Stockpiling for resilience
The world has turned upside down. All around us, it feels like our environmental and biological systems are simultaneously rebelling. Borders are being decimated by war, weather, fire and sickness, rendering man-made demarcations all but useless. We have begun 2020 as if mid-way through a Margaret Atwood novel and after a long and dystopian summer of orange skies and facemasks, it’s fair to say we are all freaked out.
Fear, and its foot soldier, panic, is a legitimate and completely natural response to insecurity and crisis. As a human emotion, fear can trump hope with ease. I am struggling to recall the hope I felt for 2020, at the start of our beautiful summer, what seemed like an eternity ago.
The propensity to stockpile when we feel scared and unsafe is both a primitive and conditioned reaction in our consumer driven society. It makes us feel safer. While the current panic buying of toilet paper in Australia has prompted some truly inspired humour, it would be pure comedy only if it wasn’t so sad, for so many reasons.
The most basic reason, of course, is the simple fact that we don’t need to stockpile toilet paper. There really is enough to go around. Secondly, there’s a broader context to consider. The World Health Organisation estimates that around two billion people around the world still don’t have access to a toilet, let alone toilet paper, at the best of times. About four billion people in total, or two thirds of the world’s population, don’t use toilet paper. When I was growing up in India, a bucket of water was actually considered a much more hygienic option.
When the ‘haves’ fill their trolley, the underbelly of social inequality is left even more vulnerable and exposed. It highlights what others have not. The elderly, disabled, chronically sick and marginalised; those without the ability to stock up on two weeks food. Not to mention the 25,000 people that currently die of hunger around the world, every single day. Fear may be a natural response to insecurity, but it’s a privilege in itself to feed it.
Normal biases always deepen during periods of great uncertainty, the desire to sort the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Racism and xenophobia escalate during tough economic times, or after terrorist attacks. Covid-19 has already severely impacted the social and economic wellbeing of many Asian communities, in Australia and around the world. It’s the ‘yellow peril’ all over again, the existential threat of the ‘other’.
The consequences of this racialisation will almost certainly be more far reaching than coronavirus itself. If left to run rampant, our continued panic is going to allow governments to separate us, to narrow our social and civic zones further. It’s fascism’s wet dream, playing out before our eyes.
To survive we have to allow our minds to expand beyond our fast contracting borders, to reframe our instinctive response to uncertainty and use the opportunity of impending system collapse to create healthier and more positive reconfigurations of society. It’s not an impossible ask, it’s in our DNA.
As the psychologist Richard Crisp writes in his book The Social Brain: How Diversity Made The Modern Mind, “humans who were able to form effective collectives would stand a much greater chance of survival than those who decided to go it alone”, and were capable, thousands of years ago, of developing “distinct ‘coalition-building’ systems designed to build intercultural bridges, when it was more adaptive to do so rather than fight or fly.”
“There will have been situations in which only by working together could different tribes solve the survival problems they faced: for instance, pooling resources in times of famine… Such abilities would have been even more necessary in forging intercultural coalitions, because in intercultural activities of any kind one has to overcome a competing process — the brain’s automatic tendency to characterise outgroups as a threat.”
As we work individually and together to address the latest crisis of our times, the need for greater collective community resilience is inarguable if humanity is to prevail across and between traditional social groups.
Basic resilience can be found in self and mutual care, being kind and empathetic, looking after ourselves and others mentally and spiritually, online and in real life. These forms of care may not protect us from Covid-19, but they can protect our communities emotionally as well as physically. Research has shown that people who feel more connected to their communities can have stronger immunity than those who feel alone and lonely. Kindness really can make you feel better.
As I make my mental shopping list, I’m reminding myself to stock up on kindness and empathy and invest in the resilience of my family and friends. These profoundly human practices are intrinsically generative, abundant and inclusive. We may not be able to panic buy them at Woolworths, but on the plus side, they won’t run out.
