Camo

A bird, sitting on a fencepost. I don't know what kind of bird it is, or whether it's resident or migratory. It was close enough to photograph and it stood still for a bit, so I snapped a picture. I thought about cropping in on it, but the busy background makes the bird seem more camouflaged, which they never really seem to strike me as when I see them. Maybe I'm just better about picking out bits of bird-shaped brown out of all of the other brown than the bird's natural predators are, or maybe it's not really optimized for close-range viewing. But I do notice that the bird seems a bit out of focus, even though the fencepost and foliage seem sharp enough. Maybe that's part of the effect. Or maybe I need more practice.

Discriminatory

I was talking with a conservative acquaintance about "cancel culture." Like many conservatives, he was up in arms about it, and the unfairness of it all. So I asked him just what was so bad about it. He replied that it was a form of unfair discrimination, and something that people should be protected against.

Then I reminded him that he opposed antidiscrimination laws, and believed that boycotts were how society should deal with people who behaved in ways they disapproved of, rather than empowering the state to use force to enforce norms.

The conversation went downhill from there. In the end, the whole thing reminded me of a line that I'd read in The Economist a few years ago.

Unfortunately, notes Jacob Mchangama, a Danish lawyer and free-speech advocate who regularly attends the Oslo Freedom Forum, most people are passionate only about the rights of people who think the same way as themselves.

I think that it's basic human nature, but I do find it to be interesting. "Cancellation," I think, hits the same nerve for some people that "cultural appropriation" does for others. It threatens a sense of personal significance and meaning by reminding them that, at any point, they can be deemed expendable. And without them, society will go on as if nothing had happened. Which is pretty much exactly what happens. That's what makes cancellation, especially for those people who hadn't made it into the ranks of the independently wealthy prior to their downfalls, so devastating. When brought to bear, the power of even a relatively small segment of society can simply erase a person as if they had never been; and resist the efforts of others to prevent that erasure. And I think that conservatives have come to fear (rationally or not) that fate befalling them.

Part of that fear is, I think, completely irrational. It doesn't take that large a group of people to support another person, and cushion them from the worst of the consequences. But that's part of the point, I think. What makes cancellation such a bugbear on the American political Right is that it plays into that idea that only cultural dominance can protect them. While the numbers of conservatives in the United States is not small, many people act as if it's positively minuscule. If one views society as kill or be killed, not being strong enough to kill is to be weak enough to be at the mercy of those around you.

Another thing strikes me as ironic about the conservative reaction to cancel culture. When I was younger, one of the conservative knocks on liberalism was over the latter's embrace of moral relativism. This was seen as an unwillingness to call out wrong when it was plainly obvious. It's now become a case of being careful of what one wishes for, I think, and it seems to place conservatives in the position of asking that others be less strident in their moral judgements.

In any event, this is not going to be a permanent state of affairs. I'm curious to see what follows it.

Hang Loose

There is a story on the NPR website, "Why 'Tight' Cultures May Fare Better Than 'Loose' Cultures In A Pandemic." The general gist of the piece is simple; cultures with stricter social norms, greater restrictions and harsher disciplinary measures, which are considered "tight," have significantly lower case counts per capita than societies with more relaxed norms and fewer rules, or "loose" cultures. The working theory is that in tight cultures, people are more willing to accept limits on their actions for the greater good. As can be imagined, when NPR interviewed Michele Gelfand, the lead author of the study, she characterized the United States as too loose for its own good. She held out the idea that cultures should be "ambidextrous," tightening and loosening as befit the situation. No real-world examples of such cultural ambidexterity were offered, however. Nor were there any real hints as to how this would work, other than bromides like "leadership" and "sacrifice."

The piece struck me as something of a missed opportunity in it's "we can have our cake and eat it, too" attitude, since it cast the course of the SARS-2 CoV pandemic in the United States as a result of current inflexibility, rather than the result of a long series of choices that lead the nation to its current state. If "[t]ight cultures tend to have had a lot of threat in their histories from Mother Nature, like disasters, famine and pathogen outbreaks, and non-natural threats such as invasions on their territory," it seems unrealistic to presume that cultures that haven't had that sort of history can act as if they have on the basis of a single event, even if it is a relatively long one. Which, in the grand scheme if things, the current pandemic hasn't been.

And the characterization of tight and loose cultures also stood out for me. Because tight cultures could also be seen as those with very far-reaching and consistent social norms across the whole of the society. Looking at it in total, I don't actually believe that social norms are more relaxed and that there are fewer rules in the United States; they just don't have the same reach. Social norms in the Seattle area, where I live now, are as rigorously observed as they were in my previous hometown of Chicago. It's just that the norms are different between here and there. Professor Gelfand holds up New Zealand as a nation that's gotten it right. But New Zealand is roughly the same area and population as Colorado. Taiwan, likewise, is very small, although it has a large population. The United States is in the top four in both land area and population. And it lacks the ethnic homogeneity of India or the controlling government of China to enforce a single set of norms and rules on the whole of its population. And while Professor Gelfand says that "We shouldn't confuse authoritarianism with tightness," she also notes that "Tight cultures have a lot of order and discipline — they have a lot less crime and more monitoring of [citizens'] behavior and [more] security personnel and police per capita." Maybe it's just me, but I'm sensing a correlation there.

It's possible, and honestly, I suspect, likely, that the course of the pandemic in the United States is a foreseeable outcome of a society that's made up of a disparate groups of people from around the world and who live in a vast area that's been relatively free of serious existential threats for the past two centuries. Maybe there's nothing wrong with taking the bad with the good in this case. I understand that when people are alarmed, they are clamorous to be led to safety, as H. L. Mencken put it. And that they can resent factors that stand in the way of this. But I don't know that it's reasonable to expect that the distance and diversity of the United States can be ground out of the populace on short notice. And a year is, in the grand scheme of things, very short notice. Many much less significant changes than everyone suddenly deciding to trust whatever some "leadership" tells them to do have take much longed to come into being, even if it took some time to actually notice the differences. It's understandable that people want to always have the best of all possible worlds; to have all of the advantages, and none of the downsides, of everything. But that's not a realistic way of looking at life. Nor is it a useful one.

Gamble

Although operation warp speed was successful, at least in comparison with Europe’s efforts, part of its victory came down to luck. If the vaccines that the U.S. scooped up so many doses of, by Moderna and Pfizer, had failed clinical trials, “the U.S. would look extraordinarily stupid right now,” [Scott] Greer[, a health-policy professor at the University of Michigan,] says.
The One Area Where the U.S. COVID-19 Strategy Seems to Be Working

I suppose that it's part of how people tend to see the world, but the conflation of unlucky and stupid (especially in many modern contexts, where "stupid" is a descriptor of moral, rather than intellectual, failing) has struck me as being unfair for some time. Part of me wonders if this viewpoint is a cause of people being loss-averse or an effect of same, but the outcome is the same: the expectation that bad outcomes are always predictable. There is some irony, I think, in the fact that one of the "unfair" things about the world is that so many people believe that the world is in fact, "fair." If one inhabits a world where the difficult events that befall other people are generally of their own making, then it makes sense that the person who gambles and loses has revealed that they are of flawed character, even if the precise nature of the flaw remains unknown.

But there is something else that occurred to me when I read Professor Greer's words; that hint of mistrust that people often have for one another, especially people who work in the corporate world. Had Moderna's and Pfizer's vaccines not turned out to be effective, I suspect that a lot of people would have been prepared to claim that the companies had acted in knowing bad-faith; understanding all along that either the task before them was impossible, or, since the money was theirs either way, not worth the expense of doing well. Bad faith and ill-intent are things that many people pride themselves on being able to suss out in others, despite the fact that people generally are quite poor at it.

In any event, there is always an understanding that people need not really ever deal with uncertainty. The person who gambles and wins is credited with being able to put together all of the clues that pointed to an inevitable outcome. The person who rolls the dice and loses is faulted for not having seen the same.

It's interesting that Operation Warp Speed was deemed a success because the vaccines turned out to work. One wonders if that was actually the criteria when it was proposed. After all, the whole point behind funding research and development into anything is to try out a number of different approaches and ideas and see not only what works, but what doesn't. In that sense, even if the program hadn't directly lead to a single effective intervention, it still would have been useful, in pointing out the blind alleys quickly. It does a disservice to forget that.

A River Rushing

 

Boot Hill

According to KTXS in Abilene, Texas, "Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid." And okay, I can live with that. Maybe Texans are really big on self-sufficiency, and if that means having an efficient power grid that lacks resiliency, that's their choice. People have chosen less rational hills to die on. Personally, if I were going to take pride in a statewide energy grid, I wouldn't choose widespread blackouts in the middle of Winter to make that point, but to each their own.

There's nothing wrong to selecting a hill and deciding to make one's last stand there. Of such tales are legends made. But if other people on that hill with you, it's something of a different story. While Texas lawmakers are busily pointing fingers at renewable energy as the source of their state's energy woes and swearing eternal fealty to fossil fuels, people are freezing to death, both in homes and outside of them. I'm not sure that many Texans would tell former Governor Perry that they'd rather die a miserable death than have federal regulation of the power grid.

I'm not going to fault anyone for letting their pride call the shots. I've certainly done that on occasion, even when wisdom quite clearly dictated otherwise. I've just been fortunate in that I've (hopefully) learned better without anyone going down with me.

The Agenda

In my quest to find new reading material, I've wandered into the land of think tanks, and earlier today was looking at the Brookings Institution website. I found an interesting post there: What should the Biden administration prioritize in a policy agenda that promotes equity for Black Americans? It's a set of policy recommendations from a panel of Brookings experts. They're fairly straightforward; I'm not sure that one needs experts to make these cases. Only "Require all banks to offer very low-cost basic accounts" and "Reduce the barriers to entering the legal profession," were things that I hadn't heard suggested before. And there was one thing that struck me as a glaring omission; the list didn't include anything about financial literacy. (Which is something that I think is just a good thing in general.)

The general gist of the entire set of recommendations, though was the usual. Make Black Americans better able to compete in society. Whether that was for jobs, wealth building opportunities or what have you. Which is fine. But what about the people that they're now going to be outcompeting? I'm not sure that the problem is as much the same people are always losing the race as it is that the loser starves.

Of course, if equity is the problem, that might not really be a big consideration, but I think that it's worth putting more thought into. Because while "Address exclusionary zoning laws and encourage pathways to build wealth outside homeownership" made the list, there wasn't much about helping Black people make the most of the resources they have to create, and protect, wealth. Sure, there are parts of the country where people are threatened when people they dislike do better for themselves, and so one can imagine some level of resistance to anything that assists one group of people more than another. But if one's going to think big, then maybe going really big, and asking how to get to a post-scarcity economy, is the way to go.

Two Quarters

Pithy sayings are one thing; saving the world is another. And things like this irk me because they lack enough context to be actionable. This isn't the first time that someone has made the point that if only hamburgers were more expensive, the world would be a better place.

But when the picture says "I don't know about you," I wonder who they're speaking to. Me? I don't eat hamburgers very often. They're calorie carpet bombs. I might have one on the order of two to three times a year. But sure, I'm not all that price-sensitive when I go out for a hamburger. And I tend to go to places like Five Guys, which have fairly high prices for their burgers in the first place. So I doubt that I'd really notice an extra 50¢.

The question, however, is are the regular customers of fast-food places as dismissive of the retail prices as I am? Many McDonald's customers, as I understand it, are not. They're in the market for cheap food, and adding 50¢ to the price of each burger would likely change their food buying habits. And while some people would applaud that, I don't know how much that helps out hypothetical fast-food worker who needs two other jobs.

In the end, a better solution might be to pay more for other labor intensive work; things that pay better, yet don't make it to the level of being considered highly skilled work. fast-food work pays poorly because the skills needed are easy to come by; they can be trained fairly easily. And there are a lot of people who are willing to take those jobs. Giving as many of those people as possible other alternatives might lower the supply of labor, and thus require employers to raise wages. Although, to be sure, it could simply result in more immigrant labor being used. Americans are, after all, price sensitive. And they're likely to stay that way.

Precious

So a ways back, when I would find interesting short news articles, I would copy them into a text file, and store them away. This digital clipping book soon became unwieldy, and I stopped adding to it, and eventually forgot about it entirely. I was wandering through some old folders, from old computers, and found them.

One interesting story was about an acupuncturist in Japan, who, when he found his marriage foundering, turned, of all places, to his library of business books to figure out how to turn things around. According to the article, he hit upon 8 simple precepts:

1. Listen to your wife attentively at least once a day without asking her to hurry up or get to the point.
2. Share the housework.
3. Do not forget to say “Thank you” and “You are kind.”
4. Never look down at your wife.
5. Do your work together with your wife if you are self-employed.
6. Do not fight. Listen to your wife patiently at first, even if you think she is completely wrong.
7. If there is something you really need or want to buy, persuade your wife daily so that she will come around to understanding why you want it.
8. If you want your wife to change, you need to change, too.

On the face of it, it all seems rather quaint, really. The kind of stuff that you expect to hear from elderly couples on how they managed to remain married for 75 years or some such. Although I will admit to being a bit dubious about number 7.

To be sure, the article that I'd found treated the whole thing with a mix of "news of the weird" and "oh, those wacky foreigners." Of the acupuncturist's choice to scour business books for marital advice, the article gushed: "Yet as preposterous as it sounds, this unusual approach actually worked." But looking on the whole thing some 15 years later, it seems pretty clear. Because all of the precepts presented can really be summed up in one:

Value your spouse, and your relationship with them.

And isn't the central point of most business books to treat your business as something valuable, and therefore worth spending the effort to nurture?

I'd noted that I've been wandering the Internet recently, and I've been reading some think tanks. Having found my way to the American Enterprise Institute and from there to the Institute for Family Studies, I popped back over to read some of their articles on marriage, and what was interesting about them was the high value that they placed on the institution, and the societal benefits thereof.

And I'm sure that valuing the institution of marriage works for a lot of people. But I wonder if the reason so many marriages fail is a lack of the sort of valuing of the partner that I saw in that old article.

Not, of course, that I'm one to talk. I am, after all, an Ineligible Bachelor™, one of the roughly ten percent of Americans (according to Pew Research) who has no intention of ever walking down an aisle. The person who sidles up to a friend who has just announced their engagement and stage-whispers with a broad smirk: "Run for it. I'll cover you." But even with that, I get it. Love is about valuing people. And while that might seem obvious, I'm not sure that it really is. Fortunately, there are always people out there who come to understand this, and are unashamed to tell us.

Unseen

So. Here's a question. Let's presume for a moment that the lives of men between the ages of who are neither working, looking for work or in school are marked by "anomie, alienation, or even despair." Is this because they don't have to find work in order to live, or is it because they've given up on looking?

I was wandering around the web, when I found an article on the American Enterprise Institute's website that billed itself as "a cautionary on universal basic income." Given this, and how I opened this posting, you may be able to guess what the overall theme of the article was. To be sure, the American Enterprise Institute is a conservative think tank, and the article was borrowed from the Institute for Family Studies, which is another conservative think tank, yet I was still somewhat surprised that no effort was being made to understand which was the chicken and which was the egg here. Because it's actually of no small importance to the central point of the article. Maybe. The article claims that the "detachment of more men from paid employment" runs the risk of depleting the United States' "social capital." But one would presume that the unemployed, more or less by definition are also detached from paid employment, yet somehow, their efforts to find work protected them from the supposed deleterious effects of not working.

One of the interesting connections the article makes is between not being employed or in schooling and drug use. "According to a 2017 study by Alan Krueger, almost half of NILF men reported taking some form of pain medication every day." The blog post's authors take this and conclude: "The rhythms of life for a great many of the prime-age men in America currently disengaged with the world of work is defined not simply by days and nights sitting in front of screens—but sitting in front of screens while numbed or stoned." But are these guys really trying to escape "anomie, alienation, or even despair"? Or are they actually disabled people using medications to manage their symptoms, or people who have been pushed out of the labor force by an addiction (itself possibly brought on by poor injury management)? The more I read the piece, the more it seemed to make assumptions that it didn't bother to explain. And I found myself asking again and again: "Wait... how did you establish this link?"

And perhaps this is why partisans have so much difficulty speaking to one another. The American Enterprise Institute is a conservative think tank, and I think that it expects everyone who randomly drops in to read their articles and blog posts is also a conservative, and makes the same assumptions about the world that they do. I can't say that any of the conclusions drawn by the article are incorrect; but the problem is I don't know enough about the thought processes to say anything about them at all. It all starts to come across as having been pulled out of thin air somewhere along the way. And I wonder if the authors realized that. But more importantly, it prompted me to wonder if I realize it when I do it? Do I blithely make assumptions and then presume that my audience makes those same assumptions and so gloss over topics that I should be taking the time to explain? (Or at least link to sources.) Or am I blind to the ways that I am blind?

Abnormal

Societies have multiple ways of enforcing their norms. Many of them, from the gravely serious to the remarkably trivial are formally encoded into laws. These are often enforced with varying degrees of consistency and enthusiasm. Here in the United States, the body of law is vast, so much so that many laws are routinely ignored and it's likely that many more are routinely transgressed by people who have no idea that they're committing a criminal act. And there is the ever-present suspicion that some people, for whatever reason, have simply been granted a pass from statutes that are binding on "the common person."

Despite the length and breadth of the legal system, there are still plenty of situations that some or another group of people understand to be wrong to a degree, but do not rise to the level of illegality. And how societies deal with those is an open question. The phenomenon of "cancel culture" is one such way that portions of society make their displeasure known; although how effective it is can be open to interpretation. At its core, "cancel culture" is little more than an expansive boycott, or threat thereof. Institutions capitulate when they find that standing up for someone or something is not in their interests. One could make the case that the sort of public shaming that "cancel culture" trades in is different than a boycott, but the outcome is basically the same; people threatening to take their business elsewhere. But this, of course, exposes one of the flaws of boycotts; they're ineffective in the face of persons and organizations who need nothing from the would-be boycotters. In effect, threats to take one's business elsewhere aren't really a problem for someone that one is already not doing business with, or won't miss the lost revenue.

And this creates a gap that can be difficult to fill. Sometimes, a person or organization can be forced to change their behavior through direct action, but unless those actions are themselves scrupulously legal (and sometimes even when they are), they can subject to legal action.

Heterogeneous societies, like the United States, I think, have a more difficult time enforcing norms on the large scale, because the various groups that comprise the society aren't always going to agree on whether a given norm suits people's purposes. A lot has been made recently of violations of norms, especially in the political arena, but I wonder how much consideration has been given to whether the people who were called upon to enforce the norms saw that enforcement as being in their interests. In other words, are people really being called upon to defend their norms, or those of other people who just happen to live in the same nation?

I suspect that I was a child the last time I saw the United States as being a genuinely unified nation, in the sense that there were broad, mutually understood goals that people were working together to achieve. Of course, it could be, by that definition, that no nations are unified. But this is the one that I have direct experience with. In any event, I wonder if it's past time that the United States abandons the idea of shared national norms, given that don't appear to be any shared national goals. It strikes me as a more realistic outlook on things than is currently in evidence. Although perhaps exceptionalism means never having to be all that realistic.

Still, it strikes me that a clear-eyed understanding that there are many different facets to the United States and its cultures might allow for a more constructive means of looking both at norms and the various failures of them. If it's understood that there are few to no genuinely national norms, perhaps people can avoid losing so much time to lamenting perceived violations.

Promise Of The Spring To Come

 

The Knowledge

I came across an article on expertise (and the lack thereof) in Aeon a while back. The URL is telling, it says that "Real experts know what they don’t know and we should value it." Okay. I'll sort of grant that. So how do I, as a layperson, tell the "real experts" from the "ersatz experts, or even outright charlatans?" After all, if I had the subject matter expertise to know if someone was a real expert or not, I likely wouldn't often need to go to them for advise. And even if I did have a level of expertise that informed me of what I don't know, that, in and of itself, is not enough to inform me of whether someone else genuinely knows it.

The authors of the piece advice dividing questions into three categories (helpfully named levels one, two and three): those that anyone can answer with some time spent researching, those that require genuine expertise in order to answer and those that are effectively unanswerable.

Okay, so how do I determine what level a question falls into?

Knowing which questions fall into which category requires expertise.

So I need an expert in order to tell me if I need an expert to answer a question?

The key difference between these kinds of questions is ‘Would a competent expert well-versed in the relevant scientific literature be reasonably confident in the answer?’

But if I'm a layperson, how do I know this? This is another question that requires expertise; if I don't know the relevant scientific literature I can't answer the question.

And this goes back to one of the fundamental problems between laypeople and experts. Outside of a track record of good and/or bad advice, there's no real way for a layperson to quickly and accurately evaluate someone else's expertise.

In the end, the authors suggest that people with a track record of admitting to ignorance are better picks than those who are not. And there's something to be said for going with humility, even if it leaves the underlying question intact.

Being willing to take "I don't know" for an answer is helpful, but doing that requires only asking questions that can reasonably go unanswered. And that's really the difficulty. If someone needs an answer, "I don't know" isn't useful to them, and it's that need to know that leads them astray.

Another Page

Hello. Welcome to post number two thousand five hundred. This is where I admit to being very impressed to have kept this going this long, although I suppose that I've done that before. One of the things that occurred to me, when I realized that I was closing in on this many posts is that this is how novel are written. One page (or so) at a time. Eventually, one will finish. It's too bad that I never looked at that way before. I might have actually been able to write a novel.

Although honestly, the real reason why I never attempted a novel was that I never felt that I had an idea for one that I would actually want to read that someone else hadn't already written. I'd learned in college that what feels like "creativity" is often simply the result of not being very well read, and as I read more and more, I realized that the ideas that I thought I had were pretty much done to death already. So I let it drop. I was always more of a short story person.

And when I was in school, I took some writing classes, to indulge my desire to pen short stories of my own. They were mostly bad. For some reason I eventually retyped a couple of them into the computer and kept them. I go back and read them from time to time, which I how I know how bad they are. The first was a simple enough idea: I wanted to take the trope of a person "wrestling with their inner demons" and have them lose. It seemed creative and iconoclastic at the time. Now it just seems like the script of a bad Lifetime piece. Boy meets girl, boy decides that maybe girl can help him defeat the darkness within himself, darkness is having none of it, boy kills girl and disposes of the body. It's not even as edgy as it sounds. The second was also a simple idea: what if the guy on the run for having committed some dark deed... had actually done it? It's pretty bad, too, although in hindsight, for someone who didn't date at all, I did what now seems like a remarkably acurate job of portraying an emotionally abusive relationship. Maybe the people in my social circles weren't quite as well adjusted as I'd presumed they were.

Being a fan of speculative fiction, I dabbled in science-fiction and fantasy, but the stories I concocted were derivative and improbable. Being a good genre writer requires a solid grounding in the way the world would work minus the high-technology or everyday magic, and I didn't have that. Interestingly, I never managed to fully retype those stories from paper to digital. I don't think it took me long to realize how lame they were. And I also realized, the last time I looked at them, that I ran into one of the banes of the amateur science-fiction writer; having no idea what the technology would do. Somehow I'd lucked into realizing that digital cameras and streaming television would become things, but not that floppy disks would go the way of the dodo.

After college, I never really found it in me to keep writing fiction, except for really short pieces now and again. Although I did come up with a variation of the story about the man who meets Death while out shopping that I still rather like. But it appears that commentary, with the occasional foray into the visual arts, is more my thing. Not that I'm sure that I'm any good as either an essayist or a photographer. But I do appear to have more endurance for them. Although if I have the give or take 14 years that I'll need to get to five thousand posts in me, I have no idea.

Dialing It In

Companies and government inaction are standing in the way of progress. But let’s be clear: The cult of “me first”—whether it’s at the scale of nations hoarding vaccine doses; leaders ignoring the plight of the marginalized in their own backyards; or the mad, individual-level scramble to get a jab as soon as one can figure out how to—is the source of the problem.
Gregg Gonsalves "The Vaccine Line Is Illogical"

I'm not going to disagree with the good Professor in his assessment that "the cult of 'me first'" is a problem. But I will dispute that it is the source of the problem. It's been ten or eleven months since the SARS-2 coronavirus hit the United States, and in that time, most of the public has been turned into cowering paranoids and many of them have come to see the less-paranoid as dangerously irresponsible. Those people who suspect that they might not be in very much danger of dying have been constantly warned that even on the off chance that they are correct, they could give the disease to someone who could give the disease to an elderly relation or neighbor; and would this be responsible for an unnecessary death. Even now that remarkably effective vaccines are becoming available, the doomsaying continues, with talk of continued ability of the vaccinated to spread the disease to the unvaccinated (which kind of wrecks one of the primary goals of mass vaccination in the first place) and new variants that might be completely able to escape the vaccines (which kind of wrecks the point of vaccines, period) being common in the media.

It's been a highly effective machine of fear. And in the face of such, why would one expect people to calmly wait their turn in line? If you want an orderly queue for the lifeboats on a sinking ship, you first have to convince everyone that even the last person in line will be well underway before there's a chance for them to get their shoes wet. That's a difficult message to convey when one is also attempting to frighten those who refuse to leave into heading above decks.

If in fact the shelf-life for vigilance in the U.S. is only about 3 months, new surges may occur in the fall in previously hard-hit regions such as the Northeast—unless residents remember to stay afraid.
Professor Robert M. Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF.

In this case, the supposed "cult of 'me first'" is not the source of the problem, but a symptom. If public health officials are telling the public that they need to "remember to stay afraid," and a vaccination is the solution to that fear, why would people not be clamoring to the first in line? I'm not particularly worried about what would happen if I contracted the novel coronavirus. I live alone, so there's no-one else in my home to infect, I've survived severe respiratory illnesses before and I'm not yet old enough to be in the high-risk population. So while it would quite likely suck out loud, I think I'd get through it. I've encountered people who consider me to be something between insane and insufferably arrogant for thinking this way, seeing my lack of outward concern as indicative of willful ignorance of the risks.

Fear may be an excellent motivator, but it's not a particularly precise too. It's difficult, if not impossible to simply turn it on or off when one thinks it should be. If the only thing that people are supposed to fear is the SARS-2 coronavirus, then it's reasonable to expect that they'll act as though they are afraid. And the whole point behind fear is to motivate people to do something to relieve it. If that means doing whatever it takes to get to the front of the line, that's what will happen. If Professor Gonsalves wants people to be willing to wait longer in the name of equity, perhaps he could have a talk with Professor Wachter.