Louisiana deep oil drilling disaster

[Peter Presland]

Hardly the occasion for levity I know - God knows some of the pictures of devastation coming out of the GOM are enough to make any sane person weep - but Dmitry Orlov does have a unique perspective. His deep droll black humour with its roots in his experience of the Old Soviet Union's collapse, are guaranteed to shed useful light on parallel events in the West. The destruction being wrought in the GOM is no exception.

A brief extract from his latest Blog post:

It is embarrassing to be lost. It is even more embarrassing for a leader to be lost. And what's really really embarrassing to all concerned is when national and transnational corporate leaders attempt to tackle a major disaster and are found out to have been issuing marching orders based on the wrong map. Everyone then executes a routine of turning toward each other in shock, frowning while shaking their heads slowly from side to side and looking away in disgust. After that, these leaders might as well limit their public pronouncements to the traditional "Milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner fudge is made." Whatever they say, the universal reaction becomes: "What leaders? We don't have any."

Getting lost can be traumatic for the rest of us too. When we suddenly realize that we don't know where we are, urgent neural messages are exchanged between our prefrontal cortex, which struggles to form a coherent picture of what's happening, our amygdala, whose job is to hold on to a sense of where we are, and our hippocampus, which motivates us to get back to a place we know as quickly as we possibly can. This strange bit of internal wiring explains why humans who are only slightly lost tend to trot off in a random direction and promptly become profoundly lost. After these immediate biochemical reactions have run their course, we go through the usual stages of:

1. denial—"We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next..."
   
2. anger—"We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!"
   
3. bargaining—"The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there..."
   
4. depression—"We'll never get there! We're all going to die out here!" and
   
5. acceptance—"We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold."
   

Some people don't survive, some do; the difference in outcome turns out to have precious little to do with skill or training, and everything to do with motivation—the desire to survive no matter how much pain and discomfort that involves—and the mental flexibility to adjust one's mental map on the fly to fit the new reality, and to reach stage 5 quickly. Those who go on attempting to operate based on an outdated mental map tend to die in utter bewilderment.