ATOMIC IGNORANCE: Living with a sciency mate who studied physics, I have direct access to intel.

Distraught about the pandemic of willful ignorance, I asked him to break it down for me while we were hiking today.

Here’s how the convo went.
1/
HSC: Sweetheart, why are massive amounts of people ignoring science, ignoring the data.

BF: Well the media since long before Fox has been sewing the seeds of suspicion of science, claiming that it’s profit-driven, that it’s dangerous, that it’s all kinds of..

HSC: Malarkey?
2/

BF: Right.

HSC: Why? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for Fox Trump Putin Mercer—we know it’s all the usual suspects—to get people to doubt science?

BF: What it is now is a conspiracy, but it wasn’t a conspiracy originally.
3/

HSC: What was it originally?

BF: The atomic bomb scared the shit out of everyone, and science rose to the fore of the public’s mind.

HSC: Ya.

BF: Suddenly, science went from something that brought good things to something that could bring total destruction.
4/

HSC: Therein lied the avenue of exploration, they could exploit fear.

BF: Yes, decades later people started to realize that this fear could be exploited.

HSC: That is the root of everything.
5/

HSC: When we see all these group gatherings, people ignoring the data, the facts, the science, ignoring just his contagious this thing, this virus without a vaccine is, it boggles the mind that they don’t consider their behavior grossly negligent.
6/

BF: If they thought about their behavior in a clear-headed manner, they would think it was chaotic, self-harming.

HSC: Because they’re wrapped up in conspiracies, microdosed on lies, they inflict harm on themselves and others in total defiance of provable facts and reason?
7/

BF: I don’t know because I’m not one of them—I don’t watch Fox, I don’t vote Republican—but presumably there’s a mindset that is deeply entrenched and that mindset says ‘COVID-19 is a fraud, a fake, brought about to undermine America.’
8/

BF: The conspiracy fed mindset tells them ‘this COVID-19 fraud should be resisted in any way’ even if it’s symbolic, even if it’s dangerous.
9/

HSC: So here we are. Any parting thoughts?

BF: Wear a mask. Don’t linger too long in public places. Stay apart from one another. This is gonna take awhile.
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