Emergency Plans / Disaster Management

When paranoia and fear become extreme, mental health professionals identify these feelings as symptoms of diagnosable mental illness. When paranoia and fear become sanctioned by government-sponsored initiatives, what should we conclude about the mental health of our politicians? The latest government–sponsored delusion is a campaign encouraging each household to stockpile enough supplies to cope with a 72 hour infrastructure meltdown. Thanks but I’ll take a pass. I’m already screwed up enough without help from the government.

Government-sponsored paranoia is not a new thing. I had my first taste of it as a kid in the 60’s. My dad had a colleague who took a sabbatical to do graduate studies at an American university. He and his family lived in an apartment just off campus. When we visited, they gave us a tour including a visit to the basement of their apartment building which had been converted into a fallout shelter. What impressed me most were the black metal barrels stacked from floor to ceiling—thousands of gallons of water—thousands of gallons of what was no doubt the stalest worst–tasting water in the Finger Lakes watershed. They never used the fallout shelter, but they did enjoy giving tours and boasting about their readiness.

There’s something I’ve never understood about nuclear paranoia. On the one hand the DOD experts told us with a delicious sobriety about the awesome forces they had unlocked and how nothing could withstand the devastation of a nuclear (or nuculer, if you are George W.) holocaust. On the other hand, those same experts narrated public service (propaganda) films assuring us that if the Russians dropped bombs on us, our children could save themselves by hiding under their desks. As we learn from our movies, the bad guy’s bullets always miss. The same is true of nuclear warfare—the bad guy’s bombs explode with inferior atoms.

The same kind of duplicity is at work today, only now the perpetrators are economists and software engineers. They celebrate the marvels of modern infrastructure by pointing to our global markets and cellular networks. When we unleash the awful forces of infrastructure meltdown against our enemies (as we have against the people of Iraq) then millions are displaced, hundreds of thousands die, and everybody gets traumatized for life. Yet we in North America can guard against such a disaster by setting aside a six–pack of bottled water, a case of canned beans and a box of candles.

If we opt into the program, then we diminish ourselves. We engage in a species of exceptionalism. In the skirmish of us and them, the bullets will miss us because we are the good guys. Except there is no us and them. There is only us. Even them is us. And there is only one infrastructure. It’s called the globe. If the infrastructure is broken in one part of the globe, then the infrastructure is broken everywhere. We all are worse off for it.

The problem with government–sponsored paranoia is that it plays to only one side of an irresolvable tension. It plays to the MacGyver impulse—the fantasy many of us entertain that if we were dropped alone into the wilderness, we’d invent clever ways to survive even the most daunting challenges. But even the cleverest of us, if dropped alone into the wilderness, couldn’t solve the challenge of loneliness. The other side of the irresolvable tension is that we are social beings. We are individuals—together. The irony is that this time the MacGyver impulse is fed by government — a social institution.

The MacGyver impulse is also supported by a fundamental tenet of classical economic theory: humans are motivated by self–interest, and optimal outcomes arise from the rational pursuit of that self–interest. When blackouts happen, we return to a Hobbesian state of nature. Property rights go out the window. We loot and rape and pillage. Except the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Were you affected by the blackout of August 14, 2003 that hit the whole of the North America’s eastern seaboard? If so, were you robbed? Did people hoard goods and charge you extortionate prices for them? What I recall was a deep stillness. Without TVs (part of our cherished infrastructure) people went for walks and chatted with strangers and enjoyed the starlit sky. I didn’t see anybody who looked the least bit like MacGyver.

Yes, it’s arrogant to assume that our infrastructures are invulnerable. But it’s unholy to assume that without them human beings would devolve to an innate savagery. The government’s call to hoard assumes the worst in us as individuals and denies the value of us as interdependent collectives.

I offer a countervailing call which assumes the best in us as individuals and affirms the value of dependency. Stockpile goods if you must. Not to look out for your own interest. But so you have enough goods to give away should the need arise. If everyone had goods to give away, then no one would go without. This is not a naive utopianism. If we take care to look, we can witness it already at work daily in our midst.