On rationality amid a crisis: Ellen Ripley and Chesley Sullenberger

You may notice a recurring theme here.  There is a mathematical distinction between your individual risk regarding coronavirus, and the current expectation of societal damage.  Your reaction, as a rational individual, should be tempered by that mathematical distinction.  To the degree that it is not, you are not reacting rationally.  See the Buchler-Gekko rule, and the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.  Put more simply, calm down.  That doesn't mean this isn't very, very bad, but at an individual level, calm down.  The distinction is a difficult one, unless you are accustomed to thinking in economic terms and dealing with paradoxes like the collective action problem, the tragedy of the commons, problems of preference aggregation like Arrow's impossibility theorem, and all that kinda wacky stuff with which I spend my professional life.  It is, however, necessary.

Anyway.  Rationality amid a crisis is hard.  It is vital.  I'll go further than that.  It is the most important thing in a crisis.  Movie action heroes generally make no sense.  Fun?  Maybe, but they make no sense.  However, let's transition to a good piece of science fiction movie history.  Alien.

Ellen Ripley is arguably the best hero in science fiction movie history.  Or, really, movie history, and to be clear, I'm going with the first Alien movie here.  I am willing to ignore Aliens, and every sequel since.  Ripley's part wasn't originally written for a woman.  It just didn't matter, so they cast Sigourney Weaver.  Alien was also a demonstration of the fundamental silliness of "the Bechdel test."  The Bechdel test is the question of whether or not a work of fiction has any scenes of two women conversing about anything other than a man.  Alien just barely passes the Bechdel test, from one scene with Ripley and Lambert.  What does this show?  It shows that the measure is stupid and simplistic, and you should ignore it because stupid, simplistic measures can't actually convey meaningful information.  Watch the damned movie.  Ripley is the best, and not because she just acts like a stereotypically male hero.  If that doesn't meet the underlying goals of Bechdel, then nothing will.  Foolishness.

Anyway, Weaver was great, helping to make Ripley great.  Why?

The alien kills everyone, in a locked-in-the-haunted-house scenario.  Everyone, except Ripley (and the cat).  The alien is scary.  And the thing is, everyone does get scared, including Ripley, but she is the one who deals with it and acts rationally.  By the time of Aliens, you see more of an action-hero Ripley, but in Alien, she's not a guns-blazing action hero.  And she absolutely does feel fear.  The reason she lives when everyone else dies is that she deals with the fear, formulates a rational plan, and acts rationally to implement the plan, and she has to fight to get those around her to recognize the need to do so.  But she does.  Despite being afraid, she doesn't panic.  She acts rationally.

Total badass.

You want a real-life example of someone dealing with a crisis and acting rationally?  Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger.  You probably remember him.  He was the pilot of a US Airways flight that experienced engine failure.  He stayed completely calm, acted completely rationally, and brought the plane to safety on the Hudson River.  No fatalities.  Why?  Because he did not panic.  He acted rationally amid a crisis.

How scared would you be?  How scared would I be?  I can't even begin to type it.  Chesley Sullenberger is the definition of "badass."  He acted rationally, and didn't panic.

The world is an odd place right now.  Congress just passed a $2 trillion stimulus package because we know the economy is in collapse, yet the collapse is so sudden that most of the people hard-hit by it haven't had time to feel it.  Three million people filed for unemployment in one week.  That's 1% of the total population of the country-- not 1% of the labor force, 1% of the total population, meaning that the denominator includes children, students, retired people...  We are just now watching the number of cases start to accelerate, but the hospitals have yet to be overwhelmed.  Businesses are shuttered, with questions about their long-term future, but again, that's long-term.  We haven't had time for people to feel the damage yet.  The picture of how bad this is has just started to materialize, without the pain at the individual level.

You know that feeling you get when you know you've just stubbed your toe, but before the pain kicks in?  Yeah, that.

Except, people are going to die, and the economic pain will be a lot worse, so comparing it to a stubbed toe is a crass analogy, but hey.  I gotta be me.  And if that's not why you're reading this blog, well... hi, there!  Hello!

So you can go outside, take a walk, and see children playing.  Grocery stores are idiosyncratically out of items until they are restocked, but for the most part, things remain calm and civil.  And the pain hasn't hit yet, neither economically nor medically.

Where is the panic?  The markets, obviously.  They've been going nuts, which is your reminder that you should plan for the long-term while ensuring that you have whatever cash you need on-hand given your time horizon.  Basic financial planning.  Me=broken record.  Of course, if you didn't do that ahead of time, now is when you pay the price, so I guess this isn't really helpful advice now, is it?  Sorry.  Next time, right?  This is me, doing a virtual finger-wag.

Where else?  Businesses... universities... lots of nuts-going in various attempts to plan for unknown contingencies.  Oh, the things I could say if I could say...  Someday.  Someday.

At the level of civil society, I have been pleased to see... I wouldn't necessarily say, "rationality," but at least lack of panic.  They aren't the same things.  The question will be how civil society holds up when the economic damage of weeks-long "stay at home" orders piles up, along with mass unemployment, questionable amelioration from the stimulus package, and I remain concerned about the long-term viability of supply chains if enough businesses either need to remain shuttered or if trade is disrupted.  That was why I wrote about Scalzi last week, and this is something sitting in the back of my mind.

Rationality is comparatively easy right now, at the level of civil society.  Of course, it's a lot easier for those of us who can work from home, have the money we need, and all of that.  Pressure will not build uniformly across civil society.  One way to look at the aid checks, unemployment extensions, health provisions and all of that is this:  do we try to preserve order and civil society as best we can?  Even those of us who are more privileged have a vested interest in that, to the extent that compassion is not a motivator.

Here, have a check.  It's on me.  Literally, as in, it's comin' out of my taxes.  Not that my capital gains are gainin' capital this year, but long-term thinking is the way to go.  Just keep it cool, everyone.

Anyway, this is a really big test.  There are plenty of people writing about how "we're all in this together," and blah, blah, blah.  No.  This is about rationality.  This is a test of civil society's capacity to avoid meltdown through panic.  So far, so good.  But the pain hasn't really started yet.

When it does, look to Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger for inspiration.  Coolest human being ever.

Or if you feel like you're trapped in a house right now, haunted or otherwise, be inspired by Ellen Ripley.