Based upon positive reviews, last night I viewed the first episode of “Chernobyl” on HBO. On one level, it is a spectacular horror movie. While the monster is slaughtering people, a few know what is happening. They are dying horrific deaths. But most are blissfully ignorant. Disturbing scenes of the townspeople gathered on a bridge 1/2 mile away, immediately after the explosion, watching the fire and “beautiful light”. With their young children playing in the fallout, enjoying it like an unexpected snow flurry. Carrying on the next day as normal. Enjoying the beautiful sunshiny day. Their children off to school as normal, bathed in radiation.
We can watch Chernobyl in disbelief. How could anyone be so ignorant. So trusting. Surely this is overly fictionalized. And yet it isn’t.
Central to my fascination is the reaction of the leadership. It would be easy to dismiss as only possible in the Soviet Union:
“What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then?”
A powerful human drama is playing out on the Chernobyl screen. Complete and utter disbelief by men in charge, so deep they create an alternate reality where everything is “under control”. Organizational drama where the truth is not communicated upward. And if someone dares to speak the truth, they are immediately dismissed.
Chernobyl stands on its own as riveting documentary-drama. A horror firm firmly rooted in actual events.
But it is more than that. There is a message that transcends Chernobyl. Horrifying human failure that can happen beyond Chernobyl. Human failure that does happen yet today. In governments. In companies. I have a friend who is still in denial about how our former company could lose 1/2 a TRILLION dollars in value. “How could this possibly happen?” … he still wails.
Watch Chernobyl. The answers are there.