Meet the Mohocks

The Mohocks were a bunch of upper-class freaks who ran riot through the streets of London in the early eighteenth century, apparently cutting off people's noses and stuffing women into beer barrels and rolling them down hills. It sounds like a Clockwork Orange-type horror-comic fantasy, but apparently (because Wikipedia says so) the Mohocks were real. Made up of aristocratic types who would hang around and get drunk and then pile into the streets to attack random passersby, the Mohocks were one of several gangs who roamed London in the post-Restoration days. It's a terrifying thought: you're just out for a late night stroll around the city when a bunch of hooligans comes screaming round the corner and sticks a knife up your nostrils, evocative in a way of the atmosphere that swirled around during the riots last year, when at times we seemed pretty close to a scenario in which the law was flat-out ignored, with people doing exactly what they wanted, mugging anybody in their way or just lashing out randomly at civilians, with their inhibitions and fear of prosecution by the police completely removed.

Situations like that really make you aware that we live in a delicately-balanced society, completely at the mercy that fear of retribution raises in the hearts of the scumbags among us. At any point our relatively genteel way of life could be destroyed in minutes if bad guys suddenly stopped caring about the consequences of their actions, or if their actions stopped having consequences, as they seemed to on those few nights when Adidas and mobile phone shops were being slaughtered in cities all around England. It makes me wonder what would happen if definitive knowledge was discovered that the end of the world was nigh; if, for example, scientists learned that we were going to collide with a huge, all-consuming asteroid in four years time, and the destruction of the world was a 100% possibility. Would the population be informed, or would governments hide the knowledge? Traditional thought of the last day on Earth is of an inhibition-free funfair, with people running around having a lovely time, shagging as many people as they can, but if we knew we instead had a few years to live, rather than twenty-four hours, society could instead fall to pieces within days. How could police be expected to keep order in the knowledge that there was no reason not to commit crime, no punishment forthcoming? They would try to carry on as normal, but the enthusiasm wouldn't be there to keep society ticking along, and that could be crucial in descent into lawlessness.  The apocalypse would come long before the asteroid struck, and gangs of Mohocks would be roaming the streets looking for blood.