A mob doesn’t need much encouragement to excite it’s murderous soul. A symbol and an enemy will get the thugs moving against a much weaker opponent. A mob hasn’t much courage. If courage was required their wouldn’t be a mob.
Crowds grow into mobs. Members have an equality about them. A single or a simple premise or purpose serves to nucleate a crowd into a mob. When the density is large enough and the direction is clear the crowd becomes a mob. Seen from the outside it is similar to fire. It is born by internal intent that becomes directed only in the sense of something like being born, an ideology, not expressed but common. Growth is not certain. Stillborn or death is possible. It can be stopped and it may die. See: Elias Canetti’s “Crowds and Power”
Mobs don’t reason. A has no mind. A mind isn’t a mob which explains how the simplist of chants can excite a crowd and move it to a Ferguson or South Central crazed, looting group.
The group feeds itself. The eaters are like a wolf with a bone. Only eating or rioting works. Hurry to the feast. Free sneakers, candy, booze and TV’s. A riotous part of the population, the roughest, the rabble, almost self-excited to lawlessness and rampage. The wolves form the Wolfpack that becomes wild and a danger to itself that fuels the excitement of being in the moving mob. They gain “Equality”. They no longer fear being touched. They pursue an unobtainable goal but attaining the goal would stop the mob.
Innocent approaching the mob, Demonic within it. . .
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