The pandemic highlighted how decades of pushing for socialism have utterly destroyed our ability to measure costs against benefits and evaluate risk. We're down to people refusing to take vaccines until they're 100% effective and demands for lockdown until we have 0% coronavirus.
This neurotic hysteria is a result of pushing people to demand 100% safety and security in all things, and convincing them only bigger maternal government can make the safety blanket bigger. The law of diminishing returns means each 1% increase in "security" now costs billions.
Socialism thrives by frightening people out of taking risks and convincing them to demand Mommy Government take care of all their "grievances." By definition, the idea is to "socialize" all costs. The Big Lie is tricking people into thinking socializing costs makes them vanish.
Thus you have the absurd spectacle of socialists constantly promising "free" goodies, or insisting that if people pay a single penny for anything the socialists deem "vital," their "rights" have been trampled and their "access" to those necessary goods has been blocked.
The fraudulent ideal of socialism is that everyone pays equally for goods that everyone must have. The ugly reality is that some are looted so that others get a "free" ride. Either way, success for the socialists requires tricking the public into demanding total "security."
The Wuhan coronavirus came crashing down on a society conditioned for generations to demand absolute security, zero risk, even the most fanciful grievances redressed by the Mommy State. They were taught to be terrified of risk and to ignore the cost of "virtuous" programs.
The hysteria of the past year is the unsurprising result of a REAL crisis descending upon people conditioned to collapse into nervous heaps and scream for Mommy Government over countless imaginary, exaggerated, and minuscule "crises." We were ALREADY in constant panic.
Hysteria is really all about losing the ability to evaluate risk and measure costs against benefits. Hysterics see inevitable doom in tiny risks and demand safety at all costs. "If it saves just one life..." is an idiotic slogan deployed by socialists YEARS before the pandemic.
You talk hysterical people down by calmly getting them to see the truth of their situation and evaluate it reasonably. You get them to understand that refusing to take any action is more dangerous than doing nothing because every action seems too perilous.
In short, hysteria disables our ability to evaluate costs and risk. The return to sanity involves regaining our sense of paying reasonable costs for rational benefits, and taking important actions even if success and safety are not 100% guaranteed.
The hysteria of 2020 is what happens when a society deliberately bred and trained to become a panicked herd, kept in a constant state of terror and grievance by political opportunists, gets hit by a genuine crisis. No one remembers how to evaluate risk and cost rationally.
For generations, we've been trained by ambitious socialists that asking about the cost of their programs is EVIL. We've been taught to demand perfect guarantees, total assurances, ideal outcomes, and zero costs - and to surrender more of our money and freedom to get them.
A society that thinks that way is utterly unprepared to deal with a menace like the coronavirus. Rational planning demands an ability to measure costs vs. benefits that has been deemed absolutely heretical by our political class because it would compromise our faith in THEM. /end
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