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Check "Among the Thugs" by Bill Buford. It is the story of an investigative journalist who gets "involved" with studying crowd behavior -- mostly the British hooligans who go to European soccer matches IN ORDER to incite, and participate in, riots and other forms of crowd violence. It is not a "study" or a "scientific investigation," since the AUTHOR HIMSELF gets "hooked" on the violence and starts trying to participate. It's just human nature. There is a lot of insight in there -- how officials escalate things by doing all the wrong (but accepted) things, how many officers get turned on by the violence too, how your head gets turned around into Lemming-think, how it feels to be beaten with a truncheon, how the system of traveling "on the jib" (for free or cheat, illegally) supported the soccer hooligans, etc.
I've been to Mardi Gras and other mass events, and I get the sense. There was once, I was at the Zulu parade, and some French chick was in front of me, acting all Frenchy. It was a throng fifty deep on each side of the street. I kept getting pushed into her from behind, and she kept turning around indignantly. I didn't have much choice, there were like forty-eight people pushing. But she was at the front, and she thought she had a "right" to tell the rest of the crowd what to do. Eventually she gave me this total cunt-face look and told me I wasn't being very polite.
Another time, leaving the Detroit Silverdome, I saw something stunningly stupid. The crowd was pressing forward to the revolving doors (exits and entrances there are by revolving door, since it's an air-supported "parachute" dome). The people were getting more and more pushy as we reached the threshold, and of course the revolving doors were spinning as fast as they could. The woman about three in front of me wanted people to slow down, since she was kind of inept at revolving doors -- she kept trying to grab it and sort of, slow the whole world down so she could gingerly step inside it at a pretty little princess'es pace. Well, that was causing HUGE trouble because the crowd was building, she was blocking, she was letting it revolve empty whereas previously it had had one (or two!) people in each compartment for a constant exit flow. The guy behind her got smart and just picked her up and SLAMMED her into the compartment and joined her, and they exited and the backup eased. But, then, at the OTHER side of the door, dumb princess tried to stop and tell him off, like, right there where other people were exiting the revolving door. She just did NOT want to cooperate with the crowd, and that was endangering EVERYONE.
Finally, I was downtown in Toronto for the first year the Blue Jays won the World Series (1992? 93?). It was a huge victory, of course, and the city went wild, crowds of people converging (for no apparent reason) on Yonge Street (not very near the stadium, but what the heck). I and my girlfriend got too far into the crowd, and we were pressed up against a plate-glass window of a store-front. I felt it bending back with my weight and the weight of the whole crowd, buckling like metal. So, I grabbed her and lifted her and plunged -- head first -- down subway steps into a subway station. She was indignant, like, "What the hell are you doing we could be killed people up there are safer you have gone crazy" but then we heard behind us the glass shatter and people start screaming and we had to run farther down the stairs fast as the swell came toward us. Later I explained it to her and she was more sane.
The thing is, all these people's reactions were insane. "Here's a big piece of glass, I'd better say right next to it as it breaks and cuts me." "Here's a doorway with a huge crowd rushing toward it, I'd better stop it up for a while." Duh. It's how we think, in a group. If you know about it, you can sort of figure it out and work against it. But if you think "I would never be like that, other people are just stupid" then YOU'RE THE MOST LIKELY ONE to cause the problems.
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The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. Friedrich Nietzsche
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