Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [80]
What happened to the hajj? Why were people getting crushed and asphyxiated, year after year, when they had come to pray? What was causing what appeared to be mass panic?
Panic is one of those words that change shape depending on the moment. Like heroism, it is defined in retrospect, often in ways that reflect more about the rest of us than about the facts on the ground. The word comes from mythology, which is appropriate. The Greek god Pan had a human torso and the legs, horns, and beard of goat. During the day, he roamed the forests and meadows, tending to flocks and playing songs on his flute. At night, he devoted much of his energy to the conquest of various nymphs. But from time to time, he amused himself by playing tricks on human travelers. As people passed through the lonely mountain slopes between the Greek city-states, Pan made those strange, creeping noises that slither from the darkness, never to be fully explained. He rustled the underbrush, and people quickened their pace; he did it again, and people ran for their lives. Fear at such harmless noises came to be known as “panic.”
Sometimes we use panic to mean a rippling kind of terror that robs us of self-control. But it can also be a reason for fear. There is panic, the emotion, and then there is panic, the behavior—the irrational shrieking and clamoring and shoving that can jeopardize the survival of ourselves and those around us. Both meanings get conflated in one short word, overloaded with implications. This chapter is about panic, the behavior, as manifested in a stampede—one of the most frightening and extreme versions of panic.
This chapter also marks the beginning of the end—the final phase of the survival arc. After denial and deliberation comes what I will call the decisive moment. This is a phrase borrowed from Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who may be the father of modern photojournalism. For him, the decisive moment was, among other things, “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” It happened when his camera managed to capture the essence of a thing or a person in a single frame.
Likewise, the last stage in the survival arc is over in a flash. It is the sudden distillation of everything that has come before, and it determines what, if anything, will come after. As in photography, what happens in this single moment depends on many things: timing, experience, sensibility—and, perhaps most of all, luck. What happens once we have accepted the fact that something terrible is upon us and deliberated our options? Panic is the worst-case scenario in the human imagination. All norms of behavior, all the things that make us human, dissolve, and all that remains is chaos. If we think back to the dread equation, panic scores high on every metric: uncontrollability, unfamiliarity, imaginability, suffering, scale of destruction, and unfairness. The only thing as dreadful as panic might be terrorism.
The current fashion in disaster research is to deny that panic ever happens. But one exaggeration doesn’t fix another exaggeration. Yes, people rarely do hysterical things that violate basic social mores. The vast majority of the time, as we have seen, panic does not occur. Doing nothing at all is in fact a much more common reaction to a disaster, as we’ll see in the next chapter. Afterward, people may say they “panicked,” and the media may report a “panic,” but in truth almost no one misbehaved. They felt their breath quicken and their heart pound. They felt afraid, in other words, and it was an uncomfortable sensation. But they didn’t actually become wilding