Why do people do the things they do?
Seems to me that a lot of analysis goes wrong today because it starts with an assumption like “humans are basically rational actors seeking to improve their material welfare”… which works sometimes yes, but fails badly as an explanation for all human behavior. And in fact our experience this last year has really been stupendous as a study of the psychological and religious reasons that actually motivate a lot of human behavior. Let me give you just a couple recent examples if I may.
A few days ago Emily Oster of Brown University wrote a very benign article for The Atlantic in which she pointed out that the risk to children from COVID-19 is very low, so if parents have been vaccinated, they should feel no great concern at taking family vacations this summer, even if their children are unvaccinated. Now of course people like vacations, and people can’t wait for all these COVID restrictions to be over, so people were happy and thanked her for her article, right? Wrong. What actually happened is that she was vilified, and so badly that she has temporarily left Twitter. (I don’t want to share it here, but you can pretty easily find her original tweets and read the replies if you want. This was not a few disagreeing people, this was a vicious, often I would even say deranged, online mob. I don’t blame her for leaving.)
What is going on? What is going on is, in fact, religion. (Shadi Hamid, down below, calls it “COVID absolutism”, and that seems as good a name as any.) People found in COVID meaning, and a shared sense of purpose that had been lacking in their life (and a group of heretics to shame too). So they don’t want that to end. You never get away from religion, you only keep inventing new idols. But doesn’t taking vacations improve material welfare? Wouldn’t a restoration of normal social interactions bring joy? Isn’t it more pleasant to breathe while not wearing a mask? Yes, even for them, but the sort of psychological/religious benefit people get out of continuing COVID fear is literally more important to them than the material benefits of ending it. Eventually (I hope) they’ll have to recalibrate their psychology and find fulfillment in something else. But right now, COVID is at the center of their belief system.
Let me also favorably link Nellie Bowles, a NYTimes journalist who lives in San Francisco… because of course it is always pleasant when someone who is coming at life from a very different perspective than yourself is noticing the same phenomenon.
Covid taught me how many people need religion in their lives. Because the virus became a religion. Or at least that’s how I saw it, among many in my circles both professional and social and in much of the writing I read about the pandemic. More than devotion to the covid rules, there was the shaming of anyone who joked about them (fine, yeah, I made some jokes, and I got yelled at!) or who dared be on a beach without a mask (also me, so many times). …
Sometimes seeing how the passion consumed people scared me. I don’t know where that energy goes without the virus. Maybe it finds another illness. Maybe it goes back to politics.
(Incidentally, Nellie leans more on the “shaming” phenomenon there as evidence that it had become a religion than I would. What usually first sets off my own “we’re dealing with religion now” sensors is when I see people become far more emotionally invested in something than any levelheaded look at the facts would justify. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re dealing with religion, but it is often the first alarm to sound in my head.)
I’ll give you one more on that point because I just came across it last night, here from Shadi Hamid, who is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and Muslim (we’ll hit the point from every perspective today!).
OK, enough about that. Let me give you one more related example - and one which, actually, I have still not explained to my own satisfaction, so maybe you can help me here, and that is the strange case of Eric Feigl-Ding. Feigl-Ding is probably the archetypal COVID panic-merchant on Twitter. What he sells, every day for months now, is doom, gloom, and panic, in emotionally charged language like “this is exactly what I feared!” and, and this is the critical part here, he has built a huge following by doing it. Clearly there is a sizable market out there for regular predictions of death and destruction. Why? When Trump was still president you could’ve said “well bad COVID news makes Trump look bad and that makes them feel good” - and surely that was part of the explanation, at least pre-November, but we’re past that now. I’ve compared it to something else I don’t well understand (and maybe that’s part of the problem), and that is people who enjoy disaster movies. In bad COVID news, people are sort of consuming a disaster movie in real time, and they get a sort of psychological pleasure from that. Let me give you one example of a recent tweet (and one with a minimum of doom language, actually).
Now I don’t know what’s going to happen next month (and, despite his unwavering confidence in everything he says, neither does he), but I can tell you that Feigl-Ding tweets something like this all the time, whenever a popular photo of a large gathering passes his way, and his predictions of doom have been demonstrably false now many many times. And yet he just keeps making them. And people keep buying them. It’s not rational as reason is normally defined, but it’s a remarkable human phenomenon.