You need people to survive. What if you can't trust them?
As we head into a likely year of multiple overlapping crises, our most important resource is lying in shreds.
Back in 2017, I had the opportunity to catch a talk at the atheoskeptic convention Skepticon by science communicator Mika McKinnon, whimsically titled "A Practical Guide to Pre-Apocalyptic Party Planning." McKinnon, a geophysicist and disaster researcher (and a delightful speaker), spent a good deal of the talk engaging the audience about ways to be prepared for disasters, but about halfway through the talk, she asked a question left me somewhat stunned: Why does knowing your neighbors mean you're more likely to survive?
McKinnon's thesis shouldn't be that surprising—disasters are maybe one of the clearest examples when cooperation can make all the difference. Your neighbors can help you access vital resources like water and power; they are the people best situated to help quickly when disasters are widespread and institutional aid may be slow; they will know who is missing or in danger because they know who their neighbors are.
But to understand my particular reaction, you have to know this about me: For most of my life, I lived in communities so small that knowing your neighbors was a foregone conclusion. Of course you knew your neighbors—your "neighborhood" was often not much smaller than the community itself. Your neighbors knew you. In many cases, they knew far more than you ever wanted them to. The idea of the "nosy neighbor" in small communities—your Gladys Kravitzes—is a trope in large part because it describes a real phenomenon of pseudo-voyeurism driven in part by the boredom of small towns.
When I left these small towns behind for a larger city, part of the appeal was in not knowing my neighbors. It wasn't that I had a desire to be antisocial, just to be anonymous—to escape the history that made those small communities so stifling.
But McKinnon's thesis—that knowing your neighbors provides an advantage against adversity—is one that has stuck with me for years.
Losing faith in people
It would not be an understatement to say that recent events have done some real damage to my already-shaky affection for humanity.
I say "already-shaky" because being disappointed by people is not a particularly novel development. Almost eight years ago, I published an essay (sadly no longer available online) called "These Are the Times That Try My Humanism," inspired by the earliest days of a Trump administration, in which I concluded:
If humanism requires faith of me, then I confess that I am a doubter — not in the rightness of the vision of humanism, but in humanity’s ability to carry it out.
I only hope that humanity manages to prove me wrong.
The intervening years have not been kind to my trust of people. The trends that presaged the rise of Trump and the far-right in 2016 have not only continued but have escalated at an alarming rate. Many of those trends—the increased rejection of expertise, an uptick in the spread of disinformation, and the ongoing erosion of public institutions like government, business, even democracy itself—are also at their core crises of trust.
On a personal level, coming out as a trans woman during the first Trump administration has made me even more acutely aware of how being a member of a tiny, widely reviled group makes trusting people even more tenuous—in some cases, literally a matter of life and death.
At the same time, that position as the member of a tiny marginalized group has also reminded me that there aren't enough of us to hold back the tide of persecution. To survive, we need other people willing to stand beside us. We need, in the strictest sense, neighbors.
So what do you do when you need people but you also can't trust them?
A block party before the end of the world
McKinnon's Skepticon talk wasn't just about the importance of community in times of emergency. It was also an admonition on how to establish it: Throw a block party. Get to know your neighbors.
Building community is about disaster preparedness. The worst time to build community is in the moment of crisis—by the time that everything is falling apart around you, it's a little late.
The idea of a block party is practical and maybe a little cute in the context of where people live, but what does this mean as we prepare for looming crisis on a larger scale?
First, trust should be predicated on actions. In the context of a disaster, the people you trust are simply those in your proximity, but it's also important to remember that trust must be earned. Solidarity is important, but we have to know we can depend on each other. That means we have to show up for each other. Talk is cheap.
Second, addressing the crisis supersedes the need to place blame. Part of what makes trust so difficult in a situation like an election is the extent to which the crisis is human-caused. Some of the people who are going to be allies against the disaster may also have some culpability in causing it. No one needs to forgive these people—I know I will have difficulty doing that with many people—but allies are allies, and we will have to get past our personal grudges for our own sakes.
Third, we don't have a minute to lose. For those of us in the US (and increasingly elsewhere) facing the prospect of the most overtly fascist government America has ever seen, the time to prepare is short, just mere days away. Where possible, we should be plugging into the networks and organization that already exists, leaving novel organization as a last resort. Even if you aren't personally prepared, that doesn't mean someone else isn't. And where we can, the best place to fight back may be locally.
None of this is going to be easy, but finding our metaphorical neighbors is likely to make all the difference.
