Repercussion Section: Cry Havoc

by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence

It feels like a good time for a dramatic reading of Julius Caesar. Specifically, Marc Antony’s soliloquy in Act III, scene 1 when he is alone with Caesar’s just-executed corpse and imagines himself as an avenging monarch who would “cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war.” 

Here’s a thing I learned recently: In ancient Rome, havoc was not a state of disorder that happened to get wreaked. It was an official military order. 

A commander of a battlefield army crying HAVOC! was directing his troops to break rank and go pillage. Go plunder. Go burn it down. Make mayhem. Start the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents. 

The quotation marks in the script that Shakespeare added around “havoc” indicate that the speaker is not expressing fear that chaos may bubble up in the political vacuum created by Caesar’s assassination. He is plotting to bring it about. 

Understanding havoc as a top-down plan makes more terrible the other imagery in Marc Antony’s dark speech in which he foresees all of Italy consumed by “domestic fury and fierce civil strife” and prophesies of an aggression so widespread and relentless that the civilian population will lose empathy (“all pity choked”), become inured to violence, and hence pacified: 

Blood and destruction shall be so in use 
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war.

The imperative word havoc gives it away. The soldier Marc Antony isn’t Cassandra, warning about a coming reign of terror. In his monologue, he is sharing the recipe for it, actively imagining all the elements his campaign will include as he prepares to seize power and, under the guise of revenge, secure his own ambitions. 

Cruelty will be the point. The passivity inflicted by the cruelty will be the result. 

The assassination of Julius Caesar, painted by William Holmes Sullivan, c. 1888. (Public domain)

We are now living in a time of havoc. It’s relentless. It is cruel. It’s dehumanizing. It’s violent and will get more violent. It is everything, everywhere, all at once. 

And it’s by design. It’s intended to numb us to the ongoing destruction of all that we hold dear, including the bonds between us. It’s the enactment of Project 2025, and it’s a script lifted right out of the Shakespearean playbook. 

Consider another soliloquy on havoc that gives away the game, delivered in a speech weeks before the election by Trump advisor Russell Vought, in which he describes how he intends to disable the EPA:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma. 

Vought is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget where he is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the President’s policy and regulatory agendas across the Executive Branch.

***

Since we ourselves, as individuals, can’t respond to everything, everywhere, all at once, it’s easy to succumb to the urge to retreat from civic engagement altogether and slip into what voting rights activist Stacey Abrams calls “internal exile.”  The more headlines we read, the more despair we feel and, seeking escape from what feels unbearable, the more we withdraw. 

Psychologists also have a word for this: well-informed futility. It’s a form of learned helplessness. 

First described in 1974 by U.S. psychologist Gerhart Wiebe—who was trying to understand why watching Vietnam War news on television made viewers less likely to engage in activism against the war—"well-informed futility syndrome” describes a particular paralysis that is fueled by learning about complex disasters not solvable by individual actions. We naturally avoid seeking out more information about monumental problems over which we feel no agency.

Denial is futility’s offspring, as communications scholar Peter Sandman pointed out two decades ago, reprising Wiebe’s ideas for the climate crisis. “We intuitively avoid information that elicits uncomfortable feelings. Because we don’t want to confront fear or guilt, we reflexively exercise the mental gymnastics that avoid confrontations with such emotional experiences.”

Reprising Wiebe and Sandman for the current political moment: when overwhelmed by a firehose of harm, it becomes seductive—as both a form of consolation and as an excuse for keeping our heads down for the next four years—to tell ourselves that the pendulum always swings back. Even as we are watching the pendulum being torn from its pivot and smashed. Especially then. 

***

Let’s test this hypothesis. Here are six distressing events that you may have missed: 

The White House vowed to revive the 124-mile Constitution Pipeline project that would carry fracked gas from Pennsylvania into New York, whose construction scientists and citizens in both states halted nearly ten years ago on the grounds that it violated provisions of the Clean Water Act, a decision that was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2017. The Constitution Pipeline would cross 250 waterways in New York State alone, including 85 trout streams.

The federal hiring freeze and return-to-office orders have thrown into chaos the Veterans Crisis Line, which operates remotely and provides support to veterans who are suicidal, homeless, overdosing, experiencing PTSD, are in need of services, or are otherwise caught in emergency situations that need immediate de-escalation. 

The U.S. National Park Service eliminated all references to transgender people from the website of the Stonewall National Monument, which commemorates the (transwomen-led) uprising against a police raid on the legendary gay bar in Manhattan in June 1969. 

Immigrant rights groups filed a lawsuit demanding access to the people who are now being sent daily to Guantanamo Bay without access to legal counsel or communication with relatives.

As concerns about bird flu ramp up, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gutted a program that places early-career public health professionals in local health departments, even as the National Institutes of Health fired 1,200 employees.

In spite of two federal court orders directing the White House to resume distributing federal EPA grants and loans representing at least $19 billion to thousands of nonprofits and state and local governments for climate and environmental justice efforts, these funds remain frozen. 

These are just a small subsample of the events from last week. Next week there will be many more. And how do they make you feel? 

***

I don’t know the way out of the-more-we-know-the-worse-we-feel conundrum for you, but I do that, for me, there are three lessons from my own field of ecology that are serving me well right now. 

First, ecological systems are strongest and most resilient when organisms maintain a multiplicity of connections to each other. As epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina has herself recently reminded us, “Evolution shows that species thrive not in isolation but through deep connections to their ecosystems. Nature knows diversity isn’t a threat—it’s resilience. Like a tree in a forest, no organism stands alone; roots intertwine, sharing resources and enriching the soil.”

And second, ecology also tells us that no single species plays all the roles. Each has its own niche, its own special thing that it contributes to the whole living network of life. 

The side-step to well-informed futility, lies, I believe, in niche work—the ability to specialize in one or two forms of resistance and to do them in concert with others. 

And to keep doing them. Because persistence in the face of havoc is the third lesson of ecology. 

As always, the poets say it best. From the 14th century Persian poet Hafez:  

This sky where we live is no place to lose your wings 
so love, love, love