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The BBC reports that yet another person in Indonesia has succumbed to the H5N1 "bird flu". Fifty people have died in Indonesia, and the global worldwide total of human deaths from bird flu has reached 140.
I notice that the catastrophiles who worked themselves up into a frenzy all last winter about the coming pandemic that was going to destroy humanity have managed to be a bit more restrained so far this year. Not that they probably won't try, but I think that the utter lack of a pandemic finally got a lot of people to realize that there was more than a little bit of crying wolf involved.
That's not to say that flu pandemics can't happen or that H5N1 doesn't have the potential to morph into a virus more readily communicable between humans. It is to say that the people who seem so deeply invested in imagining the worst-case scenarios really need to screw their tin-foil helmets on a bit more tightly and try looking at the world with a working reality.
People are imaginative creatures, and the point of these three posts today is that most people will believe what they want to believe even if there is no evidence to back them up or even when the existing evidence contradicts them completely. They will, in fact, go out of their way to seek out anything that has the most tenuous connection to their belief and overstate it as necessary to shore up their clearly erroneous and sometimes outright delusional beliefs.
This is called "faith", and it's an incredibly destructive human tendency. Faith and its various manifestations does more to harm our ability to cope with the world as it really is than almost any other human emotion.
As a culture, we have taken this to an extreme perversion by transforming fears into a form of "faith" -- we want to believe that the worst possible things are going to happen to us, despite all indications to the contrary: tusnamis, terror attacks, pandemics, even the "Second Coming" is a fearful faith. It's not just Americans, either; a Guardian article I saw the other day noted that most Britons think the world is a more dangerous place now than it was 50 years ago, despite plenty of evidence otherwise. Historically, Western culture goes through these cycles, most usually described as "Millenialism" due to the prevalence of the belief that "End Times" were upon them (as surely the belief curses our culture now). Ultimately even the most fervent doomsdayers are compelled to give in to the brutal daily reality of our dogged continuation, and the mania wanes to wait its turn for another century or so. And, oddly enough, the deluded people actually do eventually get their wish in some fashion through the inescapability of death, even if they don't get to go out in the blaze of glory they wished for or get that all-important resurrection they spent so much time praying for.
Our imaginations and our propensity to believe in them to the exclusion of our ability to comprehend the world around us are a far greater threat to our ultimate survival than dead chickens in Asia.
© BrianKaneOnline.com 2000-2007