(My perspective is from living in the United States, the premier capitalist hellscape on Planet Earth):
1. Most people are really selfish.
2. Most people don’t care about others, including family, friends, and colleagues.
3. Most parents don’t actually love and care for their children as much as they feign over social media. When people say they’ll do anything for their children, that’s bullshit.
4. Most people are willing to risk their lives and their health and the lives and health of others rather than relinquish their privileges, such as dining at a restaurant to have other people serve them, or vacation or travel via airplane.
5. Individualist societies are indeed poorly positioned to respond to a pandemic driven by a highly-infectious virus.
6. A person’s level of education does not directly correlate to their ability to make sound decisions.
7. Most people seemingly lack a basic understanding of statistics and probabilities.
8. A lot more people are far more stupid than I previously thought, including esteemed professionals such as physicians, nurses, teachers, professors, journalists, and writers.
9. Public health is political. Its institutions exist to serve the capitalist system, not its people.
10. Gaslighting and propaganda are incredibly effective tools for controlling a populace, especially a constant deluge doled out over an extended period of time.
11. The need to conform is greater than our instinct for self-preservation. The majority of humans will conform to the norms around them, even if it jeopardizes their life and health.
12. Most people are infatuated with mediocrity and readily welcome it. For example, most people will put their life and health at risk to experience an inferior version of the life we lived in the Before Times.
13. Most people are incapable of taking a step back from a complex, societal-level predicament to foresee or consider a host of detrimental consequences stemming from decisions solely focused on the short run.
14. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has exacerbated problems that already existed, including those at the societal and personal level.
15. In a world where a Biosafety Level 3 pathogen freely circulates through our communities, the social contract no longer exists.
16. The overwhelming majority of people would rather be ignorant instead of informed of the severe problems we face.
17. Toxic positivity is like a form of faith, and most people will rely and function from it instead of what we collectively learn from science.
18. Man’s hubris is truly boundless.
19. The overwhelming majority of humans are reluctant or incapable of adapting to calamities unless presented with no other choice.
20. In terms of near-future climate change mitigation, we are absolutely positively fucking screwed as a species.
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