This morning, I read in today’s Washington Post about the damage caused by rioters in College Park after the Terrapins’ loss to Duke in the NCAA Final Four tournament. I was particularly struck by the statement of one knucklehead:
I got the impression that this man has no internal moral regulator. He saw people burning things and trashing College Park, so he felt he should join in. Didn’t anything inside him tell him that this was wrong? Judging from the article, I see several hundred people felt the same way. Did none of these people have a conscience?
So my question is, where does your sense of right and wrong come from? Is is merely a fear of official punishment that keeps people orderly, or would most people behave decently, even in an anarchic situation? Is your moral behavior dependent on the dictates of your religion? If you stopped believing in God, would you cease to be a moral person? Does your moral sense come from reasoned principles or is it axiomatic?
Which is more important to the development of a personal moral code, outer compulsion, inner direction, or a mix of the two?
Well I can’t answere your question but I would like to talk about the group dynamics of a mob. When a person is in a large group (like a group of basketball fans) you tend to surrender your will to go along with the group. For example you do ‘the wave’ at the stadium. It is in no interest for you to stand up and put your hands up but you do it with/for the group. You cheer with the group and you boo with the group. When someone goes to a game and comes back they say ‘We won’ or ‘We lost’ so the fans really identify with the team. If the team loses and maybe the loss seems unfair then when one fan starts misbehaving it is easy for other members of the group to start as well. I’m not saying it is an excuse but it is a real phenomanon that riots break out or mobs run rampant.
WAG here. Maybe the mob mentality is an outgrowth of the herd mentality. The chimpanzee who seperates itself physically or by it’s behavior is a lot more likely to be driven off as an outsider or picked off by a predator. The loner kid on the schoolground gets ostracized by the group and is more vulnerable to bullies. In many cases it is a positive survival trait. Besides, morals are a pretty recent addition to the mix and tend to get shed very quickly when the going gets ugly.
Was it Terry Pratchitt who said that the IQ of a mob can be determined by taking the IQ of the stupidest person in the mob and dividing it by the number of people in the mob? or something like that.
I would like to think that my morality and standards come from ‘reasoned principles.’ I’m not a particularly religious person, so punishments from God aren’t really a driving force, although religious guilt can sneak in sometimes.
If anger, humiliation, or anything else causes my internal moral guidelines to break down, I control myself by saying “How guilty will I feel about this later?” I know it’s a cheap and selfish way to go about governing oneself, but I find I can separate myself from quite a few bad situations if I take my future mental well-being into account.