Mob Rule: The Darkness of Unhinged Group Justice

Mobs can be dangerous entities.

Online or offline.

The Rwanda genocide often involved these large groups (mobs) enacting horrific violence on their fellow citizens. Here's a description from the book, When Victims Become Killers.

“Without massacres by machete-wielding civilian mobs, in the hundreds and thousands, there would have been no genocide. Just as the killing in Rwanda was not done by shadowy death squads but by mobs of ordinary people guided by armed militia and trained infantrymen, the killing also did not happen in secluded but in public places. Most often, the killings happened in places of worship.” - Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp 225

The social dynamics of mobs are difficult to overcome. With mobs, leaders can direct groups of people to do horrible things, and they can do it without getting their hands directly dirty.

The religious leaders inciting the mob to pressure Pilate to crucify Jesus were able to direct the desire for retribution against the innocent.

The following passage puts it into perspective for us. The mob added a toxic soup to a horrible unfolding set of events for Jesus. 

"If he was innocent then the whole world was guilty.

"It is not surprising that under these circumstances, and in the absence of any defence, the Jerusalem community and the Roman government decided to exterminate Jesus. They had just as much right to do so as to exterminate the two thieves who perished with him. But there was neither right nor reason in torturing him. He was entitled to the painless death of Socrates. We may charitably suppose that if the death could have been arranged privately between Pilate and Caiaphas Jesus would have been dispatched as quickly and suddenly as John the Baptist. But the mob wanted the horrible fun of seeing somebody crucified: an abominably cruel method of execution. Pilate only made matters worse by trying to appease them by having Jesus flogged. The soldiers, too, had to have their bit of sport, to crown him with thorns and, when they buffeted him, challenge him ironically to guess which of them had struck the blow." - George Bernard Shaw, On the Rocks

Large groups of people can want and perpetuate unjust ideas, rules, and laws. 

But to stand up to a mob who wants something wrong requires risking life and power to push back. Pilate pushed back at first, but he ultimately relented.

If a group of people you were with, engaged in illegal and morally wrong behavior, would you stand up and push back or go along with it? If you haven't prepared yourself for this, you'll probably go along with it; as would I.

Sin will corrupt all of us given enough time and the right circumstances. It's something that overcomes us. And eventually, it leads to our physical death. But that physical death is simply a representation of the state of spiritual death we already inhabit.

With multiple former clients, I’ve experienced online mob justice. People loyal to their friends but ignorant of the truth quickly jump on the bandwagon, taking destructive actions to defend their friends at the cost of the victim. 

On January 6th, I witnessed a mob storm the capitol threatening the vice president and Congress, all based on a lie and a desire to consolidate power.

Abraham Lincoln had an interesting take on mobs and their danger to society, as Congress representative Jamie Raskin expressed. 

“In 1837, a racist mob in Alton, Illinois broke into the offices of an abolitionist newspaper and killed its editor, Elijah Lovejoy.

Lincoln wrote a speech in which he said that no transatlantic military giant could ever crush us as a nation, even with all of the fortunes in the world.

But if downfall ever comes to America, he said, we ourselves would be its author and finisher. If racist mobs are encouraged by politicians to rampage and terrorize, Lincoln said, they will violate the rights of other citizens and quickly destroy the bonds of social trust necessary for democracy to work.

Mobs and demagogues will put us on a path to political tyranny, Lincoln said. As we'll see today, this very old problem has returned with new ferocity today, as a president who lost an election deployed a mob, which included dangerous extremists, to attack the constitutional system of election and the peaceful transfer of power.

—Representative Jamie Raskin, July 12, 2022

The culmination of Jesus' trial ends with a chanting bloodthirsty mob. Crucify him, they yelled.

Research for my book on Jesus' passion involved diving deep into the atrocities of humanity across history. The totalitarianism of Nazi Germany was one of the events I explored. Hannah Arendt famously mapped out the dynamics and structure of totalitarianism in her book on its origins.

She had the following to say about mobs. 

“It was commonly believed that the "voice of the people was the voice of God," and that the task of a leader was, as Clemenceau so scornfully expressed it, to follow that voice shrewdly…

“The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for the "strong man," the "great leader." For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented… 

Jews were to be torn to pieces like Marsyas in the Greek myth; Reinach ought to be boiled alive; Jews should be stewed in oil or pierced to death with needles; they should be "circumcised up to the neck…

in the eyes of the mob the Jews came to serve as an object lesson for all the things they detested.” - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p106-107

This horrifying insight about the mobs of Nazi German has eerie overlays to the mobs demanding the death of Jesus and the freeing of the insurrectionist, Barrabas.

Social media influencers are perhaps a modern-day collective class of Pilates subject to the mobs they can summon or those that can be summoned against them. Now we have to contend with these dynamics in day-to-day life.

Mobs want blood. Jesus gave his.

"In cancel culture, the goal is punishment and isolation for human failure. Jesus on the other hand cancels the record of our failures and the goal is restoration and redemption." - Lecrae