There has been a lot of breast-beating in the media recently because of the upswing in violent crime. Ever since the COVID epidemic, instances of racially motivated attacks have grown. Especially disturbing recently is the rising number of random attacks on strangers.
Why is this happening, and what should we do about it? Well, let’s take a look at the perpetrators: the racists, the bullies, the mobbers.
Don’t blame them for it. They were brought up to believe that society is a contest, and the winner takes all. This makes them frightened all the time, and they take every opportunity they can to climb over other people to make themselves feel strong. And lately, people are telling them that this behaviour is okay.
Socialization/Laws
However, if society allowed these antisocial actions, the structure would fracture. Thus the group asks all individuals to conform. The main way we do this is through social pressure. We socialize our children to act in ways that keep society strong: good manners, respect, charity, obedience, etc. However, that is not enough, so for special circumstances, we have codified the rules into laws that society believes are important enough to enforce.
The freedom movement is fighting this control. They feel, (and they are correct) that society is requiring them to be more cooperative than they are comfortable with. Society’s answer (which is correct) is that the amount of freedom they want is bad for society.
Every society creates a balance between these two desires, and that balance shifts with the passage of time. Germany made a great swing during the 1930s and ended up with fascism. America made a significant change in the 1950s and created the triumph of the civil rights movement.
New Technology
Every new invention that affects the greater operation of society creates waves in this balance, because at the start we have neither social mores nor laws to control it. The invention of the six-gun created the Wild West in America, where bullies ruled by virtue of a warped duelling system that amounted to legalized murder. Then civilization moved in and the law prevailed (sort of). Early television had tobacco ads for years until laws were made restricting them.
At the moment, gambling is in the same position. Soon we will come around to realize that excessive gambling is bad for society, and we will start protecting the vulnerable from those ads.
Then Came the Internet
The world-wide-web is arguably the most socially disruptive creation since the printing press. From the very beginning, users revelled in the freedom it gave them. And promptly overused those freedoms, creating a digital Wild West, where everything was allowed, and most importantly, everything was anonymous. Exposure to public censure is the main tool of socialization. So, the frightened people we mentioned earlier took advantage of this anonymity, and the internet troll was born. Now, people with a poor concept of reality take the rants of the trolls into the street and act them out.
Social and Political Factors
Combined with this technology, as both a cause and an effect, is the growing desperation of the social right because the progressive left has been taking advantage of the “first past the post” election system to force more social change than that segment of the population can handle. This has made some strange bedfellows in conservative-leaning parties and allowed demagogues like Donald Trump and his rabid followers to take political power and, more importantly, dominate the news media.
Permission to Act Out
A constant theme in my posts over the years is summed up in this meme. “Remember that the next mass shooter is reading your social media post.” Any time the media publicizes a radical viewpoint, individuals who are even more radical assume that this is a societal standard. This gives them permission to take their desires public. So, in the long run, a Republican Representative who lauds the right to own an AK-47 is interpreted by a mentally unstable person as giving permission to use one on other people.
The Bottom Line
We must stop giving violent people permission to act out. In a more balanced society, they would be constantly reminded that their behaviour is wrong. Eventually, most of them stop the behaviour, discover that doing so does not result in catastrophe, and conform to society’s mores.
To aid socialization, we have to control the use of the Internet to more socially acceptable guidelines and remove the anonymity that allows the violent to escape social (and legal) censure.