Screaming Memes
The true pandemic crisis is in our heads
The present social crisis is so much more than a health emergency.
Seeing it as an economic, political, and civic phenomenon helps us come to grips with its true reality.
Above all, we need to confront the ideas in our heads, in order to create social change that enhances our prosperity and peace of mind.
Health Meme
There are so many ways to look at this time of pandemic, and memes, a form of idea contagion, are one way to bring order to perceptual chaos.
The most commonplace meme is pandemic as a health emergency, where an invisible enemy invades our very physical being and causes escalating suffering and death beyond recent compare.
This is the stuff of 24 hour cable news, daily public health office briefings, brave front line workers, and a cowering and deeply concerned public. It is the feedstock for epidemiological models to guide policy and thousands of instant research studies to shed light on nature’s very dubious gift to humanity.
Seen this way, there is nothing we should not do to vanquish our foe, and so never-ending lockdowns and the end of any physical contact with other people seem a small price to pay. Every life is priceless, say some, and it is a crass and uncaring person who would trade lives against mere lucre.
Such a perspective elevates pandemic health outcomes above all else and dictates a now well-known regime to ensure ultimate victory: wash your hands, stay home, avoid others, and wait, wait, wait for the “all’s clear”.
Money Meme
The health sector does not sit in splendid isolation on this planet, however, and so we have quickly discovered to our horror that hiding from each other comes at a great social and economic cost.
We are the ultimate in integrated societies, intimately bound to each other for our basic needs and desires. So, breaking those bonds has caused a different sort of crisis, namely:
· A financial market plunge like no other in history,
· An economic contraction worse than any in centuries,
· A loss in jobs and livelihoods rivaling the Great Depression, and
· A shock to confidence that is fundamentally reordering the global economy.
A few months of response to the health crisis have seemingly birthed years of adjustments to a new and retrograde way of connecting to each other.
We are barely into the transitional period but the outlines of this novel world are coming into focus: an overwhelming emphasis on trust, security, stability, reliability, community, and safety, all of which add up to a less vigorous economy and pressure on our standard of living and quality of life.
We also have yet to sort out the longer-term distortions to our economic relationships, which are expected to harm our health, our work ethic, and our mental wellbeing.
Political Meme
This profound shift brings up the next perspective on this odd time: the way in which politics and policy have bolstered and shaped health and economic threats alike.
The pandemic has reeked of politics from the very start, with Chinese authorities acting to silence whistleblowers and hide the bad news from the outside world.
Their malfeasance was compounded by a phony war against the virus in most countries, where our leaders talked loudly but slow-walked public health measures in early 2020, in an apparent belief that the pandemic would not go global.
This too-little-too-late approach morphed into too-much-too-late in mid-March, when most governments slammed on the economic brakes by closing down as much human contact as possible. That this occurred right after the peak of contagion highlights just how panicky and reactive policy had become.
The political slow walk is now staging a comeback in the form of tepid and reluctant re-openings of many economies, and so delaying a fulsome recovery.
Policy options have turned into guidelines and then rigid regulations, such that most businesses, schools, hospitals, and other organizations are only able to operate at higher cost and lower capacity, thus impairing both jobs and financial stability.
Expanding micro-management of everything from mask wearing to correct opinions is a sure way of imposing even more political costs on society, in the form of reduced prosperity and freedoms.
And all this while the pandemic itself slowly wafts away in most places, leaving its regulatory ghost behind to permanently haunt us all.
Civic Meme
Where there are politicians, there are voters and votes to be had, and that is another way to look at this time of social crisis.
Our civic society has bent and buckled under the weight of suspicion of others, their motives, and behaviors.
We are split between two sizable fringes, with a great chasm between those (labelled as stupid and scared) who support restrictions and those (seen as mean and selfish) who do not.
Battles over mask wearing, lockdowns, therapeutic drug use, and even data collection are but a preamble to emerging controversies over travel restrictions, vaccines, censorship, and democratic norms. The lines being drawn are increasingly shrill and partisan and are building on decades-long trends and the populist-tinged politics of the past few years.
We are not coming back together, since the very essence of our societies is our diverse beliefs and practices. Democratic politics exists to find a peaceable way for disagreeable people to live with each other. Absent trust and tolerance, however, we will be hard put to create a less cantankerous polity.
And then there are things that are far worse than a simple societal division of opinion.
So far, we have seen a false dawn of political behavior, whereby leaders have benefitted from a rally-to-the-flag effect.
It is more than likely that this will quickly fade and be replaced by normal electorate cynicism and street protests, especially with the emergence of mass unemployment and fading hopes in a strong economic recovery.
Hong Kong and France, for different reasons, show the way forward to a new time of perma-revolt, where neither governments nor protesters yield to each other. Guerilla tactics and recurrent skirmishes may be new normal practices that add even more disharmony to our daily lives.
Take Occupy Wall Street, Climate Strike Fridays, and Gilet Jaune, mix with massed jobless youth in a hundred or more different cities at once, united by an anti-status quo attitude and every advanced social media tech tool, and you get a taste of coming post-covid civil society. It will not be polite protest.
Mental Meme
The deepest perspective on this time of crisis is the most nuanced. It basically urges us to look within ourselves to understand why things are so bad.
The corona virus itself is a natural process, but the pandemic is a combination of that plus human interaction. So, our attitudes towards each other are significant drivers of contagion.
For example, Chinese officials hid the pandemic news because they feared exposure before their own people. Other governments sought to avoid political blame by initially downplaying the risk and then later on by massively over-reacting in response to the popular outcry.
These attitudes directly inflated an epidemic into a pandemic and an economic crisis. A culture that accepts dissent and encourages public dialogue is one that will do better at reducing these errors in the future.
Further, there is little evidence that most of the macro policy measures to combat contagion actually worked, aside from simple hygiene and distancing protocols.
What makes us think that we can subvert nature and its processes, especially with a novel disease in a very short time span? This hubris is a major failing of humanity and argues for easing off the blame game when we inevitably fail as a species.
That blame game is not just pointed at our political leaders either. We are all in the firing line and one can see vitriol on social media and in person on issues ranging from social distancing to mask wearing and closing borders. These are disagreements over ideas and beliefs and they are best resolved with open — but respectful — discussion.
Finally, our attitudes towards pandemic risk are also based in our minds.
There is the actual risk, our varying perceptions of that real risk, and then our perceptions of risk that are free floating and unrelated to reality. Sadly, it is the flights of fancy in the latter perceptions that have driven most people throughout this crisis period.
No matter the facts that this corona virus is not terribly dangerous for most people, aside from the elderly and those with chronic medical conditions, the unknowable possibility of contagion and the non-zero risk of suffering are enough to convince most people of imminent danger.
That fear is what has ultimately driven this crisis and it must be redefined and reinterpreted through evidence and persuasion in order to free us from its grip.
What to Do
All of the preceding thoughts and attitudes led us down the path from a natural mutation to a global conflagration. The wrong choices at the wrong time allowed contagion to spread and then heavy-handed government intervention turned a health emergency into an economic and social disaster.
Ultimately, the pandemic is in our heads and that is the only place where we will find a viable solution.
Thankfully, we do not have to wait until the next mutation to fix these problems.
The time to think clearly and act is now.
We need to put in place societal changes that are preventive in nature, flexible, and effective, and that add, rather than subtract, from our prosperity and peace of mind.
End the lockdown, stop the isolation, return to work and play, let people self-select their levels of risk, allow public spaces to reflect community standards, let the mass market have its say, expose policy decisions to open criticism, and stop coercing people and collaborate instead.
Ask, don’t yell.
There is frankly a lot of work to be done, as the present track we are following is anything but these approaches. Let’s call that the meme to end all of these terrible memes.
