Inner Workings of a Riot

A riot is like a fire. It requires fuel (the anger or fear, usually over a prolonged period of time, of a large group of people) and a spark (generally one obvious and unforgivable act of injustice). With these two requirements fulfilled, an explosion of raging heat consumes the group and the mob mentality is born.

What is mob mentality exactly, and how does it work? Usually, people in a riot act on situational or circumstantial stimuli, not on their deepest and longest-held moral values. So, the mob mentality is a temporary attitude that people adopt due to unwarranted excitement or desperation. The chaotic nature of a full-scale riot makes it easy to fall right into step with everyone around you, because you become anonymous; you are just one small component of a large, seemingly unstoppable movement, and your actions seem just as meaningless, just as senselessly violent, as others’.

The cause of the extreme anger or fear can be any kind of widespread problem that, for too long, has gone unsolved or even ignored. Racial discrimination and economic conflict are two of the more common sources of the kind of frustration that can serve as fuel for a riot. The trigger, or “spark,” of the riot itself is the action that increases the tension to an unbearable degree. It is the last straw, so to speak. The injustice (or seeming injustice) could be tolerated before, with its milder intensity, but now it has become totally unacceptable.

Riots can also be sparked by sudden or temporary, rather than prolonged, frustration that opposes a group of people’s strongest values or way of thinking. For example, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the group of people waiting for their ration of the anesthetizing drug known as soma start a riot when John, a nonconformist and would-be revolutionary, throws the soma out the window, meanwhile shouting about their need for freedom from mindless loyalty to social stability. (The whole situation is kind of ironic, if you think about it.)

If riots are to be avoided, people must take the time to compromise and solve the problems at hand, so that this deep-seated rage and fear is not built up to begin with. These “fires,” after all, can spread, and one minor event can trigger a long chain reaction of pointless violence.