‘The country is now trapped in an intuition nightmare: Like the spiraling ants [army ants that sometimes walked in circles until they died of hunger and dehydration because they followed pheromone trails of others], Americans are walled in by their own unhelpful instincts, which lead them round and round in self-destructive circles. “The grand challenge now is, how can we adjust our thinking to match the problem before us?” says Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disasters. Here, then, are nine errors of intuition that still hamstring the U.S. pandemic response, and a glimpse at the future if they continue unchecked. The time to break free is now. Our pandemic summer is nearly over. Now come fall, the season of preparation, and winter, the season of survival.’
The nine errors:
- A serial monogamy of solutions
- False dichotomies
- The comfort of theatricality
- Personal blame over systemic fixes
- The normality trap
- Magical thinking
- The complacency of inexperience
- A reactive rut
- The habituation of horror
On point 9: ‘The US might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is. Daily tragedy might become ambient noise. The desire for normality might render the unthinkable normal. Like poverty and racism, school shootings and police brutality, mass incarceration and sexual harassment, widespread extinctions and changing climate, COVID-19 might become yet another unacceptable thing that America comes to accept.’
Read here (The Atlantic, Sept 9, 2020)
