Prevention is hard for us to do, and even harder to appreciate. This is because it requires long-term thinking, which is not our species’ specialty. It is also because paradoxically, successful prevention efforts tend to look like overreactions.
Prevention isn’t exciting, and doesn’t produce easy heroes. When something is broken, the problem is self-evident, and the person who fixes it is the clear hero. When a problem is prevented, nothing bad happens, and we often can’t know for certain whether it would have happened had we not intervened. Perhaps the calamity we claim to have averted would not have materialized in the first place. That’s why all the TV shows are about detectives and lawyers and surgeons—the people who solve murders, try criminals, and save the sick, not the people who prevent criminality and sickness from happening in the first place.
The current coronavirus response constitutes a public, large-scale, and acute attempt at prevention. Our preventative measures, in addition to the technical, economic, and political problems they pose, are also bound to be psychologically trying. We can therefore anticipate a backlash. Such a backlash will take various forms, but without a doubt, it will involve the flowering of a thousand conspiracy theories. The 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory is but the beginning.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202004/true-false-believers-the-psychology-conspiracy-theories
