Once in a Lifetime
Epsilon Theory
March 29, 2020·39 comments·Politics
Leaders are telling a story about which lives matter less in a pandemic. The old, the sick, those in hotspots. But this narrative isn't about disease patterns. It's about training populations to think in trade offs and accept the unacceptable. When decisions cannot be reversed and probabilities are unknowable, the entire framework collapses.
- The division being manufactured is deliberate. Narratives separating the "vulnerable" from everyone else are not epidemiological analysis. They're permission structures for abandoning entire groups.
- The math we're told to use assumes we get multiple chances. Risk calculations work when you play the game repeatedly. A pandemic is a one shot decision where unlucky outcomes cannot be corrected over time, rendering the entire expected utility framework obsolete.
- Common sense becomes heresy when leaders need you to accept the unacceptable. The insistence that trade offs are inevitable and that some deaths are simply acceptable costs depends on your acceptance of a particular way of thinking. One designed to minimize your empathy, not maximize your safety.
- The mechanism that flips decision making isn't calculation; it's recognition. When you acknowledge that you could be the vulnerable person in the next moment, in the next year, in the next decade, the policy question changes entirely.
- What's actually at stake is whether we remain autonomous beings or whether we abdicate that autonomy to leaders who've already decided which of us matter. The real war isn't against the virus; it's against the narrative designed to make you accept its terms.
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Comments
Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwl.
Shit is real… just got the call my uncle passed this am. In Arizona. With just 15 deaths as of yesterday. Today it’ll be over 30 for sure. You think it won’t come because you’re young or you live in Yavapai county or whatever.
You are undoubtedly right Ben, and thanks for another superb article. A question I always end up asking when I contemplate empathy or the lack of it across the top echelons of our economic and political leaders is whether empathy and compassion are in some way an impediment to the kind of ‘success’ we laud in our modern societies.
Empathy and compassion the characteristics of the cooperative game (like you say), but are the rewards of breaking the game are so large now (and the costs of breaking it so low) that we can’t find a cooperative equilibrium without external enforcement. Rebuilding via the pack works on a smaller scale, I am less sure that membership based social conformity (with the payoffs in modern society as they are) is enough to keep the empathetic and compassionate equilibrium stable. I really hope I’m wrong.
Thanks as always for the constant wonderful writing.
With you Ben.
Completely agree on rebuilding on a smaller scale. With economy built on just in time combined with lowest cost labor offshoring, we are now seeing the downside. The fix isn’t to wait for DC. Communities should be 3D printing masks, making PAPR hoods from vaccum hoses and clear plastic. We have to fight this virus and most injustice in packs, communities that are (or can become) flexible, nimble, and adaptable.
I am so, so sorry for your loss…sending many virtual hugs.
As I often am by your posts, I’m so moved by this…but this reached another level for me, you express so eloquently what I’ve been feeling. Thank you, Ben.
I was gonna post on my Facebook: “eli eli lama sabachthani” but after reading your post, I aint got time for that now. Gathering my pack.
And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention.
-Nothing But Flowers, Talking Heads
First responders, health care workers, supply lines. I was a NYC Firefighter 9/11 and was dumbfounded how wonderful people pitch together when called to be human. Less Individualism more Humanity. Empathy need not be learned. Ben you are right,it is unlearned. We can do this.
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