Sometimes a social environment will provide the raw materials conducive to a pattern of behavior, but the behavior itself is catalyzed by coming into contact with a pre-existing example.
In Rise of Victimhood Culture, Bradley Campbell and I used the example several young men from a housing project who were attacked by members of a gang. For defense they banded together into a gang of their own. Pretty soon their gang is engaging in the same sorts of antics as the other gangs.
A related phenomenon is when an individual who already has some experience engaging in the behavior joins a group or otherwise gets involved in their conflict.
In Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai, a village of peasants needs to defend itself from a horde of bandits. So they hire a group of masterless samurai – ronin – to help. The samurai arm the peasants with spears, organize them, and drill them. Led by the samurai, the villagers fight.
In real life too, having a few individuals with experience or skill in some way of handling conflict — including violence — makes the overall group more likely to turn to that way of handling conflict. It may sometimes be, as in the film, that those wanting to fight actively seek out professionals to help them. Probably more often, though, it’s a matter of simply having them around as part of a group.
This shows up in various rebellions and revolutions. It didn’t help the Russian Czar in 1917 that not only was there widespread anger among the citizens, but those citizens included a large number of soldiers returning home from the meat grinder of World War I. WWI veterans also helped organize miners to fight in the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia’s Mine Wars. The leaders of the Stono Rebellion, a slave uprising in colonial South Carolina, were former soldiers from the Kingdom of Kongo. And the enslaved African ethnic group most known for staging large rebellions on Caribbean plantations were the Coromantee, who were taken from a highly militaristic society and many of whom had been former war leaders.
The point generalizes not only to other examples of organized violence, but to other ways of handling conflict, including non-violent ones. If the group has some lawyers, or even people who’ve had experience hiring lawyers, they’re more likely to resort to lawfare. If the group has some veteran protestors, or people with experience organizing protests, a street demonstration becomes more likely.
And you can see people with experience in law, violence, or protest drifting from one conflict situation to another, like the ronin of old. They may get recruited by the participants or offer their services for a fee. Or maybe they just jump into the conflict on their own accord. In either case, their presence and involvement tends to produce their preferred way of handling conflict.
For instance, there are people who specialize in being activists. I once had an acquaintance like this. After moving to town, she quickly networked with local lefty organizations to offer her organizing experience, and lamented in private that they were amateurs in need her help. It seems there’s a number of experienced activists and organizers circulating at any given time, and one might be able to connect local spikes in protest activity to their movements.
Other specialists might get involved only after getting wind of a relevant conflict — seeing news of some outrage or dispute and coming to offer their services, whatever those might be.
Notably, the interests of the outside specialists might diverge from those whose cause they take up. They might even muscle aside local leaders or use the conflict to further broader goals at the expense of what locals want. What’s best for the family of a black woman shot by police and what’s best for Black Lives Matter as an organization aren’t necessarily the same.
Professional activists and organizers for hire, discharged soldiers and wandering ronin, pro bono lawyers and thugs for hire — individual experience can play an important role in sparking various forms of collective behavior.
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