Of COURSE we're having a coronavirus panic. Generally speaking, people have short, white-hot attention spans, and modern media culture makes them even shorter and hotter. Every problem is an annoying distraction until it affects daily life, at which point it becomes Armageddon.
A month ago, even the most sober discussion of the emerging coronavirus threat was treated like hysterical overreaction, and measures taken to keep it out of the U.S. were at best unnecessary, at worst xenophobia.
Modern media culture is not good at advocating reasonable early precautions to minimize distant threats. Coverage tends to be driven by activists and absolutists who don't have much sense of proportionality and don't want to talk about cost-benefit analysis or trade-offs.
The public has been numbed by so many manufactured crises and politicized theatrics that it takes a huge shock to our collective nervous system to make us take a real problem seriously. Naturally, people jolted out of a stupor by a massive shock tend to panic and overreact.
Focused intently on the suddenly urgent, all-consuming crisis thrust before our bleary eyes, we lose our senses of time and proportion. We want an immediate solution to the danger that jolted us awake. We eagerly signal to each other that we're fully awake and engaged now.
But we suspect maybe OTHERS are still asleep, still numb to the real danger, foolishly taking risks and making mistakes that could jeopardize everyone else. Our instinct to raise the general alarm level makes us amplify bad news and get angry at anyone who isn't at Defcon 1.
Few want to discuss proportionality during the fearful days after we are jolted awake. We want to spread the alarm and focus on this new terrible thing to the exclusion of all else. We want it to be over fast. We want to go back to sleep.
And it's at times like these we realize our system - from government agencies to activists and the media - spends a LOT of time and money on manufactured crises, leaving them with fewer resources to handle real ones. They have to work harder to communicate with a jaded public.
That's why the serious people dealing with a real crisis sometimes find panic useful. It's better than under-reaction for their purposes. They know a certain degree of hysteria must be reached in order for a critical mass of people to pay attention and follow instructions.
It's too bad things have gotten this way. It's a combination of our high-strung media nervous system, understandable distrust of big institutions, distrust of our neighbors, herd instinct, and that powerful sense that SOMEBODY should be doing SOMETHING to make the crisis go away.
We should learn not to sleep so deeply between red-alert crises. We should demand more focus and less mission creep from the agencies that are supposed to be prepared for them. We should begin reacting judiciously to threats before they cross the horizon.
Most of all, we should learn there are costs and benefits to every action, and to inaction. Rationally balancing them against each other is difficult both in times of apathy and white-hot panic. If we learn to do it better when we're not panicking, we'll panic less often. /end
