Covid: check
George Floyd's murder which sparked worldwide protests: check
Smoke covering half the US: check
Not that I'm a polymath or have any answers. My approach to these problems is to leave the fate of the world to those who hold the power and just do my best to locally mitigate the damage.
we've regressed from self-actualization and are now focused on issues of survival
If government were better-federated, to push the power and decision-making to smaller and smaller units, then citizen buy-in would be a lot easier because the answer would always be "get involved in your local legislature", not "cast your vote into an ocean of millions of votes and hope for the best".
Americans sometimes look at Iceland as an example of Scandinavian Utopia, but I think the single best thing Iceland has done that's the cause to a lot of the effects has been to stay small. It's easy to know someone in government personally even if you're an outsider. Sure, there's still corruption and centralization of power and wealth, but the scale is so much smaller that it's a lot easier to just kind of shrug it off than when the fate of the world's data is at stake.
Russia and conservative media (murdoch media, etc) seeding regressive/anti-intellectual movements has been massively successful, western society is just completely unprepared to deal with freedom of speech being leveraged to spew an unending firehose of bullshit, it's a "copyleft" style trojan approach of using our own democratic values against us.
The firehose of bullshit has led to the rise of anti-intellectual movements, an anti-intellectual president, and a party that just votes absolutely lockstep with him no matter what he does. They don't give a shit about absolutely anything, not fires or hurricanes or plagues, and just let all these problems fester. It has a lot of other negative effects too of course, but we have reached the point where we simply can't respond even to acute crises anymore, our system has long-since lost its higher functioning in terms of setting goals and being able to execute them (what you'd call "self-actualization" in maslow's hierachy) and now is struggling even to maintain basic homeostasis (the "physical needs" tier of the maslow hierarchy).
(I include Brexit, Bolsanaro, Duarte, etc in this as well - western democracy is in deep fucking shit worldwide and if we don’t get our shit together and deal with the firehose of falsehoods we will be supplanted by more authoritarian forms of government that don’t suffer this vulnerability because they don’t tolerate free speech and dissent.)
It is also super depressing to know that even with everything that's gone on, less than 5% of america has even changed its mind. Even with the plague, even with the fires, even with civil unrest and mass arrests, even as the post office is dismantled and we lose the ability even to get a fucking package on time, 40% of america will go in the booth and pull the lever for more of this. It goes beyond just "doesn't affect me, who cares", or "that's 20 years from now me's problem", this has all affected everyone, now, today, and people still want more as long as they get to own the libs. It's maddening.
Intellectuals have led us to credit crisis. But "Nobody saw it coming!" Is not a response. Remember that statement?
Intellectuals have led us to forever wars everywhere.
Intellectuals have overseen the collapse of the family unit in the last 70 years
Intellectuals old us in the 90s that the polar caps would melt in....2020
Intellectuals have led us to a permanent underclass of people in cities like detroit, chicago, NY and Philadelphia.
I'd say that's enough. People have a right to call out the bullshit.
Because most of what intellectuals say is bullshit.
Human knowledge is limited. intellectuals have failed to exercise basic humility.
The bill is now due and those institutions need to dissappear (unis, newspapers etc) so something new can rise.
Wearing my high-bypass N95 mask, or a sloppy ill-fitting "surgical" mask or an un-rated cloth mask around a vulnerable person with multiple comorbidities is a dangerous show of virtue-signalling: it does essentially nothing to protect that individual.
Encouraging vulnerable people to wear a powered HEPA ventilator on their hip, connected to a full face mask would be useful. Not perfect, but statistically 100x-1000x better outcome, should they be unfortunately exposed to a cloud of SARS-CoV-2 bearing particulates. Isn't a hundred bucks a worthwhile investment to actually protect a vulnerable person?
Forcing people to do worthless things (wear masks, when they have no comorbidities, which do nothing to protect the vulnerable) is ridiculous, and is rightly held in contempt by many caring people.
Its very strange, to me, that even on a platform like HN, we get many (most?) accounts involved in denigrating entire groups by name-calling them "deniers" -- without actually materially addressing any of the concerns of the individuals within the "group"...
Do you think refusing to visit grandma because you don't think your face mask will protect her is a self-actualization need? Sounds like a group safety need to me. Your choice of examples reads more like equivocation (conflating two things with similar features) which is generally a no-no in public debate circles.
The evidence still supports the idea that prophylaxis at the point source is an order more effective than prophylaxis at the sink, and they are not mutually exclusive. The Precautionary Principle means you do cheap things that may not work or even be necessary, but the cost of being wrong is so high that it doesn't matter how low the probability is. It's not a waste of resources. It's hedging.
If I had to be in a room with her and there was only one mask, I'd wear it instead of giving it to grandma. But why the hell am I in this situation to begin with?