This image of the COVID-19 era pool party in Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks [1] is deservedly viral.These are stunning and disturbing images for me.
I’m struggling to get inside of the heads of these people. Are they extroverts suffering from living in isolation? Are they simply in denial of the danger? Are they innumerate, not appreciating the meaning of exponential? Are they succumbing to incessant pressures of their in-group. to conform. Are they doing expensive signaling to impress each other? Have they attempted any sort of moral calculus in their minds, or have they simply declared themselves to be mini-Fiefdoms, self-legislating that it’s time to move on, the consequences be damned? I’m working hard to pull myself out of any Manichean matrix that might tempt me to see the world in terms of “good” people and “bad” people.
I prefer to think of these people are ordinary flawed people, just like the rest of us, except that they are making a bad decision here.
[Added 2020.05.27]: This situation brings to mind William James theory of the emotions. “I feel afraid BECAUSE I RUN.” Does it work in reverse? “I feel brave because I am ACTING brave”? Or “COVID won’t hurt me because I will pretend it won’t hurt me?”
The snag might be, however, it might not hurt THEM, but they could serve as a vector and serve as an intermediary cause for COVID hurting someone else. With the experts struggling to size up risk with exactness, maybe it’s easy to write off all of the experts, even where they are in general agreement.
Also, This willingness to crowd together in the pool during the pandemic seems to illustrate the power of framing. It would seem that lives are fungible–protecting a life on the highway would seem to be the moral equivalent of protecting someone from COVID-19. But maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe we can more vividly imagine the screeching tires, the crunching metal, the screams and the smell of things burning. Because we have basic level experience with the horror of crashing cars, it provokes us to do what we can to stop it from happening. Even those who drive while drunk think that drinking driving laws are appropriate in principle. COVID-19 is so tiny as to be invisible, so there is no basic level reaction to it. If only it were bigger, like a wasp, we might react to the danger of it better. But because it is silent and invisible, maybe it easy to pretend that it isn’t really a big deal.
Print this post [2]
[3]