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One of the most important lessons I’d learned was cautionary in nature. The most committed activists on the left and the right are convinced that the majority of voters agree with them but that institutional flaws in our democracy prevent popular sentiment from prevailing. They are usually wrong. Today conservatives are more profoundly damaged by this state of mind than liberals, but in the late 1960s and early ’70s it was primarily a problem for liberal Democratic officeholders. Their allies were certain that the great mass of voters were ready for a sharp shift to the left, and they excoriated those in power for failing—or maybe refusing—to take advantage of this opportunity. In recent years, this tension between committed activists and political reality has worsened significantly, exacerbated by changes in how people—especially the most ideologically driven—get their information. Thirty years ago, people watched, read, and listened to the same relatively few outlets, albeit with varying degrees of skepticism. Over the past decade, America’s political community has come to live in two parallel media universes. Each wing ingests information and opinion that reinforces its own policy preferences and its own conviction that those preferences reflect majority opinion.
It turned out that the Chinese Communist Party didn’t turn to its CDC to lead the response; they turned instead to the military. More worrying, Chinese officials didn’t feel a strong imperative to keep their own public health agencies informed of events. Through December, information on the outbreak was widely shared with the medical branches of the Chinese military, but not with China’s CDC, according to US health officials I spoke with who were in contact with their Chinese counterparts. One illuminating fact: the Chinese authorities sent the head of their biowarfare program to Wuhan to oversee the response. In the US, we were misled by a belief that China’s effort would conform to the type of response that many US public health officials would have envisioned, with public health institutions taking the lead. China’s CDC was largely sidelined.
Uncontrolled Spread
Scott Gottlieb
The Odysseus myth highlights a key feature of behavior change: Recounting our experiences gives us mastery over them. Whether in the context of psychotherapy, talking to an AA sponsor, confessing to a priest, confiding in a friend, or writing in a journal, our honest disclosure brings our behavior into relief, allowing us in some cases to see it for the first time. This is especially true for behaviors that involve a level of automaticity outside of conscious awareness.
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke
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