A psychological condition known as “normalcy bias” leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings, according to Wikipedia.
In recent history, we’ve seen examples of normalcy bias when, for example, the mountain man Harry R. Truman (no, not the president) refused to evacuate his cabin on Mt. St. Helens in 1980 despite repeated warnings that the volcano was about to erupt. “This area is heavily timbered, Spirit Lake is in between me and the mountain, and the mountain is a mile away,” Truman argued, adding, “the mountain ain't gonna hurt me.” Shortly thereafter, St. Helens blew, and good old Harry was incinerated in the pyroclastic inferno. He hadn’t believed the threat: he thought his “normal” existence would continue as always.
We see normalcy bias among Americans who will not believe that the re-election of Donald Trump would pose a grave threat to America, despite ample evidence from Trump himself that he plans to be a dictator. Closer to home, here in Oakland, normalcy bias is exhibited by people who call themselves “progressive” and will not believe that politicians such as Pamela Price, Nikki Bas and Carroll Fife are dangerous to our city’s health and vitality, as well as to their own safety.
There’s no agreement concerning the cause/s of normalcy bias. One interesting hypothesis offered by a journalist in TIME Magazine suggests “an evolutionary reason” for it: normalcy bias can result in psychological paralysis, in which the person is unable to respond rationally to external threats. The theory is that “an animal [has] a better chance of surviving an attack [if] predators are less likely to see prey that is not moving,” i.e. is paralyzed. (Think of an opossum playing dead.) If this is true, it explains why otherwise intelligent humans (such as Price supporters) insist that all is well in Oakland, there’s nothing to see here, folks, just a hard-working D.A. trying to free her people from racism.
It can be hard to liberate people from their normalcy biases. A lot of prior thought and experience had gone into erecting these barriers in the first place: the organism will resist changing its assumptions despite evidence to the contrary, which explains why Price supporters are so oblivious to the conditions their she-ro, Price, created and supports—conditions that have led to our current nadir. Were these Price supporters to agree with her critics, who maintain that Price and her policies are making Oakland far more dangerous, they—the Price supporters—would have to concede that many of their other basic progressive assumptions are false. This would lead to an immediate threat to the ego: as Freud explained, “The ego in all its conflicts can have no other aim than to maintain itself.”
Self-preservation, in other words, demands of Price’s supporters that they deny the truths that are closing in on them and are obvious to the rest of us. It’s so ironic, because it’s precisely their self-preservation that’s at risk because of Price and other soft-on-crime progressives.
This explains why all Alamedans are not united in recalling Price. People have too much invested in maintaining their fantasies. They rationalize, in order to explain away the discrepancies between what they profess to believe (equity and social justice) and what they’re getting (danger, crime, falling property values, and an increasingly unlivable city). According to the progressive mindset, the latter realities ought not to exist in a city run by progressives. And yet they do. So, when they’re warned things will get worse unless we course-correct, they fall into normalcy bias, a cognitive dissonance and defense mechanism that is quickly destroying us.
These progressives are in the final stages of Kubler-Rossian denial. They think, “If only we throw more money into ‘the community,’ we’ll be able to solve crime.” Actually, the opposite is true: pouring cash into minority communities only prolongs the problem. Proof? Sixty years of anti-poverty programs that have invested billions of dollars and yet have brought us backwards. We need, not more money, but more morality. As John Adams said, “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue.”
Private virtue! Now there’s a concept. It can be summarized by the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But the message Price puts out to evil-doers is, “Do unto others whatever you can get away with, and don’t worry about me. I have your back.”
Steve Heimoff