When we’re angry, we dance and destroy

IOFTEN wonder what it is that switches off the logic circuits in the human brain and causes normally rational people to behave irrationally. A crowd of football spectators, for example, will suddenly erupt into a crazed mob, rush on to the field, rip up seats and burn them, pull down billboards and generally become totally destructive.

Ripping up seats and setting fire to them is not going to achieve anything useful, even if you’re angry your team has lost a match. No amount of destruction will change the outcome of the match.

I wonder whether those spectators go home afterwards and feel slightly embarrassed about what they did. They certainly should. Do they look at the TV screen and say: “Oh my goodness, what a I’ve been!”

There have been many occasions when crowds of people suddenly turn violent, yell slogans and burn parked vehicles or smash the windscreens of vehicles.

Do they watch themselves later on TV news bulletins and say: “We did a good job”, or do they feel rather silly and think: “I wonder what made me suddenly behave like an idiot?

“I set fire to a car and I didn’t even know whose it was. And I threw a brick through a dress-shop window and I don’t wear dresses.”

What ridiculous impulse would make the driver of a truckload of farmworkers suddenly find it necessary to try to race a train at a level crossing?

Nobody in their right mind would risk destroying 10 human lives for the chance of saving less than a minute of travelling time. It makes no logical sense.

So why do people do it? And repeat it even after they know others have been stupid enough to do it? What makes normal people suddenly go on a rampage and set fire to a train, or burn a school?

This sort of howling mob madness is nothing new. It’s a madness that has affected the human race for ages.

Less than a century ago, villagers marched, screaming and shouting, to burn women they thought were witches because somebody claimed they has seen them riding on broomsticks.

They probably felt rather ashamed later, when they remembered how the “witch” had cured their child of an illness, or helped one of their sheep with a difficult birth or made a nourishing soup for a sick husband.

It seems to me the human mind operates on a level very close to insanity a lot of the time. It just takes one hot-headed fool to start shouting a slogan and pretty soon you have a marching mob looking for something to burn.

I suppose we should be grateful it’s usually very old tyres that are burned. It’s a strange, but traditional, South African form of protest. That, and dancing. When we are angry we dance and burn tyres. Foreigners sometimes find this puzzling.

Last Laugh

How many aerospace engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None. Changing a light bulb doesn’t take rocket science, you know.