Let’s riot

You need a few things to kick-start a riot.

A political ideology isn’t really necessary. Nor is a great deal of planning.

What you will need is rabid misinformation, longing for camaraderie and connection, angry and overly emotional online discourse. Oh, and heat. You need heat as in hot weather.

Riots peak in summer. A study of unrest in fifty African and Asian cities between nineteen-sixty and two-thousand-and-six by Adam Yeeles of the University of Texas at Dallas found that heat made urban social disturbances more likely, with peak levels of unrest occurring in the upper twenty degrees Celsius.

Most rioters are male because riots are an assertion of masculinity. Hence the chanting, drumming, hurling of abuse.

The streets are hot. The air thick with tension. Men with beer bellies and English flags prowl like wolves, looking for a fight. It’s summer in Britain. It’s riot time.

You’ve seen it before. The smashed windows, the burning cars, the primal roar of the mob. They called it political. Said it was about immigration, about taking back control.

But you knew better. You’ve been in the thick of it, felt the electricity in the air, the intoxicating rush of power that comes from destruction. This wasn’t politics. This was animal instinct.

It’s the same tribal energy of the football hooligans of your youth. The same mindless violence. Only now they’ve traded team colours for nationalist flags, and instead of rival fans, they hunt immigrants and Muslims.

Politicians and pundits argue about causes and solutions. But they miss the point. These men don’t want solutions. They wanted release. They want to feel alive, to matter, if only for a moment.

It isn’t about politics or grievances or social change. It’s about men seeking meaning in a world that had left them behind.

It’s about the intoxicating power of destruction. First against property, then against people.

It’s about the simple, terrible joy of breaking things.