In my lifetime, I’ve had the misfortune of being present in two major
natural disasters and one violent social crisis. Each taught me
valuable lessons.
In the aftermath of a natural disaster, there’s the danger of the
loss of shelter, services and food. In most cases, people who experience
the loss of shelter and services realise that “things are bad all
around” and they tend to do the best they can, accepting that life will
be hard for a period of time.
Food is a different matter. People, no matter how civilized, tend to
panic if they become uncertain as to when they will next be able to eat.
And, not surprisingly, this panic is exacerbated if they have
dependents, particularly children who are saying, fearfully, “Daddy, I’m
hungry.” As Henry Lewis said in 1906, “There are only nine meals
between mankind and anarchy.” Quite so.
Intelligent, educated, otherwise-peaceful people can be driven to
violence and even murder if the likelihood of future meals becomes
uncertain. This has been the cause of spontaneous riots throughout
history.
But this is not the only cause of riots. In the post 1960 period in
the West, a new phenomenon has occurred that has steadily grown:
governments and the halls of higher education have increasingly taught
people that they are “entitled.” Governments have been guilty of this
for millennia, beginning at least as early as the “bread and circuses”
of ancient Rome. It’s a way for governments to get people to be
dependent upon them and thereby to do their bidding. But, since the
1960’s, it’s become a systemic norm.
And it always ends in the same way. The false economy of “free stuff”
eventually devolves into over-taxation and economic collapse. When it
does, people are more likely to riot, as the entitlements are “owed” to
them. In today’s world, however, this condition has peaked far beyond
what the world has ever seen before.
Increasingly, those who are angry that the free stuff they are
receiving is not enough to placate them, take to the streets. Typically,
they throw rocks and Molotov cocktails, burn cars at random, destroy
buildings and loot stores. All of this activity, of course, does not
make it more likely that they will receive more free stuff from the
authorities who presumably owe it to them. Instead, it victimizes those
who have lived lawfully and with less dependence upon the state.
Riots occur for a great variety of reasons. The trigger can be
something as absurd as in the 2011 Vancouver, Canada riot, in which
locals became infuriated over the loss of a hockey game. Over 140 people
were injured and over five million dollars in damage was done in a
five–hour period. That last bit of information should be emphasized, as
the fans had plenty of time to calm down after their team’s loss, but
the rage, once ignited, became
self-regenerating. This is one of the important dynamics of a riot that’s often overlooked. The riot, which may begin as a reaction to an event, becomes the event and is continued for its own sake.
In the same year, thousands of people rioted in London. The trigger
was more serious this time – the shooting of a local man by a policeman.
(Although the man had fired on police prior to being shot himself, this
fact failed to deter rioters.) The riots, like most irrational
retaliations, only served to cause
more deaths and injuries.
The riots lasted a full five days over a dozen London boroughs, then
ignited further in a dozen other cities. Over £200 million in damages
occurred and over 3400 crimes were logged.
There’s another dynamic that’s not revealed as it’s seen from the safety of our television screens and that is the spontaneity of a riot. For anyone who has lived through a riot, as I have, the lesson is an indelible one.
Riots, on occasion, are planned and, once they begin, there are
occasions in which individuals capitalize on them (such as the riots in
Ferguson Missouri, where hired rioters were bussed in). But, in most
cases, they’re spontaneous. They begin as a reaction to pent-up anger.
(In the Vancouver incident, the anger was building even before the
hockey game had ended, but many riots, especially socially-related
riots, are
often the result of many years of pent-up anger.)
The riot itself is generally a small spark that’s added to the
existing anger and is often related to a specific event, such as the
riots in US cities the night Martin Luther King was shot in 1968.
Once started, riots, for the most part, are entirely unplanned and
rely on random acts of violence. Within minutes of the first violent
act, entire neighbourhoods spontaneously ignite. As in the London riots,
the same incident can spark off multiple riots, miles from each other.
A third often-misunderstood dynamic is uncontrolability. Police can
race to the centre of a riot and, in some cases, quell the rioters, but,
as the riot is not “organized,” the rioters have merely to stop
whatever they’re doing and, for the moment, they cease to be
participants. If police move on to other riot locations, the rioters who
had been temporarily inactive could begin to riot again. Even if police
are successful in quelling
all violent activity in a neighbourhood, they could receive a radio call directing them to a new riot location, just blocks away.
In my own experience, new locations of violence erupting seemed to be
going off all around the city, like popcorn. Before one could be
quelled, others would pop up. The incidents were therefore, unstoppable
by authorities.
Warfare has traditionally been approached from the standpoint that
one army faces another and they fight until one surrenders. Guerilla
warfare, however, has always proven unwinnable, as long as the guerillas
are fighting on their home turf. Rioters have the same advantage as,
say, an armed sheepherder in Afghanistan or a rice farmer in Viet Nam.
The violence only ends when all rioters have decided they’ve had enough.
Of course we’d hope that rioters would learn from their crimes, but
this is rarely the case. In the London riots of 2011, rioters burned
down the local Sainsbury’s in their own neighbourhood. The next day, the
same people were on the streets, in front of the television cameras,
angrily stating that their grocery store was now gone and their children
needed food. They demanded that the government truck in free food as an
emergency measure and, not surprisingly, that’s what they got.
This is exemplary that, in every case, reason is abandoned and anger
rules the day. No lessons are learned by the rioters. In fact, months
later, rioters have often been quoted as saying, “We showed ‘em.”
So, what can we take away here? First, and most importantly, that riots are, by their very nature spontaneous, mindless and, for the most part, uncontrollable.
Second, if an individual lives in or near a location where
sociopolitical tension is on the increase, he is living in danger. The
spontaneity of a riot means that he cannot prepare for it. If it arrives
on his doorstep, or if he’s on the street at the time when it occurs,
he may lose everything, including his life.
Since riots are mindless, rioters cannot be reasoned with. There’s no
talking your way out of the danger, once it has reached you. Finally,
as riots cannot effectively be controlled, the one and only defense
against them is to conclude that, if one lives in an area where
socioeconomic conditions indicate that the location (whether it be a
neighbourhood or even an entire country) is an unsafe place in which to
live, it may be time to move.
The key here is that the move occur before violence erupts. Once it has, it’s too late.
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Jeff Thomas is British and resides in the Caribbean. The son of an economist and historian, he learned early to be distrustful of governments as a general principle. Although he spent his career creating and developing businesses, for eight years, he penned a weekly newspaper column on the theme of limiting government. He began his study of economics around 1990, learning initially from Sir John Templeton, then Harry Schulz and Doug Casey and later others of an Austrian persuasion. He is now a regular feature writer for Casey Research’s International Man (http://www.internationalman.com) and Strategic Wealth Preservation in the Cayman Islands.
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The author is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Sprott Money Ltd. The views and opinions expressed in this material are those of the author or guest speaker, are subject to change and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Sprott Money Ltd. Sprott Money does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness and reliability of the information or any results from its use.
