We have a relative in the ICU with covid. We are personally affected by this disease. Yet every day we fear it less and less.
Reader’s comment to the article, “Contra Costa County part of new stay-at-home order to take effect here Sunday”.
Once upon a time I worked at VMware, which is only a couple of miles from my house. Whenever the weather and my schedule co-operated, I rode my bike to work. Along the route home is a rather long straight downhill stretch (on Hanover Street). At first when I would ride down the hill I would ride the brakes to keep my speed down, but as time went by I used the brakes less and less. My speed was high enough that if my bike had taken a tumble I risked a serious injury. Yet, as time went by I felt more and more confident.
It’s not that I was more safe. It’s just that I felt more safe. A friend of mine, who is a psychologist, said that that’s how they “cure” people with phobias: they gradually expose them more and more to the thing they irrationally fear.
The problem is, my fear of crashing my bicycle is not irrational, and yet the same method allowed me to get over that fear. Every day I feared less and less, to paraphrase the quote at the top of the page. I may have felt less in danger, but in fact, my danger was not substantially less. (I did learn where the potholes were.)
The same is true of the reader: he feels less afraid, but the danger is actually greater now. Thus, I argue, that his intuition of the risk is wrong.
If the reader I quoted had left things at the end of the paragraph I quoted, I would have said, that’s human nature, and it’s one of the things that is helping to spread the virus.
But he goes on to conclude from his faulty assessment of his risks. “These lockdowns need to end. Life has a purpose and it includes taking risks while we pursue our individual forms of happiness.” What this overlooks is that his “pursuit of individual forms of happiness” disregards the fact that the main purpose of wearing a mask is to protect others from getting sick from his germs.
There is an old saying (with multiple attributions) that says “He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool; shun him.” I would hate to call him, or anyone, a fool, but I will certainly try my best to shun him and all the others who refuse to wear a mask. I constantly wonder how many of them are ignorant of the purposes of wearing a mask (to protect others from the wearer’s germs), how many of them don’t believe what they are told, and how many of them just don’t care about the safety of others.