Modesty, humility, and courage are ancient virtues. They are also universal and timeless ones. The supreme mitigating factor in all that we do is the law of unintended consequences. In other words, crap happens. Humility and modesty should restrain blustery confidence. Courage is a necessity to counter an inane conventional wisdom. Trying times, like the present pandemic, put all of us to the test. Inanity surrounds.
Inane conventional wisdom #1 is the blind acceptance of saving lives at any cost – literally, any cost. Sure, save lives, but you can’t throw caution and limits to the wind as you do it. The law of unintended consequences kicks in. Take for example economic ruination and all that it portends. If past is prologue, the well-trodden path of hyper-inflation is littered with well-intentioned public policy. Shelter-in-place is destroying associations of every kind, up to and including businesses. We must gird ourselves for the very real possibility of inflation-run-amok. Price inflation from product shortages will be accelerated by monetary inflation from our political chiefs’ insistence on a national shutdown. Get ready for a double whammy, and all that comes with a wrecking of the national wealth.
Inane conventional wisdom #2 is a mindless worship of anything “data-driven”. What data? Have you ever questioned those numbers? How are they arrived at? Throwing numbers at a problem goes hand-in-glove with throwing paper money at it.
Cases and deaths flow into graphs and charts to stampede the public into accepting what are the equivalent of imperial decrees. I’m reminded of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth: numbers are playthings to create new “realities”. In the hands of today’s Democratic Party and the Squad, the “new reality” is a universe of socialism.
At root are pressures to assign a digit to the most politically useful category. Cause of death is too easily accredited to the favorite of the moment, COVID-19. During a normal flu season, the low-hanging fruit for a disease are people suffering from multiple and chronic health threats. Did they die of the flu or was it their preexistent weakened bodies? In the hospital, the coin flip for cause of death will always come up tails, tails being the flu. Ditto for COVID-19.
The “cases” number is also playdough. Here, the choice of the COVID-19 category for a patient is on firmer ground with tests to identify the presence of the bug. As I’ve written before, though, the total is an ever-moving goalpost. Power-hungry politicos shout in blood-curdling tones of a death rate of 7% and millions in the morgue. The omnibus total, however, is a product of an incomplete denominator because of the lack of sufficient antibody testing and an unacknowledged ignorance of when the bug entered the US. However, today, everywhere you look, the number of cases is swelling. People had it, didn’t know they had it, recovered, and went on with their lives. Thus, early and many later prognostications were a sham. But shams can be politically useful.
Do we really know what we are doing? I’m beginning to doubt it. We over-confidently proclaim our omniscience, scorn unintended consequences, and blindly march into catastrophe. We are proving that science and fact are as easily manipulated as Winston Smith discovered in Orwell’s 1984.
Roger Graf