The 10,000-Foot View: Forever Lockdown Unraveling?

A short (for me) thread on what I perceive as the current macro situation (warning: contains some optimism)

1) I believe many have overestimated the degree to which people “like” lockdown. Sure, there are some.

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But rather, they might simply “support” it as they believe it to be a necessary part of our societal approach to the virus due to that claim having been repeated ad nauseum in MSM.

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Further, they have merely been inconvenienced by lockdown (the Zoom class) rather than decimated (working class), so they lack any incentive to question the prevailing narrative and instead conform to what is perceived as the virtuous course of action.

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2) This leads to a form of Preference Falsification (Timur Kuran). I am a huge fan of his work and it is deserving of a longer thread (which I will do at some point), but his book contains such gems as:

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“preference falsification may cause everyone, including those privately supportive of change, to underestimate the extent of popular dissatisfaction”

“democracies will tend to display less preference falsification than dictatorships” (think Florida vs California)

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“on issues where..people rely on social proof, huge transformations in both private and public opinion can take place over short periods”
“fearful of losing their privileges, officials conspire to block reforms, even as they recognize the horrendous social costs of...status quo”

“most members of communist-ruled societies displayed a remarkable tolerance for tyranny and inefficiency. They remained docile, submissive, and even outwardly supportive of the status quo”

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In our context, lockdown forced communication primarily onto social media, where all the crazies live (and are most vocal), which distorts our view of what most normal people desire. Further, immense societal pressures exacerbate expression of Preference Falsification.

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3) Three things are now happening that are causing people to seek, some for the first time, what Kuran refers to as “hard knowledge” instead of MSM narrative-based “soft knowledge”: (i) schools, (ii) the variants, and (iii) post-vaccine messaging.

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(i) Schools: People want their kids in school and are not stupid enough to believe that it is somehow safe to go to school 5 days per week in Florida but only 2 days—and maybe not until next year—in SF. Its become blatantly obvious this is not about the virus.

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(ii) Variants: Every day there is a headline about a new variant that is going to send us back to March 2020. Yet the epidemiological wave continues to ferociously crash (albeit with a changing composition beneath the surface).

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(iii) Post-Vaccine Messaging: People are being told now, after a year of goalpost moving that ultimately culminated in “lockdown until vaccine,” that nothing will change or improve even after vaccination. Nobody is buying it and it is not going over well.

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The good news: the ingredients appear to be there for a rapid shift in both private and public opinion. The bad news, such unstable regimes have historically persisted for decades despite widespread preference falsification.

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The cycle that must stop is where we “conceal from others facts we know to be true..[and therefore] distort, corrupt, and impoverish the knowledge in the public domain” I am optimistic we’re starting to see this with governors/mayors opening-up or being recalled/impeached.
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We need a catalyst. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I am a political cynic and believer in convergent opportunism. There’s a $2 trillion stimulus package pending (which actually has little to do with COVID). Maybe the narrative just needs to hang on a little longer?

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