The Death of the Festival

This seems wrong to me. Most society rules have a reason to exist. Maybe, in the past century a few of that rules have become obsolete. But humanity is excellent at creating rules that makes things good enough to keep going.

There is nothing that makes a society change its rules like a change on the environment.

> We should not be surprised that Western societies are showing signs of mass psychosis.

The "everything is going to hell" theory. And, as often happens, without any proof or care to explain.

> More generally, locked in, locked down, and locked out, the population’s confinement within the highly controlled environment of the internet is driving them crazy.

*Them. I guess that the author is immune to this effect.

I love festivals, and they make for a great opportunity to meet people and create community. Also, festivals are an opportunity for a community to present respect to folklore heroes and their moral values, and to laugh at villain and their lack thereof. Festivals are not to for "blow off steam".

Quite some rules are affected by such reasons as "power begets power" - incumbent rulers/influencers tweaking the rulebook to reward incumbent powers and compliant populace and punish contenders.

> Maybe, in the past century a few of that rules have become obsolete. But humanity is excellent at creating rules that makes things good enough to keep going.

> There is nothing that makes a society change its rules like a change on the environment.

From evolutionary perspective, I'd say people make up all sorts of changes, to a large degree at random, according to their own appetite. Then environment does its things, especially but not necessarily with factors not well understood by the societies, and wipes out the societies which can't survive in the new environment.

For example, the USSR has played out the game of "more power to the center, more limitations for the public, more punishments for the dissenters" until it couldn't operate anymore. And increasingly lots of people have seen it coming, some of them decades in advance.

Of course you can say "well but most people have survived and now the society has re-made itself", sure, but the society as in the set of definitive, durable, observable social constructs has ceased to exist.

When watching livestreams of riots, it's really evident that the chaos they produce is rather like little bursts of action, and not so much a sustained pandemonium. These bursts are a thing that can actually take place anytime and don't gain special value because of the riot, they are just more common, more easily prompted. Everyone gets behind on their narrative of events in the process; though the observers'll say something is happening according to their beliefs, it's not literally the thing that is happening.

And that isn't so far removed from just an ordinary "wild party" that hurts people or gets stuff smashed. It's riotous specifically because of the context and political impact. There aren't "sides" in a party, unless there's a gang fight or something of that nature. But a riot always expresses some politics.