What Will “Normal” Look Like?

A recent Slate article, “I Do Not Trust People in the Same Way and I Don’t Think I Ever Will Again," really struck a chord with me. The article was mostly about the anxiety many feel about going back to the office. “Workers have also seen over the past year that even when employers claim they’ll implement safety measures, the reality is often very different. Social distancing requirements often go unenforced, and many people report colleagues going unmasked without any consequences. So employees are primed to be incredulous.” All of that is absolutely valid, too. A friend recently interviewed for a job with a Minnesota medical-tech company and all of the people who met with him, except the department manger, proudly went maskless in a small room and implied that he was being rude in keeping his mask on.

As a spectacularly accurate recent paper on human stupidity, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,” stated, “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. . . Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction σ of them were stupid. As σ's value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white-collar employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same fraction σ of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature's supreme powers: σ fraction of the Nobel laureates are stupid.” (I seriously recommend that you read this paper as it contains far more human natural selection information than practically anything I’ve seen since Euell Gibbon’s survivalist books.) As the illustration from that paper aptly describes, the four basic categories of humans are: “the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid.” (In clockwise rotation starting from the top left.)

Learning that so many humans in every field, distributed across all populations, are stupid is not a comforting piece of information. It does explain why so many self-declared or media-selected “experts” have been so wrong about so many things in the past and, specially, in the past dozen years. As our education system is dumbed-down to prop-up academic revenues, even more idiots are getting advanced degrees in fields they can barely describe. Decades ago, SF writer Theodore Sturgeon said, “90% of everything is crap.” Looks like you could accurately rephrase that to “90% of everyone is stupid.” If you don’t think even the most lauded, anointed, and prominent humans can be stupid, just look at the folks the late Bernie Madoff convinced to pour money down his sinkhole, from other investment companies and pension funds to famous entertainers to scientists. All people desperately wanting to believe that the facts could be contradicted by their desires and ignoring “if it seems too good to be true, it is.”

Stupid people are dangerous, as a few thousand stupid insurrectionists demonstrated in Washington, DC on January 6th. Learning that so many of those around us are unpredictably foolish and self-destructive and well-armed puts an edge on every interaction many of us will have for the rest of our lives. In the Slate article about losing trust the author said, “But the real problem, I suspect, is that in the past year, we’ve experienced a massive loss of trust in our institutions and in one another.” In fact, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the people I know in this small Minnesota community who are not stupid and considerably less surprised at discovering the ones who are dumb as a post (or “dumb as a Trump voter,” the new idiom for a total fool).

That is going to be a problem for a lot of local businesses, too. In my village, many of our local bars, restaurants, and retailers went proudly mask-less and precaution-free until the state mandated those basic and obvious rules. I, for one, will not be going back to those businesses anytime soon, regardless of the state of the nation’s health. Why would I? During the last year, those businesses and employees willingly, carelessly, and arrogantly demonstrated their distain for science, decency, and their community by flaunting their politics over any other value. Why would I want to help those people stay in business in my community with my money? I’m not even a little bit alone in this decision, either. The wingnuts jabber mindlessly about “cancel culture,” but what they want is to be able to boycott any person or business or community at will for their pet peeve of the moment but when the tables turn on them they whine “that’s not fair!” Remember the Beatles after Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” comment or Starbuck’s red Xmas cups or Oreo cookies or Netflix or Budweiser’s horses or Keurig and Roy Moore or a lot more wingnut boycotts? It’s ok when they do it, but if people with money (the educated non-MAGA crowd) do the same thing it’s “cancel culture.” Personally, some of those businesses that disappointed me locally will be missed from my pre-pandemic routine and appreciation of this little village. I do, however, hold a grudge for a long time and at this point it’s hard for me to imagine going back to the “old normal” knowing what I know of who these people really are.

All of that is going to make both the economic and social recovery complicated and there will be some-to-a-lot of fallout in the long run. When all of that “socialist” small business support vanishes as we go back to business as usual, the new usual will leave many of those places without a lot of the people who once provided a good bit of their income. Trump loved the uneducated, but most businesses need people with an income to provide their businesses with an income. Trump’s fools may be going back under the rocks where they normally hide, but we all know who many of them are now and we’ll be avoiding those rocks for many years.