Bad messaging, a COVID-promoting president, plus Dunning-Kruger equals disaster

This is the Age of Crazy. Trump Republicans and Sanders Democrats are pretty much mirror images of one another- naive, willfully ignorant extremists who know practically nothing about things they fervently believe that they know more about than the experts. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is operative on both ends of the political spectrum, not just on the Trumpist right; a five-minute conversation with the average highly educated (and highly indoctrinated) young Bernie-loving college student will reveal incredibly deep and rich strata of ignorance, naivete, and righteous certitude about nonsense to rival anything you'll find in the MAGA crowd.

We've heard toe word "radical" a great deal from the RNC this past week. That's ironic, given the fanaticism that's virtually dripped from the speeches and the extremism that defines Donald Trump's Republican Party. It's worth noting, though, that the word "radical" comes from the word "root." A "radical" is not, etymologically speaking, an extreme person. A radical is a person who wants to solve a problem by getting to the root of that problem- or what he or she imagines to be the root.

The trouble is that in the real world problems seldom have a single root cause. They are complex. They have many causes that interact with one another and complicate things. Radicals technically are found only on the left; extremists of the right, properly speaking, are reactionaries. Radicals advocate simplistic and drastic solutions designed to get to the "root" of a problem which in fact has many roots; reactionaries seek to solve the problems of the present by resorting to the solutions of a past which they don't truly understand and know much less about than they think they do, a past which usually didn't even have to address the problem the reactionary wants to solve except in a general, indirect, and not necessarily helpful way.

A radical might see inequality and unfairness as the root that all of our problems. These are good things to be concerned about; equality and fairness are humane virtues esteemed by our national tradition. Conservatives revere tradition and the values of those who have gone before us; again, in a constitutional republic such as ours, things worthy of reverence and respect (American conservatives tend not to realize that the past and political tradition have different meanings in Germany or Russia than they do in America, and elsewhere often mean oppression and tyranny rather than freedom and opportunity). But at least in an American context to be a conservative to channel the Founding Fathers and think that individual freedom is the most important value. The problem arises when the radical forgets that the government pays for things with our money and that economics is a science that is governed by natural laws that can't simply be ignored, and tries to vindicate the cause of human equality by utilizing the tools of oppression. In the same way, problems arise when the reactionary, for example, takes an absolutist view of individual liberty that ignores the fact that even the Founding Fathers approved of mandatory public health measures in times of pestilence enforced, if necessary, by government compulsion.

Sorry, guys, but Jefferson and Madison would have been completely good with fining and even jailing people who endanger the health and safety of others by refusing to wear a mask.

There are comparatively few liberals and conservatives these days. There are lots of radicals and reactionaries (those on the left prefer the word "progressives" these days, which itself seems more and more to be a synonym of "radical" rather than "liberal"). Simplistic solutions to complex problems abound, and in this Dunning-Kruger age, the ignorant are usually confident that they know more about everything than do the experts. And in 2016, the ignorant even managed through a fluke of demographics to get one of their own elected as President of the United States, a full-fledged member of the Dunning-Kruger club who combines staggering ignorance about almost everything with the unshakable conviction that he knows more about everything than do the experts.

That's a dangerous combination in the world's most powerful man. In this case, it's resulted in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans because Donald Trump thought he knew more about epidemiology and the SARS-CoV-19 virus than the experts did.

He still thinks that. His handling of the pandemic has been staggeringly erratic and incompetent, and a failure unparalleled in any other developed nation on the planet. And yet this very night, his sycophants at the Republican National Convention are seeking to present him to America as its savior from a public health disaster for which he is in no small measure to blame. He routinely lies about it, but the numbers tell a tale that cannot be denied: Mr. Trump's failure to lead a coordinated national assault on a disease which has killed 178,000 Americans and his habit of disputing known medical facts, minimizing the danger of the virus, and dispensing catastrophically foolish and often absurd advice has made the most scientifically advanced and wealthiest nation on the planet the nation with the most confirmed cases, the most deaths, and a cautionary tale of how not to handle a public health crisis.

People like Dr. Fauci, to whom we ought to be listening, are demonized and vilified by his supporters. Scofflaws who defy common-sense public health measures see themselves as freedom fighters. That craziness, together with the incredible incompetence and misfeasance of our national leadership, has plunged America into a crisis whose depth every other developed country on Earth has managed to avoid when it comes to the current pandemic. The virus runs rampant among us because extremism and ignorance are running rampant among us, and because an extreme and ignorant president has been to all intents and purposes the virus's greatest ally. Americans die in numbers unmatched anywhere else on the planet, in part because the administration has actively discouraged its supporters from embracing proven, effective ways of minimizing its spread like wearing a damn facemask in public.

But along with government by the ignorant and the incompetent, a second reason why COVID-19 is ravaging the land is that we haven't done a very good job of educating people as to how it can be fought. Sure, it doesn't help that the President of the United States is routinely handing out misinformation about the virus and his equally uninformed supporters believe every word, refusing to listen to those who actually know what they're talking about. If you listen to Donald Trump about a pandemic but ignore and even demonize Dr. Anthony Fauci, you're gonna have problems.

But the experts have contradicted themselves. That is not their fault.  COVID is, after all, a new virus about which we initially knew very little and concerning which even now we have a great deal to learn. We were wrong about a great deal where COVID-19 was concerned, and we're only now learning just how wrong. The advice the experts have given us has changed over time, and that has encouraged the impression that the experts don't know what they're talking about.  Well, they knew very little at the beginning. But they've learned. And as a result, their advice has changed.

But we haven't done a very good job of communicating what we have learned. And as a result, people are still following outdated advice, or not following the advice of the experts at all.

First, they said that it wasn't necessary to wear a mask. Then it was. An awful lot of people take that as evidence that they shouldn't be listened to when in fact it merely means that they're learning about a disease nobody has previous experience with. There are other coronaviruses, but they aren't the same as this one. It's turned out to be exponentially more contagious than most of the others, and far more contagious than we initially thought. It turns out not to be easily spread by touching surfaces and then touching our faces; hand-washing and hand-sanitizer are still needed, but the real problem is people who are carriers of disease coughing or sneezing or simply breathing on people.

Or around people. It seems that the virus lingers in the air.

Those who refuse to wear masks are sometimes fruitcake libertarians who are unaware that the Founders would have been completely comfortable with mask mandates and with jailing people who endangered the public health by refusing to wear them. They may be sociopaths. But they may also be people who think that because masks don't prevent the transmission of the virus, that means that it doesn't limit its transmission.

It does, and the evidence that it does is massive. No, there is no doubt whatsoever of that.

If the anti-mask folks were right, and the purpose of wearing masks was to protect the wearer, they would have a reasonable argument when they say that, first, they don't do a very good job of that, and secondly, that if a person chooses to take risks with his or her own health and doesn't endanger the health of others by so doing, they have every right to do so and the government has no business stopping them. The problem is that they're wrong; that's not why the experts recommend that we wear masks. It's not to protect ourselves. It's precisely to avoid endangering the health and the lives of others, something we have no right to do.

Granted, masks may supply some small amount of protection. But the reason why every responsible public health expert in the world advocates their use is that the virus is most contagious before symptoms appear- and in nearly have the cases, symptoms never appear. But the person with the virus is still spreading the virus!

None of us know that we don't have the virus and aren't spreading it at this very moment. Sorry, but "I'm not sick, so I shouldn't have to wear a mask" is a claim none of us can be sure is true, and it's a well-established fact that while masks don't eliminate the possibility of transmission, wearing them greatly reduces the chances of our giving it to someone else if we are infected.

It is of vital importance that the American people be educated about this fact far better than they have been.

Some people say spreading the virus should not concern us too much because people are likely to recover if they aren't old or have a heart condition or high blood pressure or diabetes or are obese or have any of a host of other conditions. They don't seem to realize that those exceptions include up so about a third of the population.

They need to be educated about that. I am deeply disturbed by the number of Americans who are unconcerned that if they have a "silent" or pre-symptomatic case of COVID they are literally a mortal danger to a third of their fellow Americans. We seem to have a greater concentration of sociopaths in our population than I would have ever believed. But I choose to believe- and I think I'm right- that far more people have a blase attitude toward COVID simply because they don't know any better. And we haven't done a very good job of informing them.

 Most Americans also seem to be unaware of the large number of young, otherwise healthy people who supposedly are at little risk, who have no symptoms or seem to be recovering from COVID, but who suddenly drop dead of COVID-related heart attacks and strokes. This is a sickness that promotes unnatural blood clotting and- contrary to what we initially thought and most Americans still seem to believe- attacks literally every organ in the body and does severe and often permanent neurological damage to large numbers of victims whose lives are never in manifest danger. Not only are children not, as the president claims, immune to COVID, but it causes a serious and widespread syndrome among children that can do permanent damage. That most have mild symptoms that do not change the fact that a great many are crippled for life because of it.

COVID does to a great of damage to many people whose lives are never at imminent risk.  It's worrisome that so many of us don't understand the physical damage the virus does even to survivors. We as a people need to be educated about that.

Perhaps most worrisome of all is that we don't know how why some people have no symptoms at all, and others are crippled for life or even killed by the same virus. This much we do know: whatever the reason, it's a very effective "strategy" with which a virus can spread throughout an entire population. Some believe that asymptomatic people who believe themselves to be perfectly healthy are responsible for most of the transmission of COVID!

The ignorant claim that COVID is overdiagnosed because it's being listed as a contributing cause of death when something else, perhaps made lethal by COVID, is the immediate cause of death. They somehow seem not to realize that this is standard procedure concerning any disease and always has been.   
We as a nation need to have it explained to us the exact opposite is the case. There have probably been at least twice as many cases of COVID and twice as many COViD-related deaths than the official numbers show! Only those with conspicuous and severe symptoms were ever diagnosed, and even now the administration's inexplicable policy of slowing testing down is preventing us from getting more accurate figures. We will never know how many undiagnosed people with "minor" cases of COVID have stroked out or had COVID-induced heart attacks at and died at home, their deaths attributed to other causes. Yet the number of "excess deaths-" the number of people who have died of all causes during the pandemic compared with those who died of all causes during a similar period before the outbreak- demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that even taking suicides, domestic violence, and other secondary products of the pandemic into account doubling the actual number of both cases and deaths might be conservative!

The malignant, willful ignorance that powers so much COVID denialism has cost tens of thousands of Americans who didn't have to die their lives. We may never know the actual figure because only a minority of the people who have contracted- or died of- COVID have been diagnosed.

People believe, finally, what they want to believe, and all the information in the world won't cure willful ignorance. But stupidity, psychopathy, political extremism, and the Dunning-Kruger effect aside, we have to do a better job of educating the American public. There is no excuse for the fact that we aren't drenching the networks with ads providing the American people with the actual facts.

Well, there is one excuse: the President of the United States is the most active purveyor of misinformation on the subject, and the truth would make his already-unlikely reelection even more so. There have simply been too many lies and too much incompetence. Too much snake-oil has been sold, and to many manifest facts denied.

But when Joe Biden takes office in January, we need to have a massive effort through TV commercials, ads, and through every other possible medium to educate the American people and dispel the thick cloud of ignorance, craziness, and lies which have deceived so many whose ignorance is not willful.