Contemplating dystopia in 2020, part 2
When the worst happens, humans don’t become monsters.
We don’t turn on each other.
All of human history has been about community, or at least I prefer to read it that way. I’m not interested in stories that uphold the Great Man Theory of history; I’m interested in stories that explore how people survive and manipulate the world around them, whether they’re experiencing war or disaster or anything else.
…the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.
Mar 20, 2020 / Rutger Bregman
In the event of tragedy, we far more often work together and take care of each other than melt down, but that’s not what I tend to see in our entertainment media. It’s far less exciting than madness, I suppose.
The field of disasterology has established this pretty well, and it’s the basic idea behind a lot of modern anarchist movements — without the structures of normal society, we actually do pretty well for ourselves. I’m not saying I want a disaster to leave us scattered so we can see what glory arises in response; that would suck for a lot of people. Humans surviving disasters don’t come together in community because it’s just a nice thing to do–they do it because they must in order to survive. Given that we haven’t seen much of this behavior in 2020, perhaps it has to be a pretty massive disaster for these nice bits of human nature to arise. But they do arise, and too often we forget that.
This article from Scientific American discusses several reasons why this might be, namely that humans are social creatures and stress makes us need each other even more. This resonates with how I react to stress more than the idea that we become more selfish when things go wrong. I’ve sure needed a hug a lot in a year like 2020! Evidently, vulnerability is a core part of social bonding. And when do we feel more vulnerable than when things go very wrong?
Then here’s a collection of stories from early in the pandemic that describes all the ways we drew together. We can certainly find examples of people acting badly this year, too (antimask violence, anyone?) but those are in the minority. “Since 1963, the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center has conducted nearly 700 field studies on floods and earthquakes, and on-site research reveals the same results every time: the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.”