Anger? No.
No one can have missed the news about riots. Like any sort of sudden shift – a big fall in the stock market, an election – more or less everyone hears that it has happened. However, unlike a general election, a variety of people are asking what has gone wrong, and whom is responsible.
The rioting has lead to some sickening blaming by bleeding-heart whingers. Somehow they think complaining about the police or the Home Secretary or criticising the exact moment the Prime Minister flies home will help. It won’t. It won’t undo the damage and it won’t stop rioting happening again. Calls for the use of Draconian measures by the police are equally misguided. At what point do such measures become violence against one’s own people? The bashings the police have had in the past about (fatal) mistakes made in the heat of a situation will have made them understandably circumspect.
You may be wondering where the fault does lie if we take the above as our starting point. You may be relieved to hear that I am not going to bang on about a flaw in the fabric of society, or anything similarly woolly. The fault lies with people wantonly doing something they know they shouldn’t. Many people they know were doing it, and as there is strength in numbers, they will have had the confidence to go further. This is the chief reason why the rioting spread to different parts of London and even England: they heard about other riots and ‘wanted in’. I expect they also wanted stuff, hence the looting. This rather proves that the ‘anger’ commentators are citing is a fantasy. It’s not anger; it is a mixture of stroppiness and selfish, indulgent destruction. We know it is not anger because the situation will stop all-of-a-sudden and not wither away slowly, or have the cold regret that anger does. As soon as the media coverage moves to a focus on the damage caused by the rioting, the shock and disapproval will halt the damage. I suspect that will be today.
Of course another question that will be raised is ‘How did this happen?’ It’s easy to blame ill-disciplined youff (spelt with double ‘f’), but rioting and warfare have been happening since before we have tangible records of social behaviour. So the reason it happens is the result of an innate part of human nature. What can we do to prevent it? Not much. What is the effect if we do not prevent it? A Lot. Should we stop trusting people not to do this? Certainly it is hard to keep trusting them.
But equally trust is part of human nature as well. We are self-destructive, and desire having what we want. They are two sides of the same coin: alcohol makes one feel better, but is destructive, even if taken in small doses. Trust is only trust if something we know could happen does not, even if there is not something to prevent it.
So what can be done to prevent it? Kill the chavs? If only. Oh wait, hang on…
6 responses to “Anger? No.”
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Rioting and warfare have both been happening since time immemorial, correct. They also historically had underlying reasons – riots and war do not start out of nothing. Looking at those reasons and trying to prevent them is how society progresses. To ignore those and say it’s just part of human nature is quite literally ignorant.
I’m not sure what you mean by society in this context — presumably it’s the way in which lots of people who live in static accommodation (I.e. Not nomadically) deal with doing so, which I think is perhaps more precisely called civilisation (although it sounds more pretentious)? I am not sure we can call it progress, I think it is more evolution of cultural ideas than progress. A good example is he concept of ‘normality’. In western Europe the concept for it appyling to human behaviour or appearance didn’t exist until the C.18th and is of course is currently going out of fashion — a variety of things that were considered abnormal a hundred years ago are treated more compassionately now. More importantly evolution is evidence of our ability to solve the problems we have at a given time, our ability to adapt. Rioting is clearly a refreshed problem and so we are adapting to sort it out. I do believe both rioting and evolution are the result of human nature: there is good and bad in everyone, and in order to survive we adapt. That’s why it is evolution and not progress.
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