One of my dogs is totally relaxed and chilled out. She has been since I picked her up from the dog warden in 2008. My other dog is more neurotic and fearful in general; she's not terrible about it, but will overreact to novel situations more often than not. For example if we saw some weird animatronic halloween decoration while out walking, the neurotic dog will be afraid, but the chilled dog will actually be able to figure out it's just a manmade object.
I think that's as good a template for understanding what happened with covid as any--fear response and hysteria versus the ability to contextualize novel information.
For some reason, many people, even intelligent people turned to the government and the media for information on covid. That is, they looked for an authority to contextualize a novel situation rather than sus it out on their own.
It seemed like a 90/10 split, maybe 85/15, initially. Some small segment of the population formed their own opinions about covid and the vaccines, but the bulk of people adopted the official story, even though it was wrong time and time again.
Over the course of about 18 months those percentages reversed. Now I think only 20% or less believe the official story, but fell into a sort of passive, null model about covid and the official narrative. That is, they just dropped it rather than conclude they were lied to or scammed.
That makes sense, actually, since fear was the basis for their opinion in the first place. They sought refuge from their fear in the official story. The idea that the government and corporations were actively scamming them is similarly scary, so it's best just to drop it.
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