Mob response

Recent events have brought back to my memory a realization that fundamentally changed my outlook on life around one year ago.

 The recent event is one of the newer instances of Europeans naively going unprepared to an African nation and being murdered therein. The primary instinctive reaction is one of empathic despair, like when a defenseless animal is predated. Suffering of humans at the hands of other humans is particularly stomach churning, a hopeless situation that concludes only as the tormentor loses interest.

 The incident that caused a change in my way of thinking however, was something that happened in England in late 2016 or early 2017. One of the terrorist attacks in London where knife wielding attackers ran around a restauranted area. The news articles described people being instructed to hide under tables in buildings by police, and an old white guy in a pub getting stabbed while trying to defend the place.

 My first thought at the time was: If there were a few attackers, armed with knifes, running towards a public area filled with outdoor seating, tables covered in cutlery and (presumably) porcelain tableware, surely if every man and rugby playing woman in the area just began throwing knives, plates, chairs at the attackers, they would have potentially neutralized them completely?

 Obviously if there are guns involved in an area where the public is disarmed it is a different story, but even so.. Poor men, women and children in the middle east fight tooth and nail against western military or oppositional local forces, but ourselves, even in huge numbers, can only run!

 How obedient we are, what Eloi we have become!

 But then I turned this thought to myself. If I were there at the time, being at the closest table to the parked car, and saw these men approach, machete in hand; what would be my response? The fact that I could not both immediately and honestly say to myself that I would retaliate with blood in my teeth and without flinching at the thought of dying in the process deeply disgusted me. I am not a soldier, I have never been a particularly aggressive man, but what value is there in having a patriotic feeling, or to tell oneself that one cares about ones culture, ethnicity, race or whatever, if deep down it is apparent that I may fail to defend it in the most vital way?

 I realize that part of this is down to Mob Response. People on twitter are conditioned to be rhetorical piranhas whenever somebody worth taking down utters something down-takeable. If it turned out that your real life social circle would start calling you a cunt and stop having drinks with you once you become a vindictive report button presser, such a blood thirsty environment may not have developed. The majority of people in any extreme movement did not carry out extreme actions out of a thorough understanding and agreement with the extreme ideology of the movement, but because it was established already, that this behavior is the trademark of that particular group.

 People in the West have been saved from a propensity for group physical violence. Mobs are a thing of lynching, inquisition, and (though they will never openly identify it as such) certain types of political action that are commonly seen in less developed nations. We have lost that instinct entirely. When a threat approaches us as a group, we respond as individuals. When you are at a party and a group of men start molesting the women you respond as an individual who says "what if THEY have a knife, what could I do about it?" you no longer think "WE should get rid of THESE bastards". There is no WE for the group who does not exist, who is simultaneously responsible for all of the suffering that THEM the poor exploited.

 I have no proposed solution this issue, but perhaps first we should reflect on what we ourselves would be willing to risk at the moment of mortality. If we are not willing to risk our lives to protect what we love, and if we are not able to recognize this potential in our fellow men, then we are as vulnerable as those misguided fools who now lie desecrated in a foreign country. If we know what is at stake, it is hubris not to evaluate our own ability deal with it.

 P.S. for the sake of anyone sharing this, I am not advocating hate crimes, I am advocating a willingness to defend you and the people you love.