The shitstorm
Feeling in a bit of a strange mood after more than a week of pretty much staying home. Just putting down my thoughts here.
Because, like these good medical professionals, I’m scared.
Why am I scared?
Because the human condition has left us ill-equipped for a crisis of this nature.
What is the nature of this threat that scares me?
It is a threat that only needs one weak link to wreak havoc.
Why does the human condition combined with the nature of this threat scare me?
The human condition is all about fighting the good fight between short and long term gratification. We are hard-wired to want things that make us feel good in the short term. We like to overeat, fuck, fight, drink, do drugs, overwork, and all kinds of other risky behavior because evolution has had billions of years to craft us this way. And the crafting makes sense: they have had a huge hand in making us the dominant species on our planet.
This very sloppy (but effective) process of evolution has created a very diverse population of people that have all kinds of different strengths and weaknesses. Some are good long term planners. Some are very creative. Some are more productive. Some are more driven and focused. Some are also more sloppy. Still more are very greedy. However, we all have one thing in common: the human condition.
When you have a whole society in which our populations are so diverse in their strengths and weaknesses, it is usually a good thing. All we need to do is have some portion of the population that is willing to act in good faith and it makes even the most difficult challenges doable.
This one is different. A single weak link in a huge population is enough to wreak havoc on the lives of thousands. Literally thousands. The spreading rate of COVID-19 looks to be very high. High enough that a single person is enough to start an outbreak that, if no measures are taken, can lead to tens of thousands of infections.
Fighting this threat is, in many ways, fighting our desire for short term gratification. We want to go out to eat. We want to go to the gym. We want to go to the party. We want to go to the bar. We are social animals! We are creatures of habit! Of course we want all of this! And when all of the guidelines from all of the experts tell us we cannot do any of these things, the challenge becomes a fight against instant gratification.
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So this essentially boils down to a fight against instant gratification against a threat that only requires a single weak link to bring down entire economies. The prognosis is not good.
An erosion of trust in science has left us vulnerable
The sheer amount of disinformation circulating the web has left people distrustful in anything that resembles authority. While we should all definitely be wary of authority, it seems like many of us have lost the ability to distinguish between scientific authority and political authority. Scientific authority is generally accurate. Here’s a few facebook posts of a particularly conspiracy-laden facebook friend of mine from the beginning days of the outbreak in the states.
This one is basically calling you a pussy if you take the threat seriously:
And this one questions whether or not there was actually a pandemic, even after the WHO declared it one. Wrap it up with a bit of UBI goodwill to soften the blow:
And here they are in full-on conspiracy mode linking the virus somehow to the death of Kobe Bryant and suggesting it also has something to do with Cuomo wanting to be “Big Brother”. It’s actually difficult to follow the layers of disinformation in this one as many of the connections are not even clear. But the message is clear: COVID-19 is to be associated with conspiracy.
Now before you get bogged down in the fine details of these posts, let’s consider what the right thing to do is. The only thing to be saying at a time like this is encouraging people to stay home and wash their fucking hands. These posts are a far cry from the right thing to do.
And this kind of thing was coming up everywhere during the first week or so of the outbreak when people weren’t sure of what to make of it. And I’ve got a particularly rational and scientific facebook feed. I can only imagine what the facebook feed of the person that posted this looks like. They are probably in an echo chamber that resulted in that particular community reacting slower to the seriousness of the threat. Consider this effect nationwide and it means deaths. Potentially lots of them. This is why I’m scared.
What to be done?
Well wouldn’t I love to have an answer. I don’t. But what I’ve been starting to do a bit more is offer (generally) respectful counterpoints when I see blatant disinformation show up in my facebook feed. I’ll leave a comment explaining why it’s not true. Then at least if someone goes through and reads the thread, there’s a bit of exposure to the truth.
Long term, it’s difficult to say. The particular individual I mentioned before is probably too far gone. They have completely rejected science and truth in any of its forms and revel in verifiably false conspiracy theories as a matter of identity and pride.
I guess it will come back to the same thing as always: education. People need to learn how to think critically. Without that, any sufficiently powerful viral thread will kill more people than it needs to.
