As a public high school teacher, I have had a lot of opportunity to witness the 6-7 phenomenon in real life. Let me talk about how fascinating and disturbing the 6-7 mania is to me as an example of pure, unadulterated herd behavior.

Typically, herd behavior involves actions that are, on their own, meaningful in some way; people vote for the same candidate, listen to the same songs, wear the same clothes, chant the same political slogans. But those votes, songs, clothes, and slogans all have independent cultural significance apart from the herd action.

But when people, in a frenzy of mindless enthusiasm, scream “6-7!” and move their arms up and down opposite each other, the phrase and gesture have literally no meaning on their own. Yet they engage in that behavior because other people are. They partake of the mob’s thrill without borrowing any meaningful emotion from the mob–such as the courage to charge into battle, or the righteous anger of a political movement, or the pride for a sporting team’s achievement–nothing except an automatic and absurd rush, devoid of sense and significance. They don’t even get to enjoy the thrill of being publically obscene!

If there is any meaningful emotion being felt by these people, it is the feeling of being part of a group engaging in the same activity. But the activity–unlike a political rally, musical concert, or other event where herd behavior is exhibited–has no inherent meaning. The shared action could be anything at all.

It’s the essense of automatic mimickry that you’d expect to see in primates other than homo sapiens. But there it is, on full display in classrooms and sporting events everywhere. Leave it to the Internet to unleash our basest nature. It has isolated a fundamental psychological mechanism that makes social conformity possible in the same way that chemists isolate compounds responsible for a certain chemical reaction.

And all it took was one Tik Tok video of a boy, as boys are naturally disposed to do, acting like an idiot at a basketball game.