STREET DOGS

We can’t look at history to tell us what might happen next. We can ... there use history is a historical as a guide map, to”predict says the kind of behaviours people are susceptible to when faced with a similar event. And that’s where Morgan Housel at Collaborative Fund. “It’s World War 2.”

Historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in 1952: “The war crisis brought together as never before the pure scientist, the applied scientist, the manufacturing executive, the military officer, and the government administrator, and put them into a partnership which mightily affected their future understanding of one another. The physicist or chemist who had been cloistered in a university laboratory, and had taken a special pride in paying no heed to the possible practical application of his findings, was thrust into emergency work of the most lethally practical sort, and hauled off to consult with generals and admirals and bureaucrats and engineers and manufacturers; and these others acquired a new respect for his scholarly ardour, now suddenly so vital to them.”

Charles Fritz, who spent years studying the psychology of disasters, said disasters bring people together in calm solidarity.

As Sebastian Junger said in his book Tribe: “Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a ‘community of sufferers’ that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face existential threat, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed by what they are willing to do for the group.”