Moral Sabotage & Community Care Disengaged
Moral Sabotage & Community Care Disengaged
Public health has been under attack. Community care and cooperation is natural and desirable. Moral disengagement is anything but normal.
I would prefer to counter this.
@wsbgnl on twitter 2:32 AM · Dec 7, 2022
The US has "learned to live with covid" not by effectively addressing the problem, but through a broad deliberate effort to erode empathy, break solidarity, desensitize the public to mass illness and mass death, and inculcate a sense of hopelessness and futility
Moral Disengagement
According to Bandura (1996) moral disengagement is an internal thought process by which an individual is able to disengage their own inner moral control to justify inhumane conduct. For the most part, an individual’s moral standards, which are a product of their social and cultural learning, serve to regulate human behavior. This occurs by the self-sanctions that people apply to themselves when they violate their own internal standards. Self condemnation is a highly uncomfortable psychological state leading to devaluation of self worth and considerable anxiety (Bandura 1990). Consequently, most people seek to avoid a state in which their own actions are not in line with their internal moral standards. One such process, moral disengagement, involves the use of a variety of psycho-social mechanisms that allow an individual or group to disengage from their self regulatory standards and exonerate their violent behavior. The definitions of the eight mechanisms are included in Table 3 below.
Simple Sabotage
Moral Sabotage in the Pandemic
The tables below are in the PDF file.
How and why is there this attack on our values?
Elite panic, big money, ad campaigns, tricky influence, warped science, and repetition.
https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/moral-sabotage
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Excellent review of our country's dysfunctional attitudes and behavior. To me it reads like a catalog of ways to capitulate to Darwinian self-extinction. So why did all this perversity happen? I contrast it to the general enthusiasm and mass compliance to isolate and to vaccinate during the polio epidemic in the 1950s (even though early on there was a bad batch of vaccine that gave people polio). I think it all boils down to 4 factors:
(1) In an era of monstrous (good paying, secure) job loss and unprecedented wealth inequality, people over valued the last remaining resource and pride that they have left - their personal liberty and freedom. They did so, even though this is an illusion, as civic society has become less stable. These are the unvaccinated MAGA folks. Now they continue to get infected and die in excess numbers.
(2) We had a narrow-minded, self-serving, exploitative, mendacious leadership which promoted anti-science, disease misinformation, retarded effective interventions, and promoted false pride and liberty, thus minimizing and, even disparaging and avoiding, actually possible collective public health strategies. (This class remained mostly safe due to their individual financial capacity to avoid infection risk.) This approach enjoyed sacrificing the poor and lower class ("essential") workers and the unproductive nursing home residents to the plague.
(3) The capture of (an always elite, haughty and arrogant) scientific medical care establishment by impersonal bureaucracies and a well established for-profit capitalist exploitation medical system created a chasm of distrust and alienation which, after the initial recognition of "heroes in the hospitals" turned sour as people rejected science as something others wanted to do to them, instead of for them or with them.
(4) Years of neoliberal economics, capitalist mantras, climate change disinformation, declining take home wages, and falsely conceived wars and an expanding reactionary rigid fundamentalist religion have turned the collective foundation of the US from a coherent enthusiastic democratic society, to a collection of fragmented groups, struggling against each other and against more loss. This has destroyed any collective sense of common welfare, empathy and support for public health or civic strength.
Thus the USA was a perfect host for Sars-Co-V-2 which exploited all our societal faults to reach 100,000,000 documented cases and over 1,000,000 deaths and still counting.