SEND LAWYERS, GUNS & MONEY

I am pro-riot.  Based on the Facebook statuses I’m reading and the admonitions from the news anchors I’m watching, I guess this is a bit of a contentious position.  I’d love to explain why I’m pro-riot, but it’s going to take a while.

Are you ready?

Here we go.

I don’t think rioting is an understandable response to something as trivial as simply losing a hockey game.  I think it’s an understandable response to just about everything, all the time, always.

I need to start with the concept of “authenticity.”  I know it’s a fraught term, and I know heaps of people today would argue that “true authenticity” either doesn’t exist, or isn’t what we think it is.  But for a lot of us, we spend our lives in search of “authentic experiences” and we don’t care whether academics think they exist or not.

Consider the success of reality TV, true crime novels, tour packages promising the “local experience” and restaurants offering “authentic cuisine.”  Shit, we’re invested in this so heavily that we basically ran James Frey out of town when Oprah busted him for that memoir he made up a few years ago.  We crave what we believe to be “authentic experiences.”

Marry this to the idea that we live a heavily mediated existence.  In fact, it is easily the most mediated existence any generation of humans has ever lived.  Our experiences are constantly handed to us through various filters.  We hear through speakers, we see through monitors.  Not just the internet and television but EVERYTHING mediates our lives.  Photographs, books, telephones.  Almost all of the information we process on a daily basis comes at us through a mediating technology.

Take that idea one step further.  Not only is the information you take in constantly mediated, but the information you put out is constantly mediated.  Your behaviour is bounded by the mores of the community you exist in.  A number of “social contracts” dictate my possible responses to various situations.  When somebody says “Hello” to me, my possible responses are, in all practicality, limited.  I may say “Hello” back.  I may shake their hand.  I may even ignore them.  But if I were to, say, punch them in the face, set a cop car on fire and piss through the broken window of a department store… Well, I would be crossing a social boundary that would likely land me in a great deal of trouble. 

This isn’t a problem for the most part, because I don’t have a constant (or even fleeting) need to punch anybody in the face.  But the fact remains that even though I am technically free to do as I wish, my behavioural freedom has practical limits.  In addition to keeping society from imploding, these limits act as yet another mediating force on our lives.

When you consider how much our lives lack so-called “authentic experience” and how many limits are imposed upon us by our social contracts, it’s no surprise that people riot.  A riot is the physical manifestation of the metaphysical desire to both experience an unmediated existence and act in an unmediated manner.  It gives you the freedom to transgress our most basic social boundaries and to experience those transgressions firsthand.

When people riot, they are rioting because of an existential lack, whether they know it or not.  Nobody really cares that much that the Canucks lost to the Bruins in Game 7.  Further, nobody believes that rioting will change the outcome or even make them perform better next year.  Whether they know it or not, they are rioting so that they can experience something with absolute ownership of the experience and their actions.  It’s a reaction to life, not to the game.

The reason that this particular riot happened to coincide with Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals is simply because it could.

Have you ever tried to start a riot based on the shared recognition of an existential lack?  The bummer news is that you can’t.  You can’t just walk into the middle of the street and scream, “HEY EVERYBODY! ARE YOU TIRED OF EXPERIENCING THE WORLD THROUGH DEGREES?  LET’S SET THIS CITY ON FIRE AND FEEL WHAT IT’S LIKE TO LIVE IN AN AUTHENTIC MOMENT!”

For a riot to occur you need a whole shit tonne of people in one place with emotions running high and inhibitions drastically lowered.  The riot needs an excuse.  A pretense.  But once that riot starts, it loses all connection to the pretense.  It becomes about experiencing existence in an absolutely unmediated format.  With our mediating technologies becoming more prevalent by the day, and our mediating social contracts showing no signs of disappearing any time soon, this pure and unbridled existence is something that most people will never have the opportunity to experience again.

“Noble” isn’t the right word for it, but neither is “embarrassing.”