Don’t panic! Toilet paper, petrol, and politics

If a population lets its appetite and impulses hijack its common sense, it is bound to be controlled by its own biological urges and prey to a power hungry dictatorial political elite.

In general, humans are hardwired to seek safety first and apologise later instead of acting in a calm demeanour and observing history as it takes its course. It is a survival trait engrained into our primordial DNA, whose sole mission is to ensure the prolongation and replication of itself. When it comes to decision-making, it makes far more sense to exterminate a group of large and visually threatening creatures just in case they have a hunger for human flesh, even though they may be a herbivore.

It may upset the local eco-system, but survival undoubtedly favours blind action over careful patience. The same principle is applied to resource consumption, which is why our stomachs are so easily overfed in the modern era; when the body adopted the ‘get while the going’s good’ mantra, this was in a time when food was a scarce resource, largely hacked off the carcass of a woolly mammoth.

Although we live in the time when an average income lifestyle can make the monarchs of old blush with just a quick peak in the fridge, this deep-rooted survival trigger can be activated when there are even slight nudges to a civilisation’s nervous system.

This played out in the early days of the Pandemic, where panic reached fever-pitch and the population at large began to bulk buy pasta and toilet paper. We must also bear in mind that humans are a tribal species and tend to copy how the herd is acting to insulate itself from disaster. It is a hivemind predicated upon ‘if I follow what the most paranoid individuals are up to, I shall not die.’

The battle for toilet paper and non-perishables set off a chain reaction that enticed others into the supermarket dogpile, depleting the shelves of all food goods. In the end it largely became a self-fulfilling prophecy: worrying that goods would be exhausted, the consumer population became hellbent on stockpiling.

Now there is panic over the availability of petrol. As with McDonald’s milkshakes and Nando’s chicken, a shortage of HGV drivers is delaying the supply. The supply chain was already burdened, and now it has been overrun. I’m confident that many drivers on three quarters of a tank rushed to their local BP garage for a top-up, just in case.

Over the past year, the British public have become a panic-stricken people. One only needs to look at the Government’s fear-hyperinflation operation to witness how easily this aspect of human nature can be weaponised and exploited. Then the panic which results in empty shelves or petrol pumps can be the least of one’s worries when hysteria fuels the nebulous growth of an unchecked and unaccountable state apparatus.

Fear is the primary motivating factor embedded deep within our conscious – without it, the species would have perished long ago. But millennia defying benefits are always combined with severe disadvantages.

If a population lets its appetite and impulses hijack its common sense, it is bound to be controlled by its own biological urges at the mercy of fragile globalised supply chains and prey to a power hungry dictatorial political elite. Take the advice of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: don’t panic.