Smart Versus Stupid

Just because something becomes the group norm doesn’t ever mean it’s the right thing to do

Image credit: HikingArtist

Thanks to the power of the mass media and the fact we expose ourselves to its sensationalism every waking moment of our lives (can’t stop staring at those beguiling screens, can we?) the world is now firmly in the grip of hysteria over a virus that all available data shows to be essentially harmless for 98% of the population.

We’ve thrown half a billion of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people into absolute poverty in which millions will soon starve to death. We’ve made tens of millions of the poorest citizens of the West even more financially insecure than they were before, a situation from which few if any will ever recover.

Central banks are printing vast amounts of money to pay for the impact of the global shut-down which inevitably will lead to inflation that will hugely erode ordinary people’s savings while ultimately boosting the already-obscene wealth of the super-rich because they own hard assets that will increase in value with inflation.

And we have no credible exit strategy.

Some people might think this wasn’t a very smart position to adopt. And they’d be right.

It’s all very well criticizing the folly of citizens who were so easily stampeded…