A Note on Groupthink (and COVID-19, Economic Bubbles, Climate Devastation, World War and Even Bigger Threats)

from the Kristof and Thompson article

We're all trying to wrap our heads around COVID-19 and the mathematics of epidemics.

There was a very good piece by Nick Kristof and Stuart A. Thompson in The New York Times that uses an interactive graph to help one understand how the numbers behave: "How Much Worse the Coronavirus Could Get, in Charts."

I've noticed that all of us have a difficult time sorting out the risk we face individually from the risk to society in aggregate. The problem seems to be that our minds have trouble holding different categories of numbers at the same time.

A related problem is what we are willing to think, and what we feel comfortable saying in conversation with other people.

I made a note of another article that appeared in The New York Times - "Why Did the Coronavirus Outbreak Start in China?" by Yi-Zheng Lian. Lian argues that things got out of hand because of a cultural tendency in China to defer to "the official line" -- or, more to the point, the fear of punishment meted out to anyone who contradicts the official line. Lian writes, "Punishing people who speak the truth has been a standard practice of China’s ruling elite for more than two millenniums and is an established means of coercing stability. It is not an invention of modern China under the Communists — although the party, true to form, has perfected the practice. And now, muzzling the messenger has helped spread the deadly COVID-19, which has infected some 75,000 people."

I have become very wary of broad brush characterizations of peoples and nations. (I come by this wariness honestly, as a recovering Orientalist.) But I was struck by echoes I found in Lian's article of a post I wrote about a decade ago about how the Chinese context sets up a "prisoner's dilemma" that squelches independent voices and independent action: "Merry Christmas, Mr. Liu: The Prisoner's Dilemma in China."

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I watched an online lecture about the years leading up to World War II in the Pacific. Prof. Mark Ravina makes the case in "War Without a Master Plan: Japan, 1931-1945" (Lecture 19 in Understanding Japan: A Cultural History) that something similar was operating in Japan at the time: the facts showed plainly that Japan was embarking on a path that was doomed, but there was a cultural tendency to acquiesce to what was believed to be the group's overall view. No one wanted to dissent.

Groupthink: the same phenomenon that we see in Florida today, where no one dares utter the words "climate change."

Which brings me to the problem I spend the most time puzzling over: our inability to cope with the risk inherent in the current nuclear weapons regime, and our acquiescence in this state of affairs.

We are all huddled in our homes now. We have a lot of time to think. We have grown tired of watching the same talking heads on the TV news shows. We have begun to reflect, and to have heart-to-heart talks with people we can really level with. And some of us are even beginning to think that maybe we really can live our lives differently.

To do so will require us to think.

And to say what we think.