Don’t Panic?
Is the most effective way to get one or many people to do exactly that.
Like in Douglas Adams book “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” the Hitchhiker’s Guide displaced Asimov’s “Encyclopaedia Galactica” to become a best seller because it had the words “Don’t Panic” in large friendly letters on the cover.
At the start of the current pandemic many governments implored their citizens to not Panic Buy essential items and groceries -which resulted in exactly this happening with associated waste when consumers exploited all possible channels to panic buy. The beneficiaries being online retailers and not society as a whole.
Some people never learn from experience however, this week Boris Johnston implored the Great British Public of Brexit Britain to avoid panic buying petrol — which is exactly what happened and further accelerated the probability of rationing for everything in Europe’s newly “Failed State”
Stopping panic by not starting it, is the obvious solution, but when failure beckons this is not straightforward.
I was greeted by mountains of toilet paper in my supermarket who deliberately overstocked their shelves to supress their customers panic buying instincts.
Newton’s third law in 1687 stated to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction which is fundamental to space travel for getting a spaceship off the ground and to get any object to move from its static state.
Thanks to Newton’s third law we learn in business and society, that the progressive slow application of force contains the panic. For example when a business is failing, death by a thousand cuts is best approach to maintain operations, this is often referred to as gradualism or “creeping normality” , where essential workers continue to support the business until it closes.
A essential ingredient to avoiding general panic is trust, if employees, customers and citizens believe what they are being told they will remain engaged and avoid panic which is generally selfish and generally results in maximum collective and collateral damage.
In politics we see the consequences of this when governments say they “follow the science” but the individual politicians do the opposite and lose trust of their people — look at the global Covid vaccination stats as evidence for this, many of the worlds richest countries failing to protect their populations when their leaders followed right wing ideologies for their personal benefit rather than for those they were elected to lead.
Changing direction once a country is committed to a belief is nearly impossible, good examples being WMD in Iraq and Brexit in Britain. This is due to self-justification which kills our ethical compass incrementally. The solution is generally the collective panic of revolution or the creeping normality of democratic elections which results in a change of government.
