Burn Down the Disco!

First of all, relax. Take a minute. Breathe deep. Well, maybe not that last part if you're within 20 feet of another person who is also breathing. Who knows what will happen to whatever they've exhaled when you decide to inhale? In fact, you know what, go ahead and roll back all the things I said at the start of this paragraph. Do not relax. You don't need a minute. Everyone is always telling you not to panic when sometimes, obviously, panic is the exact right response to the stimulus at hand. We've got it wired into our endocrine and nervous systems for a reason. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself and for your species is to FREAK THE FUCK OUT.

There are benefits to panic mitigation, sure, but they are a shit-ton of work. Some people* can't even manage it on their own, they have to rely on chemical mood alteration (prescribed or improvised) or an elaborate program of conscious cognitive behavioral modification techniques in order to produce the obviously artificial state of Not Panic. Anything that takes that much work in violation of your body's default processes I'm immediately suspicious of. Like eyebrow threading. Or crossfit.

Even if you were to achieve chilling out, what does it benefit you really? A more settled place from which to make more reasonable and beneficial decisions? OK, but for whom? If you panic first, you're most likely to look out for one person: just you. This seems a basic violation of at least deontological ethics, but think about it: if I don't save myself now, I won't be around later when I could totally conceivably be in a position to act in a way that benefits all kinds of gross strangers, maybe even foreigners! This is easily defensible from a utilitarian point of view. Just not, you know, in the moment maybe when I'm running in the direction of away as I leave my compatriots to die. Eventually though! It's a non-zero probability!

I'm not saying panic is justified because I feel like I'm on my own here, I'm just strongly suggesting that if I were going to judge who is helping (or supposed to be helping), maybe I'm just better off on my own.

Facebook is facebook, which means it's a place I can go to collect most of the worst opinions on the internet, at least in the age demographic that is frightened by twitter and never heard of reddit. It's where I've learned that the coronavirus story is mostly "fake news" and a plot to discredit the president. I'm skeptical of course because a) how do you discredit someone with no measurable bona fides? and b) this is a group whose only real consistent feature is aggressively missing the point.**

The panic isn't motivated by the fact that we think this virus is going to kill us all. Sure, it's not ebola, it's not going to melt our insides and send them streaming out of our eye sockets and assholes. Clearly it's only coming for some of the olds and the odd beloved global cultural icon. Most of us who are exposed will barely even get sick. It's that if it were orders of magnitude more deadly, if it were a genuinely genocidal pandemic and not just a disruptive and upsetting one, we have no confidence in anyone in positions of authority at the highest levels to do Thing Fucking One about it.

And the outbreak keeps canceling all the things we would use to distract us from news of itself. The feedback loop is frantic circle, a widening gyre of isolation and dread. Keep calm and carry on? Fuck that, I'm not British. Accepting things from foreigners is how we got into this mess in the first place.

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*Literally everyone except a few people who have actually reached a state of zen, but I bet they were the first people to get it in the first place.

**Some of them professionally!