{"id":80684,"date":"2022-01-18T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-18T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80684"},"modified":"2022-01-18T09:29:25","modified_gmt":"2022-01-18T15:29:25","slug":"panicky-elites-resilient-normies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80684","title":{"rendered":"Panicky Elites, Resilient Normies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“Government is all the things we do together – stupidly and ineffectively”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Government is ponderous and brittle. People, when acting in enlightened self-interest, usually make the right call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My favorite example: before 9\/11, the official <\/em>guidance for people in skyscraper offices in case of a major emergency was to wait for official instructions. The powers that be assumed that people would be a panicky mob, there’d be stampedes in the stairwells, and more people would die from the panic than from the disaster, since humans are (to officialdom) like longhorns in a thunderstorm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, on 9\/11, the normies ignored the instructions to stay in their cubes – and, more importantly, they self-organized an evacuation that got just about everyone below the points of impact out of the Twin Towers that morning. Another epic self-organization led to the more or less organic appearance of the greatest maritime evacuation since Dunkirk, as boats, official and private, carried people across the Hudson and East Rivers, without any need for official guidance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Government learned nothing from this, of course; one of the first rule of public health crisis communications is to try to convince people of one or both of two things; “you’re going to die a horrible death if you dbn’t follow directions”,, or “your children are going to die a horrible death if you don’t follow directions”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doesn’t sound very confident in human intelligence, does it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People can be breathtakingly stupid – but enlightened self-interest is a powerful force for good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s by no means a rare trait. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I talked about this article in “Commentary” last weekend on the show – “Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace<\/a>” by James Meigs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s about the gulf between the panicky official response to the Anchorage Earthquake of 1964 – the strongest earthquake in North American history – and the calm, purposeful response of the normies, who organized themselves much more effectively than the local authorities did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The officlals assumed that the populace would panic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost as soon as the shaking stopped, city officials began worrying about how the populace would respond. With every shop window broken, would looters ransack the local merchants? Would citizens panic at the sight of the dead or wounded? Police quickly deputized a group of volunteers\u2014some of them freshly emerged from those Fourth Avenue bars\u2014as ad hoc officers. The men put on armbands with the word police emblazoned in lipstick\u2014a few were even issued firearms\u2014and off they went to protect the city from the inevitable post-disaster crime wave.<\/p>

The Anchorage officials weren\u2019t being unusually paranoid. At the time, most experts believed any major disaster would cause \u201ca mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,\u201d as social scientist Richard M. Titmuss had put it some years earlier. Shocked by carnage and desperate for food and shelter, people would \u201cbehave like frightened and unsatisfied children.\u201d Only firm control by powerful authorities could keep the lid on such dangerous situations….Disaster researchers call this phenomenon \u201celite panic.\u201d When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don\u2019t just waste resources, one study notes; they also \u201cundermine the public\u2019s capacity for resilient behaviors.\u201d In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This led the authorities to devote far more effort to controlling crowds that tryint to rescue people trapped in buildings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sound familiar? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, the normies organized themselves, and did what needed to be done:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cars were buried in debris. One station wagon had been crushed almost flat by a concrete slab; Chance could hear a woman\u2019s voice coming from inside. A crowd of people was trying to save her, clawing at the slab. Then a man stepped forward to organize the effort. Somehow, two tow trucks were located; they were able to split the slab partially in two. Another man climbed into the breech with a cutting torch\u2014a cutting torch!\u2014and carved a hole in the vehicle\u2019s roof. The woman was pulled free, gravely injured but alive. She would survive. [Anchorage TV reporter Genie] Chance later marveled that all the people involved in the operation were mere passersby\u2014impromptu volunteers. And yet they functioned as a team. Though she didn\u2019t know it at the time, this dynamic was being replicated all over the city.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Officialdom was, in the meantime ,paralyzed by the collapse of its assumptions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Psychologist] Enrico Quarantelli, the leader of [a team of academics that flew to Anchorage to study the response], was particularly interested in Anchorage\u2019s small Civil Defense office. It should have been in charge of search and rescue, but, Quarantelli noted, had quickly become bogged down over questions of bureaucratic protocol. Of course, Bill Davis\u2019s amateur mountaineers had taken over that function almost immediately. Quarantelli used the term \u201cemergent groups\u201d to describe teams of self-organized volunteers like Davis\u2019s searchers. He didn\u2019t miss the irony that the agency created to protect civilians soon became an obstacle that this emergent group of rescuers had to work around. And, far from being a hindrance to trained first responders, those gangs of citizens turned out to be an indispensable resource.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It’s not a new phenomenon at all:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disaster researchers call this phenomenon \u201celite panic.\u201d When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don\u2019t just waste resources, one study notes; they also \u201cundermine the public\u2019s capacity for resilient behaviors.\u201d In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I urge you to read the entire piece. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I urge you to read the whole thing – in particular, the article’s focus on the importance of getting reliable, trustworthy information to the population:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Fear of public panic remains common today. Disaster literature bulges with examples\u2014from Hurricane Katrina, to the 2011 Japan tsunami, to the current coronavirus pandemic\u2014in which officials suppressed information, or passed along misinformation, out of concern over an unruly populace…One symptom of elite panic is the belief that too much information, or the wrong kind of information, will send citizens reeling. After the 2011 tsunami knocked out Japan\u2019s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials gave a series of confusing briefings. To many, they seemed to be downplaying the amount of radiation released in the accident. In the end, the radiation risks turned out to be much lower than feared, resulting in no civilian deaths. But, by then, the traumatized public had lost faith in any official statements. As one team of researchers notes, any \u201cperceived lack of information provision increases public anxiety and distrust.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Similar example. the Bengal Famine of 1942, where British\/Indian authorities clamped down on information, causing the rumor mill to take over, leading to food hoarding and bureacratic – dare we say, “elite” – panic, leading to two million starvataion deaths, in a place with plenty of food<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think of that when you remember the Minnesota Department of Health’s refusal to divulge the mathematical model by which it predicted tens of thousands of Covid deaths by July 2020i, as a best case, because “people might reach different resujlts”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Government is all the things we do together – stupidly and ineffectively”. Government is ponderous and brittle. People, when acting in enlightened self-interest, usually make the right call. My favorite example: before 9\/11, the official guidance for people in skyscraper offices in case of a major emergency was to wait for official instructions. The powers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[416,51,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid19","category-liberal-tyranny","category-unions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80684"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80687,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80684\/revisions\/80687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}