One of the defining features of our civilization is that we deny what we don’t want to believe is true if it’s inconvenient to us.
Covid has been the most recent example, with the World Health Organization (WHO) taking two years to admit that it was an airborne virus, insisting it spread thru droplets. I daresay that refusal to admit reality cost a couple million people their lives.
Back in the 2000’s a number of us warned about the housing/sub-prime bubble for years. (A correspondent said he found 42 people who publicly predicted the crash.) It was obvious just from looking at charts, it was classic bubble formation.
I made two predictions about the market. The first was for late 2005. I based that on the supposition that the Federal Reserve, looking at the chart, would act. It was the last moment to do so. But the Federal Reserve believed there was no bubble, because markets are efficient, so they did nothing.
Reality denial.
It was one of my first lessons in “our elites are incompetent” (also venal and evil).
I then predicted October of 2007 about a year in advance and got that one right. A friend of mine who knows far more about economics thought it would be later, because the Fed would hold it off till after the election to help Bush. I disagreed, he thought they were still competent.
So, denial of reality and incompetence.
The grand-daddy of reality denial in the modern era is, of course, climate change. We’ve known about it for a long time, one friend has traced elite knowledge back to the 50s, and I can assure you that by the 70s and 80s knowledge was widespread and there was real alarm.
We did…. nothing, while pretending we were.
Recently WHO has said there is no longer a Covid emergency. I actually have some sympathy for what they’re saying: we’ve decided to just let it continue, and there’s evidence there are less deaths, and since no one is treating it as an emergency I suppose the emergency is over.
But we refuse to deal with the fact that it’s causing Long Covid and that repeated infections do damage to the brain, cardiovascular system and immune system, often non-symptomatic to start and that excess deaths are still highly elevated in most countries.
We’ve basically decided to ignore a mass crippling event. We can’t even be bothered to put filters in classrooms and other public areas, and hospitals are stopping mandating masks and most don’t have air filtration. (If you we won’t even put air filtration in hospitals and schools we clearly don’t give a fuck.)
And, of course, new variants emerge and there’s no reason to assume none of them will have an increase in lethality. The most recent “Arcturus” variant, while not more lethal appears far more infectious than previous variants, which were already in the running for the most virulent diseases in history.
We sort of acknowledge it exists, with a massive denialist cohort, the sort who keep insisting it’s just as bad as the flu, and then we do, effectively, nothing, after an initial, completely incompetent series of measures in the first year and a half, which because of their incompetence, discredited intervention. (Remember that 2 years of WHO claiming that Covid wasn’t airborne.)
There are plenty of other examples. I remember writing back in 2009 that if things continued as they were Americans would lose their abortion rights. I was pilloried for it. Similarly when Obama got rid of Dean at the DNC I said it was the end of the 50 state policy, and again I was savagely attacked for it, including both pushback from the White House and by commenters at FDL and Daily Kos.
Then there was all the pretense that Afghanistan could be won, or the 72% of Americans who thought that Iraq had WMD. (Well they did have some chemical weapons, but that’s not what anyone meant.)
That China is the largest economy in the world in the ways that matter is another thing most people are still in denial about, along with the fact that America is losing its tech lead.
I suppose you could say “well Ian, we admit reality and then do nothing” but actions are what count, and based on actions we’re in complete denial about our major problems, and when denial is still even remotely possible, we continue with it. I can’t count the number of people I run into who are still climate-change denialists, even as we have wildfires and every week leads to some decades old temperature record being broken.
This era is right up there with the last decades of the Western Roman Empire for stupidity and incompetence. The difference is that the scale is global and the problems are bigger than barbarian invasions.
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