Zoe Williams: The UK riots: the psychology of looting

Zoe Williams in yesterday's Guardian:

By 5pm on Monday, as I was listening to the brave manager of the Lewisham McDonald's describing, incredulously, how he had just seen the windows stoved in, and he didn't think they'd be able to open the next day, I wasn't convinced by nihilism as a reading: how can you cease to believe in law and order, a moral universe, co-operation, the purpose of existence, and yet still believe in sportswear? How can you despise culture but still want the flatscreen TV from the bookies? Alex Hiller, a marketing and consumer expert at Nottingham Business School, points out that there is no conflict between anomie and consumption: "If you look at Baudrillard and other people writing in sociology about consumption, it's a falsification of social life. Adverts promote a fantasy land. Consumerism relies upon people feeling disconnected from the world."

[...]

Between these poles is a more pragmatic reading: this is what happens when people don't have anything, when they have their noses constantly rubbed in stuff they can't afford, and they have no reason ever to believe that they will be able to afford it. Hiller takes up this idea: "Consumer society relies on your ability to participate in it. So what we recognise as a consumer now was born out of shorter hours, higher wages and the availability of credit. If you're dealing with a lot of people who don't have the last two, that contract doesn't work. They seem to be targeting the stores selling goods they would normally consume. So perhaps they're rebelling against the system that denies its bounty to them because they can't afford it."

I think she is getting at something here.

Just last week, in L'Osservatore Romano, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi placed the root of our economic troubles in a false understanding of man as a mere consumer, man as a machine whose existence is bound up with the acquisition of products and the satiation of desires; man reduced even further than merely economic man: he does not live even to produce anymore but only to feed wants, wants instinctual and wants instilled by clever advertising. Consumer man, an empty shell, manipulated, never satisfied, and only if he is lucky and has means perhaps palliated and distracted enough to bear life.

Is the falseness of consumerism disintegrating in the harshness of globalization, when working-class jobs are outsourced to Asia and more and more people cannot even function as this reduced entity, the consumer?

We are more than this, though. Yes, even the looters. All of us. We are made in the image of God to love Him and to return to Him in an eternity of bliss, if only we would rise above ourselves and towards Him, who always loved us, who sent his Son to become one of us, flesh with us, to teach us, to die for us- humbly, without anger- thereby defeating sin and redeeming us. If we only accept Him! He who, having risen from death, will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, He through whom we return to the Father in an ecstatic and perpetual vision.