THERE will always be people who enjoy swarming to the centre of a large city, scrawling angry slogans on public monuments or throwing rocks at the police and yet we should never allow our hearts to rule our heads. Such protests are two-a-penny these days and therefore nobody should be surprised about the endless riots in various European countries, because the same events are taking place all over the world and we should all be pretty used to it by now. I am not suggesting that most protesters do not have authentic grievances, of course they do, but those who possess the fundamental wherewithal to see the bigger picture should be thinking about the socio-economic structures that need to be put into place in order to weather the approaching storm. What you see is simply the tip of the iceberg.

Oswald Spengler once said that “it is always a minority which fires the multitude,” but it is important neither to become part of the multitude nor to allow oneself to be ‘fired’ by a self-seeking minority. Take a look at modern history, for example, and you will soon discover that the overwhelming number of public uprisings have been stage-managed from behind the scenes. Harry Haller, the fictional protagonist of Hermann Hesse’s 1927 novel, Der Steppenwolf, epitomises the frustrated nihilism of modern man perfectly:

“I’d rather feel burned by a diabolic pain than to live ίn these sanely temperate surroundings. Α wild desire flares uρ in me for intense emotions, sensations, a rage against this whole toneless, flat, normal, sterilized life,and a wish to destroy something – perhaps a warehouse, a cathedral, or myself – and to commit outrageous follies […] This ίn fact is what Ι have always most hated, abhorred, and cursed: this satisfaction, this complacent healthiness, this plump bourgeois optimism, this life οf the mediocre, normal, common man.”

These sentiments are perfectly understandable, even admirable up to a point, but it is the sheer lack of direction that turns Haller’s instinctual desire to overcome modern conformity into a self-destructive urge towards action for action’s sake. It is not action itself which is the problem, necessarily, but the negative forms of action that he yearns for. When Gil Scott-Heron said that “the revolution will not be televised,” he meant that one should leave the comfort of one’s armchair and take to the streets. However, there is more than one way to achieve a particular goal and the revolutionary activity that really matters will be taking place over a child’s textbook, in a self-defence class and at the end of a garden spade.

There will always be agents of destruction, and therein lies the way of the mob, but how many people will step forward to embark upon the considerably more subversive quest to create order in the midst of chaos?