Riots and Looting

            What are riots? Are they the mental discontent of the masses manifesting in the physical? Is looting a violent and destructive display of lawlessness? This is what most individuals will argue, with a surface level analysis that leads to surface level solutions that sound good but don’t really address root causes. The negative externalities of riots and looting are not the causes of riots and looting, but rather the symptoms of what are causing the rioting and looting.

            To understand rioting and looting, you have to understand what they really are, which is not found in the people doing the rioting and looting, but rather found in the people who fail to prevent the rioting and looting. The breakdown of law and descent into chaos is not the fault of those behaving “poorly” – it is the fault of the people who are responsible for maintaining control and perpetuating order.

            Riots and looting are a reflection on the ruling class, not the masses engaged in the behavior. It is the duty and responsibility of the business owners, politicians, and police to ensure their safety, and when safety is no longer existent, the blame completely at their feet. To blame the stupid and undisciplined masses is like a parent blaming a wild animal for biting a child rather than admitting the wild animal should have never been in the position to bite the child in the first place.

            If you are responsible for capital such as storefronts and the merchandise in them, you are responsible for protecting those items. If you fail in this, it is your fault. If you build your business in an area where you are not reasonably able to your business, then you are negligent and stupid and you should not expect pity or empathy when you inevitable suffer the consequences of your poor choices.

If you are a politician that creates an underclass of individuals who cannot reach a decent standard of living due to their natural limitations as well as environmental conditions, you are courting disaster and should not be surprised when this underclass begins to cause problems for those more suited for success. It is your fault for not enabling the success of your underclass or completely eliminating them. If there are riots and looting while you are in charge, then you do not understand how to do your job and are clearly not worthy of the responsibility that you have agreed to take on in exchange for some power and prestige.

What are riots and looting? They are reflections of the incompetence of the ruling class. They are the consequences of poor decisions over years and decades, not some spontaneous fluke that couldn’t have been predicted or prevented. A successful society that treats its unfortunate in a genuinely humane manner doesn’t need to worry about riots, and it doesn’t allow for conditions which breed criminals in large enough number to pose a threat to the rest of the population. Looting and riots are the fault of those who are not rioting, those who run society.

How can riots and looting be dealt with? In this age of feminine emotional hyper-sensitivity, they can’t be dealt with. The ruling class is soft and weak and doesn’t have the emotional fortitude for disciplinary measures such as mass lethal force. As such, riots and looting are allowed to continue until they burn themselves out, the underlying problems never addressed or even acknowledged.

The politicians and corporations that have influence in communities that riot and loot are so detached from reality that they do not even understand or care what is causing the riots and looting. They may face some temporary embarrassment and public shaming when the reality of how they have mismanaged their responsibility comes to light, but that has no real impact on them. They can allow disorder and destruction to spread, because nobody will ever hold them accountable for their abysmal incompetence.

Who suffers from riots and looting? Not the people who caused the riots and looting, the politicians and corporations that worked in concert to create the conditions that precede this sort of behavior, but rather the innocent people caught up in negative externalities: the poor, weak, and stupid who cannot escape the chaos of destruction that surrounds them. These people may not desire to harm others and may do their best to live life in a pro-social manner, but eventually – if they wish to survive -- they will have to decide to join the mob and become predators tearing apart the society in which they live.

It’s easy to place blame on the animalistic proles destroying their local businesses and economy, but that is a counter-productive impulse. This is not to excuse their actions and claim they are saints, they’re clearly not, but rather to say that the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of those with real influence, the people who will happily migrate to other centers of control and influence once they have mismanaged their current center of control and influence to the point of chaotic disaster.

It’s hard to point to a time where the people with influence and power have been more stupid and irresponsible. Outside of cloistered sheltered communities, the majority of America is in a state of decay. Instead of doing the intelligent thing, which is to either fix the decay or isolate and destroy the decay before it spreads, the parasites we call our leaders engage in self-enrichment and greed that is embarrassing and gaudy. The “elite” do not have class or taste, they are lowly idiots who have schemed their way into power structures, and do not have any idea about what they’re doing. Because of this, riots and looting occur.