Can't figure out my title? Don't worry, it is intentionally cryptic. However, all will become clear in due course. So please bear with me and you will understand.

As I am sure anyone who watches television, reads a newspaper or surfs the internet knows by now, it is four years since hurricane Katrina wrecked New Orleans. (I can recall that easily, as I was in New Orleans a few months before my son was born, and Katrina was a few months later, so his age and Katrina's are divided by only six months.) With all the retrospectives taking place, there is one topic I have yet to see, and that is what, precisely, Katrina says about us, as a people.

Oh, the press touches on this, but in superficial ways. The way the press bought into the worst stories, tales of cannibalism, and so on. (Though, in a very telling omission, when the press covers itself, it is always "those other guys" who bought into "absurd" stories, never to reporter doing the story.) They may mention the "oppressive poverty" of New Orleans. Mention looting, though more as a sign of poverty than as any moral indicator. And, of course, the countless retrospective criticisms of Bush, backed up by constant replaying of the "good job, Brownie" quote.

All of which only convinces me that the mindset that made a bad storm a disaster is still alive and well, as it informs every bit of history  we see concerning Katrina.

Let us first state that the past was not perfect. It is a bad habit of those who wish to moralize, recasting the past as an idealized version of itself. From those who idealize the founding fathers to those who postulate peaceful matriarchies destroyed by phallus worshiping Aryans, all points on the political spectrum have managed to fall into this trap. And I have too. Granted, I often do so knowingly, admitting I am painting with a broad brush for simplicity rather than accuracy, but at other times I have been as guilty as anyone of ignoring many ways in which the past was just as bad as the present.

So let me start by saying there were many in the past who held views just as unrealistic as are held today, and people were as prone to wanting something for nothing in the past as the present. So they were far from perfect, but they were also, in many ways, different, both from their everyday experiences and from the social pressures around them.

For instance, the experiences of our modern times tend to make us think of misfortune as something rare. We are generally used to people being born, living a long time and dying of the diseases of old age*. A few may die young, or from a mishap, but by and large, thanks to our wealth and medical science, we have come to think of life as almost guaranteed. In the past, on the other hand, they were used to children dying at a young age, people dying of disease of accident, and generally took mishaps as a part of life.

The outcome of this very different experience was a belief that misfortune was simply part of life. Something you could not avoid. You could plan so that when misfortune struck you had some reserves, but you could not avoid it, and certainly, with so much misfortune, no one would indemnify you against it. On the other hand, we moderns have come to think of misfortune as someone's fault, something that was either caused by someone, or at least due to someone not taking enough preventative steps. Thanks to a combination of government promises to protect us against all mishap,s and tort law's insistence that some deep pocket is at fault for every disaster, we have come to think that not only are mishaps always someone's fault, but that there will be someone to indemnify us against them.

And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of Katrina, the way this mindset played into the disaster that unfolded and, to a considerable degree, made it worse. You don't have to look far to see how this happened. Though the left blamed Bush for not providing funds to evacuate New Orleans, and the right blamed Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco for not using available buses, the truth is, the people most to blame are those who sat at home waiting for Bush OR Nagin to evacuate them, and did not take it upon themselves to get out of the way of a hurricane they knew was coming.  These people are the embodiment of this disastrous modern mindset, unable to help themselves, certain that it is someone else's responsibility to save them from disaster, as they certainly can't be expected to save themselves.

Then again, the blaming of Bush is yet another embodiment of this. After all, what could be a more natural outgrowth of this helpless, victim mindset than the tendency to remove responsibility form smaller, local government to more distant federal authorities. If people can't be expected to save themselves, then how could the little mayor? He cannot be expected to use his own buses, it would have to be Uncle Sam. Similarly, the single state cannot be expected to maintain levees or move people, it must be the huge federal government. At every stage, there is no responsibility for saving one's self, it is some else's job to come and rescue us from disaster. Mishaps are the fault of those who did not save us.

Of course, that is not all we can learn from Katrina, there are many other lessons. For example, where in the past shame over being seen looting would have been enough to keep looting somewhat controlled, while in modern times we have people granting interviews while self-righteously appropriating cartloads of stolen consumer goods. Similarly, even a generation ago, mainstream America would have known immediately anyone claiming the government blew up the levees was a nut, worthy of ridicule and not meriting any attention from serious reporters, while today the media feels the need to give them a "fair hearing". (On a positive note, one of the few, at least that particular lunacy still seems to have been rejected by the vast majority of Americans. So we haven't gone that far yet.) But, despite all those differences, I really think this dependency-indemnification mentality is the biggest story of Katrina. (See "Subsidizing Irresponsibility and Poor Planning ".)

Which is where my title comes into all this.

You see, in responding to comments to an earlier post ("My Health Care Plan") one of my readers brought up the famous "kill all the lawyers" aphorism. And on the surface that does seem a viable, if rather extreme, solution to our tort crisis. But, as I said in response, that really won't resolve our problem with torts.

The problem is, whether we have shyster lawyers or not, we have a body of citizens who believe life can be made risk free, and that they should be indemnified by the government against whatever risks manage to slip through. That mindset is our problem, not the lawyers who exploit it. If they were to vanish tomorrow, we would still have almost all the same problems, and some new class would rise up to give the public what they want, to promise infinite security in an insecure world.

No, what we need is an adult populace that realizes risk is part of life and that the only true protection against risk is to prepare yourself for any eventuality, to be wealthy enough to deal with any unforeseen crisis, and to be free enough that you can become that wealthy. Instead, we have a juvenile population that turns to the "mom and dad" of government again and again to bail them out. And that, not the lawyers, is our real problem.

See, I told you this wouldn't be like any other Katrina retrospective.

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* The one group that seems to understand the true nature of mishap are the extremely poor, specifically those in urban areas, black, white, hsipanic or other, as their crime ridden neighborhoods tend to make death a more common occurrence and gives them a perspective more akin to that of our ancestors. And, strangely enough, though they tend to be politically left for historical reasons, they also seem to realize there is no way the government will protect them from life's ups and downs. That belief seems to be much more common among those more affluent than them, whose lives are much more insulated against misfortune.

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POSTSCRIPT

You can read my other thoughts on the related topic of tort reform in "The Problem With Tort Reform" and "Red Herring".  I also suggest reading "Utopianism and Disaster" as the mindset described there seems closely linked tot he one I describe above.  The role our own absurd expectations play in our political misfortunes are also discussed in "What We Deserve" and  "Don't Blame the Politicians". Finally, a related topic of interest is our present and past effort to avoid the ill effects of inflation by additional inflation, as described in   "Inflation and Uncertainty", "Explaining Past Crashes", "Not Entirely to Blame", "The Inflation Engine", "A Thought on the Clinton Surpluses", "Place Blame Fairly, Regardless of Party", "The Importance of Error" and "Cash For Clunkers Revisited", among others. In those posts I discuss how our attempts to take a short cut to infinite spending (or to economic growth in some theories) always end up causing an eventual deflation, which we then try to solve by more of the same inflation which put  us there. In other words, how we try to eternally avoid the consequences of our actions.

A similar delusion is involved in the criticism of the free market for failing to be perfect, as described in "The Limits of "Scientific" Management", "Utopian Pipe Dream", "Misunderstanding Profits", "Cutting "Costs"", "Technocrats", "The Limits of Econometrics" and  "The Limits of Technocracy". "Planning For Imperfection"and "Greed Versus Evil" . The same mindset which see any mishap as someone's fault in that case sees any expense not directly related to production as "waste" and ignores the role it plays in the entire system. Instead, they imagine this waste is the only thing preventing the economy from providing infinite wealth, and rail against it and want it replaced with their "perfect" system. Again, an immature perspective that can't imagine the world could impose any limits, and that any disappointment must be someone's fault.

For that matter, in many ways, my post  "Absolute Values" shows the same mindset as well. To one unwilling to think realistically in terms of costs, any goal should be obtainable. And, on a similar note, my post "Cigarettes, Sudan and Abortion" also illustrates a very similar mentality. Finally, read my many posts on medical reform proposals, all linked in "My Health Care Plan", and see if that does not also show the same, immature thought process, the belief that any mishap can be cured by the state, that any problems must be due to problems in the system, and the belief that we can have whatever we want if we just want it badly enough.

Continue to check the blog, as this topic is one I intend to visit in more detail. Specifically the way our fear of consequences feeds into politicians' natural reluctance to tell us anything bad. All of which leads to a mutual delusion that we can somehow arrange government so that nothing bad need ever happen.