In the wake of the riots in Northern England and Belfast, I gave an interview to Trisha Goddard of Talk TV. It constitutes the second half of this video.
With your kind indulgence, I would like to expand a bit on a few of the points I've made in order to afford a context to my observations.
So riots are nothing new and they are not confined to the far right or the far left. Riots are a mode of disorganized, chaotic communication in anomic societies, societies with anomy.
People who riot are people in despair. They're hopeless. Rioting is a panic reaction. It's a panic because these people are not being seen. They're not being heard. They're disdained. They're derided. They're mocked. They're ignored. They're arrested. But they're never heard.
There's no real dialogue going on with these kind of people.
And so, ultimately, they give up on any institutional mode of exchanging views and opinions, expressing concerns, needs, worries, anxieties, and instead they go out to the street and they riot. They become violent.
Dollard suggested in 1939 that aggression is just the flip side of the same coin with frustration. When you get frustrated and there's no outlet to this frustration, you become aggressive. And when you externalize aggression, you become violent.
Durkheim, Emil Durkheim, was the first to describe anomy. It's a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards.
In societies where morality is in flux, where there is moral skepticism, where there's no agreed upon social ethic, consensus, direction, agenda. There's moral dysregulation and absence of legitimating and validating mechanisms for legitimating and validating aspirations, needs, hopes, and so and so forth.
Durkheim himself wrote, Eynome in 1893 and then in 1897, that's a long time ago. He wrote, Anomy is a mismatch, not simply the absence of norms, and thus a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion could also produce a kind of anomy.
But anomy is not enough to produce violence or rioting. It needs to be coupled with other psychological processes, or, to be more precise, mass psychological processes.
Anomy needs first and foremost to go along with what we call in psychology dissonance.
Dissonance is the inability to reconcile two conflicting thoughts, to conflicting beliefs or values or emotions or norms or edicts, or when there is a conflict that cannot be resolved internally between two psychological processes that are equipotent, equally powerful, then the outcome is dissonance and dissonance inex and invariably gives rise to anxiety.
When you put together a social landscape of anomy, lack of norms, lack of agreed upon mores, no consensus. When you put this fragmentation of society together with the individual process of dissonance and inability, as I said, to restore inner calm and inner peace because of conflicts, internal conflicts.
When you put these two together, the result is paranoid ideation, a threat perception. The threat is coming actually from the inside, but it is projected. It is perceived as if it is coming from the outside.
And I designed a model, I call it the H-pedals. H-pedal, like in a car, P-E-D-A-L-S. The H-Pedals model.
And the H-Pedals model describes the internal landscape of people who end up being politically violent, rioting, assassinating, and so and so forth.
The H stands for hopelessness, despair. The pedals stand for privilege, exclusivity, dominance or hegemony, affiliation, life or way of life, and safety.
Put together, there's an acronym, pedals. When people feel that their privilege is threatened, that they are no longer exclusive in any specific sense, they're not unique, they're not special in any way, they're just commodified, run of the mill, when people feel homogenized, similarly when people feel that they're losing their dominance or their place in the hierarchy they are losing their hegemony, then they react by affiliating themselves with like-minded people or people in the same set of circumstances and conditions.
This affiliation creates tribalism, and in-group pitted against an out-group, hatred and rejection of the other, alterality and xenophobia.
Affiliation is very important, the sense of belonging, the sense of unconditional acceptance, the sense of total understanding of your predicament.
You don't even need to speak. Everyone around is absolutely mired in the same quagmire and facing the same conundrum and dilemmas.
So this is very comforting. It's a self-soothing act getting affiliated, joining a club, a group, a gang, it's a self-soothing act.
I'm going to read to you an excerpt from an article written by Otto Kernberg in 2020.
Freud pointed out that the individual who censors himself as part of such a mass movement acquires a reduced capacity for independent judgment and rational decision-making.
To the contrary, what dominates the individuals within the mass movement is a sense of power by mutual identification, a sense of belonging and power derived from being a part of such a large movement.
So I mentioned privileged, I mentioned exclusivity, I mentioned dominance or hegemony, I mentioned the response, which is affiliation.
There's always an ambient, atmospheric sense that your way of life is at risk.
And the reaction to this is nostalgia, make America great again, or utopia on the left, socialist utopia, communist utopia, the two ways we react when reality becomes intolerable, unbearable, menacing, intimidating, dooming in some way.
In short, when we catastrophize and renounce reality, abjure reality, because we can no longer find ourselves in reality. There's no place for us.
Then we sail forward to a fantasy of the future, and that is known as utopia, or to a fantasy of the past, and that is nostalgia.
Generally, people riot because they feel unsafe. There's a sense that your safety, stability, determinacy and certainty are in jeopardy.
You could always point the finger at the other, the immigrant, the Muslim, the Jew, the outsider, the newcomer, even the newborn.
They are threatening the status quo. They are, by definition, introducing change and transformation into a system that hitherto has been utterly stable and predictable.
And people hate change. They're terrified of it. Because most people are ill-equipped to deal effectively, efficaciously with transformation.
So they blame the agents of change.
The totality of these psychological processes leads effectively to the development of psychopathic behaviors.
Defiance. Contumaciousness, rejection of authority, recklessness, paranoid conspiracyism, the game is rigged, there's no level playing field, someone else is in control, hidden or cult and dark, etc.
And this defines, this contumaciousness, this recklessness, this parallel conspiracyism, they push people to act out, to decompensate, to lose control over themselves, and to externalize the pent-up aggression which has been building in them for years and possibly decades.
And this is when we end up having a riot, not only in Northern England, and not only with a far right.
Grannon, but back to the riots, and as you may have heard in the news, Sir Keir Stama has outlined how he feels about that, the Nazi salutes in the street and what have you.
So, I mean, xenophobia, xenophobia. And he's talked about that.
And a lot of people get angry at being labeled far right and what have you.
I do think that, you know, and people have said, are there two different rules and what have you?
But I don't recall seeing the numbers of cars on fire and places being smashed up. On this scale, I can't, well, I can remember it, but that's because I'm an oldie and I go back to many, many, many years.
But this, the fires, what have you, the, you know, it's scary.
And as I said, the whole issue at the heart of this, let us not forget. It is. It's about male violence against children, those little darling babies who lost their life.
So what we don't need is male violence. It frightens women.
And how do you tell your sons it's wrong to be violent and then go out and set fire to somewhere? You can't, anyway.
But there's a lot of language going around. The mob, the thugs and people have been complaining, and that's what Keir Starmer, those terms, and they get very cross when those terms are used.
So I wanted to look at the anatomy of what goes on with this particular type of rioting.
This particular – I'm talking about rioting. I'm not talking about protest march. It's where a couple of people here and they get out of order. I'm talking about the burning, the looting, the goose stepping, the throwing of missiles, the rocks, all of those sorts of things.
Joining me now as a guest that I have, I know there is a very, very much respectful. Sam Vaknin is a psychologist and geopolitical commentator and joins me now.
Sam, the sorts of things that we're seeing, as I say, you see a mob, the thugs, and what have you. But are there any rulers, are there any leaders? What goes on within these groups?
I mean, we've heard of whatever he's calling himself now, Yaxley or Tommy Robinson or whatever, you're on holiday or running away from the police, depending on what you want to believe, but he's somewhere nice and warm and sunny and stirring things up.
Is it about outside agitators?
Talk us through. How do these things, do they just spring up?
Well, for some reason I can't see you on the screen, but it's good to hear your voice, Trisha.
Oh, sorry, I'm glad you get heavy.
Rioting is a strong indicator of what we call in sociology anomic societies.
Anomic societies are societies where there is a disintegration of norms, behavioral conventions, and social mores, where the individual feels that there is a gap, an abyss, between her or his identity and the ostensible identity of the society that it is a part of.
It's even worse when the consensus in the society, where morality itself is challenged and everything is in flux, it's very terrifying.
So these people who riot, they're actually hopeless. They are in despair. They feel unheard and ignored and unseen.
It's a panic reaction, actually.
In 1939, there was a psychologist by the name of Dollard, and he described the cycle from frustration to aggression.
And Emil Durkheim, the sociologist at the end of the 19th century, coined the phrase, Anomie.
Now, Anomie leads to two reactions.
One is dissonance, where your internal thoughts, your beliefs, your values, your convictions, your personal history, your experience, people around you, your social milieu conflict dramatically with the rest of society. So this is dissonance.
But there is something a lot more pervasive and a lot more profound. There is a threat perception, a perception of threat, something menacing, something in the atmosphere.
Now, I came up with this model, and the model, I titled the model H- PEDALS.
PEDALS, like pedal and metal in the car. So H pedal. H is hopelessness. Pedal is privilege, exclusivity, dominance or hegemony, affiliation to a group, an in-group, life, a way of life, and safety.
Put these together in an acronym and in a pedance.
These people feel that each and every item of the list that I've just enumerated is under threat.
Their privilege is under threat. Their exclusivity or supremacy is under threat. Their hegemony or dominance is under threat. Their exclusivity or supremacy is under threat. Their hegemony or dominance is under threat. Their affiliation inside a well-defined, well-demarcated in-group is in flux.
So they don't know exactly where they belong and they want very much to be accepted. And so they would do anything to fit into any collective, howeverephemeral, however violent, however, belonging and affiliation afford you with a sense of safety and stability and predictability and certainty.
And above all, these people feel that there is an external threat to their way of life.
That's the question of hostage, actually.
Yeah, you've really summed up.
So, you know, when you're scared, when you're disassociated, when you don't think you're heard, or what have you, does it mean that you will do things, as we've seen with the rioting in various parts of the UK, that you will do things that you probably wouldn't do in any other walk of life, like set fire to cars or see someone else and attack them.
Because it's interesting, we had one case where an imam came out and offered food to some of the rioters, and he actually got talking and hugged. So at some level, you can break through that.
So a couple of questions. When they're not met with the same aggression and violence, can it kind ofthrow them off?
Well, let me read to you a quote from an article by a very, very famous psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg.
And here's the quote. It's an article he has written in 2020, not long ago.
He said, Freud pointed out that the individual who censors himself as part of such a mass movement acquires a reduced capacity, who senses himself as part of such a mass movement, acquires a reduced capacity for independent judgment and irrational decision-making.
To the contrary, what dominates the individuals within the mass movement is a sense of power by mutual identification, a sense of belonging and power derived from being part of such a large group.
So there is a hive mind, there's a group mind that suspends individual judgment, individual experience, individual values, beliefs, propensities, behaviors. The individual ceases to exist. It becomes an element or a figment or an extension of the hive, of the colony of the group.
But you're right. If people are exposed to the other, if people are exposed to the immigrants they so detest, to Muslims, to other cultures, to other ethnicities, if they are exposed on the personal level, if the other person is given a name, a personal story, a face, that reduces aggression and violence dramatically.
Actually, one of the first advices, one of the first tips we give to people in a hostage situation
I was gonna going to say, Sam, Sam, I was going to say, wow, I flew with them in the Middle East, and we were trained by Israeli groups actually, security groups.
And we were told, if we were taken hostage, as some of my colleagues were, we were told one of the things to do is make sure they know your name, tell the things about your children, become human because they've seen in hostage situations when you're dealing with an enemy who suddenly knows your name, what you like, and here's your voice, and all of those sorts of things.
Establish common denominators. And the common denominator is the fact that you're both human. You both have similar circumstances like a family. You have a name, you have a personal history, you have a face, reverse the dehumanization and the objectification which are very common in such violent eruptions and so on so forth.
The worst thing you can do, by the way, the worst thing you could do is act with violence to suppress violence. That's absolutely the worst thing you could do is act with violence to suppress violence. That's absolutely the worst thing you could do.
This perpetuates the situation, aggravates it, it's throwing fuel on the fire.
And when politicians use these terms thugs, hooligans and what have you, is when you say the worst thing to do is react with violence, I'm reading violence as not just the action, but in the words, I will come down hard, I will destroy, I will, is that also, again, we come back to making things worse?
The solution is not to dehumanize those who dehumanize. The solution is not to go down to their level. The solution is not to verbally abuse them. The solution is not to castigate and chastise and render them outcasts.
And so, because this is a self-perpetuating vicious cycle.
You see, these people have two options. They are on the fringes of society, usually, typically, they're on the fringes of society.
They've never been paid attention to. They've never been seen.
Their grievances, their hopes, their dreams, their wishes, they've all been frustrated repeatedly, at least in their own eyes, and they blame the other.
So they have two solutions. One solution is nostalgia, make America great again.
And the other solution is utopia, the socialist utopia, the communist utopia, these are the two solutions.
You need to understand these people. You need to empathize.
These kind of reactions, you are bugs, you are criminals, your animals, this shows a profound lack of empathy.
How do you expect, you are not serving as a role model.
You should serve as a role model, you should demonstrate to them that there is another option for communication, for conveyance of grievances, for resolution. You should demonstrate to them that there is another option for communication, for conveyance of grievances, for resolution. You should show them that civilization is an option that they can fit into, not shun them and ostracize them. This never ends well.
Yeah, you make a very good point.
People who feel not listened to or not part of the bigger conversation to emphasize that and to pile, you know, actually point out that, no, you're not, you're not worth listening to and what have you, would absolutely make it worse.
Now, into all of this, of course, becomes, you know, people have talked about social media, the press, we talked about mainstream media, all of those, whenever there's something like this, there is kind of like a feeding frenzy, isn't there?
It's like elements will come in to either make money or gain capital or gain control, knowing what's going on, but using that.
The situation to start with involves, as I said, frustration, externalized aggression, defiance, contumaciousness, rejection of authority, externalized aggression, defiance, contumaciousness, rejection of authority, of the establishment, recklessness, paranoid ideation, conspiracy theories, xenophobia, the game is rigged, it's not a level playing field, it's us versus them, they are against us.
Anyhow, these people are totally divorced from reality. Their cognition is distorted, and it's very easy to take advantage of them.
But if you are there to communicate with them, to tell them, listen, here is a structured way for your grievances to be heard and tackled. And so on so forth, outsiders are less likely to benefit.
Of course, the more you make it a power play and a show of force, the more fertile feel there is for manipulators, psychopaths, exploitors, criminals, terrorists, and you name it.
These are the feeding routes.
We've got a message here.
Your psychologist is missing out on the fact that these rioters are projecting the parts of themselves they don't like onto minorities.
Add alcohol to this and it aggravates the situation, says Ian.
That's a point. I mean, is there that part of themselves that they don't like, whereas being part of this group, they feel accepted that part of them isn't as bad. I'm not as bad because look, everybody else around me is the same.
Projection and other defense mechanisms like splitting. I'm all good, they are all bad. We discussed it in our previous interview.
It's all very good and true.
But to pretend that there are no grievances, that there are no people left behind, that there are no groups ignored, mocked, ridiculed, disdain to pretend that this is not happening?
This is an elite point of view.
If you live at the bottom of the barrel, if you live at the bottom of a barrel, you know that it's true. There are groups that are suffering.
And of course, these groups are likely to accuse people who did nothing to them. People are innocent. That's obvious.
And yes, they're going to attribute to these people, to these innocent people, the parts of themselves that they feel uncomfortable with, their failure, their weakness, their hatred, their envy.
It's all very true, but it's all grounded in a reality that we should tackle and change. It's not a psychological artifact.
The psychology is superimposed on real life problems.
Wow.
Sam, that's why I absolutely, I so look forward to our conversations, because I do, I learn from my guess, I learn from you.
And I'm just, I'm definitely, from a journalist's point of view, there are things that I could change. There are things that I could change in the way that I speak.
And thank you. Thank you for a really illuminating conversation. Brilliant as ever talking with you.
Sam Vaknin, their psychologist and geopolitical analysts.
Okay. Some of your messages, the language might be unpleasant and personal, but I'm going to do what Sam says I hear. I hear something never too old to learn and none of us should assume we know everything about everything.
There's a number on the screen. 0344499-1,000. You can text the word talk to 8-7-22. You can X at Talk TV.
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