Locust as Metaphor

There is a certain type of grasshopper in Africa that, when conditions are just right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) and its population within a particular area passes a certain threshold, actually undergoes a biological change and transforms into the aggressive and swarming locust of infamy. The idea of the locust can be used as a metaphor for the same type of phenomenon that occurs elsewhere. Our bodies contain many germs that, in small amounts present no health risk but, if given the opportunity to reproduce without our built-in checks to their population, could pass a point where they upset the body’s equilibrium and are transformed into an actual disease. In meteorology, events such as thunderstorms or hurricanes happen when commonly occurring processes in the atmosphere involving moisture, heat, pressure, and winds get beyond a certain point where counterbalancing forces are insufficient to restrain them. In physics, chain reactions are originally natural processes that have been allowed to escalate beyond control as well. And I’m sure there are many more examples of this in science. But I’d like to examine the locust metaphor as it applies to human society.

If anyone’s ever been to a party from its beginning, they know that there can eventually come a point when the party seems to take off and drastically rise in intensity with the arrival of just a few more people, taking on a life of its own. This was the effect that poor Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore’s character) kept seeking and failing to attain with her sad parties. There are times during protest marches when the number of people concentrated in a small area can reach a point when just a small event can trigger the beginning of a riot. A nation can mobilize its troops for a potential military action, like Germany did just before World War I, and at a certain point of the buildup, the political pressure to go ahead and engage them in warfare starts to become overwhelming. I got that feeling in February 2003, when the U.S. and its coalition’s forces were teetering upon the Iraqi border. In gambling, there is a threshold when a gambler feels that he has lost too much money to walk away from the game, and then he really begins gambling in earnest trying to win it back. In verbal arguments, there is a threshold that escalating insults can reach, beyond which one or both of the parties begin to direct violence at the other. I’m sure you’ve seen ugly celebrity divorces where the couple initially proclaimed themselves as splitting up amicably, but one little charge after one gets leveled between them until one of them blows up and accuses the other of all kinds of heinous abuse, to which the accused in turn replies by accusing the accuser. A rough foul committed in a professional basketball game can lead to harsh words spoken between the players involved, increasing the overall tension to the point when a fan throwing an object at one of the players can spark a players’ riot, where players not even directly involved in the original altercation are in the stands slugging it out with fans not directly involved in throwing anything. And children are especially susceptible to this phenomenon. At a certain point, if a child keeps receiving either a lot of positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement from others, then there will come a point when he will begin to identify himself with that feedback in a more accelerated way so that his self-image can became fixed as “good” or “bad”, depending on the type of input he has been receiving.

I suppose that just becoming more aware of the “locust” dangers in our human society is in itself part of the cure. We can use this metaphor to bring good things to a threshold of momentum toward progress and compassion while being vigilant against tipping events in dangerous directions that could get out of control and bring great harm.