What if, when we encountered a new piece of information, we thought by default, "We've probably got this, and even if not, I can be chill about it" rather than "I have identified a threat to my group, and now I get to rise in social standing by alerting others to the threat"?
I suspect that that second impulse is one of the ones that evolution gave us without adequately foreseeing social media. We all want to relay threats to one another beyond any of our abilities to act on them. Backing out of that requires a conscious knowledge of why we do what we do--we're social animals who are still programmed for a largely obsolete form of sociability, itself premised, implicitly, on small groups and a dearth of information.
The person who looked at this story one year ago and said "We've probably got this, and even if not, I can be chill about it" would have had the right perspective. Would they not?
I wonder whether if we have a society that is used to never experiencing true existential threats, we don’t too greatly discounts warnings, implicitly coasting on the sense things have always been okay and so likely will continue to be? I feel that is where American society is now. I wrote an essay on it titled American Privilege about how we are blinded to our security, so we take unnecessary risks (electing a reality TV star as President, borrowing huge sums, criticizing our institutions and cultural identity with abandon, etc).
I think there’s a difference about our reactions to someone delivering warning about the outrage du jour and true existential threats. The latter we tend to completely ignore because it feels overwhelming.
Cassandra, Laocoon exist as mythic symbols not because societies over-reacted, but because they failed to act.
I’ll not argue that professional doomsaying is uncommon, but oddly it seems to function in confined ways not intended to over-provoke a reaction. (I’m reflecting on much of The Atlantic’s coverage the last two years). Yet somehow it still misses the framing problems which would identify the genuine threats.