How disasters can rebuild your faith in humanity
On "Disaster Utopias" and the spontaneous mutual aid systems that spring up in the face of chaos.
This is part of an ongoing course on mutual aid. You can read the other articles here.
When I was 12, a tornado ripped through my hometown in Ohio, killing four people and destroying or damaging hundreds of homes and businesses, as well as damaging our high school. Naturally, school was canceled the next day, and with the power out, my mom piled us into the car and we drove to the homes of friends to see if they were okay and if they needed help.
We picked debris off of lawns before being told they needed help at a local church, which was collecting food, clothes, toys, and other goods for people who had lost their homes the night before. The place was packed, with hundreds of people delivering goods and dozens of us sorting them.
The power in most places was still out, and my buddy Jake later told me that someone on his street had realized that there was a bunch of meat in their fridge and freezer that was going to spoil in the heat. So they pulled their grill into the cul-de-sac and had their kids run around, knocking on doors, to tell people there were free burgers and hot dogs. Other neighbors brought out their meat and groceries, and what started as a necessity quickly morphed into the best block party in living memory. “I’d never seen that many kids playing outside before,” he told me.
What we experienced in 1999 was a catastrophe, but it was also a demonstration of something I would experience again, two years later, on 9/11, and again in 2012 in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy: It was a disaster utopia, a moment of crisis where normal social constructs collapsed, and when, in shock and in grief, people reached out to help each other, and found that humans weren’t so awful as they supposed.
This phenomenon is universal — it can be tracked through centuries, in all sorts of different crises. And it is perhaps the best proof we have that humans, at their core, are inherently cooperative.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Better Strangers to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.