Nickie Muir
"Remain brain-dead and ignore the problem."
Not as catchy as: "Stay Calm and Carry On" and unlikely to ever get printed on a mug. Hardly an efficacious response to anything but an unheralded fart at a dinner table really. And yet. It's the default mode of public engagement in local and national politics and to some of the biggest issues facing us as a species.
What is wrong with "Stop Everything and Panic Intelligently?" Panicking is, as John Ralston Saul pointed out in his book The Doubter's Companion, "a highly underrated capacity thanks to which individuals are able to indicate clearly that they believe something is wrong".
It's a sign of life, hope and individuality and the exact opposite of dependence on vested interest authority for solutions. The saddest indictment of soothing acceptance of a higher authority was the footage of the Korean school students being told to remain where they were, while the ship calmly carried on sinking. It should have come with a warning of"contains graphic and disturbing images of not panicking sufficiently". It's anyone's guess as to whether Kiwi kids who had been brought up on boats would have obeyed those orders. Perhaps it would depend on how often they'd got to practise thinking for themselves.
Furious at a querying small person about the reasons for some request and whether or not it was fair to be asked to do dishes/lawns/general respect for elders, I remind her to only question higher authorities that are not me. She should obey - without question and immediately because in this family we do fascism.
Control is more often the actual goal as opposed to fostering a feral and free-range thinking individualism. There may be some merit in the "my way or the highway" approach to getting the dishes done and everyone fed without shouting or infanticide. Certainly Churchill feared outbreaks of screaming panic and dissent when the original "Stay Calm and Carry On" posters were printed. In surgeons and airline pilots staying calm and carrying on is most definitely a good thing. I'm just not sure that it's a good modus operandi in general or should be applied to things like town planning or public policy especially in the face of convincing evidence from the international scientific community on climate change. We believe scientists when it comes to cancer and jet engines and yet vilify them if they say anything that might impinge on our lifestyle. Instead of the real experts we turn to a soothing political authority for leadership. The more out of control world and weather events become, the political elite will be ever more aggressively insistent on the value of staying calm and moving on.
Exactly what the parents of the 10,000 dead school children in Sichuan, China, in 2008 were told to do. Their protest about the real cause of the deaths, not the earthquake but the large-scale corruption by developers, shut down by threats and money. So no change. Hard to forget that the kids who survived were the ones who broke rank and the rules and ran when they'd been ordered to stay calm and carry on.