The Teardrop Explodes

For the past week or so, on and off, I’ve been building some computer simulation models of water. Or something that’s maybe a bit like water.  Well, maybe more like porridge. Or sand. It’s a framework of bodies connected by struts.  I connect them all up in a triangulated framework, and then drop it onto a floor. And when the struts get too long, they snap, and what had been a rectangular framework starts coming apart.  The one on the right started out as a nice rectangular-shaped grid of triangles, and stayed that way until it hit the floor, when the struts started snapping, and it began to slump and spread. Just like sandcastles slump if you add too much water to the sand.

In some of them, the failure of the framework is quite spectacular – particularly if you drop the thing from a considerable height -, and bodies get fired at high velocity in all directions, as the whole framework explodes when it hits the ground.

And while I was writing it and testing it, and also thinking about smoking bans and stuff, I started to think that human societies were very much like these frameworks, with each body as a person, connected to other persons by ties that are called ‘relationships’. And when you subject the whole ‘society’  to extreme stress, like when you drop it on the floor, those ties are likely to start breaking, and what had been a single society starts to break apart into blocks, just like the slumping sandcastle in my simulation model.

And I think that this is what happens as a result of smoking bans. Because smoking bans are things that are done to whole societies, whole countries, not just individual pubs or towns here and there. And when you subject an entire society to extreme stress, it will start breaking apart. At the outset, from the outside, it doesn’t look like too much has happened, but that’s because you can’t see all the broken ties inside. You maybe just can see a crack or two on the outside (e.g. closed pubs here and there), and dismiss it as unimportant. But inside, everything is moving in slow motion, gradually falling apart. The cracks get bigger and bigger, and things start visibly falling apart.

And the thing is that, when you finally start to notice that the cracks are getting bigger, and figure out what the cause of it is, it’s too late to do anything about it. Because once the ties have broken, they stay broken.

So even if you rescind the smoking ban, and take the pressure off, you’ve still got a broken society, and one that’s coming apart faster and faster.

I wonder if the antismoking zealots realise that something like this is happening? They push and push, and shove and shove. Do they know what they’re doing? I suspect that they haven’t a clue.

But they might well end up with something like this (right), which is a teardrop hitting the floor. The whole society disintegrates.

Will they say that they hadn’t expected anything like that to happen?

Will they say that they were just trying to get a few people to quit smoking?

Is that what they’ll be saying when they’re all lined up against a wall and shot?

We’ll see.