If A Politician Convinces Me Science is a Hoax, Does That Mean I Want to Die?
Dr. Fauci predicts up to 200,000 will contract Covid daily. Why do Americans willingly play the death lottery?
I am currently in the eye of the Covid delta storm, traveling through the Deep South. I just traveled the length and breadth of Alabama and Mississippi, having arrived in Louisiana yesterday. Nary a mask is worn in the first two states, and social distancing is an alien concept. Louisiana has mandated masks indoors and people are complying.
Seven U.S. states having the lowest Covid vaccination rates - Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Missouri - account for half of the country's new cases and hospitalizations in the last week, White House Covid coordinator Jeff Zients announced on Thursday. Mississippi’s chief health officer said the Covid delta variant is “sweeping over Mississippi like a tsunami.”
The seven-day average of new reported cases is now at 95,000, five times the rate of just a month ago, according to the CDC.
At this rate, Dr. Anthony Fauci predicts a daily infection rate of 100,000 to 200,000. Hotspots, concentrated mainly in the South, are seeing their ICU’s overwhelmed and medical personnel burning out. Covid has killed 617,000 Americans so far - and it seems like it’s just getting started.
The reasons people are giving for not getting vaccinated range from hesitancy over vaccine safety, to denial, to liberals’ alleged political machinations. While tearful deathbed regrets appear to have triggered a welcome surge in vaccinations as people eye the Grim Reaper at their doorstep, not enough are getting the shot to create herd immunity.
Why not?
We didn’t experience this rejection of science and scientists with the polio or chicken pox or mumps vaccines.
The answer lies in polarized politics and a balkanized media. A toxic form of right-wing populism has taken hold in this country which rejects science, knowledge and experts and roils in a cauldron of proud ignorance, paranoia and rage.
Donald Trump capitalized on this wave of populism in his cynical pursuit of power. And he’s proven very good at it. More than with any other person, responsibility for America’s tragic and mounting Covid death toll lies with him. Like the Pied Piper, Trump has led tens of thousands of gullible citizens to their doom with his mesmerizing fabulism.
I had previously written in the Washington Monthly on the psychology at play here:
In his 2005 bestseller, On Bullshit, Harvard philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt wrote, “Bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.”
Duke psychology professor Dan Ariely is not surprised. The author of The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, his research reveals that “People don’t mind so much if their politician lies because they think it’s for the common good.” In other words, they know their hero lies but don’t care.
That’s why populist opportunists like Trump hone their message to appeal to a person’s gut and not their reason. This is a tried-and-true tactic among autocrats. Joseph Goebbels grasped this concept fully. “The broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily,” he said.
So, when Trump initially assured people that Covid “will go away,” his supporters believed him. When he ludicrously talked about injecting toxic chemicals and somehow inserting a light bulb into one’s body, he wasn’t laughed out of office. And all of his other double-talk and lies merely further cemented his Jim Jones-like attachment with his followers.
Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, author of the book, Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, sheds light on this cultish relationship between demagogue and followers:
“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.
Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum dismisses the commonly accepted wisdom that the rage coming out of the American right is due to rampant conspiracy theories, the echo chamber of social media or declining socio-economic conditions of working class white people. Instead, he lays most of the fault at the feet of Fox News:
Fox News stokes a constant sense of outrage among its base of viewers, largely by highlighting narratives of white resentment and threats to Christianity. This in turn forces Republican politicians to follow suit. It’s a positive feedback loop that has no obvious braking system, and it’s already radicalized the conservative base so much that most Republicans literally believe that elections are being stolen and democracy is all but dead if they don’t take extreme action.
…and that Covid is not a real danger, if not an outright hoax.
Finally, there are the rhetorical tools Trump employs to sway supporters and retain their blind loyalty. Communications professor Jennifer Mercieca spent five years delving into these in her book, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump in which she posits,
Trump has used six rhetorical strategies repeatedly since 2015. Three ingratiate Trump with his followers, and three alienate Trump and his followers from everyone else. The effect is to unify his followers against everyone else and to make Trump the fulcrum for all political discussion and debate.
All of the strategies are used to set the nation’s agenda, distract the nation’s attention and frame how we understand reality.
The upshot is that tens, even hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead, dying or soon will die due essentially to one demagogue’s constant lies amplified and repeated by right-wing media, the whole constituting an alternate universe of false and misleading information. And the epicenter for the raging Covid virus is the bedrock conservative South.
It disturbs me deeply that my home region (Upstate New York), with a vaccination rate of 75 percent, that I left just a few days ago has one of the lowest infection rates in the nation, with hospitals and ICU’s operating normally, treating the usual array of patients suffering from heart disease, cancer, broken bones and so on while the region I am now in is raging out of control, with emergency facilities maxed out and Covid-related morbidity rising to inexcusable levels. Why Floridians aren’t demanding the recall of Governor DeSantis, for example, defies logic. And yet, too many residents in these states carry on as if they will live forever. A perverse psychology has combined with poisoned politics to lead to mass delusion.
The truth will set you free only if you believe in truth. Otherwise, you’re on your own.