Published on vtdigger.org February 28, 2022
The Hidden Toll of the Pandemic
What has harmed you more, Covid-19 or loneliness? While daily we watched ominous dashboards of Covid deaths, delayed medical care, barriers to self-care, drug overdoses and suicides all made mortality rates rise. For my part, I have learned how to do my work via videoconference, and I have never been so busy with new referrals in my entire career as a psychiatrist.
Fear, Morality, and the Unconscious Mind
As our preoccupation with all things Covid lets up, fear is loosening its grip on our minds. Now we can gain the perspective we need to recognize the outsized influence of unconscious moral impulses on personal and communal risk management.
We like to imagine that we regularly reason our ways through life’s problems, but most of our actions are driven by the unconscious algorithms that enable us to make daily decisions small and large, without expending undue mental energy in well-worn territory. The same is true for problems of conscience. Our unconscious moral algorithms are partly inherited. They also are profoundly shaped by institutional messages, popular culture, trauma and our earliest moral role models.
The Manipulation of Conscience in Public Messaging
Various institutions, media and corporations know very well that moral responses drive many of our decisions, so when they have something to sell, they routinely provide us with a window-dressing of topical information, coupled with relentless, breathless calls to conscience as seemingly our only mode of motivation. For nearly two years now, we have been bombarded with the same kind of messaging around matters of medical science.
Well-intentioned appeals by public officials to conscience — “Do your part for your community!” — have, predictably, been appropriated as fodder for the moral outrage sales machine. Provisional scientific opinion on public health has too often been inflated to imperative in wildly punitive ways: “Comply, or you’ll kill Grandma!” “Don’t comply, or government will kill you!”
Motivating Change Through Trust, Not Shame
In my practice of motivating patients toward effective lifestyle behaviors, I deliver information about the links between today’s choices and tomorrow’s effects in carefully calibrated, nonjudgmental language. I teach my patients to self-reinforce small successes, rather than tally up the wages of failure. It only brings up resistance for me to imply, no matter how subtly or unintentionally, to a patient that they are bad if they do not follow my advice. Coercive pressure almost always backfires by undermining trust.
Exactly the same principles apply in the field of public health. A media milieu of algorithm-driven shaming and blackballing has hardly improved the quality of decision-making by elected officials, health officers, their audiences or doctors. We can have more confidence in health decisions taken in the private sphere where pressure tactics cannot reach.
Filtering Science from Morality
Just like Covid, public health controversies are here with us to stay. As you devise your own personal risk management protocols, language that implies right and wrong can be your dependable guide to recognizing science information that is contaminated by the unconscious moral-emotional complex.
“Misinformation” and “disinformation” head the list of the words I ban from my professional lexicon. These necessarily elastic pieces of journalistic shorthand mainly encourage negative moral impulses toward sources rather than rational evaluation of evidence. I routinely discount medical information presented by sources that campaign aggressively against “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As a clinical scientist, I place my confidence in the experts, agencies, and publications that rigorously eschew browbeating and threats.
The Path Forward: Humility and Respect in Public Discourse
In our hearts, we know the difference between false trust based on idealization of celebrity, deference to authority and manufactured group affiliation as well as authentic trust based on the respect, care and reciprocity that can only happen at a one-to-one level. If you need help interpreting medical science, then, your personal physician is your best guide.
Each one of us can do our part for our communities, going forward, by abstaining from all morally charged language when speaking to public health topics. If you see a neighbor practicing their own medical risk management in ways different than yours, please give them the benefit of the doubt, not the finger.