What is the psychology behind false accusations, flash mobs and jungle justice?
So a lady accused a guy of stealing her phone, a mob beat up the guy, mauled him to death and tossed him off the bridge.
The accused is a 22-year-old young man who drives tricycles to make a living for his family.
When police arrived and did some preliminary investigation, it was discovered that it was the woman’s son that took the phone.
Below is the link to the story:
What does it feel like living in a country of mob mentality where the first party to raise an alarm is automatically treated as the victim without any investigation?
The accused is considered the villain, nobody listens to their side of the story.
RIP to the dead young man.
Most adults have at least once or twice in their lifetimes been accused of something they didn’t do.
People have been fired from their jobs, jailed and executed for crimes they knew nothing about.
If you’ve been on the receiving end of a false accusation, you’ll understand exactly what it feels like to cry and no one is hearing your cry. Every single thing you say attracts more punishment. Members of the mob encourage you to keep quiet while you are being beaten into oblivion.
From the mob, you can hear words like, “yes! Serves you right! You deserve it!”.
The most dangerous type of mob is the one that splits into two upon impact. One part trying to exert punishment, the other part trying to justify the action. That’s when multiple accusers materialize from nowhere. You hear things like “I have always suspected this person. I never knew this is the crime she does.”
“one day this person came around our house, our phones got missing too”
“I know this person from 1992, everybody believed she was a thief”
“Is this not one of the people that use stolen phones for rituals? One of my friends said she used her phone for rituals”.
It’s difficult to understand the mind and rationality of a false accuser and the mob.
The false accuser in the first story above wasn’t sure of who stole her phone. She knows deep down that she isn’t sure, but she inspires the mob to beat the man to death knowing that she is the only one that can save the man. And that she won’t get her phone back if the man dies.
The mentality of the mob is baffling too. Imagine a random person, walking into a random argument about a missing phone. Then they joined and help beat the accused to death without any sort of evidence, after which they tossed his body into the lagoon and walk away as if nothing happened.
There is another type of accuser, the very dangerous accuser. This is the one that knows 100% that the accused is innocent but in order to take what belongs to the accused, they raise a false alarm and watch the mob maul the accused.
Other reasons that inspire such grievous false accusations could be to punish the accused for rejecting them, succeeding beyond their expectations or to exonerate themselves when caught in an act with the accused.
In that video, a landlord was trying to drive his tenant out of the house. The tenant immediately started accusing him of molestation. She went live on Facebook and started screaming trying to attract the attention of other tenants too.
A desperate attempt to create a crazy mob.
Well, the landlord was lucky to have a CCTV on. When the accuser found out that there was a CCTV recording the whole thing, she used an object to break the CCTV camera! If he didn’t have a camera on, he could have possibly found himself in jail and on a sex offender’s register.
The last type of accusers are the plain crazy ones. Ones that are supposed to be in the mental health home but somehow found themselves on the streets. They aren’t sure of what they are doing, they are just not in their right sense.
In the link below, a madwoman accused her husband of kidnapping her when in fact he was taking her to the hospital.
Her husband got his brother to help restrain the woman and put her in a car so that she can be driven to the hospital. On their way to the hospital, the woman started screaming to passers-by
“Help! Help! These are kidnappers they just kidnapped me. They want to kill me”.
A crazy mob quickly formed, dragged the men out of the car and started beating them to death until police intervened.
Preliminary investigations showed that the two men were her husband and brother in law. She had 3 kids for her husband.
What is the mentality of a false accuser?
It’s baffling to understand the mentality of a person who inspires a crazy mob to crucify someone else while knowing fully well that their accusation may not be true.
In all of these, the crazy flash mob behavior is consistent — show up, no investigation, believe the accuser, beat the accused to death, then disperse.
The question is, what kind of a people forms members of such a mob? At first, it might look like it’s the typical uneducated, male, youth walking the streets. Yes, that happens, but we also see that kind of crazy mob forming on the internet too among very educated populations.
I’ll leave you with one piece of wisdom I have followed all my life that saves me from that crazy mob mentality:
The crowd has both one soul. To control that soul is to control that crowd.
This simply means, if you find yourself in a mob, you and all the members of that mob have lost your souls at that moment. You are now being controlled by one soul, and that is the soul of the mischievous false accuser.
There are other kinds of people that can control a mob, Eg. Ring Leaders, sponsors of paid protests, speakers, etc
In all of those, the quote still stands true — the crowd has but one soul.
False accusations make it harder for true accusations to stand and find justice.
There are many reasons for that, one of which is the false-start that false accusation provides. By the time true accusation comes, nobody believes it.
One other point that isn’t easily observable is the fact that many true accusers aren’t actually seeking to create and control a crazy mob to hurt the accused.
They are simply raising an alarm to save themselves from the imminent danger they are facing and to save others. They usually have no manipulation agenda in their message so the mob hardly takes them seriously because then, the mob has many souls.
