CONCEPT
Elite Panic
The authorities' conviction that institutional collapse will produce chaos—a prediction almost always wrong, with the panic itself producing the disorder it was meant to prevent.
Elite panic is
Solnit's term, developed across her disaster research, for the phenomenon in which institutional authorities—government officials, corporate executives, media—respond to the collapse of normal order with predictions of chaos, looting, and violence that prove almost entirely unfounded. The actual population behavior in disasters is overwhelmingly cooperative. The predicted chaos, when it occurs, is more often produced by the authorities' response to the imagined chaos than by any actual disorder. In New Orleans after Katrina, National Guard troops were deployed to prevent looting that was, in many documented cases, residents sharing supplies from flooded stores. The military response to imagined disorder produced the disorder it was meant to prevent. Elite panic reveals a deep distrust, among those who control institutional power, of the population's capacity for
self-organization—a distrust that justifies concentration of authority and preemptive suppression of the spontaneous cooperation that disasters demonstrate is possible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Elite panic in the AI context takes the form of calls for restrictive governance justified by the