This End Up

Frani also thinks it's a bit obtuse to zero in on people being “overly cautious” when the pandemic is still causing so much loss around the world. “It’s obnoxious, the sort of glee and readiness of which we’re abandoning masks when we see what's going on in India,” she said. “Of course we're all happy that things are going well here. But it’s so cringey to me that in the same breath someone would have the audacity to say, ’You're being too safe,’ when they are people praying for anything resembling this sort of safety that we have here in other parts of the world.”
Shayla Love “People Aren’t ‘Addicted’ to Wearing Masks, They’re Traumatized”

I came across this story when it was offered up as proof (or maybe that should be “proof”), by a story in The Week, that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has resulted in “Real trauma.” Now, I’m going to admit that I’ve come to the conclusion that, while I’m not sure that this makes the definition of “trauma” too broad, that it all strikes me as a certain rejection of resiliency in modern American society.

I know that this sounds a bit mean-spirited, so bear with me for a moment. Consider glass. Glass can be fragile, enough so that it’s almost the very definition of fragility. In the 2019 movie, Glass, Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price has such fragile bones that he’s nicknamed “Mr. Glass.” But even with that fragility, glass is still used for a number of applications. Mainly because it offers advantages that more durable materials can’t really match. There’s a trade-off to be made. And I suspect that as social groups, sections of the American public have decided that there are traits and attributes that are valued more highly than resilience (or “anti-fragility,” if you will). And there’s really nothing wrong with that. But American society comes across as disliking actively acknowledging when trade-offs are being, or have been, made. And that’s especially true when the risk-reward calculation comes across as anything less than perfectly predicted.

There is the way a given individual expects the world to be, and there is the way the world actually is. These two things may be very similar or there may be a significant gap between them, but they’re always there. For many people the past year or so has been a disaster beyond anything that may have occurred to them previously, driving home just how different the two can be. And this, in turn, touched of a scramble to realign.

When I came across the quote from the pseudonymous “Frani” in the Vice article, it stood out for me for its sheer strangeness. Why should what is happening in India have any bearing on how we behave here? It’s like saying that it would be obtuse for policing in Europe to be different than that of the United States, based on the fact that American police officers are more likely to encounter armed people than their counterparts. Because the article sits in the context of an identity war between two groups of people that have been shaped by what were likely different choices made when they were children, if not before they were born, it’s about taking sides, rather than understanding why there are sides.

Technical and social progress creates options that didn’t previously exist before. Sometimes those options are clear and present, and other times, less so. It’s generally understood that careers in computer science are a relatively new thing; no-one expects to come across a coding manual from 1921 in a used bookstore somewhere. But the ability to prioritize other traits above resilience is inobvious; I suspect that a lot of people believe that Americans of the time had the same degree of difficulty managing the 1918 influenza pandemic that the country is having today. If one can’t find the stories of traumatized people and lingering Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in the news stories of the time, it’s because people then were ignorant of the signs or looked the other way. But perhaps the simple fact of the matter is that the social consensus of the time mandated that people simply be more resilient? (And suffer the opportunity costs of being so.)

When designing organizations and procedures, like supply chains, it’s understood that making the subject more resilient makes it less efficient. A store that has a stockroom filled with goods ready to be rushed to the shelves will be less likely to find themselves facing a shortage, but will have higher operating costs than a store where things are delivered daily to meet expected demand. Why wouldn’t a similar dynamic work for people? People who are more prepared for a number of things to go sideways will be less impacted by things going sideways, but less efficient in situations where things are happening as expected.

There is, I think, I widespread impression that one can have that particular cake and eat it, too. That people can be both resilient and efficient and so that when circumstances illuminate a split, rather than being something real, it’s due to a lack of compassion and understanding by whichever group holds most strongly to the idea that they’re doing it right.

But a tradeoff between resilience and efficiency, or resilience and anything else for that matter, is always about a risk-reward calculation. Going hard on efficiency pays off handsomely when things go as planned and going hard on resiliency does the same when things turn out to be unpredictable. But an emphasis on resiliency looks unnecessarily wasteful if shocks to the system never materialize; just as an emphasis on efficiency seems short-sighted when a significant, or even extreme, shock presents itself. And while it may be possible to split the difference, obtaining all of the upsides of both while accepting none of the downsides of either is a pipe dream.

Societies tend to emerge more than they are designed and so the shadings that one sees in the modern United States were not planned into it. And people don’t always see the choices they make; and often don’t even understand them as choices in the first place until well after the fact. (I am reminded of the stories that people tell of living with people who lived through the Great Depression and the habits that were instilled in them as children that seemed out-of-step with the world that they emerged into as adults.) But choices were made, and people are living with them. People are also defending them. But when they don’t see them, those defenses become part of a conflict between people, as opposed to a difference in choices.