The Cult of Ignorance
From this: A South Dakota nurse whose tweets went viral over the weekend says the hardest part of her job is convincing some critically ill patients that they really do have COVID-19. “Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening, it’s not real,” Jodi Doering said on CNN. “Even after positive results come back, they don’t believe it.”
Doering says some of her patients are also in denial, willing to believe almost anything else has made them so sick. “People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia, we’ve even had people say, ‘I think it could be lung cancer,’” she said. The nurse said that when she offers to hook some patients up with family by FaceTime for a last conversation, they say, ‘No, because I’m doing fine.’” She said the attitude is taking a toll on health-care workers. ‘It’s like a movie where the credits never roll,” she said.
This is reminiscent of what the late author “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Perhaps Asimov was correct when he said the cult of ignorance has always been here, though it’s abundantly clear that its membership roles have grown exponentially in the last few years. We didn’t have Flat Earthers and QAnon followers in any number until Trump came along in 2016 and began preaching ignorance and science-denial from the pulpit of the Oval Office.
