I once said that the US’s individual liberty fixation is a bit like the dinosaurs’ strategy of being huge. It worked for a certain amount of time, and then after a meteor hit and nuclear winter probably set in, being a burrowing mammal type thing likely became a more winning strategy.
It’s not to say that either was bad strategy before the meteor, it’s just, as circumstances change, species suffer for their locked in features.
I noted that China will have a leg up against the US of the coronavirus is bad, because the worse it would turn out to be, the harder the US would be penalized for our locked in feature of individual liberty, and the more that China—a burrowing mammal in this analogy—would benefit from its locked in feature of having cultural control over its massive population.
It’s not that Dinosaurs are dumb, they just are worse at like, hibernating, going on restricted diets, and burrowing under ground, and those all suddenly were winning survival strategies.
Conflating species and nation-cultures is risky from a pure evolutionary science perspective, but I think it’s a pretty useful example. We can see now that China will be able to basically proceed more successfully in its metaphorical borrow while the US stumbles through, because our nation can’t just change what is central to our culture. And China doesn’t have to.
Here’s the numbers:
Covid 19 cases in China to date: 91,131
Covid 19 cases in the US over the past 2 days:
167,000
Here show this looks visually.
China and the borrowing protoRodent:
US and the flailing big giant lizard: