On Emergencies
“The failings of our institutions need not lead to a total breakdown of trust in our institutions.”
—Sam Harris, in Ask Me Anything #17, released August 8, 2021
I’ve noticed lately that just before saying something authoritarian, many people — including people I formerly thought of as reliably reasonable and competent thinkers — offer the caveat, “in a public health emergency,” or “in the middle of a pandemic.”
These phrases seemingly serve to insulate them against the reality of what they now advocate. They assert that the emergency situation of a pandemic requires the government to be allowed to directly effect the decimation of livelihoods (the loss of around one third of all small businesses in the US), radically alter all former notions of freedom (for example, institute vaccine passports) for the greater good and/or insist upon the cessation of questions, at least in public. Have your private doubts if you wish, but questioning the authority of our public health institutions in public is “corrosive” to trust and “irresponsible.”
This take has an unspoken premise: that our public health institutions and government can be trusted to correctly identify a public health emergency and to act with appropriate restraint. To limit freedom only to the extent necessary to contain the emergency, to act with motives that are trustworthy and virtuous, to rise above any other possible incentives—you know, little things like power, profit, or seizing the crisis in order to re-make society in a way more pleasing to their other agendas.
I can empathize with the desire to maintain this trust. Without it, the world becomes a far more terrifying place than it already is.
I can even empathize with the mindset it takes to be able to hold this trust in circumstances as ridiculous as the one we find ourselves in— the overwhelming terror of death that can cause people to believe insane things. I grew up in a fundamentalist cult, where the fear of death caused people to believe absurdities and commit atrocities. The same fear of death is motivating people to violate their own principles and behave with flagrantly ridiculous hypocrisy.
Sam Harris is probably motivated at least in part by this fear, or so it seems. He has disclosed that he was so desperate to get vaccinated that he went to vaccine administration sites before he was eligible, hoping for one of the end-of-the-day situations where not-yet-eligible people were sometimes allowed to receive doses that would otherwise have been thrown away.
I was five years old the first time I experienced a realistic fear of impending death. I was ten the first time I was surprised to wake up alive. I was fourteen when I found a suicide and got my first look at death, up-close-and-personal. Death has always been more real and less scary to me than most.
So I can well imagine that, if I had grown up Hollywood royalty, had never wanted or lacked for anything, and was in my 50s when a disease swept the globe, terror of dying might cause me to put faith in insitutions that had obviously failed, even faith to such a degree as to make a ridiculous statement like the one quoted above.
“The failure of the prophet to correctly predict the date of the rapture does not mean that he isn’t a true prophet or that he doesn’t hear from God,” a childhood preacher said, and I can’t help but note the similarities.
Other people I respect repeatedly refer to “the data” when insisting they understand the COVID situation and their authoritarian views are well-founded.
Let’s talk about the data.
What is the source of the data? Who reports it? Lying with statistics is the easiest and most effective sort of lying, and placing total faith in “the data” when our scientists are so cowardly and weak, so driven by the desire for social acceptance and the need to virtue-signal that they have the correct politics, that even Harvard Public Health is willing to lie about what 2 + 2 equals — this seems foolish to me.
Our scientific establishment is full of people who are willing to unabashedly lie in order to deny the simple reality that humans figured out millions of years ago — that we are a sexually dimorphic species — for political reasons.
And yet in this global emergency, we must trust our institutions—wealthy, comfortable elites like Sam Harris insist. To ask questions is irresponsible and corrosive.
To wonder if the same people who lie about realities like what 2 + 2 equals or whether there are more than two sexes might be lying about any aspect of a situation that is destroying freedom, shuttering businesses, putting children at far greater risk than they face from COVID by closing schools (teachers, in their capacity as mandated reporters, report over 700,000 substantiated abuse cases per year) —this wondering is crazy at worst, indicative of being a brainwashed Trump lover at best.
What of those doctors who also doubt that we are being told the truth?
Sam Harris has an explanation for why doctors and other health professionals might disagree with him — the baseline rate of schizophrenia in the population is 1%.
(Yes, he really said that, in the episode with Eric Topol. That really was the best he could do. Yes, it’s heartbreaking to me, too.)
To doubt that the vaccines we are told are effective (except, vaccinated people still need to wear masks) and safe (what’s a little myocarditis in healthy young people at otherwise minuscule risk, and VAERS data is totally untrustworthy despite criminal penalties being attached to false reports) — clearly, this doubt is either evidence of mental illness, if one is a doctor; otherwise, a thought-crime, and could only be expressed publicly in bad faith.
Growing up in a fundamentalist cult, I swore an oath at age eleven, wincing as I placed my freshly bruised and paddled buttocks on a metal folding chair. That oath was: “They can make me not say my questions out loud, but they cannot make me stop asking them. Ever.”
Having made my case that the demand to trust and refrain from asking questions is unjustified, I must ask myself if my distrust is reasonable.
The failures of our insitutions do not necessarily mean that we are being lied to about the vaccines or about COVID, of course. To take that position would be as silly as the position of reflexively trusting and refusing to question.
Yet, I do distrust both “the data” and our institutions sufficiently to refuse to get vaccinated. Why?
For the following reasons:
If they truly think that vaccination is the key to ending the pandemic (and not a way to institute social credit scores, say) then the VERY LAST THING they would do is demand vaccine passports. Why? Because the fastest way to cause cases to shoot up would be to socially segregate the unvaccinated and keep them all together, in the same social situations, schools, grocery stores. Vaccine passports are the fastest way imaginable to cause a spike in cases, and the people most likely to want social credit scores are cheering for them the loudest.
Our government and institutions are not behaving the way that people who are truly scared of a communicable disease, that they insist even vaccinated people can transmit, behave. From public health officials declaring that mass protests are a public health good to releasing migrants into the community each day at the border to throwing large parties of unmasked people, the rhetoric and the actions simply do not line up.
Even very smart people with scientific backgrounds (like Sam Harris) fail to mention natural immunity or break down discussion of risk by age and comorbidity status. If “getting the pandemic under control” were the priority, then “wow, you recovered fully and thus have robust natural immunity—GREAT!” would be something heard daily. Instead, it’s almost never mentioned. Nor are vitamin D supplements, weight loss, or the other factors well within most people’s control that could improve COVID outcomes.
The people most intensely eager to reshape society are the same people most eager for more lockdowns and stimulus payments, more transfer of dependence to the government. From “build back better” to the new promotion of UBI, this pandemic has become a rallying cry for changing America in fundamental ways.
Dr. Fauci freely admitted to lying to the American public on multiple occasions, and asserts that doubting him is doubting science; and yet people near me still have signs in their yard reading, “Trust Fauci!” This is unhealthy.
What is beyond hilarious to me—one of those things so ridiculous that one has to choose whether to laugh or cry—is the nakedly political nature of this trust we are being told our institutions still warrant, despite their failings.
One question: if Trump were still President, would the same people be cheerleading vaccines and vaccine passports?
Of course not. The idea is laughable.
If Trump were still President, we would be constantly hearing about the inherent fascism in the government pushing people to take an experimental drug.
We would not be able to go five minutes without hearing shrieking about the return of 1960s-style segregation in refusing to allow the unvaccinated, disproportionately non-white, to work, dine, and travel.
If Trump were still President, everyone would know the precise criminal penalties for a false VAERS report, and this would be cited daily as a reason to trust each and every report filed.
If Trump were still President, ignoring natural immunity would be cited daily as evidence of being “anti science.”
The same people who cheered when Big Tech decided that we should not be allowed to hear from the sitting POTUS would be outraged at the censorship of dissenting views and the stifling of debate.
If Trump were still President, the notion of government being permitted to access data on medical procedures and use it to create tiers of citizens whose freedom depended upon compliance would be as terrifying to the masses as it is to me.
Recognizing that my distrust is partially based in the obviousness (to me) of some of the long-term consequences of Trump Derangement Syndrome (which I do not overdiagnose, though I acknowledge many people do—personally, I reserve it for people who say farcical things like that Hitler is more virtuous than Trump, which Sam Harris said in a podcast with Andrew Sullivan) I must ask myself if I am guilty of the same political blind spot I am seeing.
Here is where I just might be: if a liberal Democrat asserts that something is necessary that will restrict freedom and increase dependence on the government, I am more suspicious of that assertion than I would be if a conservative Republican made the same assertion. This seems to me to be reasonable, and I think I am being consistent. [In general, I trust liberal Democrats more to understand the impact of big business on the environment or the hardships that a lack of health insurance places on the poor. I trust conservative Republicans more to protect freedom, particularly of speech. I don’t trust anyone to correctly adjudicate racism. My other priors for who to trust on what issue are similar.]
One reason why this seems to me to be an accurate position is that CDC death numbers—if they can be trusted, which is a very, very, very big if—for Florida are in the middle of the pack, the last I checked. With the oldest population in the country (next to Maine, but Maine has fewer people in it than there are voices in my head) for Florida to be in the middle of the pack is a remarkable achievement. Thus, the Florida approach is worth consideration. And that approach has been far more freedom-based than that of many other states, and directly opposed the CDC and federal government on several measures.
Of course, I could be wrong.
My natural immunity could fade and, despite having no risk factors, I could catch COVID and die from it. This possibility exists, but it scares me less than the possibility of being struck by a car during my morning run, stung by a wasp on a day when I’ve forgotten my EpiPen, or even being murdered by one of my twitter haters.
It scares me far less than living in a country where the elites have forgotten—or perhaps never really knew—the importance of being cautious with the placement of faith, especially in those with power; the absolute necessity of refusing to be bullied out of asking questions, and the infinite value of freedom.