Mob . . . Mobbing . . . Mobbed

That a thing in its essence is both a noun and a verb, both the actor and the action, simultaneous – that without the verb, without the action, there is no noun, no ‘it’ – what is one to do with that?

Thus do I read in this morning’s paper about recent events in Egypt.  Some people have been ordered executed for their role in a previous soccer riot which resulted in deaths.  In reaction against the execution order, family, friends, soccer supporters or all of the above, rioted and caused the deaths of 27 additional people.  The irony would be laughable were it not so very tragic.

The word ‘mob’ comes from ‘mobile’ and ‘mobility’ – a thing that moves and the movement itself.     Entomology

In Examining the Mob Mentality, an interview with Tamara Avant, Psychology Program Director at South University in Southern Source, Avant says:

Deindividuation obviously does not occur every time people get together in a group, and there are some group characteristics that increase the likelihood of violence, such as group size and physical anonymity. First, many people believe they cannot be held responsible for violent behavior when part of a mob because they perceive the violent action as the group’s (e.g., “everyone was doing it”) rather than their own behavior. When in a large group, people tend to experience a diffusion of responsibility. Typically, the bigger a mob, the more its members lose self-awareness and become willing to engage in dangerous behavior.  Second, physical anonymity also leads to a person experiencing fewer social inhibitions.  When people feel that their behavior cannot be traced back to them, they are more likely to break social norms and engage in violence. 

Avant points to the presence of certain elements in mob violence:

1. Conscious choice – as in “I won’t get caught”, which suggests not that the mob makes the action happen, but that being in the mob allows cover to do that which we have wanted to do all along.  If the ‘doing’ doesn’t occur otherwise, it is only out of fear of consequences.

2. Related to #1, Avant holds that there is a sense of diffuse responsibility in a crowd that turns into a mob – that is, the individual no longer feels responsible for what he or she is doing.  But again, it would seem not that the mob gives birth to desire, but rather gives cover for it.

3. The greater the emotion, the lesser the restraint.

Anger and rage are feeding fires.  Without the oxygen of provocation (real or perceived) they die.  With it, they thrive, destroying all, including the holder of the anger or rage, in their wake.

Violence begets violence.  It’s so axiomatic I wonder that we continue to wonder at it.

A fire has to be starved of what feeds it to die.

I wonder whether any mob in history ever self-checked and simply went home.  If so, I suspect it began with one person: one person saying count me out.  One person bowing out of the fray, leaving in quiet, noticed perchance by a neighboring rioter, who then put down the brick and followed suit.  And then another. . . and another.

It takes lots of people to make a mob.  I’m guessing it only takes a few to unmake it.

Reinhold Neibuhr, as I remember, opined that the evil actions of the group are inherently different, of a differing class, than the evil of the individual.  Simply put, the evil of the group is of such a greater magnitude than the evil of the individual that there is something inherent in the nature of groups themselves that is evil.  I would tend to agree, but I have experienced mass groups differently.  Not all crowds are mobs.  Not all groups are evil.

Some years back, colleagues and I in CPT, along with our translator, monitored elections in north western Iraq, where Kurds are populous.  The Kurds had been denied the right to vote and many gathered outside the election commission to protest.  We went and spoke with many in the crowd.  They were mostly men.  They were all angry.  They were not a mob, but they could have become one.  Our translator was very nervous that we had placed ourselves in their center, and justifiably so.  And yet we stayed and we listened to their stories.  We wrote down their names.  We reported on their disenfranchisement.

There was no riot that day.  There could have been, but there wasn’t.  I don’t know if our presence played any part in that or not.  Perhaps it was as simple as this: the men and women gathered that day not in anger, but in purpose.  They were angry, but their anger was not their purpose: casting their vote was.  Maybe it’s the purposelessness of anger that is so dangerous.

Anger isn’t the opposite of peace; violence is.  And not all anger is violence.

Transforming anger at injustice into justice is hard work – painful and long and just plain hard.  The results are not often instantaneous.  It’s the work of the generations.  It takes patience.  Yet it bears fruit, this hard work.  The men and women I met that day stood taller than their fellow citizens who simply went home without their purple finger.  They took back their own pride and place.  It was a beginning.

How I wish those rioting in Egypt over a soccer match could have stood with their fellow citizens in the liberating squares, standing taller than sentiment, proud to claim responsibility, to say, We did this.

What makes the difference between a rioting mob and a citizenry gathered to change their world?  Maybe it is in the taking rather than the shedding of responsibility, in the insistence on being counted rather than being invisible.

Maybe.