Control Issues

Under experimental conditions, Americans consistently overestimate their degree of control in situations. The overestimate their influence and their effects on outcomes. In fact, they often perceive control when there is actually none. The U.S. culture, in addition, relies on the idea of meritocracy to prop up an exaggerated sense of one's personal effect on life. The culture papers over the difference between achieved and ascribed, preferring to label everything as indicative of achievement.

Americans aren't used to perceiving themselves as helpless, as unable to significantly affect the context in which they spend their days. Almost every aspect of our lives employs scorecards that enhance that sense of moment to moment achievement. Hourly wage earners exist in a milieu that emphasizes an accumulation of measurable effects. Working x number of hours measures y income, which translates into z goods and services. Our continual effect on our lives, at least vis-a-vis capitalism, is easy to perceive. What happens when something like a pandemic swoops in and undercuts this overstuffed perception of control?

When an existential threat emerges, for most of us the illusion of control is shattered. When unemployment rockets upwards, even those who prefer to hold onto that illusion of employment-as-control are forced to recalibrate their minds.

So what can we expect? As discussed in previous entries, people under duress tend to retreat to routine. Instead of tackling novel situations by ingesting new information and plotting new strategies, they tighten up their behaviors into established rigid patterns. Instead of abiding by stay-at-home orders, which are novel to them, they are motivated to mindlessly do the things they've spent their lives doing and that have made them feel good, a la the zombies heading to the shopping malls in 1978's Dawn of the Dead.


Expectations

The stay-at-home orders should have some predictable effects. When most animals are forced into limited square footage, hormonal and behavioral consequences ensue. What I expect to happen is that Americans will try to re-establish a perception of control. Upticks in domestic violence will presumably be one consequence. Gun and ammo sales should skyrocket. Most will justify this as a means to protect household resources, but the underlying and more potent reason will be to create a tangential but visceral sense of control. People know intellectually that stockpiling weaponry isn't going to slow down a virus, but they'll be driven to do it anyway.

Inability to attend religious services in person will increase the sense of loss of control, so many religious services will still be stubbornly attended. Conspiracy theories of all kinds should flourish, as conspiracies are a way of establishing a sense of understanding and control. People who ignored the pandemic warnings in January and February will be highly motivated to invent villains and scapegoats because the realization that they were responsible for their own lack of preparedness, illness, or death will be too much to process.

The need for routine will drive many to fashion and promulgate a super-capitalism argument: get back to work, those who die are necessary sacrifices, save the economy at all costs. These super-capitalists will obsess about returning to "economic normalcy," and the worse things get, the louder their drumbeats will become. They will demand that their routines be returned to them.

The main problem with all of this is that Americans, stripped of their sense of safety and control by a virus, will balk against strict governmental instructions because to do so would be an additional surrender of personal control. If people, however, are not able to put aside their need for what has always been a largely illusory control of their lives, they will pay for that illusion with not only their own lives, but the lives of those around them.


April 4, 2020
Bob Dietz