DURING PANIC

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 August 1930, Page 10

DURING PANIC

HUMAN FEELINGS ANALYSED. I have been in-a train wreck when cars were jumbled one on top of the other; I have been in a theatre file when the audience tried to climb the, walls; I have felt the power of a mob; I have reached the end of my string while swimming; I have stepped into a kitchen a couple of minutes after a man shot to death the father of a family; I have seen a human being rush headlong, his body a pillar of flames; I have been lost in the woods; I have been in a hurricane at,sea. 1 do not list these experiences to make it appear that I am one who has seen many terrible things, but simply to offer evidence of my fitness to speak on the subject of the frenzy that seizes men and women. I have studied these things and endeavoured to see how it can be that men can in an instant cease to be human beings, to become creatures obsessed by something diabolical, unsightly, incredibly frightful. I have tried to discover what, is at the root of Panic, why it seizes upon some and not upon others. It is easy to say that panic is the result of fear, but it goes deeper than that. It descends into depths more awful than mere terror. Put briefly, I think we must come to this: Suddenly a man or several men are made aware, by some, circumstance, of their futility in the face of inevitability, and the knowledge drives them inad. When a/ man knows, of a sudden, that he is in the clutch of something against which he cannot fight, then he does one of two things: he surrenders to blind panic, or he shrugs his shoulders. He goes mad, or he becomes sane with a clarity he never has known before. He becomes a Thing, or he becomes a Hero. Man is a fighting animal. If he can fight, even with the chances against him, he does not usually dissolve in panic. It is when he sees no chance that his reason totters. There is, of course, another kind of panic. The panics caused by the imminence of death or of the agony to one’s self or to one’s loved ones are as old as humanity, and easily understood. But there is Panic of another sort, artificial, impossible in another age and era. This is the Financial Panic; the frenzy brought on by apprehension lest one lose his money. In this panic of low degree and parvenu birth we see men and women frenzied. Of late we have been able to see how individuals act when there is a fire in their pocketbooks. It has not been a pleasant spectacle. Somehow, it seems more shameful to fly into a panic in the terror of losing a certain number of the counters that we call money than it does to fly off our pedestals because of fear of death or pain. By losing money man does not lose the delights of his senses or of friendship. Only the outward manner of his life changes.

One man expressed himself rather .well when a friend called to console him over losses.

“I’ve lost nothing but money,” he said.

But most men do not see it that way. There is something about the possession of wealth which is not good for the soul, perhaps. It places an artificial value upon secondary things. A man losing a million metal tokens will put a revolver to his tehiple and pull the trigger. But he has lost nothing but money. He has deprived himself of life because misfortune has deprived him of luxuries. It seems absurd; but perhaps it is not absurd. Who shall judge? Every human being may be attacked by Panic. Nothing but Discipline can make one immune. Discipline may be applied externally, as in an army or a ship’s crew, and that will avert panics. But there is a better Discipline which a man may impose upon himself as he sits with bis own wisdom and his own perceptions of truth and decency. It is the Discipline which may be had by scrutinizing the great known facts of human life, by accepting them as facts, by bowing to them, and by inuring himself to live in submission to them, and with fortitude in spite of'them. —C. B. Kelland, in the ‘‘American’ Magazine.”