Ten lessons from the pandemic...

1. Most people are not that smart. Those who are smart can easily be scared into believing whatever is told to them. People who are both smart and can continue thinking critically during crises are gemstones. When you find one, befriend them. Try to be around those people as much as you can.

2. Conformity and tribalism are strong motivators. We are living in modern times with hardware shaped during ancient times, times when being ostracized could literally mean death. Our brains still operate under the assumption that being ostracized could mean death. While this is generally not a big problem, it can lead to insanity prevailing during crises.

3. Federalism is precious. Checks and balances are essential. Left to their own instruments, institutions like to get bigger. This applies to the government as well. While a competent government could be a great asset during a crisis, an incompetent one that gets bigger and bigger does more and more damage unless there are checks and balances in place.

4. Those who claim to care about the working class are merely virtue signaling. Those who appear to not care about the working class are less likely to do things that will harm the working class. The former group is mostly made up of elites, who know they are virtue signaling, or progressive and broke young people who have been brainwashed, who don’t know they are virtue signaling. The latter group genuinely doesn’t care much about the working class, but at least one can be sure that they are not going to actively work to harm them and will allow them to live their lives if they work for it.

5. Relationships are fluid. Alliances are not set in stone. Ideologies can change. All one needs is a crisis and people/ideologies will show their true selves.

6. Public institutions in most (all?) countries are hopelessly incompetent. I suspect this is because the best talent is in the private sector. There are, without a doubt, exceptions to this. But they are too few to make a big impact (or perhaps there is too much red tape for them to make a big impact). Unfortunately, this leads to disastrous consequences when it is the government’s job to manage a pandemic…

7. Our experts are hopelessly incompetent. As an insider, I can tell you that the incentive systems in academia are seriously bad. The system rewards publications and grants. The system rewards the quantity of publications, and where they are published. Neither of these guarantees that the research leading to those publications is of high quality. In fact, it is often the opposite. Same with grants. This allows some grifters to game the system and get pubs, grants, etc. to become recognized as “experts” without actually commanding expertise in the area they are claiming to be “experts” in. To make matters worse, actual experts are generally too humble to play this game and they simply do their jobs without getting much recognition. Then a crisis happens and…

8. People can easily turn into authoritarians when their perceived safety is threatened. I would often wonder how people could support authoritarian leaders in countries like Russia or Turkey. Then the pandemic happened and I watched, in real-time, how people who claim to be champions of liberalism turned into petty little tyrants as soon as they feared for their lives. People who live in those countries live in a constant state of fear: fear of an enemy, fear of terrorists, fear of great hardship that they have experienced in the past… This pushes them to leaders who they think will keep them safe.

9. People can be manipulated to believe that their perceived safety is threatened. This, combined with #8 above, leads to a very precarious situation when it comes to the survival of the society we know it. Without the appropriate checks and balances (also see #3 here), a leader with bad faith can easily manipulate the masses that they are in danger, gain their support, and do whatever they want. Remember Hitler? Now read on to #10 to see that today’s potential Hitlers have much more effective tools at their disposal…

10. Social media is a blessing and a curse. But mostly a curse. I have long believed that social media was the biggest threat to the survival of our species. I still hold that belief. It can be weaponized too easily, by anyone with some (minor) budget to do so. Society can be engineered to polarize around political or racial or religious (pick your favorite fault line - depending on which country you are targeting) groups. Elections can be targeted. I don’t know the solution to this but I know this is not sustainable.