John Wayne's, Idea of Reactance and Monomaniacal Pursuit Of A Single Idea

It's not so surprising some folks here in the US are acting as they lost their "freedom":

Why are people being so cavalier in the face of clear instructions from the nation’s top scientists and public health experts?

Behavioral scientists have long studied the idea of reactance, a concept pioneered by Jack Brehm in 1966. In his words, psychological reactance refers to the idea that when individual freedoms are “reduced or threatened with reduction,” people tend to be “motivationally aroused to regain” those freedoms. That is, when you tell me what to do, a part of me feels compelled to do the opposite.

In short, when someone tells you how to behave, you feel your liberty threatened and “lash out” not only by ignoring the advice but by leaning into behavior that goes against what is being suggested. And while more work is needed to understand cultural differences in this domain, it seems possible that in countries like the U.S. that champion personal freedom as a virtue, people might be more predisposed to reactance behaviors than others. 

In many instances, reactance is a quirk of human behavior that is simply frustrating or annoying, and sometimes even amusing. However, right now, reactance is deadly. The advice coming from public health experts to wash our hands, stay indoors, cancel even small-group events, and stay six to nine feet away from others (especially those who are sick) is based on a combination of science and an abundance of caution about a deadly virus we still don’t know a great deal about. So our desire to “push back” against this sound guidance is driving us toward behaviors that will strengthen the public health tsunami that is just around the corner.

One of the greatest insights against too much libertarianism was captured brilliantly by M. Mitchell Waldrop in his book Complexity: Emerging Science At The Edge Of Order And Chaos. It was based on "Locked-In Syndrome" where we might choose the wrong option and stuck in it forever:

And the reason for that passion, as Arthur slowly came to realize, was that the free-market ideal had become bound up with American ideals of individual rights and individual liberty: both are grounded in the notion that society works best when people are left alone to do what they want.

"Every democratic society has to solve a certain problem," says Arthur: "If you let people do their own thing, how do you assure the common good? In Germany, that problem is solved by people watching everybody else out the windows. People will come right up to you and say, 'Put a cap on that baby!'

In England, they have this notion of a body of wise people at the top looking after things. "Oh, yes we've had this Royal Commission, chaired by Lord So-and-So. We've taken all your interests into account, and there'll be a nuclear reactor in your backyard tomorrow."   

But in the United States, the ideals maximum individual freedom - or, as Arthur puts it, "letting everybody be their own John Wayne and run around with guns." However much that ideal is compromised in practice, it still holds mythic power. 

But increasing returns cut to the heart of that myth. If small chance events can lock you in to any of several possible outcomes, then the outcome that's actually selected may not be the best. And that means that maximum individual freedom - and the free market - might not produce that best of all possible worlds. So by advocating increasing returns, Arthur was innocently treading into a minefield.

Coronavirus pandemic has exposed that "minefield" in this country when some are so blinded by idealogy that they cannot even comprehend common sense (leave alone science).

One might argue, the people who aren't following a stay at home orders are uneducated libertarians. I call that bullshit. It was the libertarian idealogy that bought us to this day - reducing funding for  CDC, no sense of precautionary principles while imagining every problem on earth can be solved by markets. Most of the current day libertarianism is unrecognizable from mystic powers to sheer magic.

Even with this unlimited cognitive dissonance of "educated" libertarians, there is hope. Niskanen Center was formed in 2018 to avoid any kind of ideologies. Here's their motto on an alternative to idealogy:

There is a word for the monomaniacal pursuit of a single idea. And that word is fanaticism.

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At this (rather late) point in my intellectual journey, I am of the same mind as the Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio:

There were only a few of us who preserved a small bag in which, before throwing ourselves into the sea, we deposited for safekeeping the most salutary fruits of the European intellectual tradition, the value of enquiry, the ferment of doubt, a willingness to dialogue, a spirit of criticism, moderation of judgment, philological scruple, a sense of the complexity of things. Many, too many, deprived themselves of this baggage: they either abandoned it, considering it a useless weight; or they never possessed it, throwing themselves into the waters before having the time to acquire it. I do not reproach them, but I prefer the company of others. Indeed, I suspect that this company is destined to grow, as the years bring wisdom and events shed new light on things.

We can use more brains with a sense of the complexity of things.