Humanity has exhibited some pretty nasty behaviors throughout its existence, but one form of behavior that really lowers the GPA of the entire class is when a group of us get together in anger and ignorance and form what we call a “mob.”
A mob can come in many different flavors. Back in the day, a mob would get together and kill women for being witches, hang or brutally destroy innocent people for having a skin color or religion that’s different from theirs, and cause devastation and destruction to their surroundings, whether their surroundings deserved it or not.
Today, many human beings continue that tradition. Today they dress in black and break store windows and set cars on fire while hitting people with hard objects, hilariously all while shouting that their enemies are fascists.
That’s not even as common as what has sprung up in today’s society. Our technology has advanced to the point where we don’t have to go out into the streets to destroy people’s lives. We can now do it from the comfort of our own home in our underwear if we so choose. Online mobs can form in the blink of an eye and destroy any given subject’s life with a deluge of short messages. Jobs have been lost and suicides have been committed all because people online decided to target one specific person and beat them down in various ways until they’ve lost almost everything.
But even then, a good ol’ fashioned mob can still form out of nowhere in real life and wreck your day.
The latest example of this can be seen in a recently released video of a mob suddenly forming around a woman to harass and chastise her simply for not wearing a facemask at the grocery store.
A mask mob screams at a woman without a mask, forcing her out of the grocery store.
Remember, this was all “15 days to flatten the curve.”
Now 2+ months later, we’re at psychotic mask mobs.
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) May 25, 2020
A quick bit of info for you. Cases of COVID-19 infection are declining across the nation, even in states that have released their lockdowns weeks ago. Hundreds of doctors have signed onto a letter urging President Trump to end the lockdown (he can’t tell the states what to do but that’s not the point) because the lockdowns are hurting more than they’re helping.
It’s unclear if the precautions are even necessary at this point, and I’ve already voiced that a lot of these “precautions” are really just theater meant to help people feel better about going back out into public.
(READ: Lockdown Theater)
Do you think that any of these people yelling at this poor woman know about this? Probably not. The media doesn’t really make information like this widespread news. I don’t say this to pardon the mob, but I want to point that out to highlight the fact that many mobs typically operate in ignorance, and that’s underselling it.
They don’t just operate in ignorance, they’re overly confident in it thanks to the fact that they have a group of people around them who are just as confident as they are in what they believe. To be clear, it’s one thing for a group of people to get together with a firm belief in something and express that belief together, it’s another to feed off of other people’s anger to the point where it becomes shared madness and the solution becomes violence or harassment.
Let’s also be clear about what harassment is, too. I won’t have some SJW claiming they were harassed when, in truth, they just had valid arguments presented to them when they said something stupid.
What that lady in the video experienced was harassment. It was pure intimidation brought on by a group of people giving her orders without the authority to do so for reasons they considered good and intelligent but, in reality, had little good and intelligence behind them.
That’s the problem with mobs. It’s humanity giving into a base instinct derived from our pack-like nature. There isn’t much thought involved. A group of people doesn’t like something and instead of reasoning it out and finding a solution, they resort to screaming, destruction, and violence like animals. While this lady suffered no physical harm, she’s one of the lucky ones.
There have been plenty of videos of conservative students and activists, pro-lifers, and speakers suffering violence at the hands of a mob.
The thing is, mobs don’t work out the way the mob intends. Mobs only increase the likelihood that the reason they became so angry in the first place is going to be exacerbated by people who want to show that mobs don’t control our society. That lady may have been scared at the moment, but who among us watched that video and didn’t feel anger on behalf of the lady? Perhaps there were those who thought her harassment was a plus, but that action is going to cause a backlash with people stripping off their masks in defiance. Seeing as how it’s highly likely nothing bad will come of them doing this, who really won here?
Not the mob. The mob is only capable, in the long run, of turning people against them. Antifa, lynch mobs, witch hunts, and more have all ended the same way: with their opponents gaining the upper hand.
That’s because, at the end of the day, the mob doesn’t have the intelligence or reasoning skills necessary to convince anyone of anything except that they need to be opposed.
