Social Fabric & Butterfly Effect
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Premise:
The initial ‘health’ status of the elements in a society (or community) is a crucial precondition for the community’s ability to withstand a variety of shocks, outbreaks, or natural disasters. This is known as community resilience, and a key element to be discussed in this article is the establishment of social connections.
Social Fabric:
This concept refers to the social elements (individuals, family structures, institutions), common beliefs, cultural practices, and their levels of cohesion in society, brought together by a web of bonds, values, norms, and connections that unite and strengthen its members.
The tighter the fabric is woven, the stronger the interactions among its members will be, contributing to their mutual prosperity and protection.
Therefore, the quality and good shape of the social fabric are essential conditions for the resilience of societies in the face of emergencies, as it determine how well a society or community can resist and recover from adversity, even emerging stronger (sustainable development)
Community Resilience:
This important concept is defined as the capacity, both as a process and an outcome, that its elements have, to adapt to challenges, withstand adversity, and recover from difficult life events such as disasters, outbreaks, or emergencies of most kinds. This is achieved by demonstrating the physical, structural, systemic, emotional, mental, and behavioural strength and flexibility necessary to adjust to external demands.
?The Effects of Social Isolation:
The drastic measures of social isolation and near-total shutdown of the global economy, implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, deeply impacted humanity. These measures have resulted in profound side effects, including increased rates of depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), especially among young adults, adverse health effects, disrupted education prospects, and financial hardships. These consequences have hurt specific societal sectors while affecting the population at large.
The effects of physical isolation imposed during the pandemic are being exacerbated in real-time by the continual influence of social media algorithms designed to maximise engagement. This, in turn, reinforces the creation of isolated virtual echo chambers. To compound matters, this trend may worsen with the increasing use of artificial intelligence to generate content within social media platforms.
Society is increasingly polarised along political and religious lines, with conspiracy theories and radical viewpoints gaining traction. There has been a concerning rise in depressive syndromes and a surge in anti-empathetic and violent behaviours. The inability to emotionally connect with others can be associated with sociopathic traits, and although the term pertains to a rather complex aspect of human behaviour, usually stemming from early experiences, it is something to keep an eye out for.
Case Study:
In Costa Rica, according to The Lancet magazine, the country experienced a significant increase in depression and anxiety disorders in 2020, surpassing global records by nearly two digits.
There was a sharp 35.2% rise in depression disorder cases and a 35.6% increase in anxiety disorder cases. In 2023, the country also saw a rise in violent homicides, reaching 17.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, which was 8.5 points higher than in 2013, the lowest year.
Alarmingly, 60% of the victims were young adults. This increase came on the heels of a rise in drug abuse and drug trafficking, contributing significantly to citizen insecurity due to violent crimes. This growing apathetic and insecure environment is manifested in disaster management terms through various behaviours:
Disbelief and hostility towards authority, as seen in the anti-vaccine movement and resistance to evacuation alerts
These examples are incompatible with the social peace and order necessary for rehabilitation and reconstruction after a disaster.
Given the challenges posed to folks living in dangerous environments, both citizens and governments tend to ignore the initially discreet signs of citizen apathy, callousness, or even violence. In the long term, however, these attitudes and events can lead to unexpected and significant effects on the social fabric.
The Butterfly Effect:
This notion describes how small, initial changes in complex but sensitive systems such as climate or human behaviour in society (also called chaotic systems) can cause unexpected results of unsuspected magnitude. The result will be the damage to the threads of the social fabric, which will irreparably undermine its resilience to disasters.
The famous question/metaphor: “Can the flutter of a butterfly's wings in Brazil make a tornado appear in Texas?” coined by Edward Norton Lorenz in 1972, can be better visualized by a famous short Sci-Fi tale named “A Sound of Thunder”, masterfully written by Ray Bradbury over half a century ago:
The butterfly effect helps explain how the social fabric may get undone at several points, to finally undermine its final resilience in the face of natural disasters.
The result will be a society where the weak are virtually helpless, the strongest take advantage of them, and where the State faces significant difficulties in maintaining order, public health, and the economy, let alone any chances of reconstruction, and building back better. All this because the effect of the threat would not meet any resistance in its path.
Symptoms:
But how can the initial symptoms be identified and eventually corrected?
In chaotic -complex- systems, sensible to small initial changes like society dynamics and human behaviour, the influence of the lack of empathy, respect for life and human solidarity may have on the desired end resulting in resilience to disasters, needs to be assumed as potentially significant.
These ‘discrete’ changes may range at the beginning of the spectrum from cruelty to animals to violent crimes, elevated murder levels and indifference to human suffering manifested in a disregard for the weak (rape, violent murders, defunding of social programs).
The point of no return for this process is not easy to identify either. Examining the history of similar societies may provide insights to the researcher (El Salvador's past criminality levels for instance), but the rapid pace social networks are forcing upon the siloing and detachment of younger generations from family and society, turning them lose from the social fabric of their community, is unprecedented and on the rise, producing low empathy and low solidarity for their peers.
To tackle this, a few countries are now trying to regulate the influence social networks are amassing, while others are considering regulations for the minimum age at which children may have access to these networks.
The researcher can also look at the perceived success of volunteer organisations, the level of donations for noble causes, the homeless, levels of crime, and public perception polls on perceived empathy levels, to start drawing up new societal profiles.
Psychologists and other professionals should then work to diagnose and help determine the relative 'health' of the social fabric, and thus the relative resiliency of a community or society.
Worst Case Scenario:
With the recent emergence of new cases of avian flu (H5N1) making a giant genetic leap from birds to mammals, the looming question arises: what if God forbid, another pandemic were to strike? What measures should be taken to prevent further deterioration of the social fabric, especially if plans to enforce mandatory social isolation were discussed once again?
Was the cure worse than the disease? Are there alternatives to social isolation that could help prevent another mental and economic pandemic? After all, resilience applies to all types of disasters, whether epidemic in nature or not. Society must learn from recent history to avert further spiralling down into turmoil.?
Possible Solutions?
The visualization of future scenarios, developed at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) in California, USA, represents a novel tool designed to directly engage the brain's Reticular System and harness the omnipresent communication technologies. Tailored for younger generations, the scenario-building processes commence with observing and identifying current trends to construct potential future scenarios for visualization.
Learning to visualize these scenarios in detail can effectively aid in preparing entire communities for emergencies, placing added emphasis on community support, and displaying empathic behaviors such as assisting the vulnerable. This type of training could prove invaluable in addressing the current challenge for a couple of reasons:
Regardless of the approach, the solution will always hinge on increased investment in education (reinstating ethics, empathy and respect for all forms of life in schools) plus job creation, to reinforce social cohesion for the marginalized segments of society left behind by the pandemic. This poses a new significant challenge of psychological, anthropological, and sustainable development nature, transcending mere emergency management, logistics, or climate change considerations.
?Moral:
Lack of empathy in the form of lack of security and criminality, no matter how small or discreet it may seem, should not be ‘normalized’ as it is highly harmful to the health of the social fabric of communities and society. The integrity of a community’s social fabric must be preserved at all costs, to keep its resiliency to disasters high.
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