The recent riot in Moscow (after Russia lost a soccer game to Japan) which
caused the police to club a fan to death is but one example of the fear of
governments -- of the left or the right -- when more than a few people
start to gather together to protest in a public place, particularly in a
capital city. Why the fear? The answer is that such a crowd (but not
necessarily soccer fans!) could simply walk into government buildings and
take over -- as they did in the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2004.
But why do crowds become emotional, uncontrollable and do extraordinary
things which individuals or very small groups would never dream of doing?
Instead of trying to answer in abstractions beloved of sociologists and
newspaper pundits, let me ask two other questions. Why do we love
chocolate? Why do we love to eat sweet things?
We love the taste of chocolate (more than most other things) -- even to the
point of being sick sometimes -- because the cacao plant never existed in
Africa during the six million years in which the hominin line evolved after
separating from chimps. Our genes never evolved resistance to eating too
much chocolate simply because we never came across it. We love sugar
because, during the same period in Africa, natural beehives were very rare.
Once a group had gorged itself on the honeycombs of one nest then that was
that. The discovery of another beehive might be months away. Consequently,
our genes had no need to build up a defence against eating too much honey.
So we now have the answer to governments' fears. It's genetic. For six
million years or so, the circumstances of the open savannah meant that we
only lived in small groups -- maybe no more than a score or so of adults
and offspring for most of that period. Our emotions could easily run riot
-- and no doubt did -- but they could never do any great damage. Even when
one group violently clashed with another, the warfare is usually appeased
when one person is killed or badly injured -- so anthropologists tell us
about those hunter-gatherers who still exist. But those genes which guide
our behaviour never had to cope with huge masses of people in which
emotions might be running riot to the very last individual.
All these -- chocolate, sugar, large crowds -- are examples of what
evolutionary biologists call super-stimuli. We have no natural defence
against them. A corollary of this is also the reason why political
demagogues or religious revivalists like crowds -- albeit in carefully
circumscribed circumstances -- because they can easily lead their auditors'
emotions along avenues which most would never have gone individually.
A recent poll in Moscow said that 60% of Moscovites did not trust their
police. A recent poll in America said that 65% of the population want the
government to crack down on bankers because of the misery of the
credit-crunch. No doubt there would be the same response in the UK and all
over Western Europe. Yet governments have not done so, or have only made
desultory gestures. Whether the banks are the primary causes or not (I
think governmental printing of money is) is beside the point. Unless an
economic recovery comes along soon, all Western governments are now on
tenterhooks because they know (without knowing the precise biological
reason) that crowds can easily gather and, when suitably triggered, can
cause even worse disaster -- even their own power.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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