There’s a culture of systemic violence in Sri Lanka here that I find entirely alien. I’ve honestly never been in a fight before and I can count the times I’ve lost my temper on one hand. Everyone here, however, has a story of some ass-kicking – either delivered or received. The fights usually have a kernel of fuck-all at the center – they’re ultimately for group loyalty more than any tangible reason. What I find more disturbing is that the same mentality seems to pervade Sri Lankan political and social life. This isn’t my observation, but it is telling that the electoral process often boils down to the same rush of raw numbers as the typical bar fight. This whole bleeding blue and black (or green, or red) drives society much more than any rational economic model of behavior. Sri Lankans won’t fight for love, money, or reason, but they will break a bat over someone’s skull for school, party or racial loyalty.
The typical structure of a fight, aside from the lubrication of alcohol, is that you count your boys and you count their boys, and if X is bigger than Y then you get to shoving. Every crowd has an irrational asshole that they love regardless, and once he throws a punch the thing just snowballs based solely on group loyalty. The original ‘reason’ may be as mundane as scuffed sneakers but everyone joins in simply to defend their friends. Like, when I walk around with my particular strangle-marks people ask me if I want those guys beaten up, which is the whole fk problem. No one cares ‘why’ I got my ass kicked, and they wouldn’t be motivated by that anyways. Any ‘reason’ for violence quickly gets lost in a domino effect of personal loyalty. A good example is this memory from this 1968 Old Boy.
Something happened during the lunch interval when someone hit my good pal Fi. Thereafter, we went looking for the guy and ended up hammering about a dozen guys. Are you there Fi…..Machan, who hit you…..can you show me the fellow….. Each time Fi suspects someone, he would point him out and this poor bugger gets hammered. I remember hitting a fellow so hard that he got airborne and ended up on the barbed wire fens. Another fellow tapped me on the shoulder to ask me for a ‘light’. I turned around and hit the bugger so hard, he fell flat on the ground. I was like King Kong marauding the grounds and getting rid of anyone who looked suspicious. All this because of Fi. Fortunate to have the fullest backing of the clan who had circled me and protected me from any harm.
As a model, you could say that every Sri Lankan has two triggers for violence. The first is rational and somewhat predicable, jealousy, personal offense, etc. The last one, however, is loyalty pure and simple. If someone fucks with my boy I will back him, no question. Now, in new and largely anonymous cultures like the West, shit can only get so out of hand before strangers start imposing some reason. In Sri Lanka, however, everyone is so tightly networked that one spark of reason-based violence can trigger a chain reaction of loyalty-based violence completely disproportionate to the original cause. As a loose equation,
Violence = (Reason OR Loyalty) + Booze
This is actually the same motivator that militaries have used since time immemorial. When you’re out there in the dirt and mud trying to kill another human being, ‘reasons’ like patriotism or WMD evaporate pretty quickly. All that’s left is loyalty to the guy next to you, and the knowledge that he’d die for you and you’d die for him. The traditional wisdom is that espoused by historian S. L. A. Marshall’s “Men Against Fire†in 1942. “I hold it to be of the simplest truths of war that the thing which enables an infantry soldier to keep going with his weapons is the near presence or the presumed presence of a comrade…He is sustained by his fellows primarily and by his weapons secondarily.†More recently, there’s a study by Leonard Wong that finds similar motivation in the Iraq War (PDF Link). It’s hard as hell to get people to fight for a ‘reason’, but if you gather then in a large enough group you get a critical mass where group loyalty can keep them fighting indefinitely for any half-assed reason. I mean, G Dub’s rationale for Iraq is entirely different than when he started. This, however, makes no difference on the ground cause the Army is driven by group loyalty, not reason.
Now, as mentioned, this group loyalty effect gets diluted in Western Civ cause you’re surrounded by anonymous people. I could never kick the shit out of someone at an Yankees game cause 99% of the people would have the appropriate reaction of ‘Who is that asshole?’ At a Royal/Thomian match, however, you get 5% going, ‘Oh, machang, I know that asshole’. Even the cops are like ‘Machang, I know that asshole’s dad.’ That critical mass is enough to turn a crowd into a blind army of dickheads. A Critical Masshole if you will.
Anonymity protects a culture by preventing the Loyalty part of the violence equation from cascading out of control, and allowing reason to play some part. In Sri Lanka, however, you’re never anonymous. Either you’re with your people who would die for you, or you’re surrounded by people who would kill you. I’m not saying normally, but if shit hits the fan some people have your back, and some people would stab you in it. You’re either ‘One of Us’ or ‘One of Them’ and you’d better pray that the former is bigger. The mentality reminds me heavily of Mobb Deep’s Infamous album, songs like Trife Life. I used to be like, ‘Who lives like that?’, but now I’m like ‘Oh shit, that’s me’. I mean, not me, I’m a non-entity, but I swear to God my friend got in a bar fight over some girl dragging him to the wrong part of town, same thing.
Sri Lanka is so tightly networked that dropping a spark anywhere will set of an immediate loyalty reaction and you will get your ass beat for no good reason. If you hit a pedestrian in even a normal part of Sri Lanka it’s very likely that that man’s neighbors will drag you out of the car and kill you. That is seriously no joke, it happened to someone close to me and he was only saved cause he knew someone that ran him to safety. Someone hit a University of Colombo student once and his fellow students beat and I think killed the driver. If you get in a fight with one particular Royalist at a match, 30 guys will kick your ass without asking questions. Simple group loyalty. Even if that particular Royalist was wrong, no one fucking cares, or even asks.
I suspect there’s the same social logic behind horrors like the 1983 riots. In Ohio I didn’t know 90% of my neighbors so I a) wouldn’t know who to kill and b) my other neighbors would be like ‘who is this homicidal asshole?’. In Colombo, however, people knew their neighbors and where the Tamil houses were, and the authorities that should’ve controlled the violence were like ‘Ah, machang, I know that asshole’. The Tamil citizen getting his house lit on fire, however, had no racial loyalty to bind him, and the only tales of salvation I’ve heard are when a Sinhala neighbor of conscience stood up to say ‘Who are you assholes? Get out of my neighborhood’. 1983 was a huge Critical Masshole and it was freaking horrible.
At the same time, the interconnectedness of Sri Lanka is part of its charm. Being anonymous in the West kinda sucks and you can die in your apartment and not be found for days. That anonymity, however, allows for quaint stuff like ‘rule of law’ to operate on humans as presumed rational actors, rather than part of a seething collective. People still fight for loyalty, but they’re also forced to live with people that aren’t loyal to them. This, conversely, leads to a more safe society because you never get a critical mass of people fighting for each other (as people do, with a feeling of honor). You can get that effect in bars or ghettos or high schools, but on a larger level you can never reach Critical Masshole cause the network isn’t dense enough. In Sri Lanka however, the network is so incredibly dense and interlinked that one little spark can start a chain reaction that reaches the highest levels of government and the lowest levels of depravity. And people bloody other humans with a feeling of honor, because they’re fighting for loyalty. What they don’t (and can’t, psychologically) see is that there’s no reason behind this violence. Furthermore, the network is so dense that authority and law enforcement are compromised by the very same binds of group loyalty, so rule-of-law is devoured by the Tribal State. In that sense the anarchy and violence we see isn’t due to any particular character flaws, but simply the psychological properties that allow the very honorable urge to defend your friends to be perverted into mass violence in a condensed network. That urge works well for defending the genetic material of you and yours in small tribes, but spread across a whole country it makes for a whole lot of ruckus. When it comes to collective violence, Sri Lanka has enough fissionable material to be a veritable asshole superpower.
PS. In psych they called this phenomenon ‘deindividuation‘. I actually wrote a paper (PDF) saying it was a flawed concept, but it sorta makes sense if you add group loyalty as a mechanism, as per the military literature. Actually that paper kinda makes sense now, though none of the research refers to (or even acknowledges) cultures like Sri Lanka where crowds are not anonymous.
Great post. There definitely is a violent mentality in many Sri Lankans’ consciousness which I find hard to explain.
I think your equation is great:
Violence = (Reason OR Loyalty) * Booze
But this implies that if Booze=0, Violence=0, which is not strictly true. Armies (as you mention) don’t need to drink to fight.
I think violence is a function of group loyalty, reason, bravado (or showing-off), and lack of real-world education. And by real-world education I mean learning that it is wrong to say you are going to hammer someone just because they dissed you, or someone you know.
Also, surely as reason goes up, violence comes down? Perhaps the following works:
Violence = (Group loyalty * bravado) / (Real-world education * reason)
Great post Indi. But your equation is flawed as the lovely person has pointed out. I think there should be a k of provocation of any sort. Rational or irrational.
Either way – you bloody well deserved to get hammered on Saturday for being so effing indiscreet, but the fact remains that even though you deserved it, we’d protect you. The question is, does your loyalty override your sense of logic and rationale? If your friend is getting completely annihilated for being a cock….do you stand and watch because, well – he’s a cock? I don’t think so.
It’s true what you say about loyalty and violence, but is the west actually better than us in this matter? Let’s make the Yankees game example a comparable situation to a Roy-Tho. Say at a Yankees-Red Sox game, you move into a huge yankees crowd with some Red Sox fans during the last few innings and start taunting them with something similar to the whole “thora ponnaya” thing. I’ve never been to such a game but I would think this would lead to some kind of a brawl. What about the whole european club soccer madness.
Plus, its true that in most conflict situations we jump in to take the side of our immediate affiliate group members (friends/partners/family members/neighbors), but isn’t that one of the essential traits of group behaviour, at least in the short term? The fight at roy-tho for instance, when you were being approached to be hammered, if the couple of friends who saved your ass started contemplating “well, was Indi actually wrong in taking pictures of someone else fighting, or does he have all the right to do that, or maybe he WAS a bit out of line, or maybe not” and so on, you’d probably be putting up posts about the number of stitches you got on your face by now.
Well, I haven’t done enough research into psychology, human and animal behaviour or anything like that to make a scientifically sound point. I’m also aware that this post is about something much broader than one single fight or just sports related violence. So, this is merely an observation.
Indi, valiyas at the match are hardly cause for surprise. At any social gathering in a society as secular as ours where large amounts of alcohol are imbibed and a fierce rivalry exists fighting will be inevitable. Add to that the fact that your average middle/upper/upper middle class Royalist/Thomian lives in this bubble where he’s is told that he is The Shit from an early age, women wont give it up until you put a ring on their finger and you have a misguided, sexually frustrated, overconfident twat. Now take all these twats, feed them copious amounts of alcohol and put a few birds in their midst and some kind of insult, real or imgainary pops up ensuing in a massive free for all.
Riots aren’t confined to our country alone, remember Rodney King?
As for group loyalty in a country where most people don’t know their neighbours, well, have you been in a builders pub on St Pat’s day?
As for Tamils not having any group loyalty, well, that’s a crock of shit. We do have group loyalty, we just don’t have the numbers the Sinhalese do and to some extent a lot of us seem to be racially colourblind. For example, during the elections last year, a large number of Tamil voted pro-UNP, but the day a Tamil candidate wins on Sinhalese votes will be the day I eat my hat, even if he/she isn’t full of half arsed bollocks. We’re also used to shutting up and taking it.
The riots happened because a few frustrated reactionary fuckwits decided to take the law into their own hands with government and politico backing while honest people looked on in fear. As some bloke said, all it takes for evil to rise up is that good men do nothing, or something to that effect.
I like the Critical Massholes theory though, very elegantly put.
Excellent post dude.
excellent post indeed.
however i don’t think (as others have pointed out) there is much difference in the west. whatever difference there is may be due to economic causes than cultural ones.
anyway ppl who are insecure and threatened, feel a need to ally themselves with groups to an extent (in some cases)that they lose their individuality. some will even sacrifice their lives for the supposed welfare of the group.
this is most apparent in the west in groups where this sort of thing is common; minorities, less educated, and those privileged ppl whose privileges are eroding. in sri lanka everybody is more or less insecure and feel threatened.
What I’m kinda saying is that theory is testable and falsifiable mathematically.
You can set up a basic (neural) network with connection weights between nodes (say +2 between Royalists and +0 between strangers). If you take fighting to be an input you can enter it at one node and see how far it travels. In a network with dense interconnections it would travel farther and sustain itself, whereas the impulse would fade in a network with weak interconnections. To make a more complex model you could assign different weights to a variety of demographic data (+4 for family, +3 for friends, +1 for race, etc). That could give you a prediction on the propensity for violence in a given space.
You could model this in Flash or LISP and test it with survey data from different cultures. Collect demographics at a RoyTho versus Yankees game, run the simulation and see if it accurately predicts the behavior. I think it would work based on intuition, but the theory is actually testable.
Yes, that equation didn’t work, thanks for pointing it out, changed it.
I would, however, have to agree with Sophist that education wouldn’t really change your inclination to fight for your friends. I consider myself reasonably educated (in that I wear glasses) and I’d still fight (badly) to defend the people I care about. I think group loyalty is such a basic, prima facie honorable trait that it makes violence so pervasive. At the individual level you’re doing the right thing by defending your people, but on the macro level you look like idiots. I think that loyalty is so basic that it would break the same regardless of education.
I think a distinction needs to be made between fighting to defend and fighting to attack.
The point I was trying to make is that people who have the attitude that they should hammer somebody who looked at them funny or dissed them (or photographed them being morons) are childish and stupid. There are a lot of people who have this kind of mentality in Sri Lanka – I don’t know why.
People who jump in to defend their friends from these idiots are not wrong. Any rational person would defend their friends and family.
It’s the aggressors that the world can do without. Not the defenders.
However, as honorable as defending your friends is, that’s the source of the problem. That’s what causes the chain reaction.
Furthermore, as Sophist says below, everybody has their share of asshole friends, and we have to stand by them too, no? I personally have at least two friends that are certifiable, is it honorable to defend them in the scrapes they get into? The problem with simply defending your friends is that you end up fighting for no reason except group loyalty, as per the equation above. And you have your own friends helping you, so you end up with a brawl completely disconnected from reality. That’s Critical Masshole.
Aggressors are the spark, but it’s defenders that cause the chain reaction. They are the source of the problem.
Are Sri Lankans afflicted by overdeveloped thymos? At the cost of reason?
From NYT
March 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
All Politics Is Thymotic
By DAVID BROOKS
Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.
Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to feel important and part of something important.
Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in the room.
Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don’t recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.
Plato went on to point out that people are not only sensitive about their own self-worth, they are also sensitive about the dignity of their group, and the dignity of others. If a group is denied the dignity it deserves, we call that injustice. Thymotic people mobilize to assert their group’s significance if they feel they are being rendered invisible by society. Thymotic people mobilize on behalf of those made voiceless by the powerful. As Plato indicated, thymos is the psychological origin of political action.
If I had the attention of the world’s politicians for one afternoon, I’d lead a discussion on the nature of the thymotic urge. I’d point out that if politicians weren’t consumed by a hunger for recognition, none of them would agree to lead the miserable lives they do. I’d point out that in the thymotic urge, selfishness and selflessness are intertwined. Men compete for personal glory. But thymos also induces them to sacrifice for causes larger than themselves.
I’d point out that if you see politics as a competition for recognition, many things become clear. The economic and literary backwardness of the Arab world has set off a thymotic crisis, as Arab men lash out to make the world pay attention to them. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not only a squabble over land; it’s intractable because each side wants the other to recognize its moral superiority. Democracy still has good long-term prospects in that region because it’s the only system that meets rising expectations about individual dignity.
In this country, when workers strike, they’re not enraged over a few cents an hour. They’re enraged because they feel their company is not acknowledging their worth. When social liberals squabble with social conservatives, each group is trying to assert the dignity of its own lifestyle.
The partisanship in Washington is a thymotic contest on stilts. The Bush administration goes out of its way to show how little it respects the Democratic opposition. The history of the Democratic Party over the last five years is the history of a party trying ever more furiously to assert its dignity. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are extremely thymotic men. President Bush is a thymotic man partially chastened by Christianity. Democratic activists have increasingly spurned measured, reasonable men for aggressive, thymotic ones: Howard Dean, James Carville and the post-2000 Al Gore.
If I had those politicians for an afternoon, I’d point out that even though the thymotic urge drives so much of public life, we really don’t talk about thymos anymore. I’d add that when you read the ancient political philosophers on thymos, they treat it as a male trait. But over the past century women have been expressing their thymotic urges more and more, and people over 40 have a complex about female thymos that people under 40 generally don’t have.
I’d ask them to read Harvey Mansfield’s new book, “Manliness,” which is two books in one. First, it’s a subtle exploration about the virtues and vices of the thymotic urge. It’s also a series of troublemaking generalizations about the differences between men and women.
Over the next few weeks, Mansfield and his feminist critics are going to brawl — thymotically — over his assertions. I’m not as impressed by Mansfield’s generalizations as he is, but he’ll have one advantage: he understands the nature of thymos, which shapes this fight, and so much of our political life.
Sri Lanka seems to becoming an increasingly lawless society by the looks of it. Obviously, the seeds of lawlessness were sown a long time ago, as your comments about the 83 riots would aptly indicate. But, those seeds appear to have taken fruit now, and lucky us to be living in the midst of it. The irony remains that, the rule of law is upheld strongly one some occasions and yet is completely disregarded in others. I guess it must be discretion here, and discretion as to where the law has to be applied and where it can’t lies on the individual morality of the person involved.
I have experienced times when a copper would accept a hundred rupee (or maybe two hundred now) bribe to waive off a speeding fine, and then you get a copper who would definitely stick by his principles. The latter seem to be a dying breed in Sri Lanka.
With regard to the detereoration of the rule of law, and the increasing importance of kinship and loyalty, Colombo society does seem to be going back to tribal structure. Not being in Sri Lanka currently, the impression I’m getting of it right now, seems increasingly disillusioning sadly.
great post but a few points worth noteing, yes this society is getting increasingly tribal and fragmented. Additionally when is a dispute between two people in this country ever just that, in my observation in other “western” countries when two people have a disagreement / fight ( physical or otherwise) in a public place the people surrounding them go about their business and ignore them quietly. So situations are allowed to deflate in time, not so here in SL everything is somebody else’s buisness and therein is the tribalism. Just because they look like me do’sn’t mean it’s any of their business something they just cannoty comprehend or don’t care to…….
This was a really really really great post.
>amounts of alcohol are imbibed and a fierce rivalry exists
> fighting will be inevitable. Add to that the fact that your
>average middle/upper/upper middle class Royalist/Thomian
>lives in this bubble where he is is told that he is
>The Shit from an early
I like the dissection of the fights at Big Matches as indicator to the
rest of the world/country. I dont think these fights are due to “fierce rivalry”.
More often than not its fights within groups in the same school.
The fights are always a factor of group loyalty, thymos (recognition) and adrenaline.
The group loyalty factor can be
a) Your group in your grade/class (if the fight is between classmates)
b) Your school (If one side is a schoolmate)
c) Class (i.e. A Royalist or Thomian fighting the Wanathamulla crowd)
The recognition factor is about the bragging and recognition of the group
you were fighting for.
e.g. If you were involved in a fight against the Wanatha crowd, you can
brag to both the Royalists and Thomians on your “achievements” even
if it was to throw a beer bottle from a safe distance.
Last but not least is the immediate or deferred adrenaline rush and duty/obligations
competing against consequences.
a) Three days of boozing and you need some excitement. There is no other
work duty in the horizon (if it was its clouded in the alcholic haze).
You see a fight, and if you are remotely connected you join in.
Otherwise you are tring to mediator, till someone punches you.
regards
barr
Compare this with a situation in the first world. See an accident/fight.
You may stop for a few seconds but move on. You need to get to your
job and defer the jollies (adrenaline rush) for the holidays/vacatation.
i.e. Do a bungee jump or S&M thingy with your wages.
That said, in first world ghettos /redneck areas you will see crowds
gathering around or joining in fights or accidents. The caveat being
the consequences. i.e. If it is gang related, and you are not part
of the gang, get away as far as possible. There is very little upside
i.e. recognition (the gang will bust you ass ) to joining the fight.
Similarly in 1983 even though a few (maybe) started, many ghetto types
joined in. The upside was great, consequences very little.
However, on Kotiya day (i.e. when they came into Colombo) you
did not see the ghetto types running toward the action. i.e. downside
was high you could get shot at.