These recent nights have felt like nights of the living dead, the darkness – and sometimes the daylight – grotesquely animated by people who appear to care for nothing and no one. What a lot of them there turned out to be – far too many for the police, initially, to contain. These people have discovered, during their week of misrule, that they do have power – the power to destroy. By the few accounts that people involved have actually vouchsafed, it's clear they've been having a ball.

I don't think it helps to call the looters and arsonists "disaffected". Apart from anything else, it's an understatement. But also, crucially, anything that smacks of bleeding-heart explanation or excuse alienates many other people in this country. Those people believe that this simply removes personal agency and responsibility from individuals, and is therefore part of the problem. You know what? I'm afraid they are right.

It is precisely that lack of personal agency and responsibility that has given these actions their inarticulate, apolitical character. Even this "protest" is without sentient direction. Others need to lend a hand in articulating what it is that the rioters "mean" by what they do. That in itself is a problem. Any number of interpretations can be, and already have been, applied to events.

Many people have their pet ideas about whose fault this outbreak of disorder is, or about which political policies, economic conditions, sociological developments or cultural trends have made the biggest contribution. Many of these ideas seem oppositional to each other, so much so that usually each and every one is "owned", either by the left or by the right. These are false oppositions, in the main, and they don't help. (And the problems had started before Thatcher's reign too. My generation was tapping its foot to Anarchy in the UK in 1977. No future, indeed.)

How much time has been wasted, squabbling over whether it's neo- liberalism or liberalism that has caused the problem, or whether it's too little help from the state, or too much? The list of contributing factors is far too long to make here – but pretty much everything on that list is actually part of the equation. Even the very length of the list is significant. Because it is the sheer amount of stuff that features in contemporary debate that makes answers hard to find. There are so many potentially dysfunctional fragments in an upbringing – in a complex, modern, human life – so many influences that are all right in moderation, or wonderful in some respects, but damaging in others. It is hard to balance them all, so it is easy for them to move out of whack. Maybe, when you score too many of the negatives, and not enough of the positives, some kind of retreat into an entirely disconnected state is the only kind of survival available to you.

Poverty – that's the key word that the left uses to explain how social detachment, lack of empathy, spiritual degradation, the death of hope, happens. Poverty is an awful, soul-shrinking condition. Yet many people dismiss even this, saying that there is no absolute poverty in a society that really does have a great deal of state provision. Again, they are right.

How to win the argument that explains how relative poverty amidst great material wealth is different to poverty in a society in which hardship is shared? Not by looking at the behaviour of the poorest. The poor and decent will always be held aloft as a counter-argument.

Bankers, journalists, politicians – all these wealthy groups have been recently exposed as the perpetrators of antisocial and immoral behaviour themselves, behaviour they appeared to believe was perfectly justified and only fair. Their own belief in their "relative poverty" – compared to the money they could earn in another country, the money they would be earning in the private sector, the money that the celebrities whose phones it was OK to hack were receiving – seems robust. So, the idea of relative poverty is used to justify of all sorts of selfish behaviour. Looters are just the most crude and inarticulate among such excuse-makers.

Yet bashing the rich does not help either. Sure, rich people can be selfish, and often are. But they clearly do not have a monopoly on this unattractive and antisocial quality. England's cities have been teeming with the selfish poor these past few days – and they don't much care who they hurt either. The attitude abroad appears to have been that if you lease a corner shop, or a fried-chicken franchise, then you've got what's coming to you. Envious self-justification – a moral problem in which it's always the richer guy's fault – is an unhelpful stance whether you are rich or poor. Crucially, it does not bring out the best in the richer guy, any more than it does in the poorer guy. The left flinches at the phrase "politics of envy". But that really is bad politics.

The lack of empathy shown by the rioters is terrible to see. A much distributed film features Ashraf Haziq, a bleeding young man with a broken jaw who was helped to his feet by seemingly concerned men, so that they could calmly rifle his rucksack and take those of his belongings that they wanted. Those people literally wanted to help themselves, and not others. That little film was a dark synecdoche of such attitudes, which are common throughout our society, not only among looters. Likewise, it is not only the rich who resent paying tax. In a film of the Clapham Junction disturbances, Sky News reporter Mark Stone challenged a woman who had just been looting the clothes-store TK Maxx. She was getting her taxes back, she blithely explained. Again, that is a common attitude.

Everyone needs to take responsibility. There can be no excuses for the rich, and no excuses for the poor either. Above all, it is simply practical to organise society so that everyone feels that they can attain some kind of stake in it, achieve some sense of responsible agency, however modest. The events of the past few days ought at least to bring home that it is simply dangerous, never mind unnecessary and wantonly cruel, to maintain a society that is inherently unstable, because those at its margins can so easily become petty, or not so petty, insurgents.

One thing ought to be crystal-clear now. Social and economic exclusion damages people, who want to do damage in turn. That opportunistic looters exist, in such numbers, is ghastly evidence of a host of societal flaws and ruptures – not least among them educational and parental failures. It's time to stop the petty, adversarial debates, and work at getting everyone possible on board to fix this.

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