On “looting,” “rioting,” agency, and democracy.

First: it is unequivocally bad when people’s stuff gets destroyed. It is unequivocally bad when third parties to a social conflict are harmed. We should be sad when that occurs.

But, it is a mistake to focus our attention on the blameworthiness, or lack thereof, of the individuals involved in such occurrences. (Before you jump down my throat about using language designed to minimize the individual responsibility of those involved: be patient, starting in the next paragraph, I’m going to justify that conscious language choice with an argument.) And it is a mistake to respond to “looting” or “rioting” associated with the mass action of citizens from subordinated groups who are protesting serious grievances with police repression or with a focus on individual blameworthiness and the associated strategies of arrest and prosecution. I’ll try to explain why that is, and why I refuse to participate in conversations about whether those who loot are right or wrong, as individuals.

Here’s the thing about angry crowds of people with serious grievances against their governments: their actions are not the products of individual agency but of group agency.

Human beings in angry crowds tend to produce emergent behavior that they don’t engage in on their own. And much of that behavior tends to be more conflictual than behavior on the individual level. We know this from generations of research in social psychology about things like intragroup polarization, cascades, bandwagoning, etc. This research isn’t controversial. It’s just in the nature of human group action.

If we had any doubts, brief reflection on the history of social unrest should settle them. Angry groups of subordinated people, it turns out, riot and rebel quite a lot. And I think it’s safe to say that such actions have always caused harm to innocent third parties. No peasant or worker or slave or even smallholder bourgeoisie rebellion in human history has been a surgical strike against the people who were responsible for the grievances. (The smallholder bourgeoisie have traditionally been just as unruly as the rest — the French and American revolutions were just replete with mob action.)

Suppose that I’m right that angry people who gather in crowds to express their anger at the refusal of society at large to listen to their grievances tend to generate “unrest” and “disorder,” including activity like “looting,” just as a natural consequence of the dynamic of pissed-off crowds. If that is true, then we waste our time debating the individual blameworthiness of the people or talking about arrests and prosecution. That conversation just misses the point. Because we’re fundamentally not talking about individual behavior, we’re talking about group behavior.

Ok, so what do we do about it? Well, one thing we might do is repression. Send in the riot cops. But here’s the thing about addressing social conflict rooted in serious grievance with repression: it doesn’t tend to work for long. The only country I can think of that has managed to actually sustain the violent repression of grievances for an extended period is China — and even China hasn’t been at it very long yet. Again, speaking historically, the common consequence of suppressing disorderly grievances with soldiers is that it merely puts off the reckoning. (And this is why it isn’t just pointless but also counterproductive to focus on police and arrests and prosecutions as a solution to social unrest — that just escalates the conflict.)

So what do we do about it? Well, there is evidence that people suffering more— more hunger, more poverty — are more likely to be in crowds that turn violent. And that shouldn’t be surprising, right? The crowds in question are angrier, they’re more frustrated, they’re not being heard — what else are they going to do?

What we really need to do is to stop creating social conditions that generate angry crowds of people who don’t see any other way to have their grievances heard. People who are suffering turn into angry crowds of people if they don’t have any other way to relieve that suffering. We have to intervene before the angry crowd is created, by finding some other way of addressing the grievances that lead to the angry crowds, that lead to the rioting and looting.

We have a word for that. The word is “democracy.” In a well-functioning democracy, the people (the “masses,” even) ought to be able to have their grievances heard and addressed without having to form angry crowds with tar and feathers (if we’re in 1776), or throw bricks through the window of the Apple Store (2020). We get angry crowds, that in turn generate destructive behavior, when democracy has failed.

The real problem here is not the actions of individual “looters” or “rioters” or whatever, and it is certainly not that the government has insufficiently repressed them — the real problem is that people in the streets have no faith in their political institutions to hear their grievances, to, for example, genuinely do something about the problem of police violence, about horrifying economic inequality, about environmental inequality leading to some people suffering from toxic physical worlds (we still don’t talk enough about Flint), and about the abandonment of the disadvantaged and of “essential workers” to COVID. Instead what those who “riot” and “loot” just see is voter suppression, a president who routinely claims that the next election will be stolen, interactions with the government that are typically limited to being ordered around by some hostile bureaucracy, whether that’s the police or the DMV or the housing authority, and elected officials who are alternating between clamoring for more policing and getting caught with their hands in the till. What do you expect to happen under those conditions? Just in terms of history and sociology, what are the consequences we would predict?