Yours truly, angry mob

Time marches on. Systems grind away. And so, in Britain, those convicted of looting and burning during the recent riots are now presenting at jails. But many of these are first-time inmates, reportedly under threat in the country’s overcrowded prison system. Apparently, the governors of all UK jails have been warned by the Prison Service to take steps to ensure the safety of those banged up for public misdeeds. The system caters for hard-core repeat crims. It has its own culture and structures and rhythms. Now it’s being used to punish vandals and first-time offenders. It’s a bad fit on both sides.

These people are being incarcerated to underline the present UK government’s ‘hard-on-crime’ credentials. It’s a standard ploy when police numbers and other services are being reduced: governments raise the level of ‘deterrence’. But doing so arises from a misapprehension of the roots of the disorder.
At first, some thought the whole thing was an anarchist uprising, organised through social media. Some saw traces of the Arab Spring and the Serbian uprising that dethroned Slobodan Milošević. Others argued it was rooted in the dissoluteness of British youth, the liberal and feminist agenda, multiculturalism, gaming, fast food…

Basically, everyone in the audience, including here, is an expert and the riots are a blank screen on which they can project their own prejudices and fantasies. No analysis is too daft to be given media space. It has become what James Connolly, in a different context, called a carnival of reaction.
We’re now a couple of weeks on and things are crystallising. To conservatives, apparently it’s all the fault of single mothers. And absent fathers… and liberal teachers… and social workers… and the internet… and godlessness… and anything else of a progressive twist that you care to name.
To those of this tendency, soullessness, dissoluteness and nihilistic tendencies have been nurtured among British young people by namby-pamby liberalism, religious and ideological softness and lack of control and structure and authority and yadda yadda yadda…

Those on the left blame cuts to youth services, the inequality of modern Britain, the excesses of capitalism which have been so evident in the last few years and have created the levels of youth unemployment. And so on…
Surprisingly, given that the whole thing was a succession of mob events, few observers looked at crowd psychology. But an article in the Observer by Tim Adams strikes a chord.
He’s writing about online anger (‘The Angry Brigade’, Observer July 24, 2011) and the rage and vituperation that characterises much online discussion. He introduces the idea of ‘deindividuation’, a term used by psychologists to describe what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed.
While Adams is writing about online anonymity, the concept also applies to social disorder where the protagonists are disguised behind masks, scarves or hoods. He cites a classic American experiment that seems to have direct relevance. In this, researchers found that only 8% of solo and unmasked trick-or-treating children stole money left beside sweets they were invited to take whereas the figure rose to 89% when the children were in larger groups and masked.

Similar phenomena have been observed among football hooligans. The crowd itself generates a dynamic. This seems borne out by the profile of the British looters. When presented to the courts it turned out that they came from a wide cross-section of British society. Far from the feral youth of fatherless families that conservative commentators assumed, a significant number were educated, had jobs and were clearly not Afro-Caribbean!
Of course, we can’t ignore the intersection of the mob and social media. In his latest book You Are Not A Gadget, virtual world entrepreneur Jaron Lanier worries about the next generation of young people around the world “growing up with internet-based technology that emphasises crowd aggregation” and wonders if they “will be more likely to succumb to pack dynamics when they come of age”. Indeed.
You might respond that everyone’s doing it, that pack dynamics are the order of the day anyway and are found far beyond the domains of disaffected or detached youth. As a term, it’s a pretty good way of describing the behaviour of the media over the last two or three years, is it not? Wasn’t Norris undone by a mob?

It’s also a pretty accurate description of the all-powerful financial markets which show all the markers of pack dynamics, driven by rapidly circulating and unsubstantiated rumours, reacting irrationally and hysterically and ransacking and looting and generally doing things they wouldn’t ever do if they were done in the open.
Sadly, there’s an almost universal swing to authoritarianism and hard lines, to demanding that arses be kicked, people fired, heads lopped off (though this, so far, only figuratively), offenders put in the stocks at best (aka facing the people!) and birched at worst…
You see it right across the board, in every sphere, but nowhere more so than in media that are owned by very rich people. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Indeed, if a politician doesn’t talk hard enough they’ll be prodded and hectored by the mob until they do. The idea that collaboration might actually be a better way of doing business has lost all currency.

The perfect headline comprises three constituents, horror, hatred and hysteria. Last year it was the banks. This year it’s the yobs. Next year it could be you.
Watch out!