We’ve all seen the rioting in the UK, Greece, Italy, and France.  We have to wonder if it can happen here.  If the Left has successfully created in our youth an entitlement culture and a predisposition for mob-like behavior, then the answer is “probably so.”

To really understand the mob mentality, read Ann Coulter’s book, Deomonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.  You don’t have to be a Coulter fan to learn a lot from this book.  She begins with a detailed analysis of the French Revolution, drawing heavily on Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

Le Bon — a French physician, scientist, and social psychologist — was the first to identify the phenomenon of mass psychology.  His ground breaking book The Crowd paints a disturbing picture of the behavior of mobs.  Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini used his book to learn how to incite a mob.  Our liberals could have been Le Bon’s study subjects.

She goes on to identify the mob-like behaviors of the modern liberal/progressive:

[L]iberals thrive on jargon as a substitute for thought.  According to Le Bon, the more dramatic and devoid of logic a chant is, the better it works to rile up a mob:  “Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. … To exaggerate … and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known …”

Liberals love slogans because “laws of logic have no action on crowds.”  Mobs, Le Bon says, “are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready association of ideas.”  He could be referring to the New York Times and other journals of elite opinion when he describes periodicals that “manufacture opinions for their readers and supply them with ready-made phrases which dispense them of the trouble of reasoning.”

To see what happens when a people abandon logic and reasoning, take a look at the riots going on in the UK.  Listen to the words of these young mobsters who blame the riots on “conservatives” and “rich people”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0pblS1DuBU

There’s no logic to it.  But there is a lesson for the rest of us.  It really doesn’t matter how much wealth you confiscate from the producers and give to the looters and moochers, it’s never enough.

You can hear these young people blaming the producers — the very people who pay for their educations, health care benefits, and Lord knows what else — for the rioting.  It makes no sense.  It’s just like hearing liberals/progressives blaming taxpayers for the debt crisis here.  It doesn’t matter how much the taxpayers provide, it’s never enough.  The takers want more and more and more.  If they don’t get it, watch out!

Although several factors have been identified as contributing to the UK rioting, the sense of entitlement to OPS (other people’s stuff) is a major one.  From the Wall Street Journal:

The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.

“There are people here with nothing,” this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.

According to Reuters:

“It’s been building up for years.  All it needed was a spark,” said E. Nan, a young man in a baseball cap surrounded by other youths in Hackney in east London.  “We ain’t got no jobs, no money … We heard that other people were getting things for free, so why not us?”

Consider this essay by Max Hastings entitled “Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters.”  In this piece, he asks who is to blame for the rioting, and then he answers:

The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.

The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.

***

This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

He concludes:

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable.  They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions.  Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.

Most of us would say this is nonsense.  Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.

There it is, the liberal mob in action.  And the entitlement mentality that infects the UK is threatening to engulf our own society.  Unless we work and pray and work to stop it.