The Great Shock is not the pandemic itself, but that incredibly wide-spread emotional reaction to the pandemic, at least in the West. Shock was the number one reaction to the pandemic, and with it came all the attendant subsequent reactions of shock: the denial; the minimization; what is termed "bargaining" in grief therapy; the sense of feeling that what was happening was "unreal" or "surreal" or "like a movie" (technical term: derealization); the wishful thinking; and the rhetoric of singularity, calling it "unprecedented" and the widespread compulsive urge to exculpatorily characterize it as both unexpected and unexpectable.
(It was, I trust my readers know, not unprecedented. And it was not unexpectable. The epidemiologists expected it; those who listened to them like Presidents Clinton and Obama, and prepared for this day, expected it.)
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See, if you were shocked that there could be a global catastrophe that directly impacted you – that threatened the lives of you and your loved ones, that changed how your worked, how you sourced food, how you ate, how much money you made, what recreational activities you could partake in, how much you could travel, what standard of living you enjoyed, even what you wore and how you moved in the world – if that whole possibility was shocking to you, if it was not something you had ever even considered could happen to you... then...
What did you think climate change meant?
The Great Shock betrays how little even liberal/left-leaning people really believed in climate change.
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It sure looks from where I sit like a certain kind of liberal reacts to people meaningfully entertaining the possibility of their state failing as if doing so were approval of and enthusiasm for the state failing. That would certainly be congruent with them calling preppers "ghouls" and "apocalypse LARPers". This has turned into something that looks to me like a patriotism loyalty test, as if they were saying, "We stand for the state protecting citizens! What kind of a socialist are you, if you dare to imagine that maybe the state might fail to do so? Have you so little faith that the state will be there for you in your hour of need?"
This cultural aspect of the left was so severe in the US – perhaps elsewhere, I don't know – that in the years before the pandemic I have had patients confess to me, gently sounding me out like they were about to disclose a stigmatized sexual practice or an affiliation with a reviled religious minority, that they were thinking about maybe storing up some food or making an evacuation bag in case of emergency. Because they expected me to judge them "crazy" or "paranoid" for doing so, or to shame them for their transgression against liberal norms.
This has to end. It is an invasive memetic weed in your mind that competes for resources against your natural prudent and responsible thoughts, strangling them before they can flourish. Rip it out wherever you see it.
From the blog post:
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