Explaining COVID Scepticism in the US and Globally
It turns out Intrinsic Inclinations has a lot to say about this topic.
To those of us in the UK, the situation in the US around COVID and anti-mask mandates seemed unbelievable at times. That a country that is the most advanced in the world, with the most resources to fight a significant event like a pandemic would choose not to do so, for reasons that seem flimsy, defied all logic and expectations.
Yet the UK was also not immune, and we have our own proto-sceptic movements which occasionally made their mark. Scepticism seems to be global and when such behaviour is global, it feels like there must be some larger cause behind this than just ignorance.
A while ago, I wrote an article about how you can combine the Intrinsic Inclinations Model (IIM for short) with statistical mechanics from physics to explain a lot about religion from first principles. The article is available here. This article continues to explore that idea, in the sense that, if you assume it’s true, there are some fascinating things you can say about other fields, and one of them is surprisingly about COVID scepticism and vaccine hesitancy in general.
A quick recap to remind ourselves of the part of the Intrinsic Inclinations model and the article I referenced that matter here: the IIM believes that there is inbuilt programming in the brain (intrinsic inclinations) that are immutable which control things like gender and sexual orientation. The article says that, applying statistical mechanics to that programming, over populations of people, you can explain many of the parts of religion that spring up everywhere across the globe as social expressions of intrinsic inclinations.
The parts that are left over are then clearer to see and can then be explained by another theory: evolution.
One of the biggest arguments against the fact that religion basically worships evolution is the fact that many religious people have chosen not to pass on their genes. Indeed, many saints and other saintly figures are those who’ve chosen not to do so and to give up their chances to do so in favour of the greater good. On a first reading, it’s safe to say that religion and evolution are very far away.
The minute you add in the IIM, the situation changes. Many saintly figures through modern eyes become intrinsic inclination minorities, asexual, trans or LGB people of the time struggling to find ways to deal with and express their intrinsic inclinations. Those that are left are otherwise people belonging to the intrinsic inclination majority who may also struggle to express their intrinsic inclinations by, for example, not being able to have children, being disabled, or just those who through circumstance would find it unwise to pursue their intrinsic inclinations towards procreation or relationships.
The remainder left over when you remove the IIM parts tends to be very evolutionary and eugenicist. Indeed, it seems likely that such ideas made their way into our intrinsic inclinations somewhere, given just how popular such ideas have remained throughout history and the way they keep cropping up, long before we knew what the meaning of these words were.
I’ve noticed the intrinsic inclination around our internal sex, dealing as it does with having babies and passing on genes, has plenty of space for such thinking, as it always makes us vulnerable to the siren call of thinking that our genes are special and particularly deserving of being passed on, when in fact other factors may be at play. This doesn’t have to be the full picture, though. After all, as a writer I’m only interested in sexuality and gender, but intrinsic inclinations don’t have to just be about those things only, and there’s lots of evidence that they are not.
This brings me back to the start of this article, COVID scepticism. This, and the broader field of vaccine hesitancy make much more sense when religion as evolution enters the scene. With a major virus like COVID, there are two solutions: attempting to prevent/cure it, or allowing it to do its thing. The prevention/cure route prevents COVID from making its mark on our genome, and ensuring that our successor generations won’t have natural immunity to it (I’m grossly simplifying here). The other route will ensure that future generations will be better able to handle COVID.
As individual clusters of humanity, we can choose which paths to go down at a national level. However, while explicitly stating such a thing makes a debate over it rational as part of national policy, if eugenicist thinking is part of our intrinsic inclinations, then suddenly the debate becomes less amenable to rational handling. Instead it becomes instinctive and emotional, with the same arguments rearing their head tailored to the local conditions, religions and customs such as the divine protection of God, the will of Allah or the potency of Ayurveda.
The net result is that, although we can stop a global pandemic, we’re now mired in the debate about whether we should and that debate isn’t happening in the realm of rational argument.
The situation is tricky. As humans we’ve evolved hand in hand with technology. As a friend of mine says: “if we were meant to run around naked, we’d have been born that way” is a powerful argument to remind us that there are entire areas of our life where, without some technological knowhow, we would not survive as a species and that we’ve learned to accept some of these things in a way that means we don’t even think about them anymore. This is worth reflecting on the next time you get dressed!
We have, at many points, chosen to develop by exploring our intrinsic inclinations more, but also by suppressing them with inventions such as capitalism, socialism, feminism, liberalism and environmentalism, to name a few. Modern society would not be possible without many of these.
The anxiety over whether we now choose to develop with our microbial environment or despite it is also another of these debates to be had, and a worthy one. But without understanding that we’re dealing with intrinsic inclinations, we can’t understand that all the rational persuasion in the world will not help. People on the opposite side will not be reasoned with and trying to tell people that they’re wrong to feel the way they do won’t work. With diseases, eugenicists just need to spread the disease to get what they want.
When it comes to winning the war against some part of our own intrinsic inclinations, what is frequently needed is to show people that it is possible and right to go down this path. Because nothing says “the right path” to evolutionary religionists like actual real evolutionary success showing that God/Allah/Karma is on your side and that things have changed. This is how we adopted things like liberalism in the first place.
And, going back to the US and some other parts of the world, it’s clear that some governments did not or could not go that far, and that’s why vaccine hesitancy and COVID scepticism remains a problem.
