It Has to Get Bad First
Why procedures wait for events — and what that says about them.
I. The question
Why do conditions have to become very bad before anyone is prepared to consider changing them?
The question sounds like resignation and is not. It can be answered, and the answer is more uncomfortable than the suspicion of laziness.
II. The easy answer, and why it does not suffice
One might say: because a change costs effort and a condition does not.
That is not so. A condition costs something too, often more than the change. What protects it is not the lower price but the way the two prices present themselves.
What the existing state costs is distributed and habitual. It falls on many, in small amounts, over a long time. Nobody receives a bill.
What a change costs is concentrated and immediate. It falls on few, in one sum, now. And those few know exactly how much it is.
Every change therefore appears dearer than it is. Not because anyone miscalculates, but because one quantity is visible and the other is not.
III. Why nobody acts
To this comes a second thing, which weighs more heavily.
A condition that belongs to nobody has nobody to change it either. As long as it strikes no one personally it is bearable for all — and whoever wanted to change it would have to bear the effort alone while the benefit spread across everyone.
This is not a question of character. It is the situation.
IV. The threshold is called an event
And here lies the core, and it is more sober than any complaint about the state of things.
For a condition there is no metric. For a catastrophe there is.
A deterioration of two per cent a year amounts after twenty years to a halving — and on no single day did it produce a news item. There was no day on which it became bad. It only became slightly worse on every day.
A collapse, by contrast, has a date, a figure, a picture. It is an event, and events are the only thing to which a procedure built around events can respond.
That is why it has to get bad. Not because those involved are dull, but because only then does the procedure have something it can answer.
V. The ozone hole
The case counts as the great counter-example — and on closer inspection it confirms precisely this thesis.
The warning came years earlier. Molina and Rowland predicted that the accumulation of the barely degradable CFCs would lead to a substantial decrease in ozone concentration, worldwide and all year round. They later received the Nobel Prize for it.
An ozone hole nobody had foreseen. It was discovered in 1985 over Antarctica — a finding that could be measured, depicted and shown in a newspaper.
Two years later the Montreal Protocol stood. And in 2009 the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol were the first treaties in the history of the United Nations to be ratified by every member state.
So it was possible. Very quickly, even.
But it needed the hole. The prediction alone had not sufficed in the years before. What was missing was not the knowledge but the picture.
The ozone case is therefore no evidence that it can also go otherwise. It is evidence of how fast it goes — once there is an event.
VI. What came together in this case
And three further circumstances, without which even the hole would not have sufficed.
A nameable cause. It was particular substances from particular manufacturers, not a diffuse behaviour of everyone.
A measurable connection. The chemistry had been elucidated, and the quantity in the atmosphere could be determined.
And a substitute that stood ready. One did not have to do without refrigerators, only to change the coolant.
Where these three are missing — many causes, a disputed connection, no substitute at hand — even an event does not suffice. Then it is inspected and lamented, and afterwards things go on.
VII. The warner’s problem of proof
There is a last reason, and it strikes those who warn beforehand.
Whoever warns in advance cannot show what would have happened without the warning. If action is taken and nothing occurs, it is said the warning was exaggerated. If no action is taken and something occurs, the warner is vindicated — but the damage has been done.
Whoever acts after the catastrophe holds the proof in his hand and has no argument against him.
That is the bitter reckoning: the successful warning devalues itself. Afterwards it looks like an exaggeration, precisely because it worked.
VIII. What follows
Not the reproach that people are indolent. They are no more so than before.
Rather the observation that our procedures are set up for events and cannot answer to creeping conditions. Where something has no date, it has no competence either.
What might follow is not an appeal but a question of design: how does one produce an event before it occurs?
A threshold whose crossing triggers a procedure is an artificial event — a date one sets before the matter itself creates one. It is the attempt to uncouple the response from the disaster.
Whether that holds nobody knows. But it is the only route that does not depend on things first getting bad.