The Flat Earth Mindset And The True Impact Of The Pandemic
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The year 2020 has been defined in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its obvious impact on the world’s economy, health and wellbeing, there are still people who routinely underplay or even deny the existence of the threat. It’s an amazing testament to the selectiveness of the human brain that a person can literally sit a few blocks away from a food line and still think the virus “isn’t as bad as we made it seem.” It’s the same quirk in our brains that gives many people the flat earth mindset. Bill Stierle and Tom begin this episode with a profound discussion of how this mindset prevails in many Americans and how it causes a conflict between the need for safety and the need for freedom that shouldn’t be a question at all. Listen in and reflect on how we can enable ourselves and the nation to deal with this massive problem more effectively.
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This has been a wonderful holiday season. Everybody gets to take a break, although a lot of us are not traveling to see our family. It’s occurring to me, at least I’m seeing it, I don’t know how much you’re seeing it, but I’m shocked how I still come across people that are denying the viruses. People are calling it a hoax.
It’s sad and disheartening to see it. It’s not going to affect me and the mindset that sets those beliefs up.
It’s shocking to me but we haven’t traveled to be with family this season. I always go skiing in Colorado every year and I’m not doing it. I know lots of people that aren’t traveling, but then I still meet people that are traveling as normal. The reports are saying that more people have traveled for Christmas than traveled for Thanksgiving in 2020. I keep hearing about the personal accounts of people I know that COVID deniers. They thought it was a hoax. It wasn’t as bad as everybody says it is. Their tune completely changes after they get it and experience it. I keep wondering, “What’s it going to take for people to take this seriously?” I don’t know at this point because you would think after 300,000 Americans dying, all the hardship of our economy has been through in 2020, and the real suffering people have.
I had to take my wife for a normal blood test type of thing to the lab. We drove to the lab and there’s this crazy traffic jam. I’m like, “I hope they’re not doing COVID testing at the same facility where we’re going to get your blood drawn.” In fact, they weren’t, but across the street was a food drive. There were thousands of cars lined up, parked, gone around the block, crossing a bridge over a freeway, and all sorts of stuff that I had to drive around. It wasn’t the end of the world, I was able to do it, but to me, the visual impact of all those people in need of food, people that are food insecure that are waiting in their cars in a drive-thru, open their trunk, and have a box of 40 pounds of food for each family. It emphasizes the impact of how things are different in America now.
It’s disheartening about the foodstuff. The ability to apply language because this is a communication show is we speak authentically that we feel shocked because our need to care for each other as a nation isn’t being met. We feel surprised because our need for awareness wasn’t met about the depth of the virus on other people and the economy. This is a part of breaking ourselves from the spell of the flat Earth mindset, because you don’t see it, it’s not happening. Here you are, you are faced with it and you saw it. It’s one thing if they talk about food insecurity on the news and they show a picture of lines of cars. It’s another thing if you drive by it or you’re impacted by it and you’re going like, “What’s happening here?”
Now, your body deepens to the American experience of food insecurity because you’re watching it in real time. Your molecules of emotion have a truth anchor that activates natural compassion and empathy because you’re seeing it in real time. When we see things on the news, we know it’s a snapshot, but it only creates an imprint on us, a temporary imprint. If we have an experience of violence happening in another country, our brain will say, “I’m not traveling to that entire country because I saw that one image.”
The inverse is also true. If I see the picture of a food line in Texas, it’s not happening in California because that’s in Texas. Our brain selectively plays with truth and frames truth only on what we see in our reality, instead of going like, “Let’s find out what the truth and the impact is.” The brain wants to select its own reality or illusion. We’ve got to remember to speak compassionately about that experience whether it’s on the news or in real time because otherwise, we won’t even feel it at all. Our brain will discard and go like, “It stinks to be in Texas with all those food lines.” Meanwhile, there might be a few in California that I’m not seeing or looking at because I’m not driving by it. It’s not on the news or it’s not in front of me.
That’s the surprising thing. Before you gain awareness as to the human brain, we do compartmentalize things well, it seems. If I don’t see it, it didn’t happen. That is the flat Earth mindset, unless you’re orbiting the Earth and see the curvature of the Earth. When you’re down on the ground in the plains of Texas and Nebraska where it’s like, “It was darn flat out here.” You don’t know it. The same thing with homelessness which I’m concerned there’s going to be a much bigger crisis with this soon, especially because the aid bill has been held up, which is supposed to extend the moratorium on evictions. Otherwise, on January 1st, 2021, landlords who’ve had enough are experiencing their own hardship, not being able to collect rent from people that can’t pay it, but you’re going to have a much bigger homeless population.
This is probably another thing about a flat Earth mindset because unless you see people camped out intense on bridge overpasses like we have in Los Angeles. We have already had a big problem with that in Los Angeles, quite honestly before the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it’s only got even worse. How are you going to control this virus and get people to take a vaccine when it’s available for them if you don’t know how to reach them? They don’t have an address, cell phone number, or email address. This problem has the possibility to get out of control here quickly.
It is a bit out of control. It doesn’t have the level of stability and certainty. I appreciate what President-elect Joe Biden is saying, “We need to come together because the worst is in front of us.” For him to do messaging that helps us collectively into a place of cooperation and collaboration, he’s not going to get things right all the time. When he gets something wrong, let’s say, “We got that one wrong. That was a mistake. That was made in that local area. That’s not a global mistake or nationwide mistake, but it is a way that that did not take place very well in that location.”
How do you create safety and speaking in a way that allows us to have an honest discussion about human beings? Perfection is not something that we can attain in the process of trying to figure out a global pandemic in a nation from state-to-state perfection. It is something that we’re not going for now. We’re going for safety and containment. I like to work our way to take an inaction to get most people’s needs met, but from time to time, we’re going to need to run over some people’s needs to get there. You’re not going to get the level of freedom you would like that you had before the pandemic because people are meeting the need for freedom at the expense of safety by going out.
Notice that message would work very well for government officials to be saying, “The need for freedom and choice is very important. Independence is important for us as Americans, not at the expense of the need for the safety and health of others. That’s why we’re working on this one.” Freedom and independence will return soon. The costs we need to pay for that is care for each other, stay at home, and care for ourselves for a time. That’s the way we’re doing it. We’re not going back to the other thing, but we can’t get to the other thing unless we go through this thing.
People are not listening because of this flat Earth mindset. People are going about their lives. The reports are more people have traveled at Christmas time for Christmas and New Year’s than traveled during Thanksgiving in 2020.
It is a rationalization. As soon as I put the word rationalization, I’m rationalizing. It’s not going to happen to me. I’m going to wear a mask as I go through this. Other people are flying. It’s not that big a deal. I’m going to take my chances. Do you see the level of rationalization? Any one of these things will cause a person to travel. I have many clients that have got sick from COVID. Even not a client but a relative of a client passed because they had COVID. One of my clients, her cousin in her 60s passed.
Here’s what happened. She was lucky enough to go to see her cousin after she passed. As she was outside about ready to go in, there were the firemen and the EMTs. They tried to resuscitate but she already had not been breathing for 10 or 15 minutes or so. “Would you like us to attempt to resuscitate?” He goes, “No, I don’t think so.” This is the way this person would have liked to have passed. They were in bad condition already. This is in alignment with her wishes. Here’s the weird part about it. As soon as we, as human beings, go through it once, we then rationalize and say, “I’ve been through this, I’m not going to get it. Everything is good with my world because one person passed.”
It’s still in the environment. It’s the same problem with the AIDS epidemic that we had in the ‘80s. There were two significant things in my memory that changed us from being compliant to proactive with AIDS, Rock Hudson and the wife of Starsky & Hutch guy. It was a famous actor dying, Rock Hudson, and a famous actor’s wife who had passed from a blood transfusion. In other words, it didn’t happen because of a person’s behavior. It happened because HIV was in the blood system. The media got ahold of those two things. All of a sudden, sex ed stuff and putting condoms on bananas showed up in the schools to demonstrate and protect the thing. There was this whole movement towards we have to do what we can to stop and prevent the spread of AIDS.
It took a long time to get to that point. There was a lot of flat Earth mindset going on then too about it, but what’s shocking to me is even with the enormity of what’s happening, we’re losing more people than we lost on 9/11 every day. We’ve had more than 300,000 people died in 2020 from COVID 19. Our hospital ICU capacity is at zero, at least in California. We have not seen the peak of this thing from all the Christmas travel. This is the shocker to me. You put up the excuses and that’s helpful how people rationalize what they’re going to do. They were experiencing their own civil liberties and freedoms at the expense of others.
There are a couple of things going on. It’s interesting because in our country, you’ve got the behavior of the average American citizen. Many of them are continuing to live their lives. They’re not going to let it impact their lives. They’re going to go about their lives, but then unwittingly spreading it or being exposed to it. The country is trying to do something in our government to help all the people with this aid package, which they passed. They are trying to get it done before Christmas. The President is throwing a huge monkey wrench in that whole works. We’re much further away from getting ahead of this thing than we realize. It seems to me the whole country from the federal government on down isn’t taking it seriously. I think there needs to be a 9/11 style shutdown of air travel for a period of time.
To get to the 9/11 style shutdown, the level of urgency to get a personal empathy to land. One of the things that happened with the AIDS epidemic, I looked it up and it was Paul Michael Glaser and his wife was Elizabeth Glaser. She put a face on AIDS that was personal. They brought their family trauma to the front of the issue. If Tom Hanks and his wife or one of them would have passed or have had extensive things, this pandemic would be different.
Let’s say if President Donald Trump had died of COVID or somebody like Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi had got it. Somebody who’s very visible in this country to die.
I remember watching and living through her story of what their family was going through because they were out in front of it. They’d put themselves as the face of it. It’s in the blood supply and all of a sudden, it completely depersonalized it. It made it viable for anybody in the nation to get it instantly because it’s in the blood supply. It puts pressure on cleaning up the blood supply. Everything from testing to, “What are we going to do with this?” It changed it to where most people were in a problem-solving activity towards it. There wasn’t anybody denying it. People were getting wiggly talking about their sexual behaviors like, “This is a gay disease,” and that kind of stuff that went with it.
It hasn’t had that moment.
It hasn’t had that personalization. It’s not like, “That was one of my favorite people that died.”
To me, one of the things that raised it to another level was Magic Johnson getting AIDS, coming out, and retiring. He didn’t die but he was a face to it that anybody can get this. That helped but it hasn’t happened. Not somebody close enough in the orbit of the president, even though Herman Cain died of it. He got it shortly after that Oklahoma rally and then ended up dying. Even that wasn’t enough. It makes you wonder, what is it going to take for people to take it seriously? It seems that there’s one of the excuses that I hear a lot of people say, “All these people that are dying, they have underlying health conditions. They weren’t healthy to begin with. It’s too easy for them to pass it off as well. “I’m healthy. I’m not going to get it.”
There are varying degrees to which people are taking the virus seriously or not. The president is obviously tired of it. CLICK TO TWEET
This kind of rationalization is like our brain is going to look like, “Why were there exceptions?” We know it’s not about the exception. The lingering effects of this thing have a tremendous incentive to keep you away from it. The lingering part of it is darn right nasty. The heart problems, the lung problems, and the pre-existing conditions so you can’t be insured. Some people that don’t have insurance are like, “I’m sorry, you’ve had COVID. You’ve had pre-existing conditions and we’re not going to insure you.” It’s challenging in this experience because it hasn’t had the level of personal traction and the believability that, “I’ve got to do something about this. I’ve got to pay attention to this.”
We’ve got this real human health catastrophe going on now, and varying degrees to which people are taking it seriously or not. That’s not just the citizenry but even in our government systems as well. You’ve had the President tired of it during the campaign. Everybody is talking about COVID. He was sick of it. It seems strange. It’s almost like we have whiplash here where the President is not a big supporter of taking the virus seriously. He didn’t want to keep talking about it. The aid package for it which he’s supposedly in favor of. Mitch McConnell doesn’t bring anything before the Senate that he isn’t fairly certain is going to pass. They have this aid package and the President doesn’t sign it, citing that, “It was only giving people $600 each. I want them to have $2,000 each.” All of a sudden, the President is for the little guy. What does this all mean? It is hard to understand that.
The President is in need of recognition acknowledgment. We want to have some empathy for him because he is a person that’s predictable in how he pursues his need for recognition, acknowledgment, respect, and his need for being seen and heard. He values those things. Those are important needs for people. Even on the stage of his casinos, he used to do it all the time like, “I’ll give you $2,000. You in the red shirt over there, somebody gives him money. He looks like he needs a car. How about a car for him?”
This is from second-hand knowledge of backstage. They’re like, “Get Donald Trump off the stage quick before he keeps giving money away.” That’s not a part of the plan. We already have their money. There’s no value in doing that other than the President getting his need for respect, recognition, and acknowledgment through the event. Regrettably, we’re 25 days out from the inauguration, it’s going to be where his need for recognition and acknowledgment has to be met for the President on his way out or he will throw a tantrum on the other end.
Are you telling me this has nothing to do with the President wanting to give people more money to help them or the economy to prevent people from being evicted? This is all, “I’m not in the news enough. I need the focus to be on me. I am not going to let this go through quietly.”
The thing he says has to meet his need. For example, if he says, “I’ve sent investigators to Hawaii to look up Barack Obama’s birth certificate and you won’t believe what they’re reporting back to me,” that’s the news imprint. Did he ever do that? Michael Cohen says, “No, he never did that. He never sent it. He just said it.” He got the news coverage of what they did because there was a belief, a bias of fallacy that when rich people say things, they can do things because they are rich. He has enough money to send a private investigator to Hawaii to look into this thing, but did he do it? He did not send anybody there. All he did was say it, the media took it over, and gave him press. It put him on the same power level as Barack Obama.
“I have just as much power as he does because I’m rich,” which was the pre-emptive, “I can be a respectful person, run, and be the president just like Barack Obama.” You know how much recognition and respect I give Donald Trump for being a marketer, a brander, and a salesperson because he can sell things that have less value than what people pay for them. He’s selling the name and the recognition because he is associated with a certain amount of respect and recognition for his facilities. People pay for that association and relationships. The voters that voted for him are doing the same thing. They want to be associated with that type of winner. The winner that gets to say what they want and has enough money to back it up.
“I want to be that person so I’m going to vote for that person because I can say I’m loyal to that person. I don’t care. I feel good about a relationship with that person because I would like to be like, I believe that person because they’ve sold me on it.” This is one of the problems with money, wealth, and things like that. Once the person has wealth, it creates natural generosity. It doesn’t necessarily do that or otherwise, we’d have different kinds of evidence of that, but we don’t. The main part about this is we need a turning point, a truth pivot to, “This is serious. This can affect me. This can affect my family. All of a sudden, there are certain people around me and I’m believing and experiencing those stories of loss.” As I said, I have a client who has lost their cousin. Another client lost their mother. My high school history teacher died of COVID.
We have another common friend in the business world who’s in the hospital now fighting for his life for COVID. You are seeing it more and more. It’s going to impact everybody. The question is, how soon it can impact everybody enough that they changed their behavior?
One of my sister and brother-in-law’s friends passed, and the sad part about it is he passed from a place of shock and disbelief because he was a Donald Trump person. He was going like, “I should get better like the President. This is a hoax. I don’t understand. This is just flu.”
That’s unfortunate. The President, Chris Christie, and other people at the high levels of our government who got it are getting privileged access to therapeutics that not everybody gets access to. That’s another story that’s not being talked about much. Unfortunately, it continues to propagate the idea that it’s not that bad. Look at all these people who got it and they’re still here.
Living with COVID is being experienced with living with AIDS. That might be a true pivot right there for the news media on several outlets to do the living with COVID for a set of scary, truthful stories of, “Here’s what I’ve had to do to live with COVID.” That might provide us a pivot. We need to purchase the truth about how bad it is and it’s not enough to say 9/11 every day. I know that’s the weirdest thing. My brain is not even getting that because 9/11 is easy to see. The building fell down. I’m not seeing the hospital. I’m not watching death over death. I’m not watching the slope passing of lives every day at the 3,000, 4,000 a person a day mark almost now. I need to look at the world of meters and see how many per day.
In the US alone, it’s over 3,000 a day.
The new deaths in the US were 3,000 or 4,000 a day. It’s sad and disheartening. New cases, new deaths, we’re sitting and we’re up there. We’re clearly on track for 500,000 by end of January or February 2021.
The fact that our hospital capacity is at capacity, that’s only going to have more people die sooner because they’re not going to get the care they need. The death rate is going to accelerate. It seems that as a nation, including our President not signing this bill so far. It seems that nobody is giving this level of seriousness that it needs.
There needs to be a truth pivot to anchor somebody into the severity piece. The fact is not getting the job done.
Not even the government is giving the pandemic the level of seriousness that it needs right now. CLICK TO TWEET
You often say the truth doesn’t matter sometimes, right?
It doesn’t. I have to have an emotional buy-in to the experience where I personalize it and I feel it. Magic Johnson getting AIDS, I felt it. I liked Magic Johnson. Elizabeth Glaser and Rock Hudson, I felt that. President Ronald Reagan felt that because that was his friend. Ronald Reagan pivoted on that because it’s somebody that he loved, that was close to him and his buddy. He’s going like, “My buddy? What can we do about this?” There was enough anchoring and then personal loss that showed up. That is the disheartening part of that.
We’ve got personal loss showing up all over the place with 300,000 dead in this country. Honestly, it’s a little bit of flat Earth mindset and a little bit of the rise of fake news that has contributed to how people are not taking this seriously. They don’t trust the media and the messages that they’re hearing.
There are enough people that would be willing to watch media that counter truth because that’s something you can purchase. I want to purchase a message that reinforces my experience. I don’t want to purchase a message that’s the opposite of my experience because then I have to rethink my belief and personalize it. It is similar to the AIDS epidemic that we experienced too. It was the same thing. Unless I experienced it personally, I have to re-evaluate my beliefs about gay people as human beings. I have to rethink that and the same thing is happening with this.
This is upsetting to say, to even come out of my mouth. Our nation doesn’t care about certain things like minorities, gay people, and the poor. We don’t do a great job with people we call others. We don’t care about old people because they’re not contributing. They’re a drain on society. I went right down that narrative to say, “What happened to respect for elders?” “They’re living longer and I wish my mom would have died years ago.” “My elderly parent is too much of a drain financially on us, they’re living longer, and we’ve got to pay for it. That’s affecting Social Security. They’re not contributing to society.” We have to rethink and question our core beliefs about respect for elders. How do we care for elders? How do we honor them through their life and their lifetime? All of a sudden, the pandemic is taking them out of the equation. It’s like, “Mom is gone.”
It would be useful for us to take a deeper dive into how the idea of fake news has contributed to this.
I think you watch a documentary on that. Didn’t you, Tom?
I did. It’s called After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. I found it fascinating. I know you haven’t seen it yet but we’re going to wait until you’ve seen it and then we’re going to come and have a discussion about that.
That would be a good place to pick us up because the truth is positioning of making something that people can have buy-in on it. I believe it is going to be effective for me whether it’s a product dealing with a pandemic or to change a person’s behavior. Unless the person has buy-in on it, they are going to do it. They’ve got to say, “Look how this affected my life because this is somebody I loved and cared about and now they’re gone.”
I just hope everybody doesn’t have to lose someone they love and care about in order to get to the point where we’re going to change our behavior to stomp this thing out. The vaccine is coming and I’m glad it’s coming, but if enough people don’t take it, we’re going to be stuck here for a long time.
I feel sad and worried about those two things. I would like us to return to stability and normalcy. I would like to feel optimistic hearing stories about collaboration, cooperation, and how people protect themselves or protect others. A reliance on allowing our needs to be met collectively, including food and shelter. We can get the food and the shelter things stabilized. People will tend to stay in and not worry as much. They wouldn’t say, “Do I need to go to work right now? It’s time for me to learn something online.” Even the technology piece needs to be increased. Our nation and people that don’t have access to technology. Those people need to get support so they can buy the food they need online to be able to figure out how to learn some things during this downtime. We have a lot of rethinking, retooling, and reworking of our own mindset in dealing with this. That is for sure.
Thank you. I appreciate that. I look forward to having our next discussion about After Truth and our readers will enjoy that as well.
That would be great. Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it.
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