Three dead in Mexico City. A festival stampede during the World Cup celebrations, not a terrorist act, not a natural disaster, but a simple, brutal failure of organisation, of crowd control, of basic civic competence. And yet, we shall no doubt hear the usual platitudes: ‘a tragic accident’, ‘our thoughts are with the families’, ‘lessons will be learned’. But will they? In an age that fetishises spectacle over substance, where festivals are marketed as ‘experiences’ rather than communal gatherings, such disasters are not anomalies; they are symptoms.
Let us consult the ancients. When the Roman games grew too grand, too bloated with imported lions and exotic dancers, the infrastructure crumbled. The Colosseum’s velarium collapsed, killing hundreds. Why? Because the pursuit of ever-larger crowds, ever-more-dazzling shows, outstripped the practical wisdom of engineers. The builders had forgotten Vitruvius. We have forgotten him too.
Mexico City’s tragedy is a microcosm of a global disease: the prioritisation of viral moments over human life. The World Cup is a carnival of nationalism, a chance for nations to preen. But when you pack tens of thousands into a public square with insufficient exits, with inadequate medical response, with security that is more for show than for safety, you are not celebrating football. You are tempting fate.
The Victorian era, for all its hypocrisy and class rigidities, understood something about public order. The great railway stations, the Crystal Palace exhibitions, even the street festivals of the time were planned with an almost obsessive attention to detail. Joseph Paxton did not just design a glasshouse; he engineered a crowd flow. The Victorians, despite their many faults, had a horror of chaos. We, in our enlightened age, have replaced that horror with a lust for spectacle. Every festival must be bigger, louder, more Instagrammable. The result: three corpses in Mexico City.
I am not, mark you, calling for a return to Victorian repression. But I am pointing out that a civilisation that cannot manage a public festival without deaths is a civilisation in decline. We have the technology: crowd modelling software, real-time communication systems, drone surveillance. And yet, we fail to use them intelligently. Why? Because the organisers care more about the branding deal with Coca-Cola than about the safety of the punters? Because politicians see the event as a photo op, not as an engineering problem? Because the public, doped on digital distraction, does not demand better?
This is intellectual decadence: the belief that good intentions and hashtags can substitute for concrete planning. We are Rome before the Visigoths, except our barbarians are our own ineptitude.
Conservatives will wring their hands about immigration or crime. The left will blame capitalism. Both miss the point. The real culprit is a failure of imagination, a refusal to treat public safety as a serious intellectual challenge. The three dead in Mexico City are not merely victims of a stampede. They are victims of our collective stupidity, of a society that has grown soft on the details, that prefers the dazzle of the spectacle to the drudgery of the spreadsheet.
And so, as the flags are lowered and the condolences are tweeted, ask yourself: what next? Another festival, another tragedy, another round of hollow promises. We are trapped in a cycle of decadence, and only a renaissance of plain, boring competence can save us. But of course, competence is not sexy. It does not sell tickets. It does not get retweeted. So the bodies will pile up, and we will call it fate.
Down with the shows. Up with the exits.
