Also, while I'm thinking about this kind of stuff

[brin_bellway]

[cw: illness, (arguably) politics]


An old friend once said to me that I seemed to exhibit a high-pathogen-stress phenotype, despite being from a low-pathogen-stress culture.

We didn't know why. Was there some neurological glitch that caused the little developmental switch in my brain to get stuck in the "on" position?

But I guess now I know. I *act* as if I'm living in a much more dangerous world than the people around me because I *am*.

How much of my life and my mind have been shaped by the strength of my immune response? This is *exactly* the kind of post the pathogen-stress hypothesis would predict from a high-pathogen-stress person in a low-pathogen-stress environment, as I understand it.

I mean, I'm not convinced the pathogen-stress hypothesis is necessarily *true*: notably, it predicts that public health would be a right-wing issue, and, uh, well, *gestures at world*. Still, it's something to think about.

Comments

[thedarlingone]

If I'm understanding that article correctly, it predicts that healthier cultures become more left-wing and accepting of outsiders, and therefore that a right-wing in-groupy culture which wants to stay that way (oh lord, do they ever want to stay that way) would fight to stay sicker so they won't become liberalized. Which is exactly what's happening. Am I missing something?

[brin_bellway]

I think there are two main issues there: they'd have to *know* that this is the reason their values are what they are, *and* they'd have to value getting people to continue *wanting* purity *more than they value purity itself*.

Which I suppose is not necessarily fatal to the idea: that second bit, at least, *does* sound like the kind of failure mode brains would be prone to. (Although it really seems like a hell of a sacrifice to, say, deliberately expose yourself to COVID-19 *just* to encourage the birth of a new endemic disease and thereby increase people's pathogen stress.) I *do* find it sad that, if the pathogen-stress people are right (and possibly even if they're not), it is impossible to build a plague-free society whose members *appreciate* not being plague-ridden. But I still put my (currently extremely meagre) charity budget towards infectious-disease prevention: even if *others* are doomed to be ungrateful for the cleaner world I helped to build, *I* will know how important it was.

(...the *really* scary implication is that there may be an equilibrium, where diseases will always exist at whatever level convinces people to give enough fucks to keep them from going higher than that level. This might be happening right now with measles: we seem to be having trouble getting people to keep *caring* about measles long enough to eradicate it.

Like, I guess from a god's-eye view this is fine: if people are keeping disease down to a level they deem acceptable, then that is by definition acceptable. But it'd be rough for the higher-caring-than-average individuals, knowing that the world could be so much better if only other people could be bothered.)

((I think I mentioned that that's been one of the best parts of owning a P100 respirator: the ability to *unilaterally* remove myself from the web of transmission. Back before that, I hated how it was primarily up to the *customers* whether or not *I* got sick. There was only so much I could do by myself, and I was forced to place the rest of my fate in the hands of, not *even* the general population (which would be bad enough), but a population *selected for recklessness*.))

[thedarlingone]

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.

[thedarlingone]

"they'd have to value getting people to continue *wanting* purity *more than they value purity itself*"

I think... I think where we're crossing our wires here is that your definition of "purity" as cleanliness shakes out completely differently from the right-wing definition of purity as in-groupiness, even though they're linked?

[brin_bellway]

>>(Most of us don't have your instincts for preventing contamination. I think we might have discussed that.)

I would like to be clear--and this might be a tangent or it might be important, I'm not sure--

--it's *not* an instinct. My contamination sense is innate only in the way that, say, muscle memory is innate: *second* nature, not first. I *trained* for this.

It was long ago, but I do distantly remember a time when I didn't have it. I remember taking the first steps, struggling not to absent-mindedly touch my face during winter trips to the grocery store, and not always succeeding. I was about ten years old, give or take (I'm not good at timestamps), and my capacity for causal reasoning had now developed enough that I could *grok* the connection between rubbing my eyes after touching a shopping cart and--sometimes--spending days T+3-6 or so utterly miserable.

(This is not the same thing as saying that *everyone* could learn to do this: conscientiousness + motivation would effectively bar quite a few people. But neither is it some rare trait I happened to be born with.)

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>>also masking shows weakness

I *have* seen a lot of people saying that the Red Tribe response to COVID-19 was, essentially, attempting to intimidate the virus into going away. That after nearly twenty years of "we do not negotiate with terrorists", and in particular with Donald Trump having spent a lifetime making real-estate deals, they seemed not to wrap their heads around the concept of problems that *don't* respond well to the kind of tactics one uses against terrorists or rival real-estate developers.


>>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

Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of "automatically taking whichever side the Enemy doesn't" going around. I hear there was a short time, just before the timeless eon, when scoffing about the virus was a *Blue* thing and the Reds were worried about the "Wuhan coronavirus". Meanwhile the Blues were all "clearly the only reason to be worried about a possible incoming plague is racism", which was not helped by *some* of the anti-plague sentiment being in fact blatantly racist.

Later on I saw some complaints that Trump had kept calling it "Wuhan coronavirus" after everyone else had stopped, and Blues were still complaining about racism, and I saw at least one mostly-serious post to the effect of "look, if calling it 'Wuhan coronavirus' is what it takes to get Reds to take it seriously, maybe we *should* call it that".


(Also, later still I saw a post--and *this* one was almost entirely joking--that was like "politicising masks is a 5D chess move to ensure that left-wing rioters don't get their faces caught on camera but right-wing rioters do". I'm not 100% sure how that ties in, but I feel like it does somehow.)

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>>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*.

It would probably make more sense if I thought God was a relevant factor.

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>>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.

[...]

having this tight-knit support network will get us through it

It sounds like...the metaphor that's coming to mind is chemotherapy? It's deadly to everyone, but it's *more* deadly to the defectors, so sometimes it's worth it to save the community. If--as, I gather, has been common throughout large swaths of (Christianised) time and space and is still true in many places today--all forms of social support are run through the church, only the sufficiently churched will survive, while the insufficiently churched will get what they deserve.

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>>I think... I think where we're crossing our wires here is that your definition of "purity" as cleanliness shakes out completely differently from the right-wing definition of purity as in-groupiness, even though they're linked?

I hear a lot about how the instinctual desire for purity was originally a disease thing, but like, instincts are frequently bad at keeping track of what their goals were, and in many cases the same failure mode will occur in large swaths of the population, usually when a proxy measure for the-original-point-of-the-instinct ceases to be a good proxy.

(I guess maybe that makes me the anti-contamination equivalent of one of those people who directly wants children, rather than merely wanting sex with reproduction as a supposedly inevitable side effect.)