Human reactions to collective pain

Expression

In 1985, when the September earthquake occurred, I was living in Mexico City and coordinating a theatrical acting workshop for young people my age. The five or six people who were part of it immediately agreed to create a play about the tragedy. We told ourselves that our job as artists was to help lift not only the urban debris but also that which had remained inside us, letting out the ghosts trapped there. A few days later, our project attracted a dozen more people. Finally, we were eighteen members willing to rehearse night and day to share with others our way of seeing, feeling, and expressing the present pain. The work, which we called “7:22” (when the earthquake had already ended and only the collapsed reality remained in our hands), is a remembering of what occurred.

In that play, a character who represented an alter ego of me appeared getting dressed to go direct his theater workshop when the tremor started. With terror, he saw the walls and the lamps move, but finally, the stillness returned, and the character went out into the street. The neighborhood, with elegant and resistant houses, was intact; however, he soon learned that there had been deadly landslides not far away. His conclusion was terrible (a kind of self-criticism that alerted me to my indifference): “The earthquake did not pass through my neighborhood. Only the tremor… and it was very short!”

Untimely scientific classifications

It seems easy to forget or ignore the tragedies when they have not touched us personally (apparently). However, the fear that the possibility of being a victim awakens in us usually stays under the skin like an animal hidden among the stones, ready to jump at the first ray of sunlight. Some have called this recovery of memory, this intense emotional reaction, in the case of earthquakes, tremophobia (phobia of tremors). Still, UNAM experts invalidate this term, arguing that the fear of dying in an earthquake cannot be considered a phobia, a mental disorder. “Nowadays,” they add, “we tend to pathologize everything in our daily lives and to classify normal phenomena as diseases.” Like so many other times, scientific classifications allow mental hygiene that tends to neutralize our experiences. Emotional asepsis, we could call it. Could it be that in this way -by classifying it- we can contemplate our terror as something objective, something more or less external and manageable? The illusion, perhaps, is that human nature can be treated and even cured and that it is possible to neutralize our memories and anesthetize the fear of dying, as well as the pain that the cruel death of our fellow men awakens in us.

Healthy distance, no denial

In the theater (and in art in general), our experience combines with others. Upon assuming a character, the actor embodies someone who is like them but is not them. The actor is not “really” experiencing what they are living for a couple of hours with all their body. Yet that small distance allows them and the viewer to identify with the character and “live” the performance profoundly. Once it is over, they sensitively return to the life they have in reality and be empathic with those around them. Every union demands a distance; the whole of humanity is nothing but a network of small distances that separate us and unite us.

However, that distance, that tension between being similar and different, must not exceed certain limits. In Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, the protagonist is an old English consul, an alcoholic, lost in Cuernavaca in the 1930s. Stumbling, he floats under the blazing sun, sweating among the members of a Day of the Dead procession. He passes by a man lying dead or unconscious; neither he nor we know. Among the crowd dragging him along, no one cares about that body, and no one does anything. Upon seeing the man, the protagonist feels that he must stop and do something, but he gets carried away by the mob. He ends up losing him (yes, the bad thing about conscience is that it requires us to act). At the end, when his own corpse lies at the bottom of a ravine next to some dogs, only the trees lean over him, pitying.

Complete amnesia

In her short story, Everything Happens, the American author Sarah K. Viatt imagines a horrifying scene: two months after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, another plane with more than two hundred passengers crashes on the city streets. Some people run on fire through the streets, which are also on fire. The news is released immediately by all media. It is the second worst air tragedy in the United States, yet people forget about it as the weeks and months pass. After a year, everyone remembers the September attacks “as if it were yesterday,” but they have erased that plane crash from their minds, which killed 260 passengers, among them children, men, and women, and another five bodies on the ground. The protagonist, the narrator of the events, believes this might have been only a dream and has to check the internet to see if it happened. In the end…

Dear reader, forgive me if I have led you into a trap. The story “Everything Happens” does not exist, nor does its author. The event I narrate above is real and one that most people have forgotten. On November 12, 2001, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed over the New York neighborhood of Queens one minute after taking off for Santo Domingo. Now it no longer matters whether or not the event was linked to the attacks on the Towers. The immediate oblivion, total denial, and amnesia were responsible for removing all importance. I spent a lot of time disturbed to see that no one around me remembered it. And yes, I had to look it up on Wikipedia to keep thinking it was not a dream. Here is the link.

Let others resolve it

A widespread reaction to the pain of others is to leave the solution to others, for example, to the authorities. Undoubtedly, this attitude can be correct when it requires efficiency. Still, it is not good to go to the extreme of delegating all responsibility to the authorities; our sensitivity and memory can be evaded. This is equivalent to forgetting oneself. Although it seems ridiculous, it must be repeated: no healthy form of social organization can do without people. Today vertical organizations still prevail, where decisions are always made by the same official or the same individual, which tends to standardize and completely ignore the role of people. Knowing that they are expendable, people choose to forget. However, everything forgotten without following a healing process will resurface sooner or later. The authority figure must be seen as a representative, whom, for the sake of efficiency, we let act, without this meaning that we forget the pain of others is our responsibility. Going back to the 1985 earthquake, I remember many people criticizing the crowds that swarmed around the disaster areas. “Let the authorities do their job,” they said. Don’t get in the way!” Indeed, the concern of those who spoke in this way was legitimate. Yet, experience has told us that the spontaneous reaction of civil society, which some describe as morbid, can be much more helpful than the indifference of those who let others solve everything.

With all its improvised and throwaway chatter, social media is likely far better than all forms of pseudo-hygienic indifference.

Person and crowd

We are not speaking, either, of making an indiscriminate apology for the multitudes. People are barbaric sometimes. We all remember some examples from yesteryear or recently. Helping others often means daring to break out of the inertia of the group to act. That means bravely breaking the regulations that require one to delegate personal responsibility to others. Daring to be the exception has its risks (one, without a doubt, is realizing that you are wrong). But we are continuously evaluating the possibility of taking such risks. Without a doubt, we must do it if our conscience dictates it clearly enough.

If acting wrong is confrontational, letting forgetfulness dig deep under the skin can be catastrophic. The typical mob that acts irrationally, as if by influence, is nothing more than an accumulation of individuals who suddenly recover the memory of a great pain that lies under their skin and respond in an overflowing manner, like a river ready to quench all thirst.

However, the dilemma is not necessarily between being the individual exception (the only hero), joining a rampaging crowd, or being led by a leader who seizes all the rationality of the group.

Crowds have often been shown to achieve nearly perfect spontaneous organization. Natural leaders often emerge in it, whom everyone follows with intelligence that unquestionably we can call “social.” This type of group frequently forms to help those in trouble (I was going to say, “to help other people,” but we have also seen people who organize themselves in this immediate and spontaneous way to save animals in danger).

Horizontality

Coming to the aid of others is not always a spontaneous action. You can prepare to do it. The fact that there is no culture of intervention solidarity in our societies does not mean we cannot promote it and better prepare ourselves for the moment when it is required. If you, the reader, have time, you can review a previous article in which I describe how we can organize ourselves to help others when action is imperative. However, at this time, I think the best recommendation I can make is to insist that there is always a way to get around the tendency to forget and delegate our responsibility to others. One way is to continue fighting to preserve artistic expression, ours, and those of others. Another is to stop reducing the human condition to scientific categories that, although useful in a professional context, neutralize empathy in daily life, even towards us. Another is to break the canons that prevent us from acting individually when necessary.

The latter example favors creating multitudes in solidarity to serve the common good. Finally, regarding the tendency to delegate personal responsibility to authority, I want to show an example of a horizontal organization that amazes me with its originality and effectiveness. In his book Earthquake in the Catholic Church, the historian and teacher Andrea Mutolo describes the action of a group of Jesuits who helped the victims of the Guerrero neighborhood, one of the most affected by Mexico City’s earthquake. The procedure they followed in an emergency was as simple as it was innovative (applied now, it would continue to be). One of its members describes it this way: “We had a slogan that was very disciplined: the first (of us) to arrive (at the scene of the emergency) assumed leadership of the (aid) process and made decisions that were not discussed; in any case, they were evaluated at a later time.” The idea of trusting those who make up a group, to the point of letting any one of them fully lead a process, seems to me to be revolutionary. I don’t know to what extent this example is currently applied within companies and institutions. Still, I do know that something very different is usually done. Even in cases of emergency, whoever arrives first on the scene tries to do the best they can provisionally, always waiting for their boss to come and make the final decisions. This often leads to reversing any progress already made. In the example I give, this is not the case: all the members of the action group are trained and empowered to make decisions and are respected, leaving the evaluation for the end. It appeals to collective learning, the sum (or instead, the multiplication) of individual responsibilities.

An ultimate fantasy

Last September 19, an intense earthquake shook the country’s central zone on that date a third time, and all kinds of superstitious and pseudoscientific reactions tried to explain the repetition. We’ll see when next September approaches how much these positions will have to be revised, but for now, I don’t think they should be given much importance. It seems to me that affirming, for example, that an attitude of fear and multitudinous alert is capable of shaking the continental shelves is just one more example of our confusion regarding human responsibility.

However, to end this article, I want to bring up just one of those versions. In reality, it seems like a story created with aesthetic intention. It is that, in the face of recurrent human amnesia, the Earth has insisted on repeating the date of the earthquake so that we do not forget it. I find it a moving idea, a poetic image. It shows how art appears to recover, even momentarily, what we have lost, in this case, the sensitivity to the pain experienced, ours and our fellow men.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints, and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.