Credulity

Along with fear (see previous post, Paranoia), which is the root of the anxiety behind mask-wearing, there is a weakness among many people to think properly, to discern truth from fiction, and an exceptional amount of gullibility. I'll give you a brief example.

Once, a long while ago, I received an email from a friend that was forwarded by him and probably by many people before him. The email stated that if you burn yourself (and here, we're talking about something like a kitchen burn) the best thing to do to cure it immediately is to plunge the burned hand/finger/whatever into a bucket of sand. Not cold water, not ice...sand.

My friend emailed this bad advice to many recipients—around 50, as I recall. I am sure that many of them responded with their own emails. One of the responders hit the "Reply All" button instead of replying only to the sender. So I got a copy of his reply. He stated that the next time he burned himself, he was going to use the bucket of sand therapy.

I sent him an email which said, "Don't do it. Use cold water on the burn."

He replied to my email, asking why he shouldn't use the bucket of sand treatment instead of cold water.

It seems like common sense to me. If you burn yourself, you want to bring down the temperature of the burned flesh as quickly as possible, and immediately running cold water over it will do that. Your burn won't be as bad as it would be if you did nothing.

But it wasn't common sense for the person with whom I was communicating. So rather than go into the laws of physics and try to explain why cold water will cool your skin faster than sand, I took a different approach. I noted that the original text that advised using sand had no references and no author's name. It was merely a piece of text written by an unknown somebody and then passed along to many others. I pointed out that the anonymous somebody who wrote it could be a bored 14 year-old kid sitting in his parents' basement and making mischief by sending out stupid advice to people. How would you know?

There is an adjective: credulous. It means having or showing too great a readiness to believe things. (The noun is credulity.) A lot of people today are too credulous. They suffer from an excess of credulity. As a result, they end up with pain and suffering and sometimes jail time and, sometimes, they end up dead.

The treat-a-burn-with-sand email was a long time ago, but people are still credulous and are still being "played." The most recent snake-oil being offered to those credulous people is a way of "undoing" a vaccine with a variety treatments. But Angela Rasmussen, a virologist and professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, stated, "Once you're injected, the lifesaving vaccination process has already begun. You can't unring a bell. It's just not physically possible." This should be obvious but, unfortunately, too many people are too credulous. They will believe anything if it's something they want to believe. As a result, many people have died and many will continue to die unnecessarily. There's a vaccine for Covid-19. Unfortunately, there's no vaccine for stupidity.