So here’s part of my post from March 16 regarding the fomentation of fear being a short-sighted strategy that would backfire:
When I originally wrote this, it was referencing this backfiring for some other issue in the future. I didn’t intend that it would immediately backfire and directly on the same subject. We find ourselves in such a situation now. We rationalized the sensationalism in the name of promoting seriousness, and there has been widespread underreport (or complete non-reporting) of the plethora of good news that has come out relative to what we had previously thought. I think on one hand, people may not wish to emphasize any of this because they feel it undermines their message of the severity of the situation, but ultimately I believe people will fundamentally believe that they’re not getting a clear picture of what’s happening, that there’s not any honest appraisal, and people end up tuning them out.
This is probably at least in large part one of the resistances to masks — people have persistently been told how bad everything will be and is, with no acknowledgement of the many ways in which we know a lot more about the virus now than we did then, and that the vast majority of what we know about is has been positive relative to our understanding then. So these people have consistently been told that they’re stupid, and they’ve tuned out. Think of a similar approach to trying to increase seatbelt usage rates of teenagers. Yes, automobile fatalities are very serious and being in a motor vehicle accident without wearing a seatbelt drastically increases your chances of major injury and/or death. It’s definitely an important public safety measure to increase seatbelt compliance, especially among teenagers. But if we’re consistently telling them that they’re going to die if they don’t wear a seatbelt, the vast, vast majority of all of them will come to learn by experience that nothing bad happens when they’re going out. You have to have a lot of kids wearing their seatbelt all the time to prevent one automobile fatality. For any given individual, they themselves probably are at a very low absolute risk of harm not wearing a seatbelt. The problem is when you have larger populations that will eventually capture more and more automobile accidents, you’re going to start seeing the large difference in relative risk. But simply telling teenagers how stupid they are and how dangerous they are for not wearing a seatbelt isn’t actually going to help, and likely will probably push them to being more defiant. Granted, there are some level headed people out there that have reached out sensibly regarding masks and education, but the vast majority of the message is coming from shaming, talking about how they’re putting everyone’s life in danger, etc. But the reality with masks, just like seatbelts, is that for every individual being shamed, their chance of actually being someone contracting or spreading COVID is still quite low. It’s only something that’s arising at the population level, just like automobile fatalities. So if we want people’s behavior to change, we may need to look at another approach. But if we’re fed up with them and are more content with reducing our anxieties about it by shaming them and venting on them, then we ca do that, too. We just have to decide what exactly it is we want.
Of course, we could assume that we shouldn’t have to explain these things or burden ourselves with that responsibility. And perhaps there’s an element of that that is true. But I would liken this to being a pedestrian. When you have the crosswalk sign, you have the right of way. You shouldn’t have to worry about a car hitting you. But just because you shouldn’t have to doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. When I enter that crosswalk, I assume that nobody is going to see me. I assume that I don’t have the right of way because my safety comes first, far and above prioritizing my assumptions of what I think should happen.
But, anyway, I think a decent size of this is that we’re reaping what we’ve sown. But, also, I think there’s a level of let down that, from a simplistic view, people hate the idea of these “rubes” being “right,” and any good news about COVID must make people feel that, somehow, this must validate these people, and in an effort to maintain footing against them (as this is ultimately a culture war), we move on to the next battle that’s viewed as winnable (from the perspective of a culture war). Thus, more emphasis on masks than what’s going on with the virus.
