The Blind Giant (22 page)

This position was reinforced when the rioters, when interviewed, were unable to explain their actions. The BBC found two teenaged girls and asked why they were looting a shop. ‘We’re showing the police we can do what we want,’ one said. The interviewer responded by asking why they were destroying a small local shop in their own community. ‘It’s the rich people,’ she said, but seemed entirely at a loss to understand either the question or her own answer. ‘They own shops. We’re showing the rich we can do what we want.’ Her friend didn’t speak. (And to be honest: how on earth were they supposed to understand what was happening to and around them? The psychological mechanics of popular discontent and group violence are complex and obscure. Short of discovering some kind of rioting John Stuart Mill setting fire to a burning car, an autodidact of the social science of rage and bewilderment, the BBC was surely never going to get any kind of answer other than ‘we’re angry and upset’. Certainly, nothing the rioters themselves could have said would answer the retributive fury that was building all around them, unless they’d been able to produce evidence of grotesque abuse at the hands of police and merchants on a par with something from the bad days of Kosovo. That fury and the demands for heavy sentences are entirely understandable, if not necessarily wise as a matter of policy. What happened was ugly. But that is not the same as saying that the riots cannot or should not be understood.)

Our main parties have a vested interest in separating the riots from the social history of the UK. Margaret Thatcher famously told Britain that ‘there is no such thing as society’, and it’s hard to miss the relevance of that dictum to what happened. The British style of policing relies heavily on consent, on a connection to other people and on a mass investment in the idea of community which is jeopardized by the hyper-individuality the
Thatcher era espoused.
Tony Blair’s Labour Party, and later
Gordon Brown’s, presided over the last decade and a half; if social conditions and the financial crisis are to blame for any of this, Labour – which courted business and finance even more assiduously than the Conservatives have traditionally done – cannot evade its share of responsibility for them.

The Cameron–Osborne response to the financial crisis, meanwhile, has seen bankers regain their explosively impressive bonuses while the institutions they control continue to refuse to lend to small businesses. (By way of an extreme comparison, consider the German response to the crisis: the former CEO of the bank IKB, whose handling of the bond market appears to have been honest if in the end massively over-trusting of the US ratings agencies Moody’s and S&P, was sentenced to prison and asked to return his salary. That salary, incidentally, was Є805,000, which is a lot of money, but barely makes a mark on the earnings of comparable UK CEOs.)

Both Labour and the Conservatives have also leaned on an idea of increasing prosperity as the natural order of things; like Icelanders before the 2007 crash, Britons have been encouraged to believe that they will grow wealthier each day, that credit will always be cheap, that the shops will always be full of discounted items and freebies, that a comfortably affluent lifestyle of increasing luxury is within reach of – even, is a natural right of – everyone in the country.

I don’t see this background as irrelevant to what happened. The rioters were disengaged from their world to the point of destroying it for reasons they themselves could not express. They were alienated from themselves, too, heedless of consequences they knew must come, but somehow they didn’t care or could not apply those consequences to themselves. They became, briefly, almost psychopathic, in that one of the distinguishing marks of psychopathy that can be measured in a magnetic resonance imaging scan is an inability to anticipate
future suffering. So what happened to them? How did the nation lose its head?

In the 1930s US Depression there was a powerful sense that obeying the rules did you no good; being a law-biding citizen, working hard and saving, had turned out not to lead to the American Dream, which at the time was solidly middle class: a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a community of like-minded fellows around you, kids going to good schools and then on to college and growing more prosperous in the next generation, and any one of them might one day be President. The key was a notion of bettering oneself; but in the 1930s, the Dream was abruptly very far off, and a nightmare took over: no matter how hard you worked you might not make enough money to feed your family. You might slip down rather than climb up the social ladder. Certainly that white picket fence was nowhere in sight.

The point here is not absolute deprivation, though there was a fair measure of that, both in 1930s America and in 2011 UK, despite the cry that ‘these kids have BlackBerries, they’re not poor’: as asinine a statement as I can imagine when there are people all around the world with cellphones who are otherwise living in conditions we would consider unthinkable. Rather, the issue is relative deprivation, the gap between the way people believe – or have been led to believe – their world will be, and the way it is. If you cannot get the things you have been told are natural to you, you will become angry, or, perhaps, in another cultural context, depressed and withdrawn: maybe that’s part of why Japan, whose economy has already suffered a blow like the one we are now experiencing, produced its
hikikomori
. Be that as it may, in the UK situation at present, and unquestionably also in the US, where the Occupy camps are still going strong, there is a perceived issue of fairness. The concept is deeply rooted in us: there are experiments in
Game Theory that show how deeply. One of them is called the Ultimatum Game.

In the Ultimatum Game, two players have to determine the split of a pot of money. One player offers a given split, and the other can accept or reject the proposal. If the second player rejects the split, neither one of them gets anything. Although the results can be variable, a surprising amount of the time the second player will reject a split that seems unfair even though the net gain of doing so is (inevitably) less than that of acceptance of even a bad deal. In other words, there is some evidence to show that people will reject an unfair settlement simply because it is unfair, rather than because it is not sufficiently advantageous. Turning the game around, there is a simpler version that does not technically qualify as a game, because the second player has no options within the structure. In the
Dictator Game, the first player can simply dispose of the amount as they see fit. The second player can do nothing to affect this result. All the same, many of those cast as dictators do share the money.

Returning to the broken American Dream of the Depression era, the 1930s produced the gangster as we understand him now, and the expression of him in the media bled into the reality until the two were not separable. Cultural critic
Robert Warshow described him in his screen incarnation as a creature bent on violence and crime as an end in itself, a man who does badness because it’s what defines him. The gangster’s salient feature, though, is that he won’t accept – cannot accept – being part of a herd of persons who live without hope despite doing everything right. His response to the Depression is to rebel, to rewrite the rules in his own favour. He recognizes something fundamental about our capitalist democratic society, and something that is perhaps more obvious about the United States, which possesses a written constitution: we ourselves make the rules. They can be rewritten by us. Situations like the Depression are not, emphatically, inhuman. They are the product of human action, and it is against these humans, in the form of policemen and judges and bank managers, that the gangster – like the girl interviewed by
the BBC – rebels. He chooses to stand above the rest, screaming defiance, and ultimately gets cut down by the larger group, or, at least, by the representatives of the supposed silent majority that has chosen the opposite course.

It’s hardly an unfamiliar narrative in these recession days. And it makes sense, as well, in the context of the
Arab Spring. An intolerable situation made people brave, or so numb that an ordinary greengrocer became a self-immolating martyr. The psychological effect of a societal dissonance was to make individuals behave – and think and feel – in a way that under less pressurized circumstances they would not have. The phenomenon is called ‘
deindividuation’. It is said to be a consequence both of the influence of wicked regimes and, in another way, of the anonymity and apparently consequence-free environment of the Internet.

The classic deindividuation study was done with Hallowe’en sweets: children who felt their individual activities could not be traced to them were likely to take more sweets from a bowl than those who knew they were observed and thus roped into the norms of sharing, generosity and moderation. It’s obvious enough from one’s own experience. But the most famous and interesting deindividuation story is the one they made the film about: the notorious
Stanford Prison Experiment, which was conducted in 1971 by
Philip Zimbardo. It has never been repeated because it went so well it nearly turned into a catastrophe. The strangest, saddest and bleakest thing I read in preparing this book was Zimbardo’s account of what happened. His horror comes across as a fracture in his life, like a bereavement: ‘I wish I could say that writing this book was a labor of love; it was not … it was emotionally painful … Time had dimmed my memory of the extent of creative evil in which many of the guards engaged, the extent of the suffering of many of the prisoners, and the extent of my passivity in allowing the abuses to continue for as long as they did.’

In the experiment, male students were selected to participate on the basis of having no negative personality traits – no narcissists, no sadists and so on. In other words, they were selected for not being dangerous monstrous bastards. They were then split into two groups, prisoners and guards. They were given uniforms and sent down to a basement level to live for two weeks in character. The experiment was halted after six days when it became apparent that the well-adjusted, hand-picked guards were becoming frighteningly violent with the prisoners. The ordinary, decent students had turned into dangerous, monstrous bastards.

Theorists highlight a number of factors: anonymity and participation in a group, diffusion of blame, hierarchy giving orders to subordinates whose defined job was not to think but to act. Students in the SPE apparently believed that if they stepped over the line, the experimenters would stop them before they went too far. Let me reiterate: these were people who should have known, without a shadow of doubt, where the line was and what ‘too far’ meant. They should not have needed a safety net to prevent them from administering a serious beating to a fellow student in an experiment. But they did. They had surrendered that aspect of the self to the rules of the game they were playing as they perceived it.

I cannot help but see deindividuation in the professional ethos I’ve discussed elsewhere in this book; in the claim that functionaries must act in accordance with decisions taken by higher-ups, that it’s ‘not their job’ to make ethical decisions. I also wonder about people working in the banks during the sub-prime days. Reading journalist and former bond salesman Michael Lewis’s extraordinary journeys through the US and European financial systems (The
Big Short
and
Boomerang
), it’s hard not to think that those traders, many of whom knew on some level that the market could not possibly work this way for ever, were under the influence of a deindividuating situation in which they saw
themselves as absolved of responsibility by the system in the same way as Zimbardo’s students. It simply was not part of their assigned role to object, so they didn’t.

The effect has been linked since the Stanford experiment with some of the really appalling moments in human conduct in the modern world, such as the Vietnam My Lai massacre and the mistreatment of prisoners at
Abu Ghraib. One of the early projects that points to deindividuation – though it actually dealt with blind obedience – was performed by
Stanley Milgram in 1963. Milgram put subjects in the position of thinking they were administering electric shocks to a test subject in another room. Under the guidance of experimenters, and despite the increasingly desperate pleas from a stooge in the other room claiming to be in mortal agony or even to be dying, 65 per cent continued the test to the very end, administering what was supposed to be a 450-volt shock to the (non-existent) test subject on the other end of the wire. In the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust, Milgram’s experiments are telling and bleakly fascinating. With Milgram in mind, look again at
Philip Zimbardo’s reference to his own behaviour. One feels he was affected both by an internal version of Milgram’s experiment in which he was both researcher and subject, and by the deindividuation affecting the test groups: they were anonymized and distanced by their roles as prisoners and guards, he by his as disinterested and objective observer.