I don’t suppose I need to spend any time here describing what happened in South Korea over the weekend, when a crowd gathered for some sort of a Halloween festivity ended up trampling more than a hundred and fifty people to death, the majority of them women. I’m guessing everyone knows the basics of this disaster.
The whole thing seems shocking. South Korea is a prosperous, pretty well-governed nation. In addition, the culture instills a high level of discipline.
So what does it mean that a crowd in the well-ordered city of Seoul could suddenly get so disordered that more than a hundred people would die even though no one intended for it to happen?
It’s not like a mass shooting at a crowd at a concert in Las Vegas a few years ago. Given American gun laws, we understand how that can happen. Because all that is required is an individual with a particular crazy and murderous intention to arm himself, as our laws make it easy to do, with the firepower necessary to kill a lot of people in a short period of time. We may wonder how it is that a supposedly sane society would arrange its laws involving such arms so that any crazy person can become a mass killer. But given those much-discussed laws, there’s no mystery about the possibility of such an event. Even the likelihood that in a nation of over 330 million people, there will be enough people with such intentions to generate such mass-killings with some frequency.
But what happened in Seoul was not about intention. Rather, it was about disorder of a kind that no one wanted.
We can assume that the South Koreans have expended a reasonably high level of energy, and intelligence, on designing their spaces and their means of maintaining order in order to protect the safety of the citizens. Why did their resulting order not suffice to prevent this disaster?
When people get trampled, that is always a sign of disorder. Panic is generally one of the essential ingredients, as the collective organism of the panicky crowd spreads fear like a contagion, and what gets started is beyond the ability of anyone to control.
It seems safe to assume that the people making the relevant decisions didn’t want things to get out of control this way.
How did a situation involving some thousands of people became so disordered? Was it a fluke? Would an astute observer of the situation immediately before the stampede began be able to see that this was a dangerously fragile order? Or is this one of those things that’s a one-in-a-million, because of a cascade of improbable circumstances?
If the situation was clearly dangerous, what changes should have been made so such a death-dealing “accident” could not have happened? So, ideally, what changes should have been made so that the society would not be vulnerable to such a thing happening?
(Reports say that the number of security personnel was much lower than it had been for a sports crowd that was also in the thousands. If that was a misjudgment, or misexecution, what was the reason things didn’t get done right?)
On the other hand, if it was a hugely improbable occurrence, that couldn’t reasonably have been foreseen, and that happened only because of a cascade of unlikely things creating a freak circumstance, then it’s a reminder of the sheer uncertainty of the human condition, of how the world is likely a more dangerous place than we like to think.
We don’t drive as though we are concerned that a vehicle coming toward us in the other lane will plow into us. But I knew the husband of a woman who was killed when a big truck crossed over the meridian on the Washington Beltway and plowed into her.
The improbable sometimes wreaks havoc.
Was that any big part of the Seoul disaster?
Anyway, this wasn’t something I was prepared to see. I was shocked when I read the news bulletin, because in the world as I imagined it, that wouldn’t happen in Seoul, South Korea. (I’d have bet heavily, too, that Putin would never make such a blundering, disastrous, and all-around destructive choice as he did in invading Ukraine.)
The world surprises. Such surprises are clues to the incompleteness of our understanding of the human world.
- Surprises like how a fascist political party could rise to this much power in the United States.
- Surprises like how a lot of decent and intelligent conservative people can be led into a place where they believe the obviously false, and serve a political party that represents the very opposite of the values they profess (in all apparent sincerity) they hold sacred.
- And the surprise that disorder at a festivity in the South Korean capital could snuff out the lives of roughly a hundred and fifty people, most of them youngish, and most of them women.
It’s these surprises that dominate my attention.