One of my favorite concepts in Neal Stephenson's Anathem is the idea of an "Emergence" — the idea that it takes effort (and training) to recognize when something dangerous is happening that requires immediate action, that has crossed out of normalcy, that cannot be ignored.

i read recently about how one thing that claims lives in otherwise survivable crisis situations is that people just refuse to believe that what is happening is happening and are cognitively unable to respond to the situation at hand.

Now that I think about it. A lot of Covid response in 2020 was like this too. It couldn’t happen here - it’s just a China problem. And then the country was caught flat-footed and hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily.

The thing you point out in this thread reminds me of interviews with Ukrainians right before Russia invaded. It couldn’t possibly happen, right? Putin wouldn’t be so bold. And then the worst possible thing happened.

The US has no living memory of this at home. These things happen to /other/ people on the same screens where they shoot lasers or singlehandedly take on a cartel. So we sit in our cafes where the old men play chess and the children play outside, and we shake our heads that it is all so severe.

But in both they are part of, and reinforce, the cultural sense that this stuff doesn't happen to real people. If an insurmountable problem arrives, they are resolvable by violence and the heroes will win. Insurmountable problems are just ghost stories. They freak us out, but aren't real.

Horror movies do the opposite: the character can't overcome it. That's what makes them horror movies. The ghost can't be harmed. The demon keeps coming. That's the core emotion that sustains the genre.

The audience has to confront the losing situation. How will the character get out of it? Here there's a genre divergence on how it resolves. Most hollywood movies take the option: the character just "man ups" and somehow finds it within themselves to overcome it by summoning even greater violence.

You also see it a bit in popular fiction. Take a look at movies. Characters often find themselves in impossible, terrible situations. Fictional situations of overwhelming severity. Someone's family kidnapped; aliens invade; evil villain threatens to destroy everything type stuff

It doesn't *just* affect the US, for sure. Ask anyone who saw the start of a war. How the days before they went to cafes, and shook their heads that it was all so severe. But it would be averted right? Right? It won't happen to us in the cafe where the old men play chess and the kids play outside