codes of behaviour - the mob!

Your Perspective can change quickly.  I can remember sitting in this café with a sore back and the effort required to lean even 5 degrees forward or backward was akin to a cheese grater on my spinal column.  I bought the same drink I have now and even sat at the same table but I could no longer smell the coffee, notice the waiter’s welcoming smile or even see the people with whom I was sitting.  My field of vision was restricted to a portion of my lower back and its surrounding nerve endings.  Each movement had to be planned in advance to prepare for the forthcoming pain.  I grew to recognize these pre pain signs, sweat to the brow and upper lip, a tightening of the stomach muscles and a roll of the shoulders as if to accomplish the required adjustment by means of the upper body alone.  People stare at you when you do such odd affected motions.  They cannot help themselves. 

Perhaps it is a lingering memory of the pack we once were.  Such movements would signal ill health, weakness, frailty and an urge to turn on the weakest pack member stirs within all the rest.  Nature’s way of strengthening the pack.  Not only killing off a substandard member but providing, by eating them, useful nutrients to the rest.  In such a win win situation pack members would be assiduous about noticing limps, stiffness, poor skin or coat health.  Of course, turning on a weakened pack member also insures that you, yourself do not become a victim.  Finding a weaker member, other than yourself, is therefore a sensible strategy.  It is thought that this self-protection lies at the heart of mob psychology. 

It has long been noted that groups of people in mobs have a communal morality much lower than any individual member.   They will tear you limb for limb, stone you to death, happily lynch and set fire to you when perversely not a single individual on their own would sanction such gross atrocities.  So what is it that makes such a discrepancy in codes of behaviour. 

The answer lies in the mobs first act of violence.  Once it is taken each member of the mob knows there is a definite possibility that the mob could turn on them just as easily.  What can they do to prevent such an outcome?  They must out do the first violence, up the anti so to speak.  By this means they prove their loyalty to the pack, keep the rage targeted on some one other than themselves and in doing so trigger an ever ascending spiral of atrocity in others for the exact same reasons.  This fuels the final carnage. 

So sad that many leaders of thought, idealists and innocent have fallen victim to the mob’s senseless selfish violence.  Perhaps it has ever been so, survival of the fittest and all that?  But, I like to think that ideals and truths also have strengths that persevere despite the mob’s advantage of numbers.  That the actions and words of brave noble people echo across the millennium and will out last and outshine the foul deeds lesser minds devise.