Why don't Americans take to the streets?

I was watching "This Week with George Stephanopolous" this morning and talk was of the riots in Syria and Lebanon over the Danish news cartoons of mohammed. I started wondering why Americans don't take to the streets when something they disagree with happens and upsets them, like we see more predominantly elsewhere in the world.

Could it be that we are afraid to? We are afraid of losing our material possessions (as a run-in with the cops could surely cause). We place a higher value on our material possessions than we place on standing up for what we believe in?

Could it be that we think rioting in the streets accomplishes nothing? Will lead to more violence and fewer solutions?

Could it be that we are more comfortable over-all? Not starving, homeless, hopeless?

Hell, these are the first three that popped into my mind. What do you think?

 

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clearly.. their govt supported the burning of the embasies... otherwise it would have been stopped.

if it is in the govt interest to let the people burn stuff.. then it lets them.

americans have burned several times.. here in LA... TO FORCE GOVT ACTION.

it happens.. just not over a cartoon...

-MT

 

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Why do you think it happens less in America than elsewhere? (I said "like we see more predominantly elsewhere in the world.")

 

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it happens.. but usually over govt injustice or lack of infrastructure for the people.. or criminal bias in the judicial system....

it has happened many times.. but we do it to fight our govt...

they do it for fun... organised hate... not at their own gov't.. but at other gov'ts...

dont you see? in this way.. those messed up gov'ts give their people something to hate beside them.... which is so important... when your people like to burn things in the name of religion. and live in crippling poverty..

those gov'ts want their people to hate everything but them...

-MT

 

Instead of rioting if U boycott tax then any damn government in the world will kneel down before public demand, but the problem is that humans are born cowards.

 

well remember, millions did protest about the Iraqi war.
it kind of split U.S.A down middle. mainly people on the coast versus Midwest, Down South...isn't it?
don'tagree with riots tho. peascful protest yes. BUT see. see how even these liberties are bein taken away as we speak!!!!!....the huge silence about THIS!!!

 

alternative theory:

US streets are not made for walking and most americans have a hard time imagining that you can actually walk on them.

 

MT made a good point. Americans will riot when necessary, but Americans need a reason to riot. We will not riot over a stupid thing like a cartoon. Give us a reason to force our government to do something, we'll take to the streets as quick as anyone; but fortunately, many Americans think with their brains instead of their hearts and decide not to riot over a ridiculous cartoon.

AmishRakeFight

 

How about the illegal NSA spying? Or being lied to by your president about the reasons for him sending our soldiers to die or be maimed for life in Iraq? Or a president and congress that are continuing to take from the poor and give to the rich? Or a government in general that is corrupt and intent on becoming more corrupt and powerful?


Are those stupid things not worth getting passionate about?

 

.......well, there's that and the fact that we can potentially litigate people in court over really stupid stuff, and actually win LOL.

Destroy city using angry mob..........no
Take the newspaper to court, and sue for millions of dollars-----yes

 

The general trend towards apathy in western societies, which has reached profound depths in the USA, can be explained as being due to multiple environmental effects working in unison.

The primary environmental effect is that of overpopulation which has made popular equalitarian, altruistic conformist ideologies promising harmony and stability, a social necessity.
The ideals of Democracy and Christianity, as well as a slew of other ideological/religious dogmas (memes) preaching tolerance,love, non-violence and non-discrimination, are directly linked to population pressures that allowed for them to spread within populations fatigued and fed up with constant strifeand dominated by weakness and need.
Inclusion became the new way of maintaining peace and stability, as systems sought methods of making themselves viable within a world of constantly changing circumstances.

This ‘leveling of mankind’ into a mass of undifferentiated “individuality”, is what is called Domestication or what I call Feminization and is currently described as the ‘dumbing-down’ of man.

Dumbing-down is a systemic necessity when one needs to integrate creatures, with the intelligence of man, into coherent and stable groups of thousands, millions, or in some cases, billions of minds.
Termite colonies are successful because its members lack any form of individuality or intelligence that would make their assimilation difficult.

To accomplish any form of systemic stability each part of the group must be made to feel a part of it, safe within it and desirable (helpful) to the group, so a common denominator becomes the core of group cohesion.
In small groups the sense of tribalism or of gang psychology is created by finding common attitudes and interests or ideals or myths to rally behind.
As groups grow in size common denominators are harder to find and to maintain due to the fact that a multiplicity of minds creates a multiplicity of diverging,and often conflicting, desires, personalities, backgrounds and interest, especially in species such as man.

The force of population pressure causes a focus on averageness or on a more and more superficial and simplistic common denominator which the majority will be able to relate to and find their interests and hopes answered by it.

In this case complicated concepts or involved arguments are detrimental to group cohesion, since they require a level of awareness and knowledge and participation not all are willing and capable of providing.

What occurs is that ideologies are simplified and watered down, by eliminating all concepts of division or of exclusion.
Race, sex, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity, intellect, physicality are minimized and/or ignored as being significant or even real.
All and everything must be made to seem similar to everything else and all that causes the mind to categorize, label or divide by discriminating becomes a source of derision that must be eliminated.

Intelligence is ridiculed, caricatured and made to seem shameful or inferior with concepts of ‘nerdiness’ and social mockery.

Sex must be defamed and debased as being a natural phenomenon with a particular procreative purpose forcing particular sexual strategies - making gender a social phenomenon with no natural foundations, making sex a matter of entertainment or bonding or life-style or some other social need, which will eliminate the implications of natural selection - making beauty a matter of taste where aesthetics are reinterpreted to include more and more people within its premises so as to not make most feel insecure or inadequate or inferior - making anything that determines quality, within the context of natural selection, a remnant of a primitive past which we must ‘correct’ by inventing ideals which will reinterpret the human condition to make it more digestible by the average mind.
We can witness this strategy on this very forum where Buddha1 reinvents sexuality to make him self more acceptable or proud of his particular genetic mutation with no natural purpose. All memes use genetic predispositions to accomplish their own ends.
In the case of memes with no procreative method of its own it becomes parasitical on others to reproduce. It recruits from the pool of genetically fit individuals and indoctrinates minds that it cannot reproduce on its own.

In the US this trend towards social cohesion has reached a technological sophistication unparalleled in history.
It’s population is indoctrinated within an ideology where no current human mind can find comfort, because it has evolved for more austere and demanding natural environments, and so escapes into Television and pop culture fantasies where the imagined ideal is projected in all its idealized glory in artificial environments that the observer is to replicate or imitate in his/her own life.

Socrates was condemned to death for spreading skepticism amongst the young and forcing the system to take severe measures against his effects.
His challenge to his fellow Athenians to explore their own motives and beliefs and to find arguments in support of their life-styles was a great threat against Athenian stability and had to be stopped.

In the US this group cohesion is maintained by making any self-exploration and thinking into something shameful or evil.
The ideal citizen follows and believes with little thought and doubt.
How this unthinking environment is created is a topic of great interest to me and it requires the analysis of media, marketing, sexuality, entertainment, economy, religion and a variety of other elements to fully explain.
How they interact is what establishes the systemic identity, as Mutarana and Varela tell us that all systems are organized in this way in their book ‘Autopoiesis and Cognition’.

The system is always interested in its own continuance, acquiring the dynamics of a living organism. You, yourself, are a self-contained system of relationships interested in maintaining stability and cohesion.
In the case of large social groups, intelligence, thought, identity, superiority/inferiority, are all aspects of human nature that make group cohesion difficult to maintain.

In response the system promotes imitation through common ideals and ambitions, and altruism and tolerance and conformity as a way of eliminating any remnant of past human psychology that will threaten harmony.
Intelligence is the greatest threat of all to group dynamics, since it is challenging, questioning, curious and unyielding. For this reason it must be curtailed, distracted or subdued.

Why don’t Americans take to the street to protest when in other nations they do for far less reason?
Because the USA is one of the dumbest nation that has ever existed on Earth since the dawn of time. It is a system dedicated to distracting, diverting, subduing, redirecting, defaming and controlling intellect through a variety of very sophisticated methods.

 

As long as the fat cats remain fat, they have no reason to care.

 

In other places, the cops agree with the rioters. Here, the cops shoot the rioters.

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there's a couple reasons why americans don't riot like in the middle east. first of all, our society and culture is made up of so many people that most of us think it really is no use to riot; 'i'm only one person, what can i do?' kind of mindset. also, there is such a variety of people with differing views and they're all spread so thin that we arent usually around other people like us a whole lot; we aren't around people who want to riot, or want to riot for the same reasons.

 

Because we, and most nations of the west, are a nation of laws. If we were to go against that ideal, we'd be nothing but savages ...which is, of course, what those Muslim rioters appear in western eyes. They have no law (other than "It's Allah's will")

Baron Max

 

That is about the most simplistic interpretation of the phenomenon one can speak without seeming obtuse.

It is a well known psychological strategy to define phenomena in ways that flatter us and insult others, as a way of avoiding any self-realization and being forced to deal with our own frailties.

But I expected no different from Baron Max.

 

Well, Satyr, please explain the laws of those rioting Muslim nations. As I'm not fully cognizant of them. I'd appreciate a little education.

Baron Max

 

Are you saying that they live in lawlessness?

Are religious laws different than political ones?
Are morals not laws?