma (with atoms you tend to need a few trillion before gravity starts to show its effects, but with people groupthink can start to emerge even in groups of three).

More importantly, if this lurking Machismo were recognized for what it was – a recessive, backward obsolescence – and if it were acknowledged that groups are inherently crippled intellectually as a direct result of the math inside the model, then maybe we’d stop making supercritical decisions via voting. This is the jumping-off point for a better system of government.

Even groups of like-minded, rational humans – say, a department faculty at a major university, or a team of engineers at NASA – routinely make idiotic choices that I have a hard time believing any one of them would make on her own. So whether or not my model represents a physical reality within the human brain, it has its use as reminder that groups are dumb, and dumb chooses poorly consistently. What the heck are we doing voting for anything?

But wait — a loose end! How is it, exactly, that Charismas cancel one another out? That’s a part of the model I haven’t yet been able to mathematize, because the cancellation needs to be, as Charisma itself is, multidimensional. A stopgap guess would be to say that there are, oh I don’t know, seven mutually orthogonal axes along which Charisma can exist, and you don’t add Charismas like you add real numbers, but maybe you take the external product of their vector forms or some such, so that pretty quickly the “sum” of a few Charismas works out to zero. Yeah, that’s good. Let’s go with that.

I could quantify and flesh out what I’ve said, but I leave that job to someone else. And they will have to work it out on their own, picking up where I’ve left off — for this project, I don’t think we should work in groups.