Recent reporting shows a correlation between voting for Trump and resisting vaccination against Covid-19. Why?
Many people would say “just plain old stupidity.” That may be part of the answer, but step back a bit: we know that many of our fellow citizens are angry - for all sorts of reasons, some legitimate, others not. And we know that Donald Trump has been in tapping into that anger, exploiting it, and exacerbating it.
We all know that anger leads to bad decisions, public and private, but in this case, there is more to it than that - if Pericles, as Thucydides represents him, was right about the psychological effects of the pandemic that hit Athens in 430 BCE…
The Athenians, in the midst of war and pandemic, were understandably angry at Pericles and his policies, and were trying to negotiate from a position of weakness. Pericles tells them he understands the causes of their anger and of the mistake they are making. Your grief, he says, has a hold on the way each of you sees things, while the benefit for everyone will become clear only in the future:
Since a great disruption – one with little advance warning - has fallen upon you, your intelligence is lowered.... For when something sudden, and unexpected, and in the highest degree irrational happens, confidence is enslaved. That is what has happened to us more than to anyone else, especially in the pandemic. Thucydides 2,61.3 f.
“Enslaved”—that’s powerful language to use when speaking to a slave-owning but freedom-espousing audience. A pandemic can do that to you. But most sobering in my view is the switch from chastising his own feckless fellow citizens as “you,” and speaking instead of what has happened to us (almost all manuscripts have "us," not "you"). It’s not just rednecks whose minds are filled with anger. In a pandemic judgment can be distorted in many ways in any of us, without our even noticing it.
We’d better all watch out.
April 21 2021
Many people would say “just plain old stupidity.” That may be part of the answer, but step back a bit: we know that many of our fellow citizens are angry - for all sorts of reasons, some legitimate, others not. And we know that Donald Trump has been in tapping into that anger, exploiting it, and exacerbating it.
We all know that anger leads to bad decisions, public and private, but in this case, there is more to it than that - if Pericles, as Thucydides represents him, was right about the psychological effects of the pandemic that hit Athens in 430 BCE…
The Athenians, in the midst of war and pandemic, were understandably angry at Pericles and his policies, and were trying to negotiate from a position of weakness. Pericles tells them he understands the causes of their anger and of the mistake they are making. Your grief, he says, has a hold on the way each of you sees things, while the benefit for everyone will become clear only in the future:
Since a great disruption – one with little advance warning - has fallen upon you, your intelligence is lowered.... For when something sudden, and unexpected, and in the highest degree irrational happens, confidence is enslaved. That is what has happened to us more than to anyone else, especially in the pandemic. Thucydides 2,61.3 f.
“Enslaved”—that’s powerful language to use when speaking to a slave-owning but freedom-espousing audience. A pandemic can do that to you. But most sobering in my view is the switch from chastising his own feckless fellow citizens as “you,” and speaking instead of what has happened to us (almost all manuscripts have "us," not "you"). It’s not just rednecks whose minds are filled with anger. In a pandemic judgment can be distorted in many ways in any of us, without our even noticing it.
We’d better all watch out.
April 21 2021