"No one is an island. We really want to be part of some group, some posse, some band of brothers, because, you know, we’re sitting ducks if we’re isolated. How do you know which group to join? You don’t want to be on the losing side. If you can find some sin that someone has committed, and you all jointly recognize that they are a sinner, they’ve broken some norm, some law, you gang up on them, and it’s common knowledge that, as you know, that the other people recognize that same violation. It is a basis for forming a coalition, and people often will band together to single out some victim. Probably the episode from fiction that draws that out the most is the famous story by Shirley Jackson called The Lottery. It came out in the late 40s and debated ever since, where the town folk of a bucolic village every year choose someone by lottery and stone them to death, suggesting that there is some kind of human urge to simply gang up on a victim. In this case, what makes the story so chilling and so kind of absurd is the victim didn’t actually do something other than being the loser in the lottery. What continues to make it fascinating is this dynamic of being part of a mob united in its victimization of the victim."