Train Wrecks

Who can forget the train wreck scene of The Cassandra Crossing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cassandra_Crossing) ? In an otherwise forgettable movie, we are frozen in horrified silence as the engine and passenger cars tumble in a dance macabre, like children’s toys flung carelessly into the gaping chasm.

Train wrecks of all kinds have a terrible fascination for us. Passenger trains in India, a hundred oil tankers jumbled on the Canadian prairie, or a derailed chemical train in Ohio, the tangled, jumbled chaos speaks to our deepest fears. It’s not for nothing that the expression “train wreck” has come to mean anything which has gone irretrievably and horribly wrong.

But it’s not just train wrecks– horrors and disasters of all kinds draw us like moths to flame. Riots, floods, tsunamis, volcanoes, beheadings– we just can’t look away. Horror movies outsell romance ten to one.

So, does this mean there’s something broken in human nature? Not at all— we’re just responding to the instincts that kept our ancestors alive for thousands of generations.

Here’s the thing: the callous fellow who ignored danger was the one who got eaten by the sabre-toothed tiger before he could procreate, while his scaredy-cat brother who cowered in the cave got to survive long enough to become our ancestor. Fear was a good thing to keep our forefathers and mothers from taking stupid risks.

So without doubt, our panic-prone scaredy-cat side has it’s place. But like everything else in life, it comes with a downside, and the downside is that the spectacular and the horrific often divert our attention from what really matters. Our sense of proportion dissolves in a rush of fear and adrenaline.

We’re all the same, you and me, and for the same reason. We have survived and thrived as a species because our antennae are finely tuned to give us early warning of danger. Individuals of our species who were blithe to danger didn’t live long enough to procreate, so we have inherited only from the scaredy-cats. You’re hard-wired for alertness to danger, nothing you can do about it.

But like so many other things which were great back in caveman days, this fascination with horror is now as much a negative as it is a positive. It has multiple downsides, perhaps the worst of which is that it warps our sense of proportion.

So while we stand aghast at a dozen residents killed in a tenement fire, we ignore the fact that thousands die daily of malnutrition, preventable disease, or rotting away in the dungeons of tin pot dictators. Or in a dozen forgotten wars currently ongoing. Deaths to disease, traffic accidents, industrial accidents, gun violence, and even preventable negligence, on any given day, far exceed those due to the horror which has our eyes glued to the screen.

Bad new sells, but only if it appeals to our scaredy-cat instincts. A plane crash, with smouldering luggage and teddy bears strewn across grainfields, rightly attracts our attention and sympathy, but it also attracts eyeballs to the screen, and eyeballs on the screen pay for advertising, and advertising is profit for the network. The fact that our species is poisoning its planet is stale news, and set aside as unprofitable.

The spectacular diverts our attention from the important.
Magicians know that we are all hard-wired to look at the razzmatazz while ignoring where the action actually is.

Politicians are masters of the train wreck manouever. While they get the populace in a frenzy about a “the socialist menace” or work everyone into an uproar about some guy on stage in lipstick and a dress, they quietly pilfer the treasury and strip us of our freedom while no one is watching. “Oh, look over there!” is the oldest trick in the book.

There will always be train wrecks, and we will always be morbidly fascinated. It’s our nature. But we must never forget that there is a lot more to the story than the twisted tracks, and more important, when someone is shouting “Oh, look at the train wreck!”, there’s probably something else afoot.