Monday, June 15, 2020
Good news about mental immunity
Some good news about public MENTAL immunity. Even in Britain, where orthodoxy has been much more rigid for several years, people are learning to preserve their lives and souls by avoiding media poison.
When the coronavirus pandemic really started to take hold in the UK in March, news consumption increased, as in many other countries. But, since then, our research shows that an increasing share of the UK population is switching off from the news. The proportion of people who say they often or always avoid news increased from 15% in mid-April 2020 to 22% in mid-May. If we include those who say they sometimes actively avoid news, then the share reaches 59%. The vast majority of these who often or always avoid news, told us that they actively avoid news about coronavirus (87%).Excellent. The survey was done by YouGov, a nominally neutral polling service. It's not a huge increase, but it's meaningful. We have natural immune systems against physical microbes AND information microbes. We may not always know WHY media is poison, but we know for sure that it IS poison. Hormesis works in both realms. We need to have an initial encounter with the pathogen to build up immunity against the specific shape and form of the microbe. After the initial encounter (the initial increase in news consumption) we are able to battle the pathogen in various ways. We avoid things that look and taste like the poison, or we fight it internally using T-cells or mental spaces.
Labels: defensible cases, defensible spaces
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