A friend of mine recently pointed out that until this point, we didn’t generally or commonly understand pandemic as a real possibility (even if we did historically & scientifically). The same is true for nuclear weapons.
It's not true at all. The entire Cold War was spent by all sides thinking and preparing for nuclear war.
This sort of attitude is a very post-Cold War one. I also share it too, because the Cold War ended when I was a child so the threat of nuclear weapons always felt like something from the past to me. But if you read about people who were older during that period, you'll see that many people genuinely did live in fear that the bombs could start falling any day. For instance, I remember an Alan Moore interview from right before Watchmen came out where he said he felt there would be a nuclear war within the next few years. It's hard to imagine what living your life in that environment was like.
"I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
"But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead."
There are generations of people alive today who don't remember the Cold War at all, and don't understand the fuss that was made about that era.
These people don't know what it was like to live with the terror that life on Earth could end, any day, within 45 minutes. That was hanging over our heads for decades before the wall fell and the Soviet's 'lost' the Cold War - and before 'terrorists' became the #1 scare factor for modern society.
I often have to remind 20-something year old folks in my circles that the 80's were absolutely terrifying for the potential for nuclear armageddon, not to mention the HIV waves that decimated certain aspects of youth society, as well. There is an ignorance for these things which I think is quite dangerous - kids these days are complacent and un-caring about the rise of the military industrial complex. In the 70's and 80's, we were all concerned not with terrorits, but with totalitarian military leaders, who might end it all ..
One of the most emotionally unsettling things I've seen is a fake BBC broadcast that was posted on youtube shortly after Trump was elected. Is was clearly labelled as fictional, but still.
It was about an hour long, and started off with a news report about some kind of stand-off in the Black sea, with footage of jets taking off from aircraft carriers and so on. The reporters say they're not really sure what's going on, and military officials aren't taking their calls. They switch back and forth between footage of non-specific military activity, and the exterior of some building as cars stop and this or that important government or military official gets out with a serious look on their face and enters the building. Then it cuts over to some people on a roof in Poland, talking about flashes of light on the horizon and how the phone lines are down and they can't reach anyone in the neighboring town where the flashes of light came from. Things go downhill from there, and the reporters eventually say they've been told that helicopters are evacuating the U.S. embassy in London and the Queen and her family are also evacuating to some unspecified safe location. The video ends shortly thereafter with the BBC going off the air and being replaced by their equivalent of the emergency broadcast system, announcing a list of cities town and neighborhoods where residents are advised to seek shelter immediately. The list goes on and on until eventually the video cuts out.
I haven't been able to find the video again, I'd guess it was either taken down by youtube or by the original poster. The message I took from it was that in the event of nuclear war, it'll be over before most ordinary people have got any idea of what's even happening, much less why. The fake broadcast was disturbing in part because it didn't have any sort of coherent story or plot.
By now I think most people's anxiety about Trump getting us into a nuclear war has gone down a bit simply because it's been over three years and it hasn't happened yet, and because we have other things to worry about. I don't think it has been quite front-of-mind like it was in the 80's or thereabout, but I also wasn't old enough to remember the cold war much.
Commonly, no, but generally we did understand pandemics. Just watch Contagion (2011). If a Hollywood movie would get it that right, then a lot of people had to be pretty sure of the details. It’s no accident that the only changes from reality can be explained by “trying to make a better movie” and “trying to be allowed to air in China”.
What philosophy do you think drove the production of these videos, if people didn't think nuclear war affecting them and their children was a real possibility?
Another possibility for the creation of films like this is to make it seem the government is doing something about a problem.
In this case, there was no evidence that 'duck and cover' saved any lives, even though some people who saw that media experienced bombs and explosions for other reasons.
Doing something ineffective is frequently better than doing nothing in the political world. The population won't accept a president saying 'We're really worried about the Soviets bombs, but we've decided the best action is to do nothing'. Saying "we're training everyone what to do if a nuke explodes" is part of a strategy to make the public think you have control of the situation.
there is a difference between the government understanding it and creating videos to teach the population and the population actually understanding it at large.
take his example of a pandemic for example. a lot of people thought that we'd be able to handle a global pandemic easily. they watch movies in which everything went to shit and think "no way it would be that bad if it actually happened". and to be honest, i think this pandemic actually enforced this mistaken believe. corona isn't that dangerous. if it killed with a 10+% chance, we still wouldn't have been handling it properly. the death toll wouldve just been higher.
Pandemic is not a “black swan” event. A black swan is by definition something you cannot know exists until you discover it. We’ve known pandemic was a real threat for a long time. pandemic was largely considered a certainty by anyone who was knowledgeable in the subject.
Pretending something isn’t a threat is a far cry from it not existing and the fact that you’re conflating the two says a lot about why we’re in the situation we are. Pandemic was a certainty we refused to prepare for. Many consider nuclear war a certainty we refuse to prevent.
I agree with your premise, but let's just not forget that we're humans with a limited life-span and our brains aren't used to dealing with events that happen this rarely. It's understandable why we may all have been caught off-guard. It's a "black swan" relative to our understanding of life.
Last century was the Spanish Flu. The century before that was the Russian Flu. Viral pandemics seem to be a 100-year event, and meanwhile your bank has no trouble insisting that you carry flood insurance if you are building in the 100-year floodplain.
Was a pandemic really a black swan event? I'm pretty sure researchers had been warning about the possibility of one for a long while, plus we had SARS, H1N1, Ebola, etc. Of course, they're not exactly the same as COVID-19 but it's not like we didn't know pandemics could happen
This one is. None of those other diseases have such a long time period where people are presymptomatic and contagious, and that's the only reason that COVID-19 is out of control.
While your characterization is valid I wouldn't call it a black swan, just because some of the characteristics are surprising/unknown.
All the top virologists I heard say pretty much the same on that front: it is a special thing, but the idea that something like this could happen sooner or later was clear as day.
I'm not so sure, If people in command have had lived through the Spanish flu the situation would have been handled extremely different, such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases.
> such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases.
That's not what would have happened.
New Zealand has zero new daily cases only because it's an island. The same reason Hawaii has done so well relatively. It has almost been a month since Hawaii has had a Covid death. It's not because their lockdown measures have been magic, it's because they're an island, they got a massive artificial booster to their isolation efforts.
Well before it was understood to lock down all transportation, the virus was already spreading across the US and Europe, it was already too late. Direct experience with the Spanish Flu pandemic would have made zero difference to that. Practically nobody outside of China knew the virus was spreading in Wuhan or how serious it was for the first two months of the outbreak, starting in late October. By the time China stopped aggressively trying to conceal the nature of the virus outbreak (mid January), it had already spread to the US and Europe (in December).
All transportation globally would have had to have been locked down in mid November at the latest to have had a shot at stopping the spread. That's a fantasy scenario.
We only locked down mid-March, but we're back down to less than 2% of our peak and have been unlocking since end-April. Stopping the spread is easy, but it apparently requires a population that understands and is committed to hygienic measures.
Not at all. Even in the era of the Spanish flu there were no drastic restrictions like we have now while it killed a lot more people. Different times and different adversity to loss of human life.
This sort of attitude is a very post-Cold War one. I also share it too, because the Cold War ended when I was a child so the threat of nuclear weapons always felt like something from the past to me. But if you read about people who were older during that period, you'll see that many people genuinely did live in fear that the bombs could start falling any day. For instance, I remember an Alan Moore interview from right before Watchmen came out where he said he felt there would be a nuclear war within the next few years. It's hard to imagine what living your life in that environment was like.