Evolution of Collective Violence

I've been aware, as I've been collecting and reflecting on the corporisation of human agglomerates that the phenomenon of mobs may be a significant dimension of the matter. So it was interesting to find an article specifically referring to this.

Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence | The Primate Diaries, Scientific American Blog Network:

From a crowd made up of individuals, each possessing the ability to make a free choice, something more powerful had been unleashed in which normal rules of conduct seemed not to apply.
“For some reason some kind of force filled me,” testified one of the rioters during his trial. “Until this day, I do not understand how I got into this. What kind of devil was it that asked me to go and forced me to enter into the police department?”
Collective violence, extending from riots to warfare, presents a challenge to our ordinary understanding of free will. Actions that would rarely be taken by an individual on their own seem to be embraced when supported by a larger group.

I'm interesting in two dimensions of this: one is the way that the individual feels their personal subjectivity is subsumed by a 'bigger' entity and the other is the issue of responsibility. The latter, certainly, is a dimension that others such as McFadyen have explored. Now I wrote 'subsumed' above as if there were a kind of loss of identity; on the other hand it could be interpreted in another way:

“You didn’t lose your identity,” says Bell, “you gained a new one in reaction to a threat.” As Bell points out in the case of riots, that threat is often excessive force from the police that turns a disgruntled crowd into an angry mob.

The new identity is a solidary one. And much of what follows in the article is an examination of how social stresses seem to be flashpoints for the emergence of a (violent) social solidarity. The point for me is that there is a function in human make-up which is clearly 'meshable'. The interesting thing (which lies beyond the scope of this article) is the possibility that this meshable-ness can be evoked and harnessed in other ways -including the emergence of corporisations with less violent modi operandi or raisons d'etre.