The Mob Mentality In A Crisis Situation
Natural disasters often bring out the best in people all across the world. When fires struck California and hurricanes in Florida, people all across the nation dug into their pockets to lend support to the relief effort.
When disaster strikes you and your family, who are you going to trust?
Your best friend? Your neighbor?
Do you know who is truly loyal to you now and who will remain loyal in the aftermath of a disaster? Is the mob mentality going to strike close to your home?
Ultimately, the only person you can place full confidence in is yourself. You and you alone have your best interests in mind and can take measures to ensure your survival.
Herd mentality, mob mentality and pack mentality, also lesser known as gang mentality, describes how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors on a largely emotional, rather than rational, basis. When individuals are affected by mob mentality, they may make different decisions than they would have individually.
Wikipedia
Why You Should Not Trust Anyone
This is one of the biggest issues faced by every prepper and should be a concern with you because the rickety bridge doesn’t really get crossed until a disaster actually strikes.
You can never really determine who can be trusted until their loyalty is put to the test in trying times.
Even your spouse, best friend, and children can accidentally divulge information to the wrong person, thinking they can trust them, only for it to come back and create an issue.
Get your family involved, informed, trained, and integrated into your survival and home defense contingency plan now.
The more trusting they are of you, your prepping efforts, and their role in the family/survival group, the more likely they are to stay true and calm when a crisis engulfs you and a mob mentality takes root from the ‘have nots’.
That’s important because people CAN and WILL change their behavior when a major disaster occurs.
What Causes Mob Mentality?
People will do whatever it takes to feed, shelter, and protect themselves. This includes your in-laws, next-door neighbors, and oldest friends.
You must decide NOW who you can trust and who will remain loyal post-disaster. Don’t wait for them to come knocking to ask yourself if you’re willing to let them in your home in a post-apocalyptic crisis or not.
In your inner circle of your closest friends and neighbors, only those that have an interest in prepping and are taking active measures to prepare themselves should be considered as potential post-disaster allies.
Anyone who isn’t doing their part now to learn survival skills, train in self-defense and firearms usage, and store potential supplies are likely to be more of a liability than an asset when it comes to helping you and your family when it matters most.
If you’ve got friends and neighbors who are avid preppers, consider establishing a plan now as to how you can mutually help each other when disaster strikes.
After all, there is safety in numbers, and surviving a long-term disaster is likely to require the efforts of a collective group of people beyond the single-family.
How Do I Stop Mob Mentality?
You should understand that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link.
The best answer on how to stop mob mentality is the understanding that you should do your very best to avoid it.
Protecting both children and unskilled or disabled adults will require considerable effort, so if at all possible, only strong, skilled, and able-bodied individuals should be considered as potential post-disaster allies.
- Do not jump to any unreasonable solutions. Stop and think about your options.
- Consider the total situation and evaluate what is the best solution for yourself and your family.
- Be resourceful and creative when you need those solutions.
- Make those well-thought-out solutions your goals and proceed to take action on them.
- Be strong-willed and do not apologize for being you. You are right to defend yourself and your family.
- Be confident in every action you take to carry out those thought solutions.
In foresight remember to never divulge the full extent of your preparations to ANYONE.
Do your part to stay well-stocked, but keep your stores hidden and your most valuable gear locked away and inaccessible to prying eyes and hands.
Don’t let anyone and everyone who comes over for dinner see your latest prepping purchase or visit your supply rooms.
Maybe let them know about the newest water purification method you’ve been trying or demonstrate a few basic self-defense moves.
However, never show them everything. You never know what friendly face will come barging through your door after remembering where you keep your stockpiles of prepping supplies.
Protecting My Home After A Disaster
A similar principle applies to the way you clothe yourself and fortify and protect your home.
You don’t want to attract any unwanted attention, which begs the importance of keeping a low personal profile and keeping your home defenses under wraps.
After disaster strikes, it’s the expensive homes with fancy security systems that are more likely to be targeted and broken into than a ramshackle house that doesn’t look like it has much to offer.
Do what you can to make your house look undesirable while still taking measures to bolster the security of your perimeter.
You’ll likely hear preppers talk about operational security (OPSEC), to which these principles loosely apply. OPSEC is essentially the concept of protecting important information that relates to the success of an operation.
As it relates to your preparation and those you trust, if you share a lot of your preps with others, they are more likely to uncover the bigger picture and come back to use your preparations against you.
Attempting to survive, persist and rebuild after a large-scale disaster is a natural desire, despite being highly demanding.
It may be human nature to pity those with nothing, but do you want it to fall on your shoulders to assist them with any of your emergency preparedness plans if it means sacrificing the potential well-being and longevity of you and your family?
In a grid-down scenario when money may (at least temporarily) lose its value, your preps will prove their worth – that is to say they’ll be priceless.
So think about it, what would you take to protect yourself and yours?
Mob Mentality Examples
How does it all start?
You may not like to admit it, but you’d probably steal from, if not hurt, others in order to get what you needed for you and your family to survive. Don’t you think your extended family, friends, and neighbors – let alone total strangers – would do the same?
Another thing to consider are individuals that may impersonate law enforcement or other figures of authority in attempts to gain your trust and get closer to your home, family, and supplies.
If you decide to go the route of trusting no one, you can treat these imposters like any other stranger and let them pass by with a watchful eye.
Otherwise, you’ll be tasked with using your best judgment to quickly determine who is who they say they are and decide what to do with them.
Unfortunately, the proverbial cat may already be out of the bag for just about every prepper out there.
Buy a box of ammo with a credit card, have a delivery of survival supplies brought to your home, and show your neighbors your preps – anything could come back to haunt you.
Being prepared is a good idea without knowing what might happen in the future. But unfortunately, being prepared also makes you a potential target.
It is up to you to decide who you can and can’t trust when and after a crisis hits and most are in need of something.
However, the overwhelming consensus shows the answer is no one.
Examples Of Mobs And Riots
Unfortunately, disasters will bring out the worst in the people affected.
Disaster survivors will often do whatever it takes to keep themselves and their families alive, often without much discretion.
Footage from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters across the world capture individuals gathering in mobs, looting stores and homes, and wreaking havoc in the aftermath of disasters.
Sometimes these mobs are after TVs, electronics, and items that will serve no purpose in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
More recently, armed protesters in Egypt attacked at least four jails and helped to free thousands of inmates, among them Muslim militants.
Why do they do it? The simple answer is that they have no regrets about carrying out that mob mentality.
However, it’s also because people become incredibly greedy and self-serving when during and after crisis situations, regardless of whether it’s a political uprising or natural disaster.
After all, it’s only natural. As humans, our survival instincts kick in and we do what we have to do in order to survive.
But it is usually the unprepared who have the tendency to amass as collective groups and behave in unpredictable ways after the crisis hits. This is known as the mob mentality.
When people see others doing something, even if they know it’s wrong, they have a tendency to join in.
Fear is also a big factor that causes people to take part in a mob.
Suppose a fire alarm rang out in a crowded movie theatre. Most people would probably crowd to the doors where they entered, without failing to consider other possible exit points.
And while there may sometimes be safety in numbers, following the mob mentality is more likely to get you hurt or killed.
Understanding The Mob Mentality
Take the opportunity to study the mob mentality every time you see it happen, whether it’s on TV or in public. Watch what people do when they riot and pillage through city streets after a disaster.
Studying the behavior of post-disaster mobs is an important part of your OPSEC (operational security) system and will help you react appropriately when you actually need it.
You must be able to assess the circumstances of a post-disaster situation and be able to predict the movement of the unprepared masses that may be around you.
You are much more likely to face a mob in an urban center or other densely populated areas. Rural areas out in the boonies are much less likely to witness the formation of a large mob capable of causing significant damage–yet the possibility is still there.
If you live in a heavily populated area, your choices are to either get out of dodge as quickly as possible or to hunker down and fortify your home, knowing that the mob could come knocking at your door.
This very much applies to suburban areas too. Your neighbors may be friendly during times of peace, but they also know your home is only a stone’s throw away, where food, guns, and refuge may await them after eliminating you.
Never let anyone, even those closest to you, know the full extent of your preps. Your neighbors, friends, and even family could become part of the mob and come barging through your gate.
Though joining a mob is likely to result in more harm than good, you can still fight fire with fire by forming a group of your own.
Your immediate family should already be a part of your survival team, but consider networking with other like-minded individuals to form a larger survival group.
Not everyone agrees with the group mentality, but being part of a well-armed, well trained, and loyal survival group could significantly increase your chances of surviving an encounter with a post-disaster mob.
From there, your biggest goal when it comes to facing a mob is to avoid it at all costs. Avoidance is your key to survival when you are outnumbered and outgunned.
Stay hidden at all costs. If you’re hunkering down, make sure your home is as unattractive as possible to looters.
If bugging out, move only under the cover of darkness and use concealment and camouflage to mask your movements.
Unfortunately, if you face a long-term survival situation, you may have no choice but to bug out to a safer, less populated area.
This may involve moving through areas where mobs may still be looting, begging the importance of knowing how to identify and analyze their activity and using evasive maneuvering tactics to avoid detection or confrontation.
Mobs are an all too real threat in any disaster situation.
They may start as nonviolent looters determined to take what they can from unarmed and abandoned stores and homes, but they will likely evolve into small bandit armies that pose an immediate threat to you and your family.
Study the mob mentality, train as much as possible, and be prepared to face (read: avoid) an angry mob when in a crisis situation.
Just remember, if you do get into a situation where fighting is unavoidable, it’s best to have an idea of how to defend yourself.
