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]

"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.)