One human in five tuned in to watch the rescue of the miners trapped underground in Chile. Just think about that. One human in five. It’s amazing but not incredible. Because the story itself was so extraordinary and so compelling, who wasn’t fascinated as it unfolded? Who didn’t yearn for their release? Who didn’t shed a tear as they emerged like sunglassed pupae from the deep – and the waiting crowd burst into their national anthem?

Naturally, our commentariat, ever alert to the usefulness of a grand simile, contrast the optimism and discipline of the miners deep down in a hole with our own intrinsic pessimism and fractiousness, stuck as we are in a hole far deeper and less reachable in many ways than that collapsed mine.
They pen paeans to Chilean president Sebastián Piñera, now seen as a fellow who took control of a bad situation… and Luis Urzúa, the leader of the miners underground.
The truth seems more complicated. Apparently unity was hard-won. There were tensions and standoffs way below the earth, and fears of cannibalism too, in the seventeen days between the collapse and the breakthrough by the first probe.
But if that’s the case, the achievement is actually all the more impressive.
The convenient story, especially to right wing commentators, is of the strong boss who imposed order after disaster and that’s probably what a lot of commentators have in mind when they contrast the Chilean mining story with our economic woes. The tougher, more difficult story is of strong leadership balancing and juggling divergent and conflicting personalities and interests towards the unity of purpose required to actually escape from the hole.
This theme has recurred in Whole Hogs over the years: there’s a profound difference between a boss and a leader. The one cannot be the other.
Because they have taken a blood oath that what went on down the mine will stay down the mine, we will never know the full story. But from what we have heard, and also from the savage intensity with which the Chilean Government went about seeking a solution, it seems that we are looking at exceptional leadership both at the top and below the ground.
Indeed, it could be argued that the fervour and pride visible at the end was a result of the efforts rather than the trigger for them – nobody called for patriotism at the start, they generated it as they went along.
A declaration by Urzúa will prove one of the statements of the year: “You just have to speak the truth and believe in democracy”… Indeed. Believe in democracy… a very political statement, given Chile’s history with juntas…
So, looking at our disunity, chaos and fatalism, we might well wonder what is it about us that’s different?
The thing is, group reactions to crises are no more preordained than the crises themselves. It might not seem so, but we can (still) make choices that change the outcomes we will eventually face.
A fascinating finding is reported in the journals Behavioural Brain Research and Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews*. It arises from research by Prof. David Eilam and his graduate student Rony Izhar of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Zoology.
They are leading a study that investigates the anxieties experienced by an entire social group. They use the natural predator-and-prey relationship between barn owl and vole to test unified group responses to a common threat. What they have found seems peculiarly applicable here.
Anxiety is ‘the reaction to a perceived danger’ and most people believe that anxiety is a response that differs from one animal or human to another, ie. that it is individual. But maybe it isn’t.
Eilam and Izhar seem to have found that in normal circumstances anxiety levels may differ among individuals but group members display the same level of anxiety when exposed to a common threat. Apparently, when facing their predators alone, there was no common stress level among the voles. But when all were exposed to the same threat, they showed the same levels of anxiety.
According to Eilam, this explains human behaviour in response to trauma or terror, as shown by Blitz-era Londoners and New Yorkers after 9/11, or to natural disasters like the Asian tsunami or earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. “These are times when people stand together and accept a general code of conduct,” says Prof. Eilam. “It’s not a question of being more or less afraid. Under threat, members of a social group will adopt a common behavioural code, regardless of their individual tendency towards anxiety.”
We can immediately see this amongst the Chilean miners and people. Over time they unified – helped, it seems, by good leadership.
But you couldn’t say it of the Irish in 2010, could you? While anxiety is at the level of mass hysteria, there is still little evident unity of purpose.
Of course general anger is so deep it’s now in our marrow. Yet, that doesn’t explain our fragmentary and disunited state. So, what might?
From the vantage point of Hog House, the most plausible explanation is that over the last generation, perhaps during the Tiger years, Ireland became a mere economy, a genuine expression of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous dictum that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”
The only society-promoting note struck by the majority of leading politicians in the present crisis is the use of the word ‘we’. Properly applied, this is a leaderly term – but not here. The word is being misused. That’s because, contrary to the inferences, ‘we’ didn’t cause the problems that ‘we’ are going to have to fix. Indeed, that deliberately deceptive use of ‘we’ is almost certainly counter-productive.
Nonetheless, if we are to emerge from the hole we are in, at some point we have to start pulling together. That is, as well as finding leadership above, somehow we’ll have to find the real ‘we’ below…

*Thanks to the Stone Hearth Newsletters