Institutionalized stupidity

Militant Trumpanzees' rejection of the scientific consensus on the dangers of covid-19, and on the best methods for preventing it, looks insane, self-destructive, and inexplicable.  In fact, it's the natural culmination of a generations-long anti-intellectual and anti-scientific trend among a large segment of our country's population.

About a third of the US population has a strong predisposition to reject and disdain science, and expertise generally.  Like most forms of human stupidity, this is ultimately rooted in religion.  Religion has been hostile to science for centuries (going back at least to Copernicus and Galileo, and arguably back to the destruction of Greco-Roman civilization), because science constantly makes discoveries which are at odds with religious dogma.  The most obvious example is evolution.  The most fervently-religious groups, in order to preserve their belief in their ancient myths and superstitions, have trained themselves to reject science and the general concept of establishing truth by evaluating evidence (that’s what science basically is).  Once that mental pattern was established for the sake of rejecting evolution, it easily got broadened to dismiss other inconvenient truths like global warming.

So we now have tens of millions of people who are culturally primed to react with hostility against any manifestation of expertise or any assertion of fact based on evidence instead of on ideology or tradition.

Most of the public figures now promoting stupid responses to covid-19 are Republican politicians.  The Republican party for decades has represented the interests of the ultra-wealthy against the rest of society, and has exploited religious fundamentalism to win elections; over time the fundamentalist element has become more and more dominant even in the upper levels of the party due to the rising influence of its grass-roots supporters.  What started off as a strategy to manipulate the rubes into voting for the party has become its real soul. It’s as if The Man Behind The Curtain had himself gradually come to believe that his projection of Oz the great and terrifying was a real entity.  And the fundamentalists themselves are now totally committed to Trump and his siren song of lies and delusion.

To that toxic situation another element has been added -- Republican leaders' fear, since around mid-2016, of crossing Trump and incurring the wrath of his hordes of fanatical, stupid, easily-enraged, and heavily-armed followers.  So the positions and statements of these politicians are rooted in two factors -- a specific form of stupidity, and a specific form of cowardice.  These exist in different proportions in different individual cases, but the practical result is pretty much the same.

Covid-19 is bringing the dangers of this mentality to the surface in ways we have not seen before.  The harm done by rejection of evolution or of climate science is long-term and generalized to the whole society -- an individual holding such anti-scientific views typically suffers no visible, immediate harm from doing so.  The harm done by rejecting the scientific consensus on covid-19 can be both personal and immediate, both to the dogmatic individual and to innocent people in his vicinity.  Our society is getting an object lesson in the dangers of irrational thinking.  And with so many states prematurely loosening their lockdowns and so many Trumpanzees and church leaders defying them, that object lesson is about to become a lot harsher.