Brinens and Things

I mean, this is the first I've heard of that theory and I only know it from the one article you linked, but what I was understanding from it was that all this "a culture becomes this way from germ avoidance" happens on a mostly subconscious basis. So the subconscious thought process of your average tight-knit in-groupy society in a high-pathogen area, we'll say the old rural South because that's the culture I'm from, was "outsiders have different germs than us, we must keep them separate from us so we don't get contaminated and die off", which morphed into the conscious thought process of "The slaves we're importing are Bad and Dirty and if you associate with them you are contaminated", if I'm understanding the theory correctly. Which makes a lot of sense to me as a thing to happen. Whereas the Northerners and Canadians in the abolitionist era, living in a lower pathogen stressed area, were like "okay we can be accepting of people who are different" because they did not have this strong instinct of "Different = Dangerous".

Then, like the professor said toward the end of the article, the big diseases that had plagued the South went away, and some Southerners started becoming more liberal because "different = more likely to have a dangerous germ I don't have" was no longer as true. *But* a whole fucking lot of Southerners went to "these liberal idea are stealing people out of our in-group and contaminating". *Liberal thought* becomes the disease to be protected against, I think? The article didn't say that, that's me thinking it out. But the thing the professor said in the last paragraph or so, that the South would only re-conservatize if it became more high-pathogen again, I think that's exactly what's happening. Because the unconscious instinct to reject the outsider gets kicked into high gear, and because that instinct is not being rational about germs, it's looking at black skin and liberal thought as the dangerous invaders. (Most of us don't have your instincts for preventing contamination. I think we might have discussed that.)

To me it makes perfect sense that this is why "the virus is fake" caught on so hard. The white South as a community, right-wingers as a community, believe themselves to have been fighting an "infection" for decades that consists of The Liberals stealing and corrupting their children, nonwhites marrying into their societies, all these things that threaten to dissolve their in-groupiness on a fundamental level. As I'm understanding the pathogen stress theory from the article, they wouldn't consciously know that it was a lack of germs that was causing their society to become liberalized, they'd just know that it was becoming liberalized and (I don't think this was in the article) they're scared as hell by it. By the prospect of losing their in-group. You know I speak from experience when I say losing that hive-mindedness when it's been part of your identity fucking hurts.

So they're losing their people to the "infection" of the liberal media / scientists / nonwhites, and then along comes COVID, from their POV a conspiracy of Chinese, scientists, and liberals. They latch on *hard* to the idea that it's being faked to make them more vulnerable to the loss of their people to the *real* pandemic. It's a very similar headspace to the anti-vaxxer thing, the basis of both is that you're protecting your family / in-group from Big Pharma or whoever by rejecting these scientific claims about germs.

There's also... I'm really struggling to word this at all, let alone in a way you might grok, so feel free to "wtf" at me, but there's this extremely strong belief, which we've seen on all fronts of US politics, that it's way more important to hurt the out-group than to accidentally benefit the out-group while trying to benefit the in-group. The number one priority has been "don't let the guvmint help people, because they will help Everybody, we need to control who gets helped so it is only the in-group, if we let any resources go to the out-group we are actively harming our children". It's a belief that we can always help our own / those we deem worthy, so something that would be of benefit to us but also the out-group is actively worse than having nothing official in place to benefit either of us.

So in time of Covid that morphs into "We won't get Covid, it's fake or God will protect us or having this tight-knit support network will get us through it, also masking shows weakness, if we wear masks we're letting the *real* enemy deceive us into doing something that has to be bad because they want us to do it so it must give them an advantage in attacking us". And even if you believe the virus is real, letting it rampage and kill those other people is better than letting the out-group get any benefit. I... I don't know if I'm capable of communicating or you're capable of comprehending the mindset that one simply won't get sick *because one is in-group*. That if they perform the racism and in-groupiness enough, *that* is what will fend off sickness far more effectively.