How much of this is... people need their lives to be part of a bigger story?
Christianity adds transcendent meaning to every human encounter. Many of our neighbors were lacking that in their lives and found it, perversely enough, through disease fear.
I may perhaps be justly accused of writing the same post over and over again, seen from slightly different angles, all of which posts ultimately come down to “people have forgotten God, that is why this has happened”. Well, uh… here is another one.
Hopefully you were too busy with friends and family yesterday to notice a fresh round of new variant! fear! danger! fear!, from southern Africa this time, followed by state actions like this one:
Now if you’re reading this post, one reaction you have to “thank you for tuning into CNN, here is yet another thing to be afraid of with COVID-19!” stories is something like… aren’t people over this already? I mean, isn’t the human brain, even, psychologically incapable of maintaining a constant sense of crisis? At some point doesn’t everyone say “look, I understand there is still continuing danger… but I can’t spend the next decade in my basement or even just covering my face, I have to live my life. I’m done.” You may, actually, favor precautionary state action like the above, but if you do you’re certainly not happy about it, you want this all to be over.
And yet, I’m not going to subject you to them, but if you go read the replies on social media to the “new variant!” stories, what you will discover is… yes, some people are just sick of it all like you, but a fair number continue to find it, it seems, fairly exciting. I’m reminded that regular Twitter conversant George Smith said to me, many months ago now, that COVID-19 is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to some people. They don’t want it to end.
Said another way, my suggestion in this post is that we need to see our lives as part of some grand story. And a fair number of people in the world were lacking that story for themselves before COVID-19, and now they have found it in the quest for zero disease risk. Now that’s a pretty dumb grand story in the list of grand stories you can pick from, but at least it is a story, and they have a place in it.
If you’re ready for this all to be over, that’s probably a sign that, to a decent extent, you were content with your pre-COVID-madness life and would be happy to have it back now. Part of that contentment was sourced in the fact that you did understand your life as part of some larger story. An adherent of any major religion sort of gets that benefit automatically. Christianity, we can rightly say, adds transcendent meaning to every human encounter, you might say it therefore makes normal human life exciting enough. For people who did not have that, thanks to COVID-19 they have it now, and they don’t want to return to lacking it.
To some extent they will even tell us this. Kelly K passed this along to me yesterday.
Now we should all be a little skeptical of survey data these days, but with that skepticism, we can look and notice here that 6% of people actually said that COVID-19 gives their life meaning. I think the real percentage is a good deal higher (and only 15% of people surveyed said “faith”?), but 6% of people actually said that COVID-19 gives their life meaning. You don’t particularly want things that give your life meaning to disappear.
An only slightly related ending comment
It isn’t much connected but I did also want to draw your attention, just because it is a great piece, to “The Vaccine Moment, Part 1”, by a writer in Ireland. The whole thing is worth your reading, but let me grab one section, not even the most important section, for my purposes here (emphasis below is mine). Following a section talking about how, despite Ireland’s very high vaccination numbers (something like 95%), and despite already employing a vaccine passport system to keep the remaining dirty unvaccinated away from everyone else, they’re still shutting down society anyway due to a case surge:
In an honest society, all of this would have been subject to robust public debate. We would have seen scientists of all opinions openly debating on TV and radio and in the press; views of all kinds aired on social media; journalists properly investigating reports of both vaccine successes and vaccine dangers; serious explorations of alternative treatments; public debates about the balance between civil liberties and public health, and what ‘public health’ even means. But we have not seen this and we will not see it, for debate, like dissent, is out of fashion. The media here in Ireland has not asked a critical question of anyone in authority for at least eighteen months.
Many of us have found ourselves thinking fairly often, “is it a conspiracy, or are our leaders just stupid, or is it something else?”. Here in the US we have experienced the same as the above, a truly astounding lack of serious questioning by the media for 18 months running. Many times I have said, you get Fauci and Walensky on your shows every day and not even once have you managed to spit out something like, “so how is it all these schools in Europe have never masked children, but you say it’s necessary here?”. I would not have guessed they could go 18 months daily avoiding such questions but they are apparently quite a dedicated profession.
Is it a conspiracy? There ain’t no way thousands of journalists worldwide are all in on the same conspiracy, that is not a believable claim. What we have, instead, is awful journalistic culture. There is endless groupthink, everybody looks at everybody else and to a few big players (e.g. the NYTimes) and makes sure their message isn’t that different from what everyone else is saying. It is a profession that is ideologically biased into preferring action over inaction, and which thinks state power is the solution to every problem. Many journalists also just aren’t very good at statistical analysis and multi-variable thinking, they don’t really understand much of the stuff they are taking it upon themselves to explain to everyone else. And it is no longer a truth-centric profession, it is a profession that thinks its job really is to direct you toward the “right” beliefs and actions, and it’s quite alright to shine the flashlight very carefully and make sure you only see those things that will lead you toward the “right” beliefs. So it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. Awful culture might even be worse, nobody even had to order them to behave so poorly.
Just to chime in to offer an attempt at defending the conspiracy minded folks out there. If the reason they are all complicit in this groupthink business is because (a) they’ve been groomed via public/higher education and (b) been specifically selected over time by “big media” and if that coincides with (c) the purging of more independent minded individuals then perhaps the conspiracy label sticks. Albeit a slow generational one.