Blame It on Pan

In March 2020, Australians stripped supermarket shelves of toilet paper. People who had never once worried about toilet paper suddenly needed forty rolls. Nobody could quite explain why. They’d just seen everyone else doing it.

The ancient Greeks would have known exactly who to blame.

Pan was the god of the wild: half man, half goat, at home in the woods, the hills and lonely pastures. Shepherds loved and feared him. He was said to make strange noises in empty places: a rustle, a cry, a sound with no source. A whole herd would hear it and bolt at once, with no predator and no danger, just a sudden shared terror. The Greeks called it panikon deima, a fear that comes from Pan.

English picked up panic as an adjective around 1600. “A panic fear” was the sudden, groundless kind. By the early 1700s it was a noun in its own right. And by the 1750s it had found its natural home: the money markets, where a rumour can turn an orderly crowd into a stampede in an afternoon.

Look at what the original idea says about panic. It isn’t just fear. It has three specific features:

• It’s groundless. There’s no actual wolf. The danger is the noise.

• It’s contagious. The herd runs because the herd is running.

• It’s sudden. One moment calm, the next a stampede.

The Greeks even claimed Pan for a battlefield. Herodotus tells of the runner Pheidippides meeting Pan on the road before the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Afterwards the Athenians gave the god a shrine. Later tradition said Pan had struck the Persian army with sudden terror.

Modern panic works the same way: the empty shelf, the run on a bank, the sell-off. It’s rarely about the facts. It’s about the noise, and the sight of everyone else running.

That’s useful to know if you lead people through a crisis. You don’t calm a panic by telling people not to panic. That’s just more noise. You calm it with the thing panic lacks: specific, boring, verifiable information. Here’s what’s happening. Here’s what isn’t. Here’s what we’re doing about it, and when you’ll hear from us next. Panic thrives on vagueness, and a clear voice is the opposite of a strange noise in the woods.

Supermarkets got the shelves restocked eventually. But it was the purchase limits and calm messaging that ended the toilet-paper rush, not the shelves themselves. People needed a reason to stop running.