Detailed Historical Examples of Community Panic Thinking

Let’s apply the theory to some historical examples.

The 9-11 Disaster

America’s response to the 9-11 disaster is the most vivid example. It started me down this whole line of thought and, unsurprisingly, is my textbook example of community Panic thinking.

The Continuing Stress

As noted above, in early September 2001 America was attempting an economic “soft landing”. There were economic and technological stress in the wake of the dot-com bust and the post-Enron accounting scandals. Moreover, the world wasn’t quite finished recovering from the fears of the Y2K non-disaster—which had, incidentally, involved airplanes falling from the skies. (Some of the most quickly forgotten parts of human history are the high emotions preceding what turn out to be non-disasters, so this element of the 9-11 emotional package is rarely noted.)

The Novel Event

The multifaceted novelty of the 9-11 event has been analyzed above. By my reckoning, it will be the most famous disaster of the 21st century, and our descendants will probably commemorate the bicentennial on 9-11-2201.

The Blunder

Almost everybody old enough (at this writing) to read this book watched as Americans enthusiastically:

Trashed their legal protections.
Trashed their airline industry.
Started wars costing billions with two countries and (in accordance with Americans’ insistence that their country behave morally whenever inconvenient) tried to exchange the existing governments for stable, pro-American democracies, but on a shoestring budget.
Established various procedures and agencies designed to improve “homeland security”, seriously inconveniencing themselves when traveling through airports and not inconsequentially in day-to-day life.

Whew! And those are just the basic set of Blunders. A mere decade in, it looks like the Novel Threat of the Century has started America on the Blunder Chain of the Century.

The Blunder Chain

America’s initial Blunders have added novel threats to communities, facilitating additional Panic thinking and Blunders.

The Iraq War, trumpeted when launched as making the world safer, ironically destabilized the Middle East for a decade, making it more violence- and terror-friendly than ever.
The prosecution of the Iraq war offers its own set of Blunders, from inadequate initial military force to sweeping de-Ba’athification, and on from there. The yearly Blunder Chain in Iraq started back in 2002 with too little planning for post-Saddam Iraq.
The Panicked focus on Iraq soon led to the virtual neglect of the Afghan conflict, so that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were left unconquered, able to flee and regroup.
As noted above, our discarding Rule of Law in favor of “these terrorists are a special case” weakened it worldwide. This added to the menace of government-sponsored violence and disenfranchised communities (on which more below), thus incubating more violence and terrorism.
The novelty of Homeland Security operations has produced Blunders ranging from the TSA gaffes beloved of YouTube, to the 2007 Boston Bomb Scare over-reactions (discussed below), to spending billions with inadequate accounting. Not to mention how the hysterical focus on airport security has starved out dealing with water-port security, among other unplugged holes.

The Scars

The long-lasting scars from post 9-11 Blunders are deep and numerous, more in the US than abroad. Here is a selection.

Bringing terrorism to center stage in American culture. Instead of treating Al-Qaeda as a crank terrorist cult that got a lucky hit, our political class chose to treat it as a major emblem of evil, likely to produce more damage on a similar scale. And our leaders proclaimed a War on Terrorism as a major evil to be battled with direct and righteous effort by our military and across society, rather than just another kind of criminal activity to be combated by police work.
Reducing America’s reputation as a powerful champion of human rights and justice. The flimsy pretexts for going to war with Iraq lost the country credibility and prestige, making it look—depending on the observer—aggressive for oil resources, anti-Muslim, and/or just plain foolish. The Abu Ghraib photos cost more moral high ground.
Reducing America’s reputation as an able problem solver. Proclaiming its intent to make Iraq into a shining example of democracy in the Middle East in just a few years, and failing, lost the country more credibility and prestige. Rather than shining lights of the Rule of Law and American democracy, our government’s appointees looked like washouts from the Imperial Stormtrooper Academy. This is a huge loss.
Reducing America’s ability to organize a coalition. This difficultly has eased under President Obama, who was memorably depicted by Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley as receiving the Nobel Peace Prize from a delegation of the European elite just “For not being that &%$#@! Bush!”
Beefing up America’s state-sponsored religion of the Holy Metal Detector, whose worship mystically improves plane performance. (More on this in one of the Case Studies at the end of this Book Two.) As with most cults, non-members have low opinions of its practitioners—ranging, in this case, from cowardly through stupid to insane.
Damaging the development of America’s transportation network. The airlines will fill a smaller role than was projected for them in 2001, with alternatives such as trucking, autos, private aviation, and the Internet prospering in their place.

The American Civil War Era (1850s–70s)

The Continuing Stress

The regional differences between American North and South began in colonial times. In the 19th century, as the North became more industrialized and cotton became “king” in the South, those differences became sharper, leading to major differences in what national economic, social, and legal policies were desirable for the regions. In the decades before the Civil War, successful solutions to those disputes had repeatedly been found.

Note that while slavery was one contentious issue, it had not been the largest or only issue in the 1850s.

The Novel Event

In the early 1850s, the national Whig Party dissolved over permitting slavery in US territories.

The power vacuum it left behind was filled suddenly and aggressively in 1854 by the foundation of the much more sectional Republican Party, with the motto “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men”. Republicans supported business-oriented banking, modernization of railroads and other industry, free homesteads to farmers, the right of a citizen to work where and how he pleased and to accumulate property in his own name, and the superiority of free-market labor over slavery—positions generally more suited to the Northern economy than to Southern conditions.

The new party’s surge to power was deeply threatening to Southern leaders.

The Blunder

Southern leaders responded by declaring they would secede from the Union if a Republican were elected president. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was in fact elected as the first Republican president, and the Southern states made good on their threat.

The Blunder Chain

The frightening novelty of secession, often threatened but never carried out before, was not responded to with attempted conciliation. The surprisingly long and damaging Civil War itself (1860–65), the first step in the Blunder Chain, was followed by the Reconstruction Era (to 1877), grossly mishandled on all sides, and the spirit-crushing Jim Crow laws that followed.

The Scars

The strong federal government of the United States—compared to that of, say, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (Note that not all scars from Blunders are universally viewed as negatives.)
The “solid South”—the near inability of Republicans to be elected below the Mason-Dixon line from the end of Reconstruction until the 1960s.
The economic backwardness of the South until that same decade.
America’s continuing entanglement with race relations.
Mostly negative economic, social, and cultural perceptions of Northerners about Southerners, and vice versa.

The 2007 Cartoon-Sign Scare in Boston

The Continuing Stress

Along with many other issues facing cities in the US Northeast in the winter of 2006–07, Boston city government was in the throes of dealing with a controversial public works project, an automobile tunnel under downtown Boston. Called “The Big Dig”, it was not only overdue and over its multibillion-dollar budget, but in 2006 it had become a high profile scandal when parts of it fell down and killed a motorist.

The Dig had become so stressful for Boston city government that it had called in outside help to do damage control.

The Novel Event

On the night of Sunday, January 30th, 2007, in high traffic areas of downtown Boston twenty odd-looking battery-powered plastic signs appeared, part of a low-budget guerrilla marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, based on a cable-TV cartoon show.

The Blunder

In nine other major US cities, the signs had been looked upon as a curiosity or gone unnoticed by officials, and no unusual action was taken.

But in Boston, one citizen’s inquiry to a Transportation Authority policeman soon led to a response by multiple emergency vehicles and the bomb squad. Officials found the novel signs, with their identifiable power sources, their circuit boards with exposed wiring, and their electrical tape, to be unsettlingly similar to the IEDs being used in Iraq. Traffic was shut down in many high volume parts of the city for a half day as the signs were examined to determine if they were harmless “hoaxes” or something more sinister.

The Blunder Chain

The city arrested the two men who were paid to put up the signs. They were eventually let off with community service and a public apology.
Turner Broadcasting divided $2 million between the Boston police and the US Department of Homeland Security to cover emergency expenses.
Despite a lack of citizen Panic in any of the other nine cities involved, after the Boston scare officials in some of those cities required lists of the sites where signs had been placed and attempted to confiscate them, usually with less than complete success. A few complained publicly that the signs had been placed irresponsibly.
The long-time head of the Cartoon Network stepped down from his presidency “in recognition of the gravity of the situation”.

The Scars

Months later, city officials were still demonstrably worried. In an April 2007 press conference, the mayor of Boston was standing solidly behind the Blunder. He urged his people to boycott the movie, scheduled to open in the area that weekend. Other Boston officials asked about their feelings on the matter responded with “No comment.”
“Banned in Boston” gained new meaning. Its citizens could expect to live with fewer quirky things and/or more paperwork. But, Boston being a college town, the bomb squad was still kept busy investigating pranks such as a pile of rocks placed in a soccer field on the MIT campus. As usual in such cases, this would affect low-budget experimental projects much more than high-budget, low-risk undertakings.

The War on Drugs

In 1969 President Nixon started what he called the War on Drug Abuse. While it hasn’t yet passed the Anglo-French Hundred Years War in duration, it’s worth pointing out that there were several multi-year interruptions in the 116 years of that medieval conflict.

The Continuing Stress

In 1969 President Nixon was still trying to extricate America from the Vietnam War. Inflation from the fiscal policies (“We will have both guns and butter!”) of LBJ, his predecessor, was rising and worrisome.

The Novel Event

The Generation Gap, arguably spawned in protests against the war, was in full flower. Young people were, as in every generation, making choices in entertainment and fashion that deeply upset their elders. In the later ’60s these included movies, music, short skirts, long hair (especially on males), free love, and recreational drug use. Unlike some previous generations, the Baby Boomers coming of voting age presented their choices as politically relevant, and many proclaimed “Don’t trust anyone over 30”.

Then as now, nearly everyone with any power in national government was significantly over 30.

The Blunder

The Nixon Administration decided that their drug abuse was at the root of young peoples’ politico-social unrest. Therefore, it was important to stop drug abuse. A War on Drugs was declared.

Most Baby Boomers admitted that psychoactive drugs could be abused, just as alcohol was abused by many of their parents, but strongly denied that their own recreational use met that threshold. The authorities disagreed, and the laws that they vigorously enforced and the anti-drug programs they launched failed to match user perceptions. The Boomers saw attacks by “the narcs” as persecution, leading them into even more severe disenfranchisement than normal for older teens and people in their early twenties.

Despite the War, American demand for illegal drugs has continued to rise and branch for over four decades now.

The Blunder Chain

Oddly, the original Blunder has continued against a threat whose novelty wore off decades ago. Even more strangely, those originally persecuted, the Boomers, have aged into strongly supporting the Blunder, even though impartial observers have repeatedly demonstrated that the War on Drugs is lost.
The War developed a tactic of mandatory minimum sentences for drug users, notably more against crack cocaine users, heavily black and poor, than against the more affluent and whiter uses of powder cocaine. The widespread liberal rejoicing that this disparity had been partially removed in 2011 is as weird as any other dispatch from this war zone.
Between the counterproductive disenfranchisement of otherwise law-abiding drug users and the useless expenditure of billions of dollars and law-enforcement hours, the War on Drugs has become the spawning ground for massive corruption, violence, and arbitrary trampling of civil liberties by government officials. These kill government credibility, which amplifies disenfranchisement.

The Scars

The disenfranchisement of large parts of American society over illegal-drug issues goes on to this day.
A disproportionate percentage of our society is in jail, in prison, or on parole.
Because of the growing violence caused by disenfranchising drug users, police must act more like occupying soldiers than community service people.
The illicit drug market spawns violence and corruption in America and abroad—more on the latter below.
Draconian drug property seizure laws have trampled Rule of Law and civil rights while encouraging corruption; such seizures are now a significant profit center for police departments.
The War has produced collateral damage in other countries as well. The disenfranchisement caused by profitable crime has spread to other countries that supply drugs to the US, such as Colombia and Mexico.
Mexico’s governmental attempts in the 2000s to stop this disenfranchisement—to take its country back from the control of narcotraffickers—have by 2012 had few positive outcomes. Since 2010, drug lords have attacked military bases!
For decades, tens of thousands of Colombian farmers looking to make a living by cultivating profitable crops have been deeply and chronically disenfranchised under a shadow government of narcotrafficking revolutionaries, sustaining an essentially permanent countryside insurrection.