Recently I’ve had several friends pose this question:
what the fuck is going on?
Some are noticing that their fourth vaccine shot did nothing to stop them from getting COVID for the third time. Some of them pose conspiracy hypotheses about depopulation and Bill Gates. Most are somewhere in between. It seems obvious to them that some order or structure exists to the chaotic mess that the West is in, particularly evidenced by the COVID response, but they’re at a loss to explain it.
The FDA approving the COVID shot for very young children under an EUA has many of them mystified again. What? Why? It makes no sense!
Here’s one answer.
I minored in psychology, mostly to try to understand myself better. Here is one of the best summaries I’ve ever read about the famous Robber’s Cave social psychology experiment. The experiment is real; the summary is taken from chapter 30 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (a truly brilliant novel-length fan fiction set in the Harry Potter universe).
There was a legendary episode in social psychology called the Robbers Cave experiment. It had been set up in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, with the intent of investigating the causes and remedies of conflicts between groups. The scientists had set up a summer camp for 22 boys from 22 different schools, selecting them to all be from stable middle-class families. The first phase of the experiment had been intended to investigate what it took to start a conflict between groups. The 22 boys had been divided into two groups of 11 -
- and this had been quite sufficient.
The hostility had started from the moment the two groups had become aware of each others' existences in the state park, insults being hurled on the first meeting. They'd named themselves the Eagles and the Rattlers (they hadn't needed names for themselves when they thought they were the only ones in the park) and had proceeded to develop contrasting group stereotypes, the Rattlers thinking of themselves as rough-and-tough and swearing heavily, the Eagles correspondingly deciding to think of themselves as upright-and-proper.
The other part of the experiment had been testing how to resolve group conflicts. Bringing the boys together to watch fireworks hadn't worked at all. They'd just shouted at each other and stayed apart. What had worked was warning them that there might be vandals in the park, and the two groups needing to work together to solve a failure of the park's water system. A common task, a common enemy.
Think about how those boys would have thought, tweeted, and YouTube’d about their experience. My best guess is that the Rattlers would have written about an elite cabal conspiring to oppress them by taking their resources and freedom. The Eagles would have been deeply concerned about a band of thugs (terrorists?) putting them in great peril and justifying almost anything in order to defend against the threat.
What if America is years into our own Robber’s Cave scenario, but it’s not an experiment (anymore?). What if now, it’s real? What if we all just live in the park now?
America was already polarized, into red states and blue states, before the 2016 election. Once the election of Trump happened, the four years that followed were full of a phenomenon that some people would call The Resistance, the good people fighting Orange Hitler; and other people would call Trump Derangement Syndrome.
When COVID came, it did not arrive in the uniform of a foreign country, threatening at gunpoint to rape the women and kill the men. Maybe (maybe) if it had, we could have united around a common enemy.
But COVID was an invisible enemy, one about which we knew little and our information constantly changed. What little we thought we knew was presented to us by untrustworthy sources, heavily filtered through economic incentives.
It was inevitable that we would go binary.
No sensible risk stratification. No targeted closures. No vitamin D and incentives for weight loss and repurposed drugs and vaccines.
We split into a binary, the good, virtuous, vaccinated, clean folks vs the bad, selfish, unvaxxed, unclean.
Was it remotely possible that it would happen any other way?
There may in fact be a grand conspiracy—or at least a conscious plan—around the unraveling of the West.
When it comes to some aspects of our unraveling (particularly higher education, it seems to me), we have very good evidence to believe that a lot of it is planned.
COVID, though?
Nope. Not necessary.
The tribal loyalties outlined above, plus the sunk cost fallacy, seems to me to be more than enough for that.