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Have you ever woke up screamin’
While munching my lunch today, I hooked a back-issue of New Scientist from the vast horde of magazines which form gentle drifts across the table in our staff room.
That particular issue had caught my eye because of the cover blurb about falling in love changing women into men. The story detailed a study which suggested that the levels of hormones in men and women who desscribe themselves as having fallen in love alter to be more like that of the other sex. Frankly, it sounded like a bunch of rubbish to me.
However, further on in the magazine I ran into a comment piece talking about human behaviour in times of disaster. We all now how humans behave in the face of crisis, right ? They run around and panic and lose all common sense. Sheep to a man. Everyone knows that. Hollywood knows it, and treats us to scenes of absolute carnage every time a natural disaster threatens. US and UK governemnts seem to know it - certainly, if Preparing For Emergencies is anything to go by, we need to be repeatedly instructed to use common sense and not to panic. According to the article, both the US and UK governments have been forming their what-to-do-in-emergencies plans in a very top-down way: people potentially nowhere near the disaster will form the plans, and the local people are completely edited out of the equation. They are to be contained, and in no event involved, or even necessarily informed.
So far, so good. Except, the article goes on to explain, people actually tend not to panic. They tend to get their act together really rather quickly, start trying to sort things out, and generally help each other. All that's best about a community tends to swing into force. Consider, said the article, Britain in the Blitz.
Indeed, I was thinking, but that was years ago. And somehow the world seems to me to be getting a lot less sensible. Would people today act with the same Blitz spirit ? The article continued citing examples - from the amazing recovery (at least economically) of Hiroshima, to the behaviour of people during and after the attack on the World Trade Centre.
Ah. I thought. Fair point. The twin towers were only knocked over a few years ago. Yet all reports suggested then that people helped each other out, did what they could, and generally pitched in in a supportive manner. The write of the article claimed that he had not yet heard of an injured or disabled person involved in the WTC disaster who did not report being assisted by colleagues or strangers.
Much smaller scale disasters, like the Boscastle flooding, seem to indicate the same thing. People will help each other out, and utterly fail to run round like screaming idiots.
When flooding, or earthquakes, or other disasters strike it is often local people who begin (and then continue) search and rescue missions before even the emergency services arrive. Individuals are hailed as heroes, but still the idea persists that people will default to mob mentality as a whole.
So, what of these reports of carnage and looting ? At the moment, I believe the flooding in Haiti has resulted in something of the sort of disorder we might expect to see. I'm not sure, though, that I really think that's quite comparable. The citizens of Haiti have been living in poverty, facing civil unrest, famine and uncertainty and now the flood has destroyed a large proportion of what little they did have. There's not a huge number of sensible courses left open to them. Their disaster is a last straw, and while looting probably doesn't help, it's really quite understandable.
I found myself agreeing with the writer of the article. People - at least those living in reasonable comfort and safety - will, when faced with an imminent crisis, generally show all that's good about human nature. I'm sure there are opportunists, but as a generalisation people will cope, and they will help. Yet the governments write them out of disaster plans as irrelevant and incapable. The Public must stay at home, be cosseted with warnings not to panic, and let the nice, big officials sort it all out.
People can be stupid, selfish, stubborn, destructive, any number of things. But just occasionally they can also be noble, reliable, brave and coolheaded. And I think we deserve a bit of credit for that.
That particular issue had caught my eye because of the cover blurb about falling in love changing women into men. The story detailed a study which suggested that the levels of hormones in men and women who desscribe themselves as having fallen in love alter to be more like that of the other sex. Frankly, it sounded like a bunch of rubbish to me.
However, further on in the magazine I ran into a comment piece talking about human behaviour in times of disaster. We all now how humans behave in the face of crisis, right ? They run around and panic and lose all common sense. Sheep to a man. Everyone knows that. Hollywood knows it, and treats us to scenes of absolute carnage every time a natural disaster threatens. US and UK governemnts seem to know it - certainly, if Preparing For Emergencies is anything to go by, we need to be repeatedly instructed to use common sense and not to panic. According to the article, both the US and UK governments have been forming their what-to-do-in-emergencies plans in a very top-down way: people potentially nowhere near the disaster will form the plans, and the local people are completely edited out of the equation. They are to be contained, and in no event involved, or even necessarily informed.
So far, so good. Except, the article goes on to explain, people actually tend not to panic. They tend to get their act together really rather quickly, start trying to sort things out, and generally help each other. All that's best about a community tends to swing into force. Consider, said the article, Britain in the Blitz.
Indeed, I was thinking, but that was years ago. And somehow the world seems to me to be getting a lot less sensible. Would people today act with the same Blitz spirit ? The article continued citing examples - from the amazing recovery (at least economically) of Hiroshima, to the behaviour of people during and after the attack on the World Trade Centre.
Ah. I thought. Fair point. The twin towers were only knocked over a few years ago. Yet all reports suggested then that people helped each other out, did what they could, and generally pitched in in a supportive manner. The write of the article claimed that he had not yet heard of an injured or disabled person involved in the WTC disaster who did not report being assisted by colleagues or strangers.
Much smaller scale disasters, like the Boscastle flooding, seem to indicate the same thing. People will help each other out, and utterly fail to run round like screaming idiots.
When flooding, or earthquakes, or other disasters strike it is often local people who begin (and then continue) search and rescue missions before even the emergency services arrive. Individuals are hailed as heroes, but still the idea persists that people will default to mob mentality as a whole.
So, what of these reports of carnage and looting ? At the moment, I believe the flooding in Haiti has resulted in something of the sort of disorder we might expect to see. I'm not sure, though, that I really think that's quite comparable. The citizens of Haiti have been living in poverty, facing civil unrest, famine and uncertainty and now the flood has destroyed a large proportion of what little they did have. There's not a huge number of sensible courses left open to them. Their disaster is a last straw, and while looting probably doesn't help, it's really quite understandable.
I found myself agreeing with the writer of the article. People - at least those living in reasonable comfort and safety - will, when faced with an imminent crisis, generally show all that's good about human nature. I'm sure there are opportunists, but as a generalisation people will cope, and they will help. Yet the governments write them out of disaster plans as irrelevant and incapable. The Public must stay at home, be cosseted with warnings not to panic, and let the nice, big officials sort it all out.
People can be stupid, selfish, stubborn, destructive, any number of things. But just occasionally they can also be noble, reliable, brave and coolheaded. And I think we deserve a bit of credit for that.
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It might be easier to say that people, when living with the lifestyle that expect....
But that's just me....
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I meant a reasonable level of comfort and safety for the time, for their expectations, etc. So basically what you said.
Though I do think pre-war London was probably safer and nicer than Haiti, to be honest :)
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I expect to have a roof over my head, food in my belly and fun. And that's the absolute minimum. I can still have them and be stressed to the nines.
Except of course 50, a 100 years ago I'd be strugglign to get those things.
equally you look at Haitai and is there style of life any wortse then it was 50 to 100 years ago, proberbly not. What's changed, what's around them.... Poverty in this country and in the states would have been described as affluant not many years ago.
Sorry, not coherant. As I say, still thinking.
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I think it may have more to do with the future expectation of comfort and safety than anything else. WWII was a period when (I would think) many people were concerned that there whole way of life would be destroyed. They actually saw that as a plausible possibility. I don't think people see that sort of future coming. They are (perhaps justifiably) worried about terrorism, but as a threat to individual lives, not to their whole civilisation. Thus, if you didn't die in the initial explosion/flood/whatever, you are one of the lucky survivors who will go on to live in peaceful tranquility, and not facing a nightmare commie/fascist/whatever future.
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Perhaps the injured and disabled people who weren't assisted didn't survive to tell the tale...
Suspect I'm overlapping with the previous thoughts
If this means going down the corner shop to buy beans, they'll do what is needed to get the corner shop rebuilt after a catastrophe. If, on the other hand, they get their daily beans by some less, um, lawful means, they'll take the opportunity to loot the poor shop, and run off with all the tins they can carry.
My impressions of city riots and looting follow roughly the same lines: the rioters, by definition, are fairly lawless, and cheerfully empty shops. The law abiding citizens are all huddled up safely in their homes. The next day, the rioters go to sleep off the excitement, and the citizenry come out to clean up the mess.
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Since for the short time right after it's all gone wrong, the people there on the scene are the only ones that can react. They know they're the only ones that can react. And so, assuming they're not totally callous, they do.
Which also begs the question of whether the Govmint disaster plans are being rather foolish in encouraging the diffusion of responsibility upwards.
Well, if we remotely believed that their plans would work, anyway.
The reverse is sometimes true.
It said that for many years the British emergency plans for air crashes were based around the Staines ir crash of 1972, where the public got in the way, stopped their cars to see what was happening and attempted to pick up souveniers to take home. As a result of this planning for such emergencies included a bit on keeping the public away from the area, and making sure that roads were kept free for emergency transport to use.
This changed when a plane crashed near Kegworth on the M1 in 1989. Here passers by proved to be usefull (people with medical help gave first aid, random people directed traffic and assisted the police) to enable the overstretched emergency services to make the most of a bad situation. Since then (allegedly) some disaster plans allow for the public to show a certain amount of common sense and a willingness to do as their told by authority figures (e.g. the police).
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People can be stupid, selfish, stubborn, destructive, any number of things
but rarely on as large a scale as governments
He's got a point!
It takes proper organisation to produce proper large scale chaos.
For example, see how much more damage the GMs can spread than the players ever do...
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(Anonymous) 2004-09-30 12:03 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
People die all the time because of lack of "common sense" when caught in a fire. They walk around in smoke, they try to grab belongings or clothes on the way out, they open doors and are hit by backdraft, or they smash windows and try to climb out of them tghrough broken glass. For that matter, frequently they caused the fire in the first place.
So, the advice of the fire service to the public has to be pitched at a level that assumes a stupid or self-destructive audience, because some members will be. Those with a bit more nouse can figure out for themselves how to interpret that advice in their particular situation. The fire service can't be responsible for telling someone "in case of fire, dash under burning timbers to rescue your child", because only 85% of people who do that will survive. Individuals can and will decide on their own behalf whether to risk their life, but no fireman can tell you to do it.
Applying this reasoning to "emergencies" (or whatever the current euphemism is for chemical warfare), the advice to the general public has to be "go indoors right now and hope for the best", because that's the closest there is to a tactic that's mostly right most of the time. If the public want to be sensible off their own bat, that's lovely, and they don't need the official advice. As a Safety 101 instructor, I'm going to ignore them (if they have any questions, they'll ask after the class), and concentrate on the muppets or those who simply operate better when they've been given a simple plan to follow.
The Blitz spirit isn't necessarily a good model for a terrorist attack, because in 1940 Britain had been expecting an all-out invasion (and indeed had been fighting the war abroad) for a year. People had been called up, rationed, evacuated, and generally had their lives messed around with, long before the bombs were falling with any regularity. They'd fought and all but won the Battle of Britain. They were, I suspect, somewhat ready for it, and had been "bolstered up" by a number of clever bits of propaganda (I don't recall from history lessons whether the tearing up of iron railings came before or after the start of the bombing, but it was a genius trick).
Right now, we live our lives essentially as we wish, with occasional mixed messages from the government which alternate between "panic!" and "don't panic!". For all Labour's slick PR, this isn't a terribly good way to mentally prepare people for Bad Stuff. To be cynical, I'd say that they aren't interested in doing that, they're just vote-grooming, but I think it's more that they aren't willing to create a probably unjustified "seriously folks, we're totally screwed, so let's buckle down" vibe.
So, if people aren't prepared I think it's harder to expect them to behave well in a crisis. And although most people probably will act as you say, we can probably expect more who either panic or go rogue, especially in the short term, than in the Blitz.
Footnote - Haiti has been in a state of military rule mixed with civil war for a generation. I don't think there's a time in living memory that there haven't been armed rebels active in the country. That being the case, I think it's to be expected that the reaction to a disaster will involve a lot more violence than would be expected in a more stable country, even before accounting for poverty.
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Yes. That's what I was trying to say, but with considerably less background information and/or eloquence.
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I was in a coach making its way up a snowbound mountain road on a January night. I had fallen asleep, and was woken by general hubbub and the less-than-gentle shakings of the friend sat next to me.
"Huh? Wha's goin' on?"
"The coach is about to slide of the mountain"
I woke up fairly quickly. I had seen the drop: it was... long. We were sat at the back, with three rugby players valiantly kicking merry hell out of the rear emegency exit that was refusing to budge.
People were filing off in an orderly manner, although far too leisurely for those of us trapped at the back. I saw the delay: a woman trying to wake a young child who was blissfully asleep. "Leave him; I'll carry him!", I yelled ahead, and so it was.
Stuck in the coach, I remember feeling surprised that I, nor anybody else, seemed to be in a panic. In a split second, I had come to realise that we might all be about to die, shrugged, and just got on with it.
We all got off, and it turned out that somebody had been feeding us duff information: in fact the engine had caught fire, which could still have been nasty. Nevertheless, until then as far as we were concerned, we were all poised to plunge to a messy end. To this day, I am amazed at how everybody took it in their stride.
We walked the last mile or two to the mountain cabin we were heading for, where huge bonfires were blazing. "Just think," said my friend, "that could have been us."
I was the only one to laugh *g*
That was *thinks* 15 years ago, though. Now, I'd expect to be trampled in the rush. I suspect that "women and children first" has been replaced by "leave the weak!"
I hope that I'm wrong.
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Now, I'd expect to be trampled in the rush.
Why do you expect that, though ?
All reports from the World Trade Centre (do I have to spell it Center?) a few years back were that this is exactly what didn't happen. Admittedly,
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Good question. I don't know if it's indicative of the world as it is, how I perceive the world, or just something in my head. I tend to assume that everybody is out for themselves and screw everybody else, unless shown otherwise. Friends tend to have shown otherwise *g*
World Trade Centre (do I have to spell it Center?)
No, spell it properly *g*
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