Further investigation into the London fires yielded up what a lot of people think were the causes of the riots. The spark was most definitely the protests over the police shooting of a suspect, but is the spark really the case? Can you say that if you have an extraordinarily volatile environment that the single spark that starts the fire is really the cause? Isn’t the cause what created the volatile environment in the first place. But then, in the case of London, England what created the volatile environment?
Some people have put forward the thoughts that the government’s recent massive cutbacks on social programs, and the millions of lives that has affected in the country, as the primary reason the country was sitting in a powder keg state. Even though those measures were taken in order to save the country from bankruptcy or worse, being forced into the Eurozone to remain solvent, and in general the British people tend to take to hardship for necessity pretty well. But the U.S. is also seeing the same thing happen at all levels of government and while protesting is for sure on the rise, it isn’t violent and destructive in nature. So why is the U.K. special in this instance? Maybe it’s not, when you compare it to Greece, for instance, which saw riots on a massive scale due to government cutbacks. It’s a fine theory to think that, but ultimately it’s flawed, because almost no Britian was saying that that was why they were rioting. The Greeks were very vocal about why they were burning things, the English were not.
There are other theories out there as well, but I have to say I think everyone has missed the point entirely. The point is that there was no point. We all like to think that when people rise up in violence that there is a good reason, but in this instance there wasn’t. Not only was there no good reason, nobody was trying to hide that fact. For the most part, the rioters were simply that, rioters. They weren’t mad about anything in specific. They weren’t “taking things back from an oppressive majority/minority”. They weren’t destroying things to show the government that they meant business. They weren’t fighting back against an out of hand police force. It wasn’t gang violence taken out of hand. It was just a bunch of people who decided that instead of sitting inside and watching TV that evening that they would rather run down the street and burn down their neighbor’s store…just because.
That’s the cause: just because. That’s the fundamental problem with the question: What was the cause? There was no cause. There was merely the environment that made what happened a possibility. So now we go back to the problem, what caused the environment? It wasn’t the cutbacks, those were a little too recent to be the cause of such a violent and yet undirected uprising. The cutbacks may have been a contributing factor, but a very small one, and in a way most people would flat out deny. In order for the cutbacks to have been a large contributing factor then the English would have to have been fairly dependent on those things that were cutback. Which means that the government had a rather large amount of control over the average English person’s life.
Ultimately what that points at is the idea that the English government was paying for so many things in the average English person’s life that cutting those things out would cause a major upheaval in every person in the country’s life. Having a situation like that would be bad, given that the government is beholden to economic forces in order to pay for things, and during bad times in the economy the entire population of the country would be screwed. Ultimately this points out that socialism is a bad call because it makes people so dependent on the government for survival that if that dependency is threatened then they might easily be convinced to rise up and destroy the very government they depended on. BUT, that’s not what happened here!
What happened here was a society of people who didn’t give a crap about law and order, deciding to take that ideal to the streets because they could get away with it. Like Penn, from Penn and Teller, says: Government is Force. When the government’s force falters, what does a society do? You can judge the character of a man a lot by seeing what he does in the dark. The same can be said for a society. In a vacuum, what would any given society do? A society that feels disenfranchised AND feels that life is meaningless will likely rise up and burn down their surroundings because they can. That’s what happened. Via social media, the population in the city was aware of where the force of government was, and knew where they could wreck mayhem free from the rule of law, and so they immediately seized the opportunity and got to burning. What has made the Londoners feel disenfranchised and that life has no meaning is the real question here.
I am of the personal opinion that rampant secularism, government corruption, and socialism are the root causes, but it’s an opinion. I have no data to back me up, just logical argument.
