Most people that I’ve spoken to over the past year regarding COVID, mortality, and risk in general find it unbelievable when I tell them that 2.8 million people die in the US every year. I get the “BS!” expression. The same when I say that around 300,000 Americans die every year from medical error. It is almost impossible to believe, until you verify it. Now check out the graphic below:
Are you paralyzed or affected emotionally in any way by these risks that are a part of living? No? They pose a dire threat to your existence, but you’re able to get on with your life without significantly altering it in any way, or holding these risks in our minds constantly while hiding in our homes. We don’t tolerate egregious human rights violations in efforts to stamp out these risks. They are facts of life that we mitigate as best we can, all while treating others with dignity and respect, without clamoring for a tyrant to save us.
This ignorance of risk must have served a purpose for our species. We probably would have never advanced to the stage we’ve found ourselves in if we hadn’t been taking wild risks in pursuit of one deranged goal or the other.
And if we had focused obsessively on a single risk, we would have been paralyzed as a species, and never made it past the Stone Age. To see how the human race behaves when it focuses exclusively on a single risk, look no further than how we’ve behaved this past year. By magnifying a single remote risk, we’ve almost single-handedly destroyed modern civilization. Our fear became all-consuming, and we allowed an apocalyptic level of pain and destruction to be inflicted on the world.
Fear is arguably our most destructive emotion. There’s no controlling it, reasoning with it, or calming it down. Fear overrides our relatively new reasoning ability. Fear brings back the caveman in us, and so we act like cavemen. And so we developed risk ignorance, in order to deal with this paralyzing emotion.
But now we have mass media, and social media. We are unable to escape the information beamed at us 24/7, which puts us in a very vulnerable position regarding our perception of risk and reality. The media pushed the COVID narrative unendingly for 10 straight months, triggering our fear and unleashing chaos. But COVID is not a real risk for children or most adults under the age of 70 and in moderate health. Over 90% of the deaths were in people who were already very sick, with up to 90% of the dead having a prior do-not-rescuscitate order in place.
The risk of COVID to children and their teachers is effectively zero. Far less than the many other risks that pose a threat to them. And yet we only pay attention to COVID because it’s been beamed at us continuously over the past year.
So we force the kids to wear masks, order them around in a social distance dance, and turn off their water fountains, and think that we’re helping them, somehow.
We need to somehow defuse our fear, before we acclimate to years of this pandemic theater. Risk is everywhere, and COVID is the least of our worries. We should be far more worried about sustained mass fear, and it’s destructive effect on all of us.
