Conversation with Jordan I about Covid in the USA

In response to a post Jordan made on facebook
“A School superintendent in GA says, ‘Wearing a mask is a personal choice and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them.’ Tell that to every single girl who has been sent home from school/forced to change for wearing spaghetti straps or shorts above the knee.”

[ 7/8/20 me ]

Don’t you just “love” hypocrisy when it is so exposed !???

[Jordan]
Ted Howard at this point you just have to laugh so you don’t cry

[my reply]

Yeah – it is a lot like that.

So many people holding on to very simple models of deeply complex realities (realities too complex for any mind to grasp in detail).

It is a kind of hubris (excessive pride and over confidence) that anyone should take any model as an accurate representation of reality. No map is the territory it maps.

And in respect of masks, there is no shadow of reasonable doubt that for the vast majority of people, the wearing of masks is one of the simplest and most effective things they can do to slow the spread of this virus.

Social distancing and hand washing are also effective tools.

The more people that do it, the safer we all are.

There is so much mis-information out there, mostly designed to deliver financial benefit to some subset of people.

Here in NZ, we have been free of community transmission for over 3 months.
We did that by huge cooperative effort, with government support to ensure that everyone had at least enough money to eat and to keep a roof over their heads during stay at home lockdown.

It is not that hard a virus to defeat, and it does take concerted cooperative effort.

There seems to be too much destructive competition in the USA for the approach we used to work there.

That is sad, because I have a lot of great friends over there who are all at risk from the many levels of over simplistic dogma and short sighted short term self interest that seem to dominate the social systems.

The long term benefits are clear – cooperation always delivers greater long term security and freedom than competition; and cooperation is not control, it is agents aligning their long term self interests to create coherent systems.