Looting at Ground Zero

While the pious among us continue to wag accusing fingers at the looters in devastated Tacloban City, it would be wise for them to pause and reflect on the universality of this seemingly perverse human instinct. For it is obvious that just as in individuals there is a tipping point in behavior when civility or restraint is dispensed with in favor of survival, power, or simply pleasure, a similar collective response may be found when a disaster (natural or manmade, such as war) strikes a town or a large modern city. This essay will limit itself to natural disasters.

When that terrible tsunami triggered by an undersea earthquake overwhelmed Japan’s northeastern coastal prefectures such as Fukushima and Miyagi in March 2011, the world was amazed at the stoic discipline of the survivors who turned to, instead of against, one another. The double whammy of violently shaking (9-magnitude) earth and up to 40-meter waves that slammed as far as 10 kilometers inland killed at least 15,000 people. The death toll would easily have been in the 6-digits had it not been for Japan’s vaunted preparedness for natural disasters.

Equally stunning was the bravery and patriotism of the technicians and scientists at the Fukushima nuclear reactor plant who never abandoned their dangerous facility, voluntarily sacrificing their lives in an attempt to prevent a catastrophic nuclear meltdown and explosion in their country.

But yes, even in highly disciplined, socially cohesive, racially homogenous and deeply nationalistic Japan, there were complaints about the slow government response and reports of looting, albeit few, harmless and scattered. Would you call people collecting edible goods washed onto the streets and shores by the tsunami, “looters”? Most were of that kind, except in the case of an ATM in the city of Sendai that appeared to have been pried open.

What most observers who were glued to the TV news found riveting were the long lines of people quietly waiting their turn at makeshift relief kitchens and depots in the devastated towns and cities. No shouting, no pulling and pushing. In short, there was no breakdown in the social order, unlike in Tacloban after Supertyphoon “Yolanda,” where a mood of anarchy and abject despair appeared not long after the sea had receded from the land. This reality highlights  the difference in cultural and environmental conditioning between the two peoples: Japan with its long tradition of social discipline, deference to authority, strong nationalism and values such as the Bushido-Samurai legacy, and the Philippines, a young, developing nation (a “soft state,” to borrow Gunnar Myrdal’s old term) with a deep, pervasive culture of corruption, a constantly bickering, griping and divided population, and a “kanya-kanya,” “bahala na” mentality—in short, a country where nationalism is still in a weak, confused, formative stage and not yet a way of life.

That explains the marked difference in crowd behavior on Day 1 between Japan’s ravaged centers of population and Tacloban, where the local media described many survivors as looking like “zombies” walking aimlessly in the destroyed city. The great majority of the Japanese tsunami-earthquake survivors demonstrated to the world an inordinately high tipping point.

Calamities that struck other developing countries—such as the great earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 that killed as many as 200,000 people and the destructive earthquake and tsunami that shook and overwhelmed the coast of Chile in March of the same year—resonate in the Philippine experience. Like Tacloban, both countries needed strong military and police intervention to save them from anarchy and total collapse. But Tacloban’s looters were meek compared to the widely reported rampaging, machete-wielding gangs in Haiti and Chile.

Hurricane “Katrina” provides another interesting insight into human mass behavior in a highly urbanized, industrial behemoth, the United States. When Katrina overpowered the protective levees in the New Orleans area with 19-foot storm surges in August 2005, up to 80 percent of the city’s estimated 1.3 million residents had already been safely evacuated. But it didn’t take long before widespread looting and mob rule strained the social order in the city’s flooded places, prompting the state leaders and Washington to call in 6,500 of the National Guard to augment the local police force in restoring peace and order.

That the world’s lone superpower had to use armed force to pacify its unruly citizens to avert a major breakdown in the social order of the New Orleans area reflects the weakening fabric and deterrent of moral law and custom in America. Divisive issues such as the Vietnam War, race, the economic slump and national deficit, illegal immigration, healthcare, etc. have undermined the once formidable American resolve. Those debilitating issues softened up the psyche of the people of New Orleans long before Katrina was spawned in the Gulf of Mexico.

In retrospect, there is a close likeness among these disparate natural disasters involving peoples and countries of different race, power, and size, and nations with varied political, economic, social, and cultural histories.

The unifying thread is that the veneer of human civilization is relatively fragile (with the notable exception of Japan), and can rupture with the right weight and stress bearing down on moral law, custom, and tradition, the bulwark of order and civility whenever governmental authority is impotent or absent during a disaster or great crisis.

Narciso M. Reyes Jr. ([email protected]) is a former journalist and diplomat. He holds an MA from Georgetown University.