IN an island where the cultural and physical landscapes have been under relentless assault for most of the past 20 years, there was a perverse symbolism at play a couple of weeks back when the accident everyone said was bound to happen finally happened. It involved the standing of a long-established symbol of sedate, genteel Bermuda on its head, a sort of belated death knell for “The Isles of Rest” sounded on the madly clanging Bermuda bell of a surrey-fringed carriage. Bucking horses, infuriated by crowds and noise and claustrophobia, careened down Front Street dragging a carriage behind them. Tourists and residents gathered for Harbour Night were scattered, some injured in the mayhem.

But the pandemonium that followed was completely disproportionate to any harm actually done.

The mass hysteria prompted by this near-tragedy was in fact suggestive of a bad case of war jitters. It went far beyond what might have been expected in an island where this year’s already near-record tally of road fatalities has gone largely unremarked on.

This is the second time in recent months when Bermudians, cosmopolitan Bermudians with push-button access to hundreds of TV channels and literally incalculable Internet news sources, have shown themselves just as susceptible to blind panic as the most unsophisticated tribesman caught up in a violent wave of mob emotion.

Last year’s tsunami panic at the West End said far more about Bermudians whose nerves have been pulled as tight as piano strings than it did about the Somerset Police Station’s inability to properly verify its information before commencing evacuation procedures.

People bolted their homes unprompted by the police and headed for high ground, spreading rumours, anxiety and fear in their wake. Not just Sandys Parish but most of the rest of Bermuda was traumatised by hysterical and increasingly exaggerated reports of the non-existent natural calamity about to befall us.

Only a tiny percentage of us took the eminently sensible precaution of double-checking the information with sources generally considered more reliable than the Bermuda grapevine. Everyone else huddled at Fort Scaur or Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, hoping to wait out the deluge from these locations.

Both incidents revealed aspects of our character we are generally happier not knowing. Both incidents revealed a sharp undertow of anxiety running beneath the deceptively placid surface of Bermudian life.

Freighted with metaphorical significance, these two instances centred around an environment that has been trampelled and tortured as a consequence of economic overreaching striking back against its oppressor.

It’s often noted by our guest workers just how entirely out of step most Bermudians are with an economy that’s in overdrive. But if many Bermudians have opted to take up permanent residence in the past (egged on by politicians who exploit past misdeeds for future electoral advantage, invariably doing the generals one better by fighting not the last campaign but the one before that and, sometimes, the one before that), it’s not entirely surprising.

Many are entirely uncomfortable in the present and utterly terrified of the future.

There’s a Robert Frost poem about a day labourer, a simple hired man, whose spiritual and cultural impoverishment prove entirely more debilitating than any lack of material possessions - “a man with nothing to look forward to with hope, nothing to look back on with pride”. It’s a sentiment many Bermudians can identify with. For the cultural contours of this island, fixed and unchanging for decades, were altered beyond all recognition after the US Senate approved the US/Bermuda Tax Treaty in 1986.

Sold to an admiring but largely uncomprehending Bermudian public as a means of resuscitating tourism because it included tax benefits for US conventions held here, the devil was in the fine print - a provision exempting insurance premium payments from US taxes.

This was the foundation stone of the new off-shore financial services economy, an economy that has led to laissez-faire excesses of all kinds and created cultural destabilisation and dislocation on a scale never before known in Bermuda. This yawning cultural estrangement has even been deliriously literalised in the ugly, functionalist architecture of the new economy.

Late Victorian Hamilton is now being overrun by what can only be described as spearing Early Blade Runner-type towers, the privileged elites of the various financial services industries working in these skyscrapers literally looking down on the masses scrambling around the city’s roots. It’s the story of rapidly accelerating social stratification writ exceedingly large in concrete, marble and glass.

In a cultural echo straight from the Tower of Babel parable, those perched above and those huddling below are losing the ability to understand one another. They speak quite different languages, pursue different goals, have radically different sensibilities.

The mutual mistrust and lack of appreciation is now palpable. As the psychologist and cultural historian Rollo May observed, community is largely based on communication — understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing. Without communication there is resentment, suspicion and the atomising of society into communities of feuding communities. These conflicts within Bermudian society are being accentuated by a complete lack of clarity on Government’s part as to how better integrate Bermuda’s primary industry into the island’s social structure, to make the financial services sector everyone’s primary concern in the same way tourism was. Entirely inadequate coordination among Goverment agencies, a cretinised public education system, out-of-date or non-existent long-term planning and minimal political interest by parties made up of individuals preoccupied with self-interest rather than anything remotely resembling national purpose are all conspiring to aggravate the situation.

Social stability, somebody once said, is based largely on the individual’s capacity to take a hand in his own development, the capacity to mold himself, his environment and his future. Instability stems from the inability to participate in such activities. So it’s probably time for the authorities to start stocking up on tranquiliser darts and capture guns because it’s likely Bermuda will have further bouts of cultural mass hysteria to contend with.>- Tim Hodgson