Gloom, despair, and agony on me
Deep, dark depression, excessive misery
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all
Gloom, despair, and agony on me
- Buck Owens and Roy Clark
Yes, I watched Hee Haw.
The photo is from January 2 of this year. I don’t remember what I was doing the day before, but evidently it wasn’t taking decent pictures.
I’m struck by the success Covid enthusiasts and global warming … maybe not deniers so much as distancers, have had in challenging reality.
People are still dying from Covid in large numbers: not so large as at the heights of the various surges, but large. 1,350 people in the U.S. died of Covid the day I took that picture, in the middle of a surge; yesterday, the number was 926, and we had almost 175,000 new reported cases (the real count is certainly much higher, which means the mortality rate is down, which is good, but not a reason for abandoning caution or remediation).
The degradation of respect for the disease among people who once took it seriously is the result in part of fatigue, and in part of an inside-outside game with the Biden administration encouraging a personal responsibility approach—”let’s you and Covid fight,” as I’ve described it elsewhere—and the large media concerns creating and elevating outside authority figures (Dr. Leana Wen, e.g.) who amplify that message.
Meanwhile, the Biden-appointed Centers for Disease Control director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has acknowledged that the CDC is a hot mess, and that it has produced variously unscientific, confusing and contradictory guidance to the public on how to cope with Covid, while ignoring the dangers and potential impact of long Covid.
Bravo. Mission Accomplished, until it isn’t.
Something similar has happened in the short term with global warming. The long-term, the past number of decades, has been marred by classic propaganda from fossil fuel companies, their paid legislatures, and people who think soy milk is unmanly, with a very satisfyingly confusion resulting. Millions of people became experts on hockey stick graphs.
My friend Kirt noted in the very first—and still too near the only—comment on these posts that the philosopher Hannah Arendt, among others, has described the goal of propaganda not as persuasion but as confusion, creating a state in which people don’t know what to believe.
I’d add exhaustion. Being confused is exhausting, and so is trying not to be confused.
Back to the short term. My very first post addressed the Biden administration’s whiplash approach to global warming in July, the month when Schumer and Joe Manchin announced their agreement on energy and social welfare legislation.
10 days prior to the announcement, when the entire country seemed to be drowning or in flames, the administration, in the person of climate envoy John Kerry, floated the notion of Biden declaring, appropriately, a climate emergency, and using executive powers to help address the problem.
The idea was widely cheered, so much so that the resistance to it from the usual suspects was all but invisible in the press. But when the Schumer-Manchin deal was announced, with its substantial expansion of oil leases on public lands and waters, the clamor rapidly died down.
We were still on fire, and we were still watching homes washed away by floods, but within a week, the administration, a lot of climate hawks and almost the entire Democratic party in Congress (and some fossil fuel execs) had united to praise the legislation and divert attention from the prospect of declaring a climate emergency.
After all, where’s the need for an emergency declaration when so many authorities are agreed that the problem has been addressed? Maybe things aren’t so bad after all. I’m not sure.
God I’m tired.
I've argued for years that personal outrage is a limited resource and encouraged people to spend theirs wisely. If there's a really effective means of coerced learned helplessness, I think it's this.
What I used to think was that the best way to control people was to scare them and then convince them you had the solution to their fears--a form of mass-gaslighting. I've since realized I was mistaken, and that the most reliable method is to psychologically pummel people into a state of confused bewilderment and then speak loudly. If there's a term I could use to describe public sentiment these days, it's confused bewilderment. All of this has parallels to the worst kinds of interpersonal victimization.
This change in media, public participation and political maneuvering coincides with remarkable progress in AI technology. This may not be directly related, but after Cambridge Analytica I have my doubts.
The Great Filter theory has some appeal. I'm thinking that if it's valid, it looks something like this; smart enough to become really dangerous and ignorant enough to maintain competitive priorities instead of collaborative/superordinate ones. And here we are. And capitalism really does suck.
Thanks for the nod, Weldon.