We need a word for this phenomenon
Or perhaps it has already been designated, "Fool's Equilibrium"
Hi all. Sorry no posts in a while, but with the busyness of the holidays, and the smash of getting Spring classes ready, and then the fact that I actually did write some things for submission elsewhere (which means I can’t share them here, right now anyway), there haven’t been any posts here.
And then of course there is the problem that we all, 100% of us, agree with Erica’s comment here.
However all of us (including Erica) are still forced to think about the topic anyway, but it does make you pause before writing anything else.
A link to one narrative elsewhere
But, I am going to share a couple more things I found interesting on that topic anyway. The first goes out to a narrative essay written by, as he says, a Democrat-voting American living in South Africa on his gradually evolving understanding of the human response to COVID-19. He hits a lot of the same points we’ve hit here over the last few months, but written through his own personal history, which makes it interesting and valuable… you should go read it, but I don’t want to say much else and spoil the read!
Except that, at the end, he does make the point that one big consideration driving his thinking now is that he does not want to live in a world where you can force medicine on people casually. If you’re going to force medicine on people that should require an impenetrable, rock-solid, of necessity, public health justification… and if that justification ever existed for COVID-19 vaccination, the omicron variant has obliterated it. You’re going to get it eventually anyway, so it is not a question of “avoiding” it, only a question of possibly delaying it, and there isn’t much of a case for forcing medicine on people so maybe someone catches cold in April instead of in January. And vaccination is certainly not preventing the spread, geographies with near 100% vaccination rates are still seeing their highest case rates ever.
But as we’ve seen, the reaction is some jurisdictions to the fact that COVID-19 mandates are less justifiable than they’ve ever been is to do them even more, and get even more hostile and intolerant in their enforcement. Vaccine mandates for college students are less justifiable than ever before, so what do we get? Booster mandates! And also you’re not allowed to dine off campus for the next month and shouldn’t leave your dorm room unless necessary. Thanks. We have no idea what the goal is anymore either, thanks.
We need a name for this phenomenon
We need a name for this phenomenon. I caught this tweet last night.
Here’s the thing (and the phenomenon for which we need a name) - we keep doing the same failed policies over and over again because they do not work. If they did work, they might be implemented, but they wouldn’t last very long, because they would do their job and then they’d be over. But in fact they don’t work very well at all. And because they don’t work very well at all, we have to keep doing them, and get more fanatical about their enforcement, because they don’t work very well. Ken Gardner told me I’m mistaken, actually this phenomenon already has a name.
Fool’s Equilibrium
I did zip a tweet to the good sociologist Bradley Campbell to say “hey, it’s the job of your field to come up with names for things like this”. And he replied that “Fool’s Equilibrium” might be, at least, related to what I’m talking about, and sent me this piece from yesterday. Now I think, actually, this is not the same phenomenon as the one I’m talking about above, but I did still find the discussion interesting, and I like new categories for bad ideas, so I’m passing it your way. The article is mainly about face masks, and here is his definition.
No, no … sane people can recognize that there are both potential benefits and major costs to public masking. And thereby arises the Fool's Equilibrium, which comes about every time a tradeoff between two competing goods is resolved in such a way that neither good is attained. This typically happens, I would say, when a tradeoff isn't explicitly acknowledged, allowing behavior to settle on, or oscillate around, an equilibrium where frivolous gestures are favored over robust reforms.
He goes on to say that, for example, there are two ways masking could have been handled. We could just not do it, and thereby get all the many, mostly unquantified benefits that come from having our face and the faces of others uncovered - but, in many areas of the country, people aren’t willing to do that. Or, we could go all in on masking and demand that everyone wear high quality, properly fitted, makes it hard to breathe all the time, masks that might have some effect on disease transmission - but most people aren’t willing to do that either. So what do we get? “Put this nearly useless piece of cloth on your face that WILL bring all the dehumanization of masking but will NOT have almost any effect on disease mitigation.” This he dubs the Fool’s Equilibrium.
His whole article is… a bit feisty, and also a good read, and I will end this post with that.
Over at eugyppius, commentator "It makes sense" described a (psychological) phenomenon called "extinction burst" which seems to come close.
https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/drosten-corona-astrologer-noted-hysteric/comments
Call it the covid chamber?
I've thought of the lingering and extension of these kinds of policies as expressions of the lockdown mentality. But as a label, "covid chamber" is better, and more specific.