Post No.: 0858
Furrywisepuppy says:
Protests generally have a low success rate – at least in directly influencing incumbent politicians and existing laws. When uncompromising demands meet uncompromising counter-demands, we get nowhere. They may influence how the electorate vote however. Yet direct action protests can backfire if they disrupt the lives of ordinary citizens or give a bad impression of democracy.
Protests can work if they produce a sustained pressure from the public, like the Civil Rights Act, anti-Vietnam War marches and women’s suffrage. We still have regular, large and global Pride parades/marches, but not Occupy movement ones. (The latter is against some incredibly wealthy and powerful opponents too.) But ceaseless campaigning can lead to burnout and thus a campaign fizzles out, especially if the protestors are driven by anger, which isn’t sustainable.
Some violent protests in history have somewhat achieved their goals, but non-violent protests statistically tend to be more successful – perhaps because they’re more inclusive and a larger support base increases the likelihood of success?
Social media definitely helps to mobilise revolts and riots. Social media is good/bad for being able to congregate groups of like-minded/narrow-minded people. By virtue of needing internet-connected smartphones and laptops though, we’re not hearing enough of the voices of the most deprived in society. It also helps to be famous first before your voice will be heard, more than being the most knowledgeable about an issue, although Greta Thunberg managed to be heard because the media latched onto the story of a surprisingly knowledgeable and vociferous schoolgirl who was protesting outside the Swedish Parliament.
Post No.: 0330 suggested we should put women at the vanguard of protests for they’re less likely to start a melee or be attacked first. Protests can easily escalate into violence because small transgressions from either the police or protestors get overreacted to (e.g. one protestor behaves aggressively and then the police treats the entire group as aggressive and so pushes everybody back). Even if 99% of the protestors are peacefully demonstrating or police are calmly enforcing, it only needs a small group to behave combatively to give the other side a reason to retaliate with force themselves. (Naturally there’ll be perennial disputes about ‘who started it’!) Peaceful approaches will always have the moral high ground. Yet, simultaneously, we shouldn’t allow those who’ll use violence against us to simply trample over us.
Protests that descend into riots that descend into mass looting or other immoral acts like lynch mobbing occur partly due to deindividuation, as individual looters hide in and feel anonymous (thus feel they won’t be identified and therefore caught and punished) within the safety of a crowd of others in a similar situation (a few may get arrested but the chances of you being one of them are reduced the larger the crowd is). They’ll also follow and copy one another (thinking that something is okay because ‘everybody else is doing it’).
Protests that ostensibly start for one reason, like anti-police brutality, sometimes escalate in their demands, or evolve or become hijacked by others for another reason, like against the notion of capitalism hence why some start to vandalise and loot businesses. These latter people may attempt to justify their actions afterwards that the looting somehow serves the cause they were protesting about, but the link is usually tenuous. And it’s usually innocent local high street businesses that get broken into and torched, not the banks who were the chief culprits of the financial crisis or the multinational corporations that dodge their fair share of taxes and pay their workers peanuts whilst their executive staff receive outsized compensation packages and wield influence in political circles.
It ends up undermining the supposed cause, and displays opportunistic acts of selfishness that take advantage of the police being overwhelmed and thus ineffective. It serves to prove the sentiments of those who understand that society would collapse in a lawless state without effective authorities. When law and order disappears or is on the back foot, and people start acting for themselves rather than for each other, looting usually starts. In about every kind of context, if some people think they can get away with something then they’ll try. For enough people, they have no qualms about committing crimes – their only concern is getting caught and punished for it. We cannot rely on self-regulation. And what a relatively few selfishly do can ruin the lives of all others.
Under the darkness and when the sound of security alarms blaring become expected and thus ignored, and especially during economically unstable times and nice weather to be outside – looting and public disorder can occur during prolonged city night-time blackouts, like the 1977 New York City blackout.
Without an effective government and police force, people freely loot and pillage, and gangs and militia groups form to contest for power in an environment of fear and violence (where the most violent groups usually win). An unstable country isn’t an ideal place to live in. Conducting legitimate local and international business becomes difficult too. We see consistent evidence of this whenever an effective government collapses within a country. We don’t follow laws because we’re blind – we follow them to maintain peace and civility. We’ll evidently rally whenever enough of us consider something sufficiently unjust.
So lootings are opportunistic. And from a neutral perspective, watching protestors looting doesn’t generally help garner support for their cause. Stealing luxury fancy sneakers, and bragging about it, instead of essentials like food, doesn’t give them good PR either. If they want jobs in their area, they’re pushing businesses away with their vandalising and looting. It increases community fear and distrust, not togetherness. Protests can start peacefully, but tag-alongs and opportunists come along to serve themselves. When some people sense they’re gaining the upper hand on the authorities – when the fear of getting caught and punished for acting selfishly dissolves – they start looting. Then copycats even in unrelated boroughs or cities may start looting too once they see their peers succeed in doing so, like during the 2011 England riots.
People won’t typically make a move unless someone else does first, but once someone does, the floodgates open. This happened on an international scale during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.
Constantly watching our own backs because there’s no police to help us is stressful and takes time and resources away from other things we’d rather do, like making money or relaxing. In places, or areas of the law, where the police aren’t trusted to do their job properly, whether because they’re considered weak or corrupt – vigilantes attempt to take the law into their own paws. Gangs, even sometimes regular citizens, will even self-administer (deadly) revenge on their personal perpetrators in the most lawless of places (which just feeds a cycle of family feuds, which were common in ancient times). And there’s obviously a bias – we don’t want the police around when we’re up to no good, but wonder where they are to protect us when we need them!
Ancient tombs and artefacts that are critical for the nation’s tourism and broader economy can get plundered to serve individualistic self-interests too, like in Egypt during the Arab Spring anti-government protests and armed rebellions. The event also highlighted how many people only want democracy if they get their own way! Winners trust elections; losers don’t! Here, they deposed an autocrat, and then the Muslim Brotherhood party was elected – but this party was then shortly militarily overthrown outside of an electoral process! Many of the protestors who wanted democracy didn’t even vote(!) Plus some were just as unprincipled as the autocrat they overthrew – seeking ‘revenge’ on the families accused of harbouring loyalists.
And an ‘armed and violent revolution’ to one person is just ‘terrorism’ to another. Taking freedom by force is like fighting wars for peace. Yet, although hypocritical, it often appears to be the only way. Sometimes we need to break things to make new and better things – although the breaking part is relatively easier! Whenever we break something, we mustn’t celebrate yet because we’re less than halfway towards our goal – we need to fill in this void. We need to ensure that we have the plan and means to build something better first. Woof.
Adolescents, from all social classes, in particular are more likely to act on their impulses, rebel, not think of the consequences of their actions, think they know more about the world (like issues and the right solutions) than they do, and get a buzz from the sense of freedom (they have a newfound sense of freedom at this age) and power and getting stuff for free. It’s essentially an expression of anarchy. They may think they’re acting individually but they rebel in quite predictable ways. Not all youths are the same however, and of course many adults behave anarchically too. Not all will be tempted to riot or loot if the opportunity arises. But those most likely to are those who face austerity, social deprivation, poverty, they feel ignored, disaffected, and thus they perceive they have no other prospects, opportunities for social mobility, and little to lose but something to gain. They therefore have underlying, perhaps legitimate, reasons to be angry about ‘the system’. Riots don’t spark in a vacuum. Inequity, inequality and injustice are prime root causes of riots. However, by unthinkingly vandalising their own communities and looting, they give politicians an easy way to blame ‘despicable youths’ who need the strong arm of the law to teach them a lesson. Parents and teachers are called to do their bit too.
We can agree with a cause but disagree with the methods used by some to attempt to further it, although one can maybe understand the desperation felt sometimes. When stressed, like when living with little prospects of upward social mobility, we crave some instant gratification, and getting stuff for free by looting could offer that. But like most instant gratifications, it produces delayed costs. A robust welfare state and protected set of freedoms is thus sensible for a government that doesn’t wish to spark riots or be overthrown. If citizens never threatened to oust a government that didn’t seem to serve them then that government wouldn’t feel incentivised to appease them, although this should preferably be expressed via elections (in places where there are free and fair elections, which isn’t always the case). Those who ‘don’t have something’ overthrowing those who ‘have something’ has happened before in history, like the French Revolution. (In a way, radicalised westerners who join extremist Islamic groups are also revolting against western capitalist culture, albeit they target capitalism as a whole rather than the gross levels of inequality.)
Affluent people don’t cheat any less than impoverished people, but if you tell someone that they’re getting less than their deserved share or less than those immediately around them who seem to be doing the same thing, they can start to rationalise cheating and stealing more. This may come across to others as ‘a sense of entitlement’ but they see it as about ‘getting even’.
People are hardly always rational but law and enforcement alters the expected payoffs for thieving and other crimes – they should make people feel they’re not worth committing. The perceived costs of crime * The perceived probability of sustaining these costs, must be > The perceived benefits of crime * The perceived probability of obtaining these benefits, to act as a deterrence. And anonymity, for instance, makes it harder for your activities and identity to be spotted, thus decreases the perceived probability of sustaining the costs of crime. Those who perceive they have less to lose by living a life of crime, due to their current poverty and perceived lack of better alternative prospects, will perceive a greater benefit from committing crime. So we don’t have to think that increasing police heavy-handedness is the only or best solution – we can increase the prospects of social mobility for the poorest.
Woof!
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