When do disasters become catastrophes?

A good point here:

From a room called fear to a room called hope: A leadership agenda for troubled times

Disasters such as earthquakes, storms, pandemics, and financial meltdowns will always be with us and will always harm people and create economic hardship. As sociologist Lowell Juilliard Carr wrote in 1932, “the collapse of the cultural protections” that sometimes follow is what constitutes a catastrophe. The ability to bounce back and move forward evaporates when people freeze up and freak out—and when they lose trust and faith in one another, in leaders, and in rules, laws, and informal social agreements.

This is an important subject, yet we rarely discuss it.

Part of the reason is that any such discussion can easily look like victim-blaming. We become willfully blind and deliberately tongue-tied for fear of appearing callous and uncaring.

(The Randian objectivists don't help matters here. They are more than willing to blame the victims. They do so gleefully because it fits nicely into the deracinated narratives of their morality plays.)

Another reason that we ignore this vital subject is that the people who are most likely to discuss it are professionals. They are experts at disaster preparation and response. We should not be surprised that they ignore and downplay the vital role that volunteers and amateurs can play.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

Upton Sinclair 

In the gravest extreme – when the disaster is so massive that a community teeters on the brink of catastrophe – a phalanx of Apollos will not save the day. What is crucial are bands of “amateurs” led by public-spirited mini-Zeuses.

For more on Zeus/Apollo see here.

Professionals are all too frequently infected by the “hive mind” virus. They do no see communities as vital organisms that can help themselves. Instead, they see a mass of witless, emotional individuals who need enlightened rulers to control and help them.

Related:

The continuing appeal of the hive mind

The Hive mind revisited