Disaster
from Crimethinc's Harbringer #5

“Disasters bring people together, imparting a common context and project. In this suddenly opened and democratized atmosphere, individuals whose lives were formerly separated identify with each other. This sense of community offers intimations of a different kind of society, turning calamity into a harbinger of better things. Disasters are often the crucibles of millenarian and revolutionary movements: in such extremes, people experience the broad possibilities of life and subsequently set out to realize them.”
-National Research Council Committee on Disaster Studies, Convergence Behavior in Disasters: A Problem in Social Control

Yes, birth rates increase immediately following disasters, just as the rate of natural death declines during them. People don’t often die of old age—that is to say, boredom—in the midst of catastrophes. Life, however precarious, is worth staying awake for; in fact, it’s never tasted so sweet. The urgency of emergency provides just the spice that the constant low-intensity stress of daily life never could.

But what about the people who do die in disasters? It’s true that people lose their lives in heat waves, flash floods, and airplane hijackings; they also die in automobile collisions, workplace accidents, of drug overdoses and heart attacks and lung cancer—and, in unprecedented numbers, alone and forgotten in rest homes. The really strange thing is that, as a society, we fixate so fearfully on disasters, when everyday life is statistically more dangerous to us; and that, at the same time as we fear them, we find them so fascinating. To get to the bottom of this, we must reexamine both disasters and their supposed opposite, normality, and figure out which is really which. Let’s begin by looking at disasters from the dissident perspective, through the forbidden eyes of the secret part of each of us that rejoices in them.

Disaster as Interruption

It’s a public secret: disasters are exciting. Trying as they may be, we come alive in them. In our “normal” lives, we accommodate ourselves to the smallness of what seems to be the world, and that accommodation becomes, itself, a prison. Disasters throw everything into disarray and into question: the wide world reasserts that anything is indeed possible, and we find ourselves tossed out of our prisons, ready or not, shivering on the sidewalk before the ruins. In these new conditions, we can become heroes, work and witness miracles, suffer tragedies rather than mere indignities; we find ourselves fully engaged, thankful for each other and everything we have, even for what we have lost. Danger and distress do not always arrive uninvited; to trade one’s tiresome old fears and frustrations for new and compelling ones can be a real relief. In the wake of a disaster, everything has weight and meaning—tears and laughter both come easily, and no one knows for sure what will follow next. Afterwards, many find it difficult to readjust, to resign themselves again to all that knowing.

Disasters deliver the equality law promises but fails to fulfill. When disaster strikes, a boy in a wheelchair is no less than a haughty executive: the two watch the burning high rise side by side. Outsiders and outcasts can find themselves elevated to positions of prestige and approval—indeed, they may be the only ones prepared for the situation: when the Is evaporates, people who have invested everything in it must rely on those who have spent their lives pondering the Could Be. Skills that seemed specialized and irrelevant—fighting riot police, or surviving in the woods—suddenly become essential for everyone, and dissident futures the pragmatic once dismissed as impossible take over where the former chains of cause and effect leave off.

Disasters render the social facts that comprise reality negotiable; abrupt freedom takes the place of hackneyed choice. Lost hikers teach themselves to start fires with wristwatches, errand-running mothers lift automobiles off children, docile airplane passengers commit cannibalism and are celebrated for it. When school is closed and the roads are impassable, when everything is up in the air, one is no longer at the mercy of routine, atrophying commitments, cowardice and inertia: complete self-determination, in the new and alien landscape of upheaval, is inescapable. Catastrophes are sometimes described as experiences of total liberation, heretical as such a notion is in our safety-first society. It’s no coincidence the Millennium referred to in so many religious traditions is to be ushered in by a phase of terrible destruction: the kingdom of heaven arrives through the smoke. That the notion of such an apocalypse—whether as nuclear war, final judgment, or total revolution—is so pervasive in our civilization suggests a popular fascination with extremes in which conventions no longer apply. Our preoccupation with danger and tragedy implies a barely disguised longing for risk and uncertainty. “What would you do if you learned you had only twenty four hours to live?” From inside our cubicles and confessionals, we can only envision total freedom and authentic living in the context of imminent destruction—so we do, constantly.

Here in the world of structure, safety, and routine, we know disaster only from afar, as spectacle: news reports, motion pictures, rumors. These representations serve a host of purposes, the foremost being intimidation: they keep us cowed, grateful for the protection of our noble leaders. The disaster we see through these screens, like the wilderness allegedly beyond the walls of civilization, is a nightmare in which life is short, brutish, and ugly. These portrayals also, more tellingly, serve an economic role: they cash in on the immense popularity of the apocalypse—vicarious living, through action movies and video games and the like, is bound to be in great demand in a society that stifles first-hand adventure. In the process, they teach the important lesson that the moments of truth we secretly pine for are distant, inaccessible, perhaps only fictional; certainly nothing we could participate in or, for that matter, precipitate. That is to say: those noble leaders are simply protecting us from ourselves! Or is it themselves they are protecting?

After all, where do our leaders fit in the anatomy of calamity? Airlifted in by private jet to address the mourners (and cameramen), they speak as if they suffer our own tragedies more than we do, but they’re not the ones who bear the brunt when something goes awry. Students of disaster tell us that while disasters can increase the opportunities for exploitation, they also reduce the motivations for it, at least among the population that experiences them; thus the only exploitation in disaster conditions is usually perpetrated by outsiders, profiteers who take advantage of the situation to fleece survivors. Our leaders are the profiteers of disaster; they rely on it—more precisely, on the terror the thought of it provokes—to maintain their power. Disaster works for them—especially if we never experience it ourselves, but only see it on television, in the papers, in our nightmares. In fact, these leaders are the ones endangering us—it is their policies which give us cancer and turn suicide bombers against us. Our protectors run the ultimate protection racket.

But are they protecting us? Once upon a time oil spills and shootings were considered disasters; today these are practically standard features of our society, built into the social fabric and accounted for in advance. They are not anomalies, but routines. Real interruptions in which the system breaks down, on the other hand, such as blackouts and bomb threats, are still described as disasters, whether or not anyone dies. Already harrowed by the vicissitudes of the system itself, we dutifully fear them, but those who have lived through such disruptions know how sweet it can be when Something Happens.

The essential quality of disasters as we know them is the break with the status quo; this is the one feature they all share. It is not destructiveness that sets disasters apart: the slaughterhouses, suicides, and collateral damages of Business As Usual take more lives than all the worst catastrophes combined, while many disasters don’t result in any deaths at all. If the casualties of all disasters were tallied and compared to those of “normal life,” disaster would look very safe indeed, just as the number of deaths and injustices that have resulted from people obeying authorities far outnumber those perpetrated by those who have broken laws. Yet there are some who live in horror of disasters while unflinchingly extolling the virtues of war: these, then, must be people who fear the boundlessness and unruliness of life but are quite at home with the orderliness of its opposite. War, in particular, is a safe ritual—it is the protector of the status quo, the reassertion of normality. It is no coincidence that the runaway disaster of September 11, 2001 was followed immediately by a series of wars—and which calamity has ultimately been the more bloody, assuming you count foreigners as human beings?

So only the coward fears disasters—that is to say, there is a cowardly part of each of us that would keep everything familiar, whatever the cost in lives and life. This is fear of the unknown in its purest form: it projects chaos, destruction, and death onto everything beyond the pale of the ordinary, projections all the more ironic in that they can only be modeled on that which is known. From this irony, we can conclude that those who most fear the unknown reveal in doing so that the world they know is a place of terror. It is precisely the terrorized, those caught in thrall to fear, who most dread to leave its territory. The free, the fearless, ready to live and all too aware of what is insufferable in the everyday, welcome new horizons, disasters included.

The Disaster as Permanent Condition

Wait—how could that be, that disasters are the apex of adventure, community, life itself? Does that mean that if we really want to live, we have to spend our lives as disastourists, quixotically chasing the few brief moments of upheaval destiny affords each of us, longing for the fleeting, borrowed wings of destruction and rebirth as we wade through years of deadening routine in the meantime? Is that practical, practicable, worthwhile? Does the woman fed up with her car payments and marriage really crave tornadoes and typhoons, or is she just desperate for an honorable way out?

Perhaps we have everything backwards here—maybe disasters aren’t so great after all, but the real Disaster, the worst one, is the Disaster we live every day: the emptiness of our full schedules, the trivia that trivializes us, the machinery that runs on rivers of blood. That would explain why we feel so free whenever something, anything, however dangerous or difficult, interrupts all this. Perhaps the excitement and immediacy that break out in emergencies are simply indications of a return to our natural state, in the break they herald from the full scale slow motion train wreck that is our society. If that is the case, then it is not disasters per se that are liberating—it is, rather, a question of perspective: a “disaster” that disrupts a life of constraint is experienced as a moment of liberation, when that “normal life” is actually Disaster in disguise.

Most of the disasters we really suffer from can be traced to this invisible Disaster, anyway. The destruction of rainforests and the ozone layer, holocausts perpetuated with biological weapons and smart bombs, even global pandemics like mad cow disease, anorexia, bulimia, depression—these would not be possible without centralized state and corporate power, and the meaningless busywork of billions that engenders it. To live with the unknown ahead of and around us, to struggle only with the “natural disasters” our ancestors faced, would almost be idyllic after all this.

Could we fight Disaster with disaster? If we stopped feeding its flames with our hard work and attention, if we ceased paying tribute, the Disaster would surely crash and burn once and for all. If this status quo is the ultimate Disaster, if it really is disorder and tragedy normalized as a system, no lower-case disaster could be worse. Interrupt the Disaster!

Some of us are already practicing this. We don’t live in the Disaster, but in encampments at its edge—yes, in a state of ongoing disasters and difficulties, but nothing compared to the misery of life in the Disaster area proper. We don’t fall for popular propaganda about disasters; we’re conducting our own experiments with them. We don’t have to wait for catastrophe to strike to enjoy its benefits—we can throw a disaster any time we like. And we are.

-Disastronauts Dilemma Goldman and Calamity Jane

The Disaster takes care of everything. That is: the Disaster ruins everything, by leaving everything intact.

We contemplate disasters from within the Disaster, their supposed opposite. From in here, they look frightening—everything does. Thinking of disasters, we always see them ahead of us: a gang of monsters around the bend, holding the future hostage. But in fact it is the present that holds our future hostage. The Disaster surrounds us, a desolation we live day after day—and it is this horror, not the unknown ahead but that which is the most banal and familiar, that we cannot concede, cannot confront. The guarantee that, unless catastrophe hits, everything will go on as is, every last injustice and humiliation included—what could be more terrible than this?

The Disaster is that there is no disaster. Only a real disaster could save us from the Disaster, which is the real disaster. We can learn a lot about the Disaster from what it says about disasters.

The Disaster needs the specter of disasters to play bad cop to its good cop; but whenever it has to let a bona fide disaster out of the cage, the Disaster endangers itself—for as soon as we establish an unmediated relationship to disasters, that specter is exorcised. It is only popular fear of disasters that keeps the Disaster in place, after all. When people recognize that it is not disasters but the Disaster they have to fear, the next disaster will put an end to it once and for all.

Nadia ——, quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s atlas of human suffering and inhuman repression The Gulag Archipelago, recalls the time when she was being taken to interrogation by an impassive, silent woman guard with unseeing eyes—when suddenly the bombs began to explode right next to the Big House and it sounded as if at the next moment they would fall directly upon them. The terrified guard threw her arms around the prisoner and embraced her, desperate for human companionship and sympathy in the face of the end. Then the bombing stopped. And her eyes became unseeing again. “Hands behind your back! Move along.”

That was a disaster that didn’t go far enough.