A big question I have seen online and amoung my family and friends is 'when will all these crazy people finally take covid seriously?'. There are plenty of answers out there; when the hospitals get over-loaded, when everyone knows someone who has died from it, when we reach the symbolic number of deaths from 9/11 in a single day. However I think these milestones will only make the deniers even more obstinate.
It reminds me about trying to talk to someone about not eating meat. On average how easy it is to convince someone is directly proportional to how young they are. There are some obvious reasons for that; young people are more open to change, less set in their ways, more idealistic, more impressionable. However in my opinion the big reason is that the younger a person is the less you are actually asking them to do.
When you try to convince someone to not eat meat you're not just convincing them to not eat meat in the future, you're asking them to accept that when they ate meat in the past they were doing something wrong. The younger a person is the less your actually asking them to accept because they have been eating meat for a much shorter time, and most of it has been because they had to eat what their parents and school cafeteria provided.
I see this same dynamic playing out with convincing people to take covid seriously. At the beginning taking covid seriously just meant wearing masks and staying home. As the deaths pile up taking covid seriously no longer just means wearing a mask, it means accepting that our failure to take it seriously is why so many people are dead. The more the deaths increase, the harder it will be for people to accept it.
Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk I guess. I had this bouncing around in my head and just wanted to get it out
Anti meat eating arguments, from my experience, are based around morality or ethics.
The anti mask arguments that I've seen are based around "not being a scared-y cat" and "not giving up agency in your life."
So I'm not sure if the comparison is adequate.
My opinion of the right wingers is that they often want a leader to tell them what to do, and tell them in a way that makes it seem like they aren't giving anything up or that their inconvenience is a brave a noble sacrifice.
Until the same media and "culture warrior leadership" that didn't take COVID seriously can find a way to frame doing everything they should have been doing at the beginning of this as "pro liberty, freedom, the USA way" without having to admit they were wrong (or hurting the stock market) there will be no central authority to give the culture warriors the order to wear masks, stay home, and not be an asshat about it. So I guess I'm saying that the number of deaths might not have any effect.
I guess we'll get to see what happens when Biden's administration takes over in January and hopefully puts out enough PR flacks to just constantly talk about wearing masks and staying home like its a normal thing and hopefully get little push back from media types.
I agree that its easier to get younger people to do the right thing, at least while it looks like everybody around them is doing it.
I don't think I expressed my idea very well.
Getting someone to take covid seriously at the beginning of the pandemic is like getting a young person to become a vegetarian. All you're asking them to do is change behavior going forward.
Getting a person to take covid seriously 300,000 deaths into it is like getting an old person to go vegetarian. You're not just asking them to change their behavior going forward, you're impling that their actions in the past are the cause of great injustice.
I think you're pretty dead on with what you're saying. I just don't think any amount of rhetorical framing will work because any amount of changing minds now requires them to accept that the reason 300,000 people are dead is because they wouldn't wear a mask and stay home.
Aha!...
That is clearer to me now.
I think something like this is called the "sunk cost fallacy."
Same type of arguments are used why the USA must keep troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. "We've lost so many lives already, and spent so much money already, if we pull out now all of those losses would have been for nothing... "