In a perfect world, Man would intuitively grasp the need to avoid crowding during a plague.
Yet we are not in a perfect world, so persuasion is necessary to sustain the greater good; life itself.
Yet for cranks such as Horowitz, ideology trumps the greater good.
"Perfect worlds" are the problem, in a sense. Perfect Worlds" are the places where ideology and dogma surpass the limbic functions which shun the sick and weak and push them toward the fringes of the herd to be picked off by predators or die of their own accord, while the remainder stay more healthy and secure.
As a result of our philosophies, however, perhaps even our humanity, we tend to nurture the sick, to protect the weak. When we stop behaving that way, we are seen by the collective as "inhuman".
This complicates the hard decisions that have to be made, like the choice to shut the watertight doors knowing there are others alive on the other side who will perish, in order to save the entire vessel from sinking and losing all.
An example:
What is the sixth leading cause of death in the 25 to 44 age group in the US?
This disease currently infects well over a million Americans, is a slow killer, and has killed over 700,000 Americans.
sourceThe outbreak could have been contained and the spread slowed once the disease was discovered by simply closing a specific sort of business, something not done out of philosophical decisions. "Ideology" trumped the greater good, and AIDS continued to spread, assisted by the very people who remain the most likely to die from it: 32,000,000 dead worldwide, and increasing, granted that infection is driven behaviourally. In the meantime, the behaviour which has contributed most to that spread has been mainstreamed in a culture which would, in moments of greater sanity, have decried it for medical reasons, if not existing other philosophical ones. So much for intuition. So much for persuasion, that battle was lost.
If we look at the most severe outbreaks of disease in this country's history,
here, for instance, we find that unless some novel disease was introduced into a population, the fundamental instinct of some humans to huddle together in urban enclaves may well be a contributor to the efficacy of pathogens, while the dispersal of other humans through their instinctive desire to spread out and maintain contact with separation, or just separation, becomes the mechanism which slows or prevents such outbreaks.
The idea that good neighbors are just out of rifle range (about an hour's walk under good conditions) from the front door has merit, especially in a pandemic.
