Nuke Opera 2020: Panic at the Apocalypse:

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Nuke Opera 2020: Panic at the Apocalypse:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.– Agent Kay, Men In Black (1997)

It’s generally accepted that people – specifically the masses — will panic in disaster situations. I mean, just look at any disaster movie and you’ll see people running madly about, trampling each other, fighting tooth and claw to save themselves and only themselves. Sometimes they’ll pause long enough to help themselves to whatever items are in the nearest store, taking advantage of the temporary suspension of societal norms to get that big-screen TV they’ve been eyeing.

Usually to underscore the utter ruthlessness of the maddened crowd, there’ll be a shot of some vulnerable individual such as a child or an elderly or disabled adult, who needs help but who is being ignored by the fleeing masses. Maybe the hero will rescue this individual to help underscore what a good guy he is or, if the director wants to really emphasize the whole ‘every man for himself’ thing, maybe the innocent victim won’t be saved. Because as everyone knows, when the thin veneer of civilization peels away, humans reveal themselves to be animals, red in tooth and claw, ready to do whatever it takes to survive.

Except, that’s not really true. It works well in fiction, especially in visual media like movies and TV because it allows for dramatic visuals, but it’s not necessarily reflected in reality. By and large, people don’t panic en masse when disaster strikes.

How do we know? Because sociologists have studied how people react in disaster situations, looking at reactions to things like the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake,  the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, the alleged panic created by Orson Wells’ 1938 broadcast of the War of the Worlds, the 1977 fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001, and the impact of Hurricane Katrina 2005 on New Orleans, among other disasters.

Studying the sociology of disasters began in the 1940s and 1950s, in part because the US government wanted to know how people would react in the event of a nuclear war. Would people panic, would society be able to rebuild after a nuclear war or would the nation die? Research into historical disasters, emergencies and catastrophes led to the conclusion in the 1960s that panic was actually rare in disasters, at least among the general public.

Rather than turning into a ruthless, rampaging mob focused only on their own survival, people react to disasters by becoming more altruistic and willing to help. Instances of the general public panicking during a disaster are, thankfully, rare.

This isn’t to say that mass panic doesn’t ever happen. It can and does, but it isn’t a given in every single disaster situation. Instead, panic is caused by specific circumstances, such as:

  • A perception of immediate great threat
  • The belief that you may be trapped – a feeling that can occur even in a wide-open space.
  • A feeling of helplessness. (source: Disaster Psychology: The Myths of Panic)

Panic, in this case, is an emotion that will affect individuals.  It can then spread from an individual or individuals into a larger group. Especially if the other members of the group believe the panicking individual knows something they don’t. Humans are social animals, like our great ape cousins, and as such we tend to want to stay with the group, looking to others for confirmation about how to react when things are uncertain or unsettled.

This tendency can be beneficial: if people see that others are calm, they’re more likely to remain calm themselves. However, following the crowd too closely can lead to ‘groupthink’ – a psychological phenomenon that happens when a group of people put getting along with the group over questioning decisions or assumptions that might be irrational, ill-conceived or even immoral.  In a groupthink situation, people become hyper focused on not rocking the boat and therefore become reluctant to question the group’s decisions, even when those decisions are clearly misguided or even potentially fatal.

The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 was a case of groupthink occurring at the highest levels of the US government. The invasion plans, originally drawn up during the Eisenhower administration, were accepted without question by the Kennedy administration as right and just. When some in the Kennedy administration tried to question some of the assumptions behind the plans, such as the belief that Castro wouldn’t be able to quell internal uprisings, they were ignored.  The invasion, as a result, was a disaster that led to 114 deaths and the capture of over 1,000 American-backed Cuban exiles who’d been recruited by the CIA for the ill-fated attempt to overthrow Castro[1].

But, Wait…

If mass panic is rare, why does the belief in it persist?

Partly because the idea that the masses are potentially dangerous animals is a fear shared by society’s elites. ‘Elite’ in this case meaning those with power and/or authority over groups of people. This concept is highly dependent on context; the mayor of a city is an elite in relation to the population of their city, but not in comparison to the President of the United States.[2]

If we think of society as a whole as a pyramid, the elites are those at the very top of the pyramid and the masses are the rest of us at the base. By their very nature, the elites are a much smaller group in comparison to the rest of society, but they have a disproportionate amount of power over society.

However, while the elites have the power, the masses have them outnumbered and can, potentially, easily overpower the elites should they decide to rebel or otherwise break the social contract that gives the elites their power.

Not-So-Jolly Old England:

To better understand why elites fear masses, we need to go back about three hundred years to the reign of England’s King George I. This was a time when the vast majority of British citizens had no real representation in their government – only about 3% of the population was eligible to vote. Members of Parliament were elected from the aristocracy[3], by the aristocracy, and to make laws to benefit the aristocracy.

As Oliver Goldsmith, a novelist of the time put it, “Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law.”

In 1723, the rich men of Parliament decided to grind the poor even finer, when they passed the Black Act of 1723.  This act strengthened Britain’s criminal code heavily in favor of the aristocracy, raising the number of crimes punishable by the death penalty from fifty to 200. Most of these offenses were crimes against property – poaching, pickpocketing, stealing anything valued at more than a shilling (approximately eight dollars in 2017 money) and looting from shipwrecks, to name a few examples.

These stronger laws against property crimes came at a time when the economic disparities between rich and poor were heightened, leading to an increase in crimes like highway robbery and muggings.  The wealthy, who already had nearly unlimited power to protect their property, made already harsh laws even more draconian in an attempt to prevent crime through fear.

It should be noted, at this point the United Kingdom didn’t have an actual police force – nor did it have prisons as we understand them today. People were jailed or imprisoned only if they were waiting to go to trial or if they’d already been sentenced to death. Courtroom trials were a form of entertainment, as were executions which were also used to demonstrate the penalty for violating the king’s law.

These strict punishments were also due to the fact that the elite of the Georgian Era feared not only losing their property but also the poor in general. Riots weren’t uncommon during this period since the poor had no real recourse to change unjust or unfair laws.

Add to this the economic and cultural changes that industrialization had brought to the United Kingdom beginning in the 1770s.  Thousands of rural workers moved into big towns and cities to work in newly opened factories, leading to a population explosion. Low wages and overcrowding meant hundreds and even thousands of people were packed into slums, where squalor and disease ran rampant. These conditions led to an increase in crime and a decreased fear of the noose, which in turn made those in power even more nervous about what could happen if the unwashed masses decided to revolt against the nobility.

La Revolution:

And then came the French Revolution, wherein as common knowledge tells us, the unwashed masses of France overthrew the nobility and guillotined anyone of noble birth, washing the streets of Paris in blood.

Except, that’s not exactly what happened. The French Revolution wasn’t started by the downtrodden and poor, though they got involved as time went on. Nor was every person of noble birth subject to being executed – some high-profile nobles were executed and those who fled France and became exiles in England or elsewhere were subject to execution if they returned home, but that was because many of them conspired against the Revolutionary government and were considered traitors[4].

This isn’t to say that the French Revolution wasn’t a bloody mess or to try and downplay the atrocities that did happen. Because atrocities did happen.  As many as 40,000 people were killed over the course of the Reign of Terror (September 5, 1793-July 27, 1794) – most of whom were peasants, not nobles. Additionally, thousands of peasants who’d remained loyal to their local nobility, if not to the monarchy itself, were killed in fighting that took place outside of Paris in other regions of France.

French Revolution: Additional Information:

While the majority of those executed during the Reign of Terror were peasants[5] we tend to focus on the deaths of the noble classes[6], especially people like Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI. After all, we know about them as people – we can read their letters and diaries, we can see them depicted in portraits, we’re able to make a connection with them that we’re not able to make with a random, nameless and faceless peasant.

In the early days of the French Revolution, there were those in the United Kingdom and America, which was only about ten years out from its own revolution, who initially supported the French Revolution[7]. This changed when the King and Queen of France were executed; even in America there were those who thought that beheading the monarchs was a step too far.

In the UK[8], the idea of the monarchy being overthrown and nobility beheaded was definitely terrifying. Especially for the elites. This fear of the mob has carried down throughout the years and is still with us today, resurfacing any time a disaster occurs. These days, those who study the sociology of disasters refer to this as ‘elite panic.’

Elite Panic:

The term ‘elite panic’ was coined by Lee Clarke and Caron Chess, sociologists from Rutgers University. In their 2008 article, Elites and Panic: More to Fear than Fear Itself, they identified three specific areas associated with members of the elite and panic:

  • Elites can fear panic – specifically, they fear mass panic, which can lead to them reacting with excessive authoritarianism or violence.
  • Elites can cause panic – for example, by hoarding information that might assist the public in making decisions regarding their own safety.
  • Elites can themselves panic – which happened in 2007 when police in Boston closed highways and bridges out of fear of a ‘suspicious device’ that turned out to be part of a viral marketing campaign for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force

In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit quotes disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney’s definition of elite panic:

Fear of social disorder, fear of the poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; actions taken on the basis of rumor. (Solnit, p. 235)

Tierney was, in this instance, speaking shortly after Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst instances of elite panic in US history. Reports of looting were overplayed by the media, as were supposed incidents of violence at evacuation points like the Superdome. This led to instances where those hit hardest by the storm were seen as a menace to be controlled rather than victims to be helped.

For many of the tens of thousands stranded there for the better part of the week, trauma was not merely the terrible storm and the flooding of their city,  the waters in which bodies floated and poisonous snakes swam, the heat that blistered skin and killed many,  the apocalyptic days in which people gave birth and died on freeway overpasses surrounded by unclean waters, in which many despaired of ever being taken from a city that had utterly collapsed into a wet and filthy ruin, or hat people tried to give away their children so that they might be evacuated first. It was being abandoned by their fellow human being and their government. And more thant aht, it was being treated as animals and enemies at the moment of their greatest vulnerability.” (Solnit, p 245-246)

Worse, the mayor of New Orleans[9], Ray Nagin and the city’s chief of police Eddie Compass helped fuel unfounded and untrue rumors about the savagery supposedly taking place at the Superdome, where 20,000 people were sheltering without air conditioning, adequate power and failed plumbing.

The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees – mass murders, rapes and beatings – have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.” – Newhouse News Service, September 26, 2005

These rumors were used to confirm preconceived notions about marginalized groups, particularly the city’s poor and minority populations, and to blame them for the governments’[10] inadequate response in the aftermath of the storm. As Michael Eric Dyson put it in his book, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster: “The message seemed to be: ‘If this is how they act, if this is who they are, then their inhumanity is a justification for not rushing to their rescue.” (Dyson, p. 174).

When elites do panic, this can cause a cascade of negative behaviors to radiate downward from the top of the social pyramid. In the aftermath of Katrina, the continued repetition of myths about violence at the Superdome and uncontrolled looking led to the formation of vigilante groups in areas of New Orleans that had escaped significant damage.  One such area was Algiers Point, community on the West Bank of the Mississippi River which had escaped flooding.

These vigilante groups, predominately white, responded to false rumors of marauding blacks by arming themselves and preparing to do battle. As Michael Lewis observed:

These men also had another informational disadvantage: working TV sets. Over and over and over again, they replayed the same few horrifying scenes from the Superdome, the Convention Center, and a shop in downtown New Orleans. If the images were to be reduced to a sentence in the minds of Uptown New Orleans [the area of the city near Algiers Point] that sentence would be ‘Crazy black people with automatic weapons are out hunting white people, and there’s no bag limit!” (“Wading Toward Home”)

In reality, the reverse was true – white vigilantes were hunting black people[11]. In her research for A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit interviewed a medic who worked with a volunteer relief group in the 15th Ward, where Algiers Point was located.  The medic, Aislyn Colgan, said that more than one vigilante reported having shot and killed people, including one woman who said “they” were “coming for our TV and we had to shoot them” because otherwise “they would have come back with their brothers and killed us.”

  • Welcome to New Orleans – a 2006 documentary about the aftermath of Katrina and the efforts of Malik Rahim to organize community relief efforts. At 5:47 minutes in, there is a brief scene of several white vigilantes from the Algiers Point community gleefully discussing shooting at “looters” followed immediately by the reaction of a young black man who was threatened by white vigilantes despite himself being a resident of the neighborhood.  Content warning for racist ideology, sexist language and discussions of violence. Also some adult language.

Actions Have Consequences:

Elites, like the general public, don’t panic often but because they are often in charge of the response to a disaster, their panic can have a greater immediate impact as well as long-lasting consequences.

Going back to the example of Katrina, the mistakes made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) not only led to people suffering in the aftermath of the storm but also to long-term economic and cultural effects for the city of New Orleans and tarnished the agency’s reputation for years to come.

In Conclusion:

As we start looking at the predecessors of the Nuke Opera genre and particularly once we begin looking at examples of Nuke Opera, we’ll see that Agent Kay’s belief that people are dumb, panicky dangerous animals will be held up again and again as gospel. Primarily, this is due to the misconception being so deeply ingrained into our society but also because dumb, panicky, dangerous animals make for a more proactive villain and are, therefore, more exciting and help to shore up the informed attributes of the Nuke Opera hero.

Sources:

Footnotes:

[1] Fortunately, by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration had learned its lesson and avoided falling into the groupthink trap. The willingness to learn from previous mistakes doubtlessly helped save millions, if not billions of lives.

[2] Likewise, a school principle is an elite in relation to the students and teachers who are under them, but not in comparison to the mayor or the President.

[3] Aristocracy in this case meaning members of the ruling class – which here includes not only hereditary nobles, but also landed gentry and wealthy businessmen.

[4] The relatives of some nobles executed by guillotine formed a fashionable club after the end of the Terror, dressing in outré fashions to annoy their elders and thumb their noses at the leaders of the Revolution.

[5] At least four thousand people, again mostly peasants, were executed in a series of mass drownings in Nantes, France between November 1793 to February 1794. Some of the ‘enemies of the Revolution’ executed in this fashion were children, including at least five infants. There was also the War in the Vendee, a region of France that was loyal to the King and nobility.

[6] This includes members of the clergy, who were often members of the nobility shunted off to a cushy church jobs in order to keep them from mucking up the lines of succession.

[7] Which, considering France’s support of the American Revolution was a large part of why we won our freedom, we kinda owed them.  Unfortunately, that support helped add to the economic downturn that helped spark the French Revolution.

[8] The fact that, at the narrowest point, it’s only about 21 miles across the English Channel and that, during this period, a crossing by sailboat could take as little as 3 hours probably added to these fears.

[9] Note: while Hurricane Katrina’s impact hit the entire Gulf Coast of the United States, the researchers I’m quoting focused primarily on responses to the disaster in New Orleans since that was the situation that received the most media attention at the time.

[10] Note: yes, I mean ‘governments’ as in more than one government, since there were failures to assist those who were hardest hit by Katrina at the city, state and federal levels and across political parties.  While George W. Bush gets a deserved share of the blame for his mishandling of the disaster, it’s worth nothing the governor of Louisiana at the time, a Democrat, gave members of the Louisiana National Guard a ‘shoot to kill’ order for ‘hoodlums’ before deploying them to assist police in New Orleans with maintaining order. (Dyson, p. 114)

[11] Malik Rahim, organizer of the Common Ground Relief, a community-initiated volunteer organization formed in September 2005 to provide disaster relief in the New Orleans area, stated in an October 2005 interview with Democracy Now that approximately 18 black men were killed in Algiers, either by the police or by white vigilante groups that had been allowed to operate unchecked.

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