Rioting as ecstatic experience

A dimension that is often missing from discussions and accounts of violence and other forms of crime, is the way that involvement in such activities, especially where crowds or large groups are concerned, is actually a desirable experience in some way. From a Guardian report on a recent CofE report on the 2011 riots:

Austin Smith, a Passionist Catholic priest from Liverpool who died in 2011, who said such rioting could be "literally an ecstatic experience" after the Toxteth trouble in the 1980s.
"Something is released in the participants which takes them out of themselves as a kind of spiritual escape," Price said. "The tragedy of our times is that, once again, we have a large population of young people who are desperate to escape from the constrained lives to which they seem to be condemned.
"Where hope has been killed off, is it surprising that their energies erupt in antisocial and violent actions?"

Especially where such actions have this "ecstatic" quality where there is a joy in shared enterprise and in breaking boundaries and in the physical activity -not to mention in getting some 'goodies'. And then there may be the sense of 'sticking it' to a society that has been excluding and 'screwing' you. A potent and heady mixture indeed. And if we don't recognise this joy (I think Nietzsche did), we may be less able to deal with it.
Church report on riots warns about effects of cuts | UK news | The Guardian: