by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright September 2015
o A mother wakes up in the middle of the night and smells thick smoke. The mother successfully runs out of the burning house and is standing on the front lawn. She suddenly yells, "My baby!" and runs back into the house. So far, so heroic. But, as she was yelling "My Baby!", her baby was in the arms of her husband, standing beside her, and crying for her!
o A nation experiences a terrorist attack on a public landmark. In response it conquers another nation because it fears that other nation has weapons of mass destruction, or worse, is harboring terrorists. After the conquest it is determined that there were no weapons of mass destruction, no terrorists, and the evidence used to justify the attack was... "flimsy" is perhaps the kindest word to describe it.
These are examples of huge blunders caused by panic thinking. The goal of this section is to help you, the reader, identify when panic thinking is being engaged in around you, so that you can identify when a huge blunder is likely to be made. This won't help you much on predicting the exact nature of the blunder, but you'll sure know it when you see it being proposed or enacted.
Panic Thinking -- As the term is used in this section, is a very specific condition. It happens when a person, or community, experiences a situation that is both new and deeply threatening. (If the situation is a repeat situation and threatening, it is not the same. Responding becomes enacting a previously practiced drill, not a panic.) When when a panic is happening, the Judgment layer of human thinking must act quickly, which is something it does not usually do, and doesn't do well. To act quickly, Judgment thinking narrows down its focus and concentrates on getting just one thing done, and getting it done fast.
Because Judgment focuses down, it pays no attention to a lot of things that are going on around it, including things that are very important to solving the crisis at hand. As a result of that, the actions that a person takes while Panic Thinking often look like huge blunders when viewed from an outside, cool-headed, point of view. Sometimes the panicked person can see the error in retrospect, but often not, because the choice made at the time has a lot of emotion packed into it.) But, regardless of how stupid an action looks in retrospect, or to an outside cool-headed observer, it looks and feels very, very right at the time by the person making the choice. This is the hallmark of Panic Thinking.
Blunder -- Is the actions taken while a person or community is in the throes of Panic Thinking. As pointed out above, these actions look very right at the time to the person taking them. But to an outside observer they look very expensive and ineffectual. "How could you make such a choice?" accompanied by much headscratching, is the outside observer reaction to the choices made.
Panic Thinking is usually identified with the thinking that happens in a fast, personal crisis, such as escaping a burning building. It can happen in two other situations, too. It can happen in a long term personal crisis situation, such as when a person becomes a soldier and goes to war, and it can happen to a whole community. When a whole community agrees to do things that look seriously stupid in retrospect, it was in the grip of Panic Thinking when the decisions were being made. (Group Think is a term that deals with this same phenomenon, the phenomenon of a group of people agreeing on a course of action that turns out to be a huge blunder, and, in retrospect, was clearly identifiable as very risky at the time the choice was made.)
I will talk mostly about community level Panic Thinking in this essay.
The Blunder response to Panic Thinking can be broken down into five steps:
o The underlying stress on the community before the panic starts.
o The novel act which starts the Panic Thinking.
o The Blunders caused by the Panic Thinking.
o Being part of a Blunder Chain: A Blunder is a new way for a community to act, and so it can become a new threat. This new threat can create more panic and another Blunder, leading to a Blunder Chain.
o The lasting scars to the community that the Blunders cause.
It is this last item, the long lasting scars, that is the reason understanding Panic Thinking is important. The huge blunders and the long lasting scars from them can affect a community's fortunes for decades to a century.
These are the five steps, lets start looking at them.
First off, Panic Thinking happens because a community is afraid -- the community is under stress. In normal times, the normal community processes and the normal community leadership solve the community's problems satisfactorily. Every day in a community: roads and buildings are wearing down, people are growing older, weeds and trees are growing... a thousand-and-one things are happening. Every day in a community a thousand-and-one things are being taken care of.
But the world is not constant: things change. There are new business opportunities, there are natural disasters, there are political changes and business cycles. If the local leadership can adapt to these changes, then community stress stays low. If a problem becomes large and chronic, such as growing unemployment because the community has invested heavily in a declining industry, then stress level in the community rises.
As an example: If a retired coal miner dies of Black Lung disease in West Virginia, that is regrettable, but not stress raising because it is a well-known hazard of coal mining in West Virginia. Every person who goes into coal mining has seen people who are suffering from Black Lung, and everyone knows it is a risk they face. This is a normal stress and does not contribute to community panic.
If, on the other hand, many coal mines in West Virginia close because the market for coal crashes, and lots of people become unemployed, that stresses the community in a scary way. The people of the community become more susceptible to Panic Thinking.
Underlying stress can come from many sources. Some common ones are:
o natural disasters such as drought, famine and flood (But if they are recurring they will generate comparatively little stress. Responding to them becomes a drill, not a panic.)
o dealing with technology-related changes. These are often deeply disturbing because they change the have's and have-not's of a community. Transitioning from agriculture-based wealth to industrial-based wealth is an example of dealing with technology change.
o economic disasters, such as changes in markets which change demand for locally made products and cause long-term unemployment.
A community can become gravely stressed, but still not fall into Panic Thinking. It can weather the stress and recover. Another factor is needed for a panic. That second factor is a novel threat.
The Novel Threat is the trigger that will kick a stressed community into Panic Thinking. A novel threat is something that is both scary and a brand new way of threatening the community. San Francisco, for instance, is not going to panic if an earthquake hits it. It has experienced earthquakes, and it expects to have a "big one" again. An earthquake is not a new and strange threat in San Francisco. But, that same earthquake would be something brand new, and very scary, to a place such as Detroit, Michigan, which sits in a virtually earthquake-free zone.
In the 2010's the biggest and most famous example of a Novel Threat kicking a community into Panic Thinking is the US response to the 9-11 Disaster. The 9-11 disaster was novel because before 9-11 no one had ever experienced:
o a suicide plane hijacking
o flying a large commercial plane into a skyscraper (a smaller military plane had flown into the Empire State Building in the 1930's)
o collapsing a skyscraper from a plane crash (the military plane did modest damage)
o hijacking four large commercial planes simultaneously as part of a terrorist plot
o running a plane into The Pentagon
o killing thousands of New York emergency personnel in one hour (so many died that other buildings around the World Trade Center skyscrapers could not be saved)
o covering Manhattan with a cloud of noxious dust so that hundreds of thousands of disaster spectators where transformed into disaster participators.
o tens of millions watching a massive disaster involving planes and skyscrapers progress on live TV, and billions watching over and over again after the fact.
... and probably a few more. And this all came from the same disaster. It was all so new, and so scary!... It is not surprising that the US government and US community went more than a little "loopy" after experiencing this. That loopiness was Panic Thinking and the acts that followed were Panic Thinking Blunders.
Panic Thinking doesn't happen every time a community is stressed, nor does it happen every time a community encounters a new threat. But, the more a community is stressed, and the more scary a new threat is, the more likely Panic Thinking Blundering is to occur.
An example of an non-Panic response to a novel situation is the world's response to North Korea's testing of a nuclear bombs in 2006 and 2009. North Korea had been threatening to do this for a decade, and the world believed for at least half a decade before it happened that North Korea could do it. So, it was a novel event that was planned for. The world response to the North Korean announcement has been a textbook case of Sports Thinking rather than Panic Thinking. (Sport Thinking is my term for a drill: a well-reasoned, appropriate response. Think of a school practicing fire drills. I will often call this kind of response Sports thinking rather than a drill.)
Once again, to get into a case of Panic Thinking it is important that the threat be perceived as new and unexpected. If the threat is perceived as something that has happened before, then Sports Thinking kicks in instead of Panic Thinking. The community will respond with a tried and true solution, or a well thought-out new solution, rather than come up with a Blunder.
The first hallmark of a Panic Thinking Blunder is that it looks like a very right solution to the people who are implementing it at the time it is being implemented.
The words of a Panic Stricken leader might be something such as, "We have to do something, and this is a good solution! It is the best solution! And anyone who thinks otherwise is badly mistaken!"
Here is an example of some real words used.
Wed July 9, 2003 11:16 AM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Wednesday the United States did not go to war with Iraq because of dramatic new evidence of banned weapons but because it saw existing information on Iraqi arms programs in a new light after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction", Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light -- through the prism of our experience on 9-11."
The above was an example of a novel and scary event changing a person's point of view.
However, to contemporary outside observers the course chosen will look like a strange choice. (Outside in the sense that they are not panicked. Another term for non-panicked observers is "cool heads".) To the outsider the plan of action being agreed upon by those in panic will look too risky at best, and "just plan bonkers" at worst. When these outside observers try to point out the problems with the plan-that-is-about-to-become-a-Blunder, they are shouted down by the insiders who are panicked. (Some of the insiders may later agree that the plan was a bad one, but that agreement will come long after the decision is made and implemented. At the time the decision is made, all the insiders will back it enthusiastically.)
The second hallmark of a Panic Thinking Blunder is that the Blunder becomes hugely expensive. Not only is the original plan not well thought out, but the provisions for what to do if the plan doesn't work right, are even more poorly thought out. When the plan doesn't go right, there are no good fallbacks available. The mistake mushrooms and becomes hugely expensive.
The Blunder will often become hugely famous as well. This happens because the mistake is expensive, usually spectacular, and because emotions are always running high when Panic Thinking is involved.
A panic thinking Blunder is spectacular, which means that it is novel, too. If it is also threatening, it sets the stage for yet another Panic Thinking episode... and yet another panic thinking Blunder. Chains of Panic Thinking Blunders are common in history. One such chain of blunders would be:
The unification of Germany and Italy in the 1860/70's and were novel events in Europe's history, and diplomats had trouble figuring out how to deal with them. This novelty set the stage for...
World War I, which turned into a Blunder as it transformed from a quick War of 1870-style confrontation into a long, damaging coalition war. It was also such a new experience for Europe and the world that it set the stage for....
Worldwide social unrest in the 1920's. Things such as the German, Austrian, Russian and Turkish Revolutions in Europe and Prohibition in the US. This new kind of unrest set the stage for....
The Great Depression in the early 1930's. The world's unrest continued, but in a new and different way, which set the stage for....
The rise of totalitarianism in the late 1930's, a new style of rulership which, thanks to the communications revolution of radio and movies, was both more public-oriented and more violent than anything mankind had previously experienced. Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin became leaders, which set the stage for....
World War Two in the early 1940's -- a different style of war than WWI, which set the stage for....
The Cold War in the 1950's -- with yet a different style of confrontation and rulership.
All of these Blunders have in common that they were huge mistakes, and that as the Blunder played out, it became a serious threat to other people -- a new kind of threat. Because each was a new threat, the response to each was poorly thought out (a Panic Thinking response) and the new response became yet another Blunder.
Blunders change history. They change history by causing huge social scars -- lasting changes to how a community feels about some issues or how a community moves through history. The Blunders happen because people are deeply afraid, and conventional solutions tried before the Blunder haven't stopped the fear. The Blunder doesn't solve the problem, but it changes circumstances so much that it can distract people from the original fear.
Fixing a Blunder can be difficult. Even though it is expensive and it doesn't work, a community will often support a Blunder solution for a long time. They do so because they don't want to be afraid again. This presents a huge challenge to those who try to fix the Blunder. They get nowhere if they say, "The solution we have in place now is a rotten fix to the problem, lets try fixing it a new way..." They get nowhere because the community says, "Let the sleeping dog lie. We don't want to go through that hell again." On the other hand, Blunders often fix themselves: Germany, Italy and Japan fixed their fears by losing wars.
These are the five steps of a Panic Thinking Blunder. The case studies sections will have numerous examples.
Panic Thinking is a common way for a community to respond to a situation that is both novel and stressful. Having an element of new threat is important for Panic Thinking to develop. If the threat is not new, sports thinking rather than panic thinking will happen, and a huge blunder is not likely.
The hallmark of Panic Thinking is that the solution the community comes up with to deal with the threat is wacky -- it is both expensive and it doesn't work well. But, it is seen as a good solution at the time it is implemented, by those that are implementing it, and by the community they are leading. Some of those around the implementors may not agree with the solution, but they are shouted down by the implementors, and the community.
Implementing the solution creates a Blunder -- a huge and expensive mistake for the community.
Making a Blunder is novel and stressful, which means one Blunder can create another Blunder, you can develop a Blunder Chain.
Even though a Blunder solution is a bad one, it may not be corrected right away, and when it is corrected it is usually corrected slowly, quietly and incompletely. A Blunder usually leaves long-lasting scars on a community.
To see a Blunder coming, look for a community that is under higher stress than normal, then watch for that community to suffer a novel threat. In trying to cope with the novel threat, the community will come up with a Blunder Plan, and the rest, is history.