Herd mentality is noticeably an inescapable subject throughout both the Trump succession and the COVID-19 pandemic. How else explain the percolating chaos that has overtaken the United States of America and the globe?
Herd mentality, mob mentality and pack mentality, also lesser known as gang mentality, describes how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors on a largely emotional, rather than rational, basis. When individuals are affected by mob mentality, they may make different decisions than they would have individually.
I conjoin herd mentality with chaos because everything about it threatens what I consider to be more appropriate ways to deal with election and disease issues. I nonetheless acknowledge it wouldn’t be the first instance in nature when behaviour of almost any risk is driven by pure and seemingly perilous instinct. That native promotion may or may not align with the best interests of the actor. Nature will have her way. But there’s only one way to find out.
Where the current madness will ultimately lead us is naturally uncertain. The more pressing dilemma is the mere fact that we’re having this conversation. I don’t know what your plans were for the rest of your life but mine have pretty much been upended to say the least! Surpassing even these difficulties and the associated epidemic, the more disturbing feature is that we haven’t a clue where or how it all ends – if indeed it will. At the moment our only assurance is the likely eventuality of winter and then spring. But other than that there isn’t much clarity.
The combination of feeling that everyone is potentially contaminated; and having to await the outcome of the US presidential election which is actively threatened by the Howdy Doody lookalike makes for a very uncomfortable “breather” from our erstwhile routine. Arguments have been advanced many times that the Trump debauchery is not his own doing but rather the pattern of politicians in general and GOP candidates in particular. The unparalleled binary nature of America is more than ever a topic of critical analysis. Because of the clear and unambiguous differences between Americans it is often callously touted that domestic insurrection will be the result of any prior electoral process. Granted – and I stand to be contradicted – this revolutionary siren is solely from the Republican side of the aisle.
As for the plague that envelopes the world, I understand Trump’s putative reasoning behind his failure to call the pandemic out. Certainly public stability is a worthy ambition. But to create a universe in which the masses are expected to endure a disease by any other name is outrageous! The government and its blind minions are shameful! The herd is effectively being driven to its death.
Fauci also criticized the concept of herd immunity, which relies on a majority of the population getting infected to build community resistance to the disease, after some White House officials appeared to partially embrace earlier this week. Trump is also advocating an approach where vulnerable people are shielded while allowing everyone else to get on with their lives — nearly impossible to accomplish in practice.
“What that will do is that there will be so many people in the community that you can’t shelter, that you can’t protect, who are going to get sick and get serious consequences,” Fauci said Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He added that the idea that “we have the power to protect the vulnerable is total nonsense.”