Utagawa Kunyoshi's early-19th century woodblock print, The Buddhist Monk Calms the Storm; probably not propaganda for Japanese superiority. ((c)Getty Images/Thinkstock)

Much has been made of the purported zero reports of looting following the Japanese earthquake, the ensuing tsunami that may have ultimately claimed upwards of 100,000 lives, and the still growing nuclear crisis. This point has often been made with a wink toward racism; that is, in comparison to the rampant looting that broke out in the predominantly black, poor sections of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

It is without a doubt remarkable that not a single of the 126 million residents of Japan has wrapped his coat around his fist and put it through a storefront window and grabbed whatever was inside. This spotless track record actually lasted three days, it turns out, although for the most part the incidents have been few and far between; order has generally prevailed in the hardest-hit areas. Despite the heavy, unspoken implication invoked by raising the comparison, this is not evidence of the racial superiority of Asians over African-Americans. It is a glimpse into a society that trusts in its government and its leaders to work out these problems and in a pan-national, homogeneous culture that will take up slack created by the disaster.

A recent blog post on the Daily Beast, for example, points out that Americans hoping to adopt ridiculously cute Japanese orphans will be almost entirely disappointed. Although there will likely be a huge surge in the orphan population following the tsunami, as a culture Japan expects extended family to take in any children left parentless. As a nation, Japan doesn’t consider parentless children as orphans; children who are without parents or any additional extended family qualify as orphans, and those who do are raised in a well-funded and well-run orphanage system.

This is not to say that Japan is superior culturally or nationally to the U.S. or to New Orleans. As a fan of sociology as a general explanatory touchstone, I believe that the stability following the tsunami relative to the looting following Katrina is an example of a society farther from the edge than the 9th Ward of New Orleans. The better explanation is that when society unravels enough, when laws diminish and humans find themselves wandering between the border of order and chaos, we may let go and follow the current that takes us into what effectively amounts to a post-apocalyptic state, the world gone crazy.

“Looting in New Orleans?!”, upper-middle-class suburban America thought. “Why I can’t believe it. I’ve puked on their streets and bought drugs from some guy during Mardi Gras and everything seemed fine to me.” Yet it was true, there was looting in New Orleans, and more specifically in the most economically depressed areas of New Orleans. And upper-middle-class suburban America remembered that there is an economically depressed area in each of its cities, and it knew fear.

It also bears repeating that it wasn’t just economically-depressed blacks in New Orleans who went crazy when Katrina hit. Members of the local law enforcement wing were also charged, for example, emptying a shotgun into the back of an unarmed mentally handicapped man without provocation and opening fire with automatic weapons on a similarly unarmed and injured crowd on a bridge out of town.

It’s depressing, but this view suggests that we are all capable of the the most unspeakable act the greatest monster among us is capable of. Indeed, current sociological theory says that serial killers aren’t deranged, psychopaths that can be explained by psychological terms, but rather humans who kill others because they’ve identified a threadbare spot in the fabric of society where their actions may be overlooked, unnoticed or where violence is more prevalent. This line of thinking logically follows to include other crime like looting during riots or natural disasters. The fabric of society has become threadbare there as well and with a lapse in the normal rules, perhaps anyone would take a TV. No? What about gasoline? Food? The idea behind this is that the distinction between Japan and New Orleans is the difference in proximity to the edge where the normal rules of society lose their strength.

Strangely, the idea that even the Ned Flanders among us exist within some distance from snapping, measurable by units of personal or social disaster, is supported by recent research into dieting. A Time post spotlights a couple of marketing professors ran a couple of studies that suggest that people on diets aren’t stereotypically cranky because of low blood sugar but because they have expended their finite daily resource of self-control on making good choices over eating. It’s not difficult to shoot holes in the studies; a recent journal paper reveals that the study populations in the vast majority of American academic psychology studies use predominantly white college undergrads as populations and one can only imagine academic marketing studies follow suit. What’s more, the authors concluded that a correlation between choosing an orange (an example of exercising self control) and choosing an aggressive Adam Sandler movie is evidence of a link between expending finite self control and aggressiveness. It’s possible they merely stumbled on a previously overlooked preference among Adam Sandler fans for oranges. It’s also possible that the orange takers considered their other options, Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth, sucky.

But the studies are based on a very interesting premise, that we all have a finite amount of patience for niceties like politeness, reserve and patience with others. Can this not be extrapolated to the notion that tolerance for law and order and the structure of society is finite as well and that when it falls away enough and need grows in proportion, each individual may lose their faith in its ability to guide and take matters into their own hands?