People's Behavior and the Corona Virus

There are multiple news stories of people ignoring the advice--even the orders--of government officials and health authorities to "shelter in place" and avoid crowds, groups, etc.

I read that many people are going to church. If that's not a crowd, I don't know what is. I strongly suspect that they feel that, if they are good, faithful, believing church goers, God will protect them from any illness. My money is on the other side, that this behavior is spreading the virus. But then I freely admit that we've got radically differing worldviews going on here.

And then there are the people gathering on beaches and so forth--for example, students on their spring break in Florida. Police had to disperse these crowds and then officials closed the beaches. In this case we think of the fact that young people seem to feel they are invulnerable and often show poor judgment.

So I thought it was going to turn out to be young people involved, again, when I saw a story about police breaking up a party in New Jersey where the partygoers were packed into a 550-sq ft apartment. But no, in this case it was actually a 47-year-old man who was hosting the party. He called it a "corona party." I can only think of adjectives like stupid and foolish and defiance of advice (and government orders) such as you'd expect from 18 year olds.

Well, readers of my blog may have already divined that--based on life experience of almost more decades than I care to admit to--I have conceived a low opinion of the wisdom and rationality of the mass of my fellow human beings. In an age when the survival of humanity is threatened by climate change and destruction of animal species and of the environment in general, I find it difficult to side with the optimists.

Copyright (c) 2020

I Am Back (Blogging, That Is)

After a lapse of a month I have decided to resume blogging.

Even though it's been unrewarding, at times—when I look at the statistics on my readership—still, I guess I am egotistical enough to believe that I have something to say and something that's worth sharing with anyone who cares to read.

At the age of 70, I have acquired some views of life and of humanity. Mainly one tinged with sadness. I think anyone who is intelligent, educated, liberal—and maybe I need to add "disaffected," which I am but which might not be a necessary consequence of any of the other traits mentioned—has to feel much as I do.

Here is one concise statement, my summing up (hey, how is that for arrogance, summing it all up in just a few words!?!) of what's wrong with humanity and what might be, ultimately, the one trait that might just do Mankind in: Man is capable of believing that which is not true (and of course that probably, or even obviously, has the corollary of denying that which is true).

There is a discipline that you never hear about these days. It was big in, say, the 1930s, and it's called General Semantics. I was introduced to it at the age of 17.

A guy by the name of Count Alfred Korzybski is credited with founding General Semantics. A man named S. I. Hayakawa, generally labeled a linguist (he was also at one time a US Senator and also, infamously, the President of the University of California, Berkeley who called in troops to combat student protesters in the era of student protests of the Viet Nam War and more, in the 1960s), also was a writer on the subject as was a man named Stuart Chase, basically a journalist.

To try to sum up General Semantics: The word is not the thing and the map is not the territory. We tend to feel that if you can put a name to something, that somehow means that the thing exists. This enables us to throw around words that don't have a referent—that is, they don't name anything that exists in the real world. It's this belief in the non-existent that is my subject here.

Now, today and in the West, most people would not believe in dragons, unicorns, mermaids, trolls, leprechauns—etc., etc. The list could go on and on.

Then there are some marginal categories where today some people, maybe a minority, do believe: UFOs, ghosts. Maybe Satan, maybe angels (we're getting a little less marginal here, I'd guess).

And the paranormal. And miracles. And maybe God. (As you can see, I've been going from minority beliefs to beliefs which are more and more common but which some few are skeptical of.)

I think many ideas, about Nature, about human society, etc., are widely held but are incorrect. Many ideas have some natural-selection value such that believing them may get their believers killed. An extreme but obvious case would be a person who thinks he can jump off the roof and not be killed—maybe because he thinks he can fly; we label that insanity. Maybe the sad story of Jonestown in Guyana, where religious leader Jim Jones persuaded nearly all his followers to commit suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. Some less extreme cases would be where someone attempts something very dangerous and gets himself killed. (Think the annual "Darwin Awards.")

Probably more incorrect ideas harm another human than harm the holder of the belief himself. As an example, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1693, it was believed that some members of the community were witches, and those "witches" had to be executed. At other times and places, witches, "heretics," homosexuals, etc., were burned at the stake, boiled in oil, or otherwise gotten rid of.

One egregious example would be the Inquisition, which probably executed thousands (forgive me for not turning up statistics here). Or take any case of genocide--the Holocaust, Rwanda, Kosovo, or any other--which killed people because they belonged to a hated group whose members were basically deemed undesirable and not deserving to live.

Is not all of this because some people hold incorrect ideas?

We may well doom our planet by means of war; pollution; global warming; other destruction of land, resources, etc.

We have evolved our ability to manipulate our planet by building great buildings and dams. We have waged wars which have destroyed, devastated, and laid waste large areas. We have built nuclear power plants which then have had accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and made sizeable areas uninhabitable.

So we have become smart, smart enough to erect these edifices. But are we smart enough?

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein