Won't Panic

January 29, 2024 12:07 AM

We require leaders who recognize before disaster strikes that mass panic is largely a myth, not after they have mismanaged it. This is a hard thing to ask of a governing class. One reason this myth has persisted despite decades of evidence to the contrary is that narratives of panic are a useful crutch for leaders under pressure. By projecting their own insecurities onto the masses they lead, elites find a ready scapegoat for their own failings. A leader who does not measure up to the demands of disaster will find it easier to blame the crowd for panic than accept the crowd’s harsh judgments on his own performance. from The Myth of Panic [Palladium; from 2021]
posted by chavenet (16 comments total)

The article's penultimate sentence says it all, doesn't it?
posted by rory at 1:04 AM on January 29 [4 favorites]

This is very important information. It comes down to what people believe about the true nature of humanity. Are we evil at the core, surrounded by a social shell that guilts us into being good? Or are we good at heart, with a hardened shell of evil hiding our true natures? The whole first half of the article gives example after example where the former is assumed. And isn't that the default view of Christianity? So it is a huge paradigm shift, that we all need to make, to realize we are all a part of one love. You can see it when the going gets tough. Holing up with a bunch of guns is not going to save you. Our true nature is to come together and help one another.
There is a delicious irony in the article, that the elite classes are the ones with the most to lose, and in an emergency where they are shown to be ineffective, they are the ones who push back against the fundamental truth of our nature.
posted by bitslayer at 3:53 AM on January 29 [11 favorites]

king farquad
posted by nofundy at 4:21 AM on January 29 [1 favorite]

Are we evil at the core, surrounded by a social shell that guilts us into being good? Or are we good at heart, with a hardened shell of evil hiding our true natures?

I'm going with, "we're apes who need love and close bonds but frighten easily."
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:09 AM on January 29 [36 favorites]

Alas, our leaders feared our fear more than they feared our deaths.

I feel like a previous great American leader had an on-point quote about this…
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:17 AM on January 29 [2 favorites]

Rebecca Solnit wrote a great book about this - A Paradise Built In Hell. It's a series of case studies of several disasters - some man-made, some natural - and the grass-roots efforts to help people that sprang up in the immediate aftermath, and how those grass-roots efforts were bulldozed and why.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:25 AM on January 29 [18 favorites]

Maybe it’s just layers of fear and love all the way down
posted by gottabefunky at 7:49 AM on January 29 [3 favorites]

The Behind the Bastards podcast (a podcast about the worst people in history) has an episode on this: Elite Panic: Why the Rich and Powerful Can't Be Trusted
posted by AlSweigart at 9:08 AM on January 29 [7 favorites]

Maybe it’s just layers of fear and love all the way down

Like pastry and butter in croissants. And just as deadly.
posted by biffa at 9:48 AM on January 29 [1 favorite]

It comes down to what people believe about the true nature of humanity. Are we evil at the core, surrounded by a social shell that guilts us into being good? Or are we good at heart, with a hardened shell of evil hiding our true natures? The whole first half of the article gives example after example where the former is assumed. And isn't that the default view of Christianity?

It is not accurate to say that Christianity holds that we are "evil at the core," or even that can be "guilted into being good!"
posted by kensington314 at 2:06 PM on January 29 [2 favorites]

One thing I learned about panic is that people who are panicking forget how to use Google Translate. Not a single bag of flour on the shelves in the early going of lockdown, but as much harina as I cared to buy sitting right next to all that empty shelf space.
posted by Pudding Yeti at 3:34 PM on January 29 [2 favorites]

The wealthy and powerful don't care if you panic. They proved beyond a doubt during the pandemic that they'd gladly participate in the deaths of millions if it meant a profit or a political advantage. They use fear as a tool without a second thought; billions of people are now afraid of masks because it was to some of the oligarchs' political advantage.

The wealthy and powerful want to have early access to accurate information so that they can figure out how to spin it in a way that doesn't threaten, and ideally enhances, their wealth and power. They're not playing their cards close to the vest because they're afraid that we'll panic and hurt ourselves; they're afraid that we'll use whatever current disaster is occurring as motivation to threaten their positions. Obfuscation and denial in the early stages of a disaster works to their advantage, as it allows them to figure out what the situation really is and to take advantage of it.
posted by MrVisible at 6:45 PM on January 29 [4 favorites]

I am worried about how the very mild pandemic response in the US fuelled our fascist movement. We had people attempting to kidnap the governor of Michigan because people weren't allowed to go to the bar for a few weeks or whatever. Fauci came to give a speech in Michigan and a caravan of fascists came out to protest him.

Maybe these type of things wouldn't have happened if there wasn't already a very strong and growing fascist movement, but it was definitely A Thing.

The article talks about times in history when an overzealous public health response by an insensitive colonial government sparked resistance. Those things make sense to me. But the response to this pandemic was extremely mild by comparison, and yet it stoked the fascists and prompted them to action.

And also, people in China eventually rebelled against their pandemic response and demanded to be allowed to get the disease.

Like, is it actually possible to have an appropriate pandemic response that doesn't cause resistance? Is it really true that the only way to keep the peace during the pandemic is to ignore it? That seems pretty similar to the "The people will panic" problem that is imaginary. Is the real truth "People will panic if we do anything to disrupt their normal lives."
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 5:51 AM on January 30 [2 favorites]

^

From the FPP:

mass panic is largely a myth

People weren’t panicking, they were pulling together. Yes, even in all of the parts of the US where I have friends and family. Then a bunch of folks got incited to play-act at rebelling by the leaders, who, as also described in the FPP quote, mismanaged the pandemic response, and by online disinformation designed to sow discontent for profit or political gain.

My part of the world, New Zealand, Thailand, and a variety of other places all had successful pandemic responses that were only undermined by the truly terrible response from the US and similar areas. We eliminated- not slowed the curve, eliminated - all local cases multiple times, and were able to congregate and have business and schools open locally without spreading COVID for a fair chunk of the first year or two. And we didn’t do that through perfect compliance either! Idiots were having parties during the initial couple weeks of lockdown and such. But enough people pulled together that it was sufficient; and in the very initial response by the public in the US had similar levels of compliance as my region, from all of the personal reports from friends and family around the US I heard and from the reporting I saw. If the US and other places with similarly bad politicians (Brazil, for example) hadn’t botched their response so badly, with the above-mentioned bad actors actively undermining their initial public health steps for personal profit and political gain, we likely would not still have sars-cov-2 around. It’s really hard to see from the inside because you don’t get much non-US news in the US, so you don’t get exposed to alternatives; but from the outside, the extent to which the Trump administration, Republican governors and state legislatures falling in line with them, woo peddlers looking to make bank on snake oil remedies, and probably Russian disinformation designed to weaken the US politically completely derailed and disrupted the pandemic response in the US despite initial public trust and compliance is mind boggling and so distressingly, saddeningly obvious.

Heck, even China’s totalitarian response would have “worked” if it hadn’t been for the US and a handful of other countries doing so badly. There are a wide variety of possibilities for actually-successful public health responses (though I think some are more ethical than others). You just have to not have your leaders (political or business) actively undermining the public health response for their own personal or political gain. Which, as the FPP also notes, is unfortunately a lot to ask of a bunch of people who think they are a better class of humans than the rest of us peons and have false and actively harmful ideas/projections of how they expect we’ll respond to stuff.
posted by eviemath at 7:58 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]

My impression is that people in China rebelled when it became clear that there was no end point to their extreme restrictions - that their government had no plan for how long the measures would have to last or how to exit the situation. Initially when there was hope that the rest of the world would also contain the pandemic and so they were making a temporary sacrifice for the public good, the extreme measures in China had more public support, from what I can tell. But people aren’t stupid and it became clear eventually that their extreme restrictions weren’t going to change the eventual outcome.
posted by eviemath at 8:06 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]

IDK, I think only looking at pandemic response instead of comparing to other tragedies is kind of limiting. You can say the US response was bungled, and it was but what are we comparing it to? New Zealand? I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. New Zealand's GDP is comparable to the US state of Alabama. GDP is not everything, but just for making high-level comparisons about it's place in the world, it's useful.

How about war response, like when war is taken seriously. Ukraine, would be one example. The US selling war bonds would be another. Did Ukraine hide information about Russian interlopers at the beginning of the war, to avoid panic? Also, when experts get the 'panic' part so wrong, it's difficult to trust them for the smaller things. Also the US did an ok job of providing the number of cases, etc, but the outcome of that (is COVID bad here?) was not scientific- it was random, with 'high' being as little as 1 case per 100,000 people. The Feds should have managed that much better.

Also the US pandemic response outcome was to drive people apart. That really should have been studied more, and probably loosened earlier. If it's your close family member that has to have a zoom funeral, or can't see your relative in the hospital, is it surprising that pisses a lot of people off? That's just a terrible risk vs mental health tradeoff.

I know a lot of people here like to blame corporations or right wing governments, but honestly the pushback started happening when lots of people actually got COVID, and nothing much happened, ie: they got over it. It's hard to empathize when the deaths are 'over there' and the living are 'over here'. Policy should have brought the groups closer together.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:21 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]