Well written and hit the nail on the head. My in-laws are genuinely nice people. They are very progressive and read the NYT daily and as gospel. I don't discuss politics much at all, besides a few joking comments from time to time. I was wondering why they are ok with the way the paper distorts stories or leaves out very important parts of a story if it makes their "side" look bad. I've come to the conclusion, they have no clue whats going on if its not reported in the NYT or CNN, MSNBC, etc. They didn't even know what the 1619 project was and they subscribe to the NYT.
When the vaccines came out my wife was pregnant and we decided she would hold off as we saw more potential cons than pros (we had already had covid in Nov of 2020). The not so gentle pressure she got from her OBGYN was pretty crazy. She asked the OBGYN if she has seen a lot of babies or mothers have serious issues with COVID and she was told "that information is not important".
After she gave birth she still didn't get the vaccine because that was when Omicron was starting and everyone around us who was vaccinated was still getting it. So again, we decided, whats the point. I got two shots but have no intention of getting a booster. My father in-law, out of the blue, sent this text (with a link to an article) to my wife: "Maddie, just listen to this ABC report on the facts supporting you getting your COVID shot, compared to people who do not get a shot. One last note, if you get sick from a bad case of COVID and die because you do not believe in science, when your children grow up they will ask all of us why you did not protect yourself during this pandemic."
Mind you, we already got COVID a year earlier and just recently easily recovered from a second COVID experience. I'm not aware of a single instance where someone got COVID a 2nd time and died from COVID.
His text perfectly summarizes the BOOMER position and their complete lack of awareness that people make decisions based on many factors. It has never occurred to him that we actually weighed the pros and cons and she decided to not get it based on her own reasons. In his opinion, she is just someone who "doesn't follow the science".
One thing I think you leave out from the Boomer Doomer typology is the implication (and sometimes explicit declaration) that Americans are too irredeemably stupid to be trusted. It flows from all Boomer Doomer takes - this idea that Americans must be lied to, misled, or otherwise guided because if we give them a full view of reality they'll merely drown in their own stupidity. Complex policies cannot be explained; why bother? Americans are stupid, they could never understand something as complicated as "we need these masks for another purpose so try to not buy them right now" or "COVID is dangerous but not as dangerous as some other activities".
Boomer Doomers are followers in part because they are the enlightened. They have learned long ago that Americans are too stupid to ever think for themselves and must follow blindly and have adopted that ethos into their own personal consumption and beliefs.
Yep, another great piece here at HoS. I don't want to be a different kind of doomer, but I see very strong connections between the (exceedingly aggressive) push for "moral clarity" over objectivity to be a potent ingredient in a larger civilization-ending-level threat. I think you've alluded to a sentiment before, Ethan. Something like "how long can a country that hates itself remain healthy?" ( Sorry if I'm totally dreaming that up.) But let me add to it: "how long can a country remain healthy admist a trust epidemic?" Literally every Covid Vaccine skeptic I know is vaccinated against all the things we were supposed to get vaccinated against. They give blood. They'll walk into an ER for some ailment (or their kid is sick) and doctors will poke and prod and prescribe and do all kinds of things and there's this quaint trust that that's the whole point of doctors and hospitals. You show up with your problems, they do their best and try to get you healthy. Most people, like your boomers reading the NYT, don't have the energy or expertise to have a better shot at knowing the right health decisions. They just follow. And yet, suddenly, with Covid, everyone's a data scientist, or microbiologist, or policy expert. For those angry with vaccine skeptics, consider this: their trust in institutions has eroded so far that people are literally willing to die rather than take their medicine. They are in many ways, so mind-f**ked and disoriented that they will contort their thinking to explain away happenings that should be very strong evidence that the Covid Vaccine is not being thrust upon them as part of a massive conspiracy to do harm. Merck, who did not have a Covid Vaccine to profit from, released a statement that Ivermectin has not demonstrated efficacy to treat Covid and it didn't change a thing. Can you think of any entity that would be MORE inclined to taut the benefits of a drug than the company that makes it?! And yet, through some 4D chess-flavored explanation, this could also be explained away.
This trust problem predated Covid but I think it's a recent phenomenon at this scale. I believe the social and political situations (fueled by the internet and telepresence as the primary means of exchanging ideas/information) in this country created this situation. Activism has replaced honesty, pragmatism, and tolerance. So many institutions have willfully betrayed the trust of those they are meant to serve. And there are huge incentives for actors to exploit this growing rift. More incentive to throw gas on that fire than to start a "Well, actually..." themed substack.
And it's never been easy to overwhelm the sense of perspective. With the sheer quantity of information on the internet, we, as a society have no sense of denominator. We have amplification of every voice, anecdote, "lived experience", etc. We have smart phones and security cams capturing evidence of nasty things day in and day out. So for the vaccine skeptics, they've found plenty of doctors telling them they're right to be skeptical and they've heard plenty of testimonies. Against an existing dearth of trust, their numerator continues to grow gradually, and it staves off this massive denominator: a vaccine experiment unparalleled in scope. We have the conditions upon which any individual can easily ignore the latter in favor of the former. If you think LeBron is inaccurate for saying "We're literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!" he's just ignoring the denominator too.
In short, lots of people are feeling deceived, and they can find almost innumerable examples to validate their perceptions. And sometimes, when they decide to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, they're cast out of polite society, one way or the other.
The way out of this vortex of fear is more Joe Rogan-like experiences, more curiosity, more House of Strauss thoughtfulness, more water cooler talk about these (suddenly) taboo subjects, more honest and replicable science. But most important is that these organizations start cleaning up their houses. How the medical establishment and the hard sciences are now following DEI, CRT, etc is literally a believable plot for a dystopian novel about the unraveling of the scientific revolution (and perhaps modern civilization itself). As we literally Ctrl+Z the scientific method and replace it with Science!-ism in service of moral clarity or activism...we may be doing some real damage to our future. (note:we'll probably be fine! Everyone predicting ruin should reflect on how terrible we are at predicting the future...)
I really appreciate when you call yourself out on giving Kerr a pass. It's understandable, but his stance on Hong Kong (I have to ask my professor brother-in-law) was weak given his zeal on other issues.
I hope you get around to media coverage of the Beijing Games particularly coverage around Eileen Gu.
Great piece. You could copy paste SVG's tweets and substitute them for the texts I get from my dad. I work in PR, so I have a nose for what PR messaging looks like and that is basically what Boomers are pushing.
I appreciate that you don't follow the "narrative." That's why I'm here, obviously. You're in favor of vaccinations for adults (seemingly), but against masks for kids (again, seemingly). Curious where you stand on vaccines for children?
I'm personally sick of my kids having to spend 8 hours a day stuck in their masks when they're largely ineffective and my kids are at extremely low risk. We've all already had Covid and are unvaccinated, so I'm not willing to go down the vaccination route with my kids. With vaccination mandates imminent for schools and mask mandates seeming like they will never go away for kids I'm getting ready to flee California after living here for 30+ years.
This is spot on. The followers/listeners dynamic is a great way to label this phenomenon you see all over Twitter and in media. Can't wait to share this with a couple of ex-journalist friends
Well done by Ethan, his point about the NYT being far better than today's WaPo is correct, though that's not much of a yardstick to measure against.
I do wonder why so many NBA coaches fall into the Van Gundy / Popovich camp. Ethan's written about Popovich before I think, describing him as someone who helps strangers in their building who hurt their back in the elevator, so it's hard to dislike him but he manages to pull it off with his fire and brimstone pronouncements. Think it's worthwhile to discuss a border wall, or that CRT is going overboard? Then you're a Neo-Nazi who needs to be cast out of polite society. No wonder Kawhi left San Antonio-- imagine what gets said in the huddle if you question a play he's diagrammed.
Steve Kerr hurts even more. He's obviously a smart guy, likable and with a self deprecating sense of humor but some of his pronouncements are Popovich without the snarl, casting half the county into the Ignorant Rube pit if they disagree with him on issues of the day, but any conversation about China and the NBA gets an "it's complicated" dodge. Strange way to build the NBA brand.
The 2010 Arizona SB 1070 controversy is a good example. It required immigrants to have their paperwork on them at all times (sounds like a vaccine passport?) and law enforcement could ask to see it if they suspected you were in the country illegally.
When the bill passed the Phoenix Suns (GM: Steve Kerr) went in-your-face with the 'Los Suns' uniforms along with statements about valuing diversity and how misguided the law was. Agree with it or not, there were less incendiary ways of expressing opposition, and compared with his very quiet stance on China and the NBA, where far worse is happening and where his voice could carry some weight -- at a cost -- Kerr is giving the impression of someone looking for easy applause.
There's definitely a special place in hell for all the boomers with grown children who want to pretend like two years of masking toddlers is no big deal.
I've only paid a little bit of attention to this Rogan topic, but has there been much elaboration on what exactly is the "Misinformation" being used? Just from the NYT article SVG referenced, the "Misinformation" is apparently 1) quote about being in shape is more important than the vax, 2) ivermectin, and 3) he had Robert Malone on as a guest. I don't see what is false/incorrect in those, so maybe I'm missing something.
But as far as I see it, "Misinformation" is basically the same thing as "Fake News" just from a different political tribe.
Great read though, and I'd be very interested to know more about these Slack channels for media companies. They seem so fascinating in how they may be contributing to editorial influence.
I think one of the reasons the internet (or should I say Internet? Are we still doing that?) is so annoying is that, regardless of age group or political leaning, everything is just so damn CATASTROPHIC.
Everyone likes to say that "we have never been more divided", but to me it seems that we have never been more upset about whatever it is we don't agree with. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe the only difference is that these days the extreme rhetoric is simply more readily available for consumption rather than more prevalent in what we call mainstream media. In any case, I find that being exposed to so much anger about everything - whether justly or not in my view - is an exhausting and occasionally numbing experience.
I should add that, as an overseas reader, I find the American variant of this type of outrage and online activism to be extremely extreme, and thus singularly annoying.
(Also, for the record, I find SVG to be an overall funny and enjoyable character, and I probably share many of his views. I'm not sure about the Rogan thing, and I'm not sure why I felt the need to add this disclaimer in the first place.)
You struck another nerve Ethan. I can't get over how these buffoons always assume that we are just a group of lemmings and aren't capable of rational thought. If anything, Rogan's audience is probably more grounded and intelligent than these so called experts. Probably are afraid of them/us. That's all I can come up with. He is obviously a threat to the system and must be removed.
I really enjoy your writing and have been a fan for a while and am a subscriber. I also strongly agree with the thesis of this article. What disturbs me is your repeated distaste for kids wearing masks in school. With 2 young kids myself I don’t see this as such a burden or terrible thing in life. Masks mitigate the spread and seem like a reasonable measure to take in schools. Sorry to trod over this lame 2 year old argument but I’ve seen the Asher reference a number of times and just fundamentally disagree with the concern. Overall though thanks for your articulate and well thought out essays and podcasts, I greatly enjoy it.
Well written and hit the nail on the head. My in-laws are genuinely nice people. They are very progressive and read the NYT daily and as gospel. I don't discuss politics much at all, besides a few joking comments from time to time. I was wondering why they are ok with the way the paper distorts stories or leaves out very important parts of a story if it makes their "side" look bad. I've come to the conclusion, they have no clue whats going on if its not reported in the NYT or CNN, MSNBC, etc. They didn't even know what the 1619 project was and they subscribe to the NYT.
When the vaccines came out my wife was pregnant and we decided she would hold off as we saw more potential cons than pros (we had already had covid in Nov of 2020). The not so gentle pressure she got from her OBGYN was pretty crazy. She asked the OBGYN if she has seen a lot of babies or mothers have serious issues with COVID and she was told "that information is not important".
After she gave birth she still didn't get the vaccine because that was when Omicron was starting and everyone around us who was vaccinated was still getting it. So again, we decided, whats the point. I got two shots but have no intention of getting a booster. My father in-law, out of the blue, sent this text (with a link to an article) to my wife: "Maddie, just listen to this ABC report on the facts supporting you getting your COVID shot, compared to people who do not get a shot. One last note, if you get sick from a bad case of COVID and die because you do not believe in science, when your children grow up they will ask all of us why you did not protect yourself during this pandemic."
Mind you, we already got COVID a year earlier and just recently easily recovered from a second COVID experience. I'm not aware of a single instance where someone got COVID a 2nd time and died from COVID.
His text perfectly summarizes the BOOMER position and their complete lack of awareness that people make decisions based on many factors. It has never occurred to him that we actually weighed the pros and cons and she decided to not get it based on her own reasons. In his opinion, she is just someone who "doesn't follow the science".
One thing I think you leave out from the Boomer Doomer typology is the implication (and sometimes explicit declaration) that Americans are too irredeemably stupid to be trusted. It flows from all Boomer Doomer takes - this idea that Americans must be lied to, misled, or otherwise guided because if we give them a full view of reality they'll merely drown in their own stupidity. Complex policies cannot be explained; why bother? Americans are stupid, they could never understand something as complicated as "we need these masks for another purpose so try to not buy them right now" or "COVID is dangerous but not as dangerous as some other activities".
Boomer Doomers are followers in part because they are the enlightened. They have learned long ago that Americans are too stupid to ever think for themselves and must follow blindly and have adopted that ethos into their own personal consumption and beliefs.
Yep, another great piece here at HoS. I don't want to be a different kind of doomer, but I see very strong connections between the (exceedingly aggressive) push for "moral clarity" over objectivity to be a potent ingredient in a larger civilization-ending-level threat. I think you've alluded to a sentiment before, Ethan. Something like "how long can a country that hates itself remain healthy?" ( Sorry if I'm totally dreaming that up.) But let me add to it: "how long can a country remain healthy admist a trust epidemic?" Literally every Covid Vaccine skeptic I know is vaccinated against all the things we were supposed to get vaccinated against. They give blood. They'll walk into an ER for some ailment (or their kid is sick) and doctors will poke and prod and prescribe and do all kinds of things and there's this quaint trust that that's the whole point of doctors and hospitals. You show up with your problems, they do their best and try to get you healthy. Most people, like your boomers reading the NYT, don't have the energy or expertise to have a better shot at knowing the right health decisions. They just follow. And yet, suddenly, with Covid, everyone's a data scientist, or microbiologist, or policy expert. For those angry with vaccine skeptics, consider this: their trust in institutions has eroded so far that people are literally willing to die rather than take their medicine. They are in many ways, so mind-f**ked and disoriented that they will contort their thinking to explain away happenings that should be very strong evidence that the Covid Vaccine is not being thrust upon them as part of a massive conspiracy to do harm. Merck, who did not have a Covid Vaccine to profit from, released a statement that Ivermectin has not demonstrated efficacy to treat Covid and it didn't change a thing. Can you think of any entity that would be MORE inclined to taut the benefits of a drug than the company that makes it?! And yet, through some 4D chess-flavored explanation, this could also be explained away.
This trust problem predated Covid but I think it's a recent phenomenon at this scale. I believe the social and political situations (fueled by the internet and telepresence as the primary means of exchanging ideas/information) in this country created this situation. Activism has replaced honesty, pragmatism, and tolerance. So many institutions have willfully betrayed the trust of those they are meant to serve. And there are huge incentives for actors to exploit this growing rift. More incentive to throw gas on that fire than to start a "Well, actually..." themed substack.
And it's never been easy to overwhelm the sense of perspective. With the sheer quantity of information on the internet, we, as a society have no sense of denominator. We have amplification of every voice, anecdote, "lived experience", etc. We have smart phones and security cams capturing evidence of nasty things day in and day out. So for the vaccine skeptics, they've found plenty of doctors telling them they're right to be skeptical and they've heard plenty of testimonies. Against an existing dearth of trust, their numerator continues to grow gradually, and it staves off this massive denominator: a vaccine experiment unparalleled in scope. We have the conditions upon which any individual can easily ignore the latter in favor of the former. If you think LeBron is inaccurate for saying "We're literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!" he's just ignoring the denominator too.
In short, lots of people are feeling deceived, and they can find almost innumerable examples to validate their perceptions. And sometimes, when they decide to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, they're cast out of polite society, one way or the other.
The way out of this vortex of fear is more Joe Rogan-like experiences, more curiosity, more House of Strauss thoughtfulness, more water cooler talk about these (suddenly) taboo subjects, more honest and replicable science. But most important is that these organizations start cleaning up their houses. How the medical establishment and the hard sciences are now following DEI, CRT, etc is literally a believable plot for a dystopian novel about the unraveling of the scientific revolution (and perhaps modern civilization itself). As we literally Ctrl+Z the scientific method and replace it with Science!-ism in service of moral clarity or activism...we may be doing some real damage to our future. (note:we'll probably be fine! Everyone predicting ruin should reflect on how terrible we are at predicting the future...)
Substack's defiant email amid calls for censorship was spot on: https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more
Never paid for a Substack subscription before, but this article was so well done I figured I owed Ethan nine bucks...
I really appreciate when you call yourself out on giving Kerr a pass. It's understandable, but his stance on Hong Kong (I have to ask my professor brother-in-law) was weak given his zeal on other issues.
I hope you get around to media coverage of the Beijing Games particularly coverage around Eileen Gu.
Great piece. You could copy paste SVG's tweets and substitute them for the texts I get from my dad. I work in PR, so I have a nose for what PR messaging looks like and that is basically what Boomers are pushing.
I appreciate that you don't follow the "narrative." That's why I'm here, obviously. You're in favor of vaccinations for adults (seemingly), but against masks for kids (again, seemingly). Curious where you stand on vaccines for children?
I'm personally sick of my kids having to spend 8 hours a day stuck in their masks when they're largely ineffective and my kids are at extremely low risk. We've all already had Covid and are unvaccinated, so I'm not willing to go down the vaccination route with my kids. With vaccination mandates imminent for schools and mask mandates seeming like they will never go away for kids I'm getting ready to flee California after living here for 30+ years.
This is spot on. The followers/listeners dynamic is a great way to label this phenomenon you see all over Twitter and in media. Can't wait to share this with a couple of ex-journalist friends
Well done by Ethan, his point about the NYT being far better than today's WaPo is correct, though that's not much of a yardstick to measure against.
I do wonder why so many NBA coaches fall into the Van Gundy / Popovich camp. Ethan's written about Popovich before I think, describing him as someone who helps strangers in their building who hurt their back in the elevator, so it's hard to dislike him but he manages to pull it off with his fire and brimstone pronouncements. Think it's worthwhile to discuss a border wall, or that CRT is going overboard? Then you're a Neo-Nazi who needs to be cast out of polite society. No wonder Kawhi left San Antonio-- imagine what gets said in the huddle if you question a play he's diagrammed.
Steve Kerr hurts even more. He's obviously a smart guy, likable and with a self deprecating sense of humor but some of his pronouncements are Popovich without the snarl, casting half the county into the Ignorant Rube pit if they disagree with him on issues of the day, but any conversation about China and the NBA gets an "it's complicated" dodge. Strange way to build the NBA brand.
The 2010 Arizona SB 1070 controversy is a good example. It required immigrants to have their paperwork on them at all times (sounds like a vaccine passport?) and law enforcement could ask to see it if they suspected you were in the country illegally.
When the bill passed the Phoenix Suns (GM: Steve Kerr) went in-your-face with the 'Los Suns' uniforms along with statements about valuing diversity and how misguided the law was. Agree with it or not, there were less incendiary ways of expressing opposition, and compared with his very quiet stance on China and the NBA, where far worse is happening and where his voice could carry some weight -- at a cost -- Kerr is giving the impression of someone looking for easy applause.
There's definitely a special place in hell for all the boomers with grown children who want to pretend like two years of masking toddlers is no big deal.
I've only paid a little bit of attention to this Rogan topic, but has there been much elaboration on what exactly is the "Misinformation" being used? Just from the NYT article SVG referenced, the "Misinformation" is apparently 1) quote about being in shape is more important than the vax, 2) ivermectin, and 3) he had Robert Malone on as a guest. I don't see what is false/incorrect in those, so maybe I'm missing something.
But as far as I see it, "Misinformation" is basically the same thing as "Fake News" just from a different political tribe.
Great read though, and I'd be very interested to know more about these Slack channels for media companies. They seem so fascinating in how they may be contributing to editorial influence.
I think one of the reasons the internet (or should I say Internet? Are we still doing that?) is so annoying is that, regardless of age group or political leaning, everything is just so damn CATASTROPHIC.
Everyone likes to say that "we have never been more divided", but to me it seems that we have never been more upset about whatever it is we don't agree with. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe the only difference is that these days the extreme rhetoric is simply more readily available for consumption rather than more prevalent in what we call mainstream media. In any case, I find that being exposed to so much anger about everything - whether justly or not in my view - is an exhausting and occasionally numbing experience.
I should add that, as an overseas reader, I find the American variant of this type of outrage and online activism to be extremely extreme, and thus singularly annoying.
(Also, for the record, I find SVG to be an overall funny and enjoyable character, and I probably share many of his views. I'm not sure about the Rogan thing, and I'm not sure why I felt the need to add this disclaimer in the first place.)
This reminds me of Scott Alexander and Zvi Mowshowitz's "conversation" about trust (or the lack thereof) of the media. Highly recommend:
Scott's Post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
Zvi's Response: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-bounded-distrust
You struck another nerve Ethan. I can't get over how these buffoons always assume that we are just a group of lemmings and aren't capable of rational thought. If anything, Rogan's audience is probably more grounded and intelligent than these so called experts. Probably are afraid of them/us. That's all I can come up with. He is obviously a threat to the system and must be removed.
This is the best article you’ve ever written. Bravo.
Ethan - This is your best piece yet. The last paragraph really nails it in a way that I never considered before.
I really enjoy your writing and have been a fan for a while and am a subscriber. I also strongly agree with the thesis of this article. What disturbs me is your repeated distaste for kids wearing masks in school. With 2 young kids myself I don’t see this as such a burden or terrible thing in life. Masks mitigate the spread and seem like a reasonable measure to take in schools. Sorry to trod over this lame 2 year old argument but I’ve seen the Asher reference a number of times and just fundamentally disagree with the concern. Overall though thanks for your articulate and well thought out essays and podcasts, I greatly enjoy it.