Risk versus chaos

I got up this morning and with some reluctance looked at the news, and I was immediately reminded of something a former student of mine said years ago.

The subject was environmental degradation and climate change, and the question I asked the class was when Americans would be motivated in sufficient numbers to initiate a real change in our environmental policy.  What she said, near as I can recall, was this.

"It won't happen until things have gotten a great deal worse.  Nothing will change until ordinary middle-class people with houses and cars and bank accounts turn on the taps in their kitchen and no water comes out.  Until their kids can't walk to school without wearing gas masks because of the air pollution.  When they go to the grocery store and find the shelves empty.  We're all too comfortable, and when we're comfortable, it's too easy to disappear into that comfort and assume it could never be any other way."

I think we might have crossed that line, not with respect to the environment, but in the governance of the United States as a whole.

In a few short weeks we've been catapulted into chaos.  The powder keg was already there, fashioned over long careful years of preparation by the constant fear-talk of people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.  That message of the Big Bad Other is, honestly, what propelled Donald Trump into the presidency, with his constant harping on illegal aliens destroying America.  Your way of life is in significant peril, they said -- all the while creating exactly the conditions that would imperil our way of life once the match was lit.

What exactly set the powder keg off was almost irrelevant; it could have been anything.  In this case, it was twofold; the lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the murder of a black civilian by a white policeman who had already been investigated multiple times for using excessive force.  It's like the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Serbian extremist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in 1914.  That one act was the first card falling, but the entire house of cards was already there -- and in five years, twenty million people were dead and whole countries devastated beyond recognition.

And like in World War I, the people who could step in and prevent the catastrophe instead are inflaming matters and making it far, far worse.  Donald Trump, who will do anything to protect his bloated ego, was so pissed off by being mocked as "BunkerBoy" on Twitter for his escape into a protected bunker and refusal to appear publicly that he decided to stage a photo-op to prove what a tough, macho strongman he is.  He had the police attack peaceful demonstrators in front of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington D. C. with tear gas and rubber bullets, then marched out in front of it holding a Bible (upside down) and threatened to unleash the military on civilians exercising their right of assembly.

"If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence," he said, "then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore, Donald Trump (29496131773), CC BY-SA 2.0]

His loyal ass-kissers were effusive in their praise.  "No one else would have had the guts to do this," crowed former governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker.  Florida Representative Matt Gaetz said this was the start of the military hunting down "members of Antifa... like we do those in the Middle East."  Not to be outdone, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had this to say:

Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.  If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.  We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.  And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order.  No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.

And you know what "no quarter" means.

Shoot to kill.

We're on a precipice right now, and the people who could rein in this lurching, out-of-control president -- the men and women of his own party -- are refusing to do anything but throw gasoline on the fire.  The only possible solution, the only thing that might keep us from descending into chaos, is if the ordinary middle-class people like the ones my student spoke of will stand up and say "Enough."  We've got to be willing to give up our comfortable, privileged safety and risk being seen and heard by a government that at the moment is doing everything in its power to stop citizens from speaking up and acting in the cause of justice.

I'll end with a quote from Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, which was written in 1935 but is frighteningly prescient:

The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work.  It's the fault of Doremus Jessup!  Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest. 

A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil.  But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn't be stirred up otherwise.  If our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the evils of slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn't have been any need of agitators and war and blood. 

It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was 'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship.  It's I who murdered Rabbi de Verez.  It's I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes.  I can blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind.  Forgive, O Lord! 

Is it too late?

************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Chain of hysteria

Because confirmation bias alone is apparently not enough, a team of psychologists at the University of Warwick (England) has just found that when bad news is passed from person to person, its capacity for inducing alarm and hysteria increases.

The study, released just this week in the journal Risk Analysis, was led by Thomas Hills, who summed up the research as "The more people share information, the more negative it becomes, the further it gets from the facts, and the more resistant it becomes to correction."  What they did was to take 154 test subjects, split them into fourteen groups of eight people each, and gave one person in each group a balanced, factual news article to read.  That person had to write a summary of the article in their own words, and pass that to another person in the group -- who read the summary, and had to summarize that, and pass that to the next person, and so on.

The sixth person was given not only the fifth person's summary, but the original article, to see if reading the original unbiased facts changed how they summarized the information.  And the scary thing is, it didn't.  The version passed on to the seventh person in the chain was just as inaccurate and alarmist as the previous ones had been.  So that points to a second, rather disturbing, conclusion from the Hills et al. research: once people have accepted a scary, emotionally-laden view of an issue, even presenting them with the facts doesn't change anything.

"Society is an amplifier for risk," Hills said.  "This research explains why our world looks increasingly threatening despite consistent reductions in real-world threats.  It also shows that the more people share information, the further that information gets from the facts and the more resilient it becomes to correction."

So it's kind of like an ugly, and potentially dangerous, game of Telephone.

1941 British advertisement [Image is in the Public Domain]

What interests me the most is this "resilience to correction" -- which I have to admit sounds way better than what I'd have called it, which is "ignorant, willful, pig-headed stupidity."  This tendency has been manipulated with what I can only interpret as cunning and malice aforethought by Fox News, which unhesitatingly broadcasts complete, outright lies, then (much more quietly) issues a "retraction" later -- knowing full well that the correction will not undo the outrage and misapprehension the original story created in the listeners.  It's what was going on this past week with the nonsense over Donald Trump's petulant and toddlerish withdrawal of the invitation to the Superbowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles over the controversy regarding players "taking the knee" during the National Anthem in protest of the unfair treatment of minorities.  Fox broadcast a story about Trump's cancellation of the visit (obviously siding with Trump, not that I probably had to mention that), and backed up the story with photographs of Eagles players kneeling.

The problem is that none of the photographs were of players "taking the knee" in protest during the National Anthem.  Every damn one of them was a photograph of a player kneeling to say a prayer prior to the start of the game, which (given their ongoing hysteria over the "War on Christianity" you'd think they'd have been in favor of).  When several players said, "Hey, wait a moment.  That picture of me wasn't what they implied it was," Fox finally (two days later) made a mealy-mouthed, and short, retraction statement.

Which one do you think got more views, and generated more attention and more emotion, the original story, or the retraction?

Don't answer that.  Rhetorical question.

So the scary part of the Hills et al. research is that knowing this, media agencies can knowingly manipulate this tendency -- start out with a sensationalized and hysteria-inducing story, which will then only amplify further in the retelling.  Then they can retract anything that was an obvious falsehood (or at least any of the falsehoods that enough people object to), and the retraction will have exactly zero effect.

What this does is make it even more imperative that we somehow fix the biased, slanted nightly shitshow that popular media has become.  How to do this, I have no idea.  But if we don't, we end up in a frightening positive-feedback loop -- where we believe the hysteria more strongly because the media insists that it's true, and they insist that it's true because it gets listeners who already believe it.

And the end result, I'm afraid, will be a nation filled with easily-led, emotion-driven dupes -- which, honestly, is probably precisely what the powers-that-be want.

***********************

This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Fighting the avalanche

Wednesday was the National Walk Out Day for the #NeverAgain movement, and it's estimated that over a million high school students walked out of their classes to protest the government's inaction on gun law reform -- and the fact that many elected officials are in the pockets of the NRA.  While some school districts were supportive of their right to protest, others chose to punish the ones who participated with penalties up to and including suspension or paddling.  (Yes, there are schools that still inflict corporal punishment on students.)

And of course, the backlash from the general public against the students who participated went full-bore almost immediately.  A quick perusal of social media was enough to gauge the vitriol being hurled at them.  One person I saw called them "lazy little snowflakes."  Others said they were only walking out so they could claim justification for skipping class (odd, then, that in our area -- where many schools were closed because of a snowstorm -- students showed up anyhow so they could stand in solidarity with the rest of the protesters).  They were called names (a politician from Maine called #NeverAgain leader Emma González "a skinhead lesbian").  They were accused of being tools of the radical left.  Most frustrating -- at least for me, looking at it from the outside -- is the level of condescension from adults, the implication that there's no way that these young adults could possibly have a relevant opinion, or one that the adults themselves should take seriously.

What this demonstration has proven, however, is that the adults who are misjudging and/or dismissing these teenagers are doing so at their own risk.  There is no sign of this movement going away, or being at all quelled by the snark being hurled their way, or how they are being portrayed in social media and (most of) the conservative press.  A banner was put up on a fence near Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday with a particularly trenchant quote from Douglas herself:

The last time I've seen an anti-establishment uprising this powerful was the anti-Vietnam-War protests of the 1960s and early 70s.  The same kind of insults were lobbed at protesters back then; they were ne'er-do-wells, hippies who just wanted to tear down the rule of law, stoners whose opinion didn't count and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Today's establishment should look at the results of that episode as the cautionary tale it is.

It's worth considering looking even further back in history, however, and recognizing that civil disobedience is how this country was founded.  And while we call the people who launched the American Revolution are called "the Founding Fathers," they were by and large young people.  In 1776, James Monroe (and French ally the Marquis de Lafayette) were 18, Aaron Burr 20, Nathan Hale 21, Robert Townsend 22, George Rodgers Clark 23, and James Madison 25.  While some of them were in their thirties and forties -- notably George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams -- the Revolution was not fought, or even led, by staid, dignified elder statesmen.

These kids have stood up to politicians all they way up to the president of the United States; they are not going to be silenced by disdain.  And it bears mention that a significant portion of the teenagers who are participating will be of voting age by the November elections; virtually all of them will be voting by November 2020.  And trust me, they are not going to forget the elected officials who have ridiculed them and dismissed their opinions.

Whether you agree with them or disagree with them, this movement is not going to be stopped.  The wise among us will at least engage in an honest dialogue with them.  The foolish will discount their power and try to stand in their way, or even pretend they don't exist.

If these young adults are snowflakes, prepare for an avalanche.