The police let the anarchists do whatever they want, within certain constraints (no injuring people, constrained to certain neighborhoods), and the anarchists only do it on that day of the year. Sometimes there are conflicts between the police and the rioters, but it never escalates to huge conflicts any more.
It’s a display of mutual respect for authority, and it allows the radical groups to blow off some steam, while campaigning for progress.
I know this idea makes no sense to law and order -type people, but it’s an ancient human idea to ritualize and sanctify the behaviors you want to discourage or control.
Your last paragraph reminded me of Eric Gans’ “Originary Hypothesis” [1]:
> Gans hypothesizes that language originates in "an aborted gesture of appropriation," which signifies the desired object as sacred and which memorializes the birth of language, serving as the basis for rituals which recreate the originary event symbolically. The originary sign serves to defer the mimetic violence threatening the group, hence Gans's capsule definition of culture as "the deferral of violence through representation."
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gans#The_Originary_Hypo...
I think I got it from a German Literature class. The professor had us read some formational texts, and one of them was a theory for the establishment of religion, written by some German 20th Century thinker. I can’t find the source now, but it was probably a pretty mainstream one, for all you internet sleuths out there.
He tried to put forward an evolutionary theory of religion. Basically, a tribe would come into conflict and children would kill their parents as a result. To try and prevent the same thing from happening to themselves, the children invented rituals that they taught to their children, so that they could control and direct their violence away from the parents. Instead of killing people, they would kill effigies made to look like people. Eventually, the children associate the effigies with their parents. But they like their parents, so they leave out the whole killing part when they teach it to their kids, who come to worship the effigies. They then kill animals instead of people. And so on. It was a really interesting exercise of rationalism!
If someone can find the source for me, I’ll give them my 2 internet points :)
Edit: I think it was Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard.