Human beings have two basic problems that are derived from
our evolutionary path; the first is that humans are easily frightened and the
second is that humans all too quick to normalize things.
Disclaimer: This author is not a psychologist, psychiatrist
or a physiotherapist and all of the views expressed here are based only on 50+
years of life and human observation.
Normalization:
As someone once rightly observed ‘No one needed over-night
delivery until it was made available.’ Humans have seen this throughout history
since the dawn of history. One of the first remarkable sustainable efforts to
improve the lives of mankind was the tool we call fire. Fire provides three
basic solutions: warmth, light and cooking (which kills germs). Just reflect
upon how far away from raw fire we have gotten a few thousand years later, much
of the Western world shifted away from wood for heat and turned it into
romance, in the western world light is no longer provided by wood or even
candle, which has become electric, and in the western world most cooking has
shifted away from wood, BBQ being the exception and now uses electric or gas. The
Western world has been highlighted because in other parts of the world, wood
and worse based fires are still a means of warmth, light and the ability to cook.
If the reader is young enough, you are requested to consider
which appliance in your kitchen you can not do without, then go and ask the
same question of your mother and then your grandmother; the reader might be
surprised by the answers they give back.
This author has noted that in recent years racism and
gender-ism have returned to many societies, and yet the long standing societies
which embrace racism or gender-ism are not being equally tasked to change and
are being invited into Western societies and given a pass on change.
COVID-19 was and still is a classic example of normalization. For many people the virus was not much of a thing while for others it was a big thing; for this author this is and was not a bad thing. Throughout the course of the ‘pandemic’ it was eventually noted that those at risk were those with a weakened immune system. The list at high risk was the old, the obese, people in areas away from the equator, those with cancer, and a plethora of others on a case by case basis depending on their specific condition or disease. People at high risk or those who cohabitate with people at high risk are strongly encouraged to maintain situational awareness; though the same could be said about the flu.
Fright:
The means taken to address the emergence of COVID-19 and the
reaction to those means is indicative of how quickly some people will leap to
fear and follow the directed path provided. Many people leapt upon the ideas of
masking, isolation, vaccination, schooling, unemployment and the closing of
small businesses; with a total disregard toward any concerns towards; mental
health, economic consequence, scholastic progress, and an honest assessment of
the medical health industry. The buy in to these lines of thinking was both
deep and wide.
It use to be that a man afraid to leave his cave or hut only
had one option left and that was to watch his children starve to death first
and then his wife and eventually himself. Another man may have a sense of
community and will give the formally mentioned man some leftover food to him and
his family. The moment there are both the brave and the protected; hierarchy is
inevitable to sort out how things are managed; this all happened way back when mankind
began seeing the start of marriages, villages, fiefdoms, and eventually royal
families.
Fear has a contagion like aspect especially in times of
uncertain; times such as conquest, famine, war and death. This contagious
nature of fear multiplies with the level of uncertainty and the governmental
reaction to the ‘pandemic’ bread nothing but uncertainty with those ever
shifting rules. The rules were deployed coupled with the ‘you want grandma to
die’ narrative. Of course most people don’t like to be afraid alone and so there
wasn’t just governmental pressure for people to comply, there was also
interpersonal pressure between the fearful and the hesitant to trust the
governmental entities.
President Donald Trump’s project Warp Speed skipped over
many of the safety measures put in place in years gone past at the time of this
writing. Many other governments followed suit and not only rushed to distribute
the vaccine, which is now referred to as a therapeutic, those
governments also infringed upon the rights of the citizenry. The people then had a choice to make; run the
risk of getting the infection and possibly killing grandma, or suffer the
restrictions being imposed upon them by both companies and the government(s).
This zero sum game imposed upon the people by governmental entities is not a
comfortable place to live and so, many people sought solace within their peer
group,
The solace being sought was expressed in two basic formats:
a) adapt to the consensus or b) try to increase the consensus already in play,
thus applying more public pressure to the dissenters hoping that those dissenters
would acquiesce just as they themselves had, therefore making a larger majority
and thus fostering the feeling that they themselves picked the right path due
to an agreement from the mob. People can be smart and are mobs rarely so.
What concerns this author is what happens when the current
list of assumed needs reverts back to being a list of wants due to a lack of
availability and what happens when the consequences of the haste everyone cried
out for comes to light?
Fear addresses matters of survivability, while normalization
addresses matters of productivity and only through a healthy balance of both
can one remain both safe and prosperous - for when one stifles the other, there
be dragons and monsters.
No comments:
Post a Comment