The Narrative Pivot Continues

Woody Harrelson surprised everyone with a joke he told on SNL the other day. The implication of the joke was that state supported drug lords had conspired with the state to lock people in their houses in order to force them to take their drugs.

The fact that this conspiracy theory was aired on prime TV is both surprising and interesting. The studio audience was visibly shocked. The mainstream media was up in arms. However, if anyone searches for news related to Woody Harrelson today, the episode is buried in a pile of gossip and stories unrelated to his joke. Rather than highlighting the story, it's now being ignored.

The reaction of the press reveals that they were taken by surprise, and that they had no idea how to deal with it. Conspiracy theories are becoming so widely accepted that the claim that Woody was spreading such stories had no negative effect on him. The narrative that worked effectively to silence dissent a year ago has lost its power.

This is a continuation of a trend that I remarked on back in August 2022. There's a shift away from the pro-vaccine narrative. People are distancing themselves from pro-vaccine statements that they made in the past. They are eager to come across as more nuanced and educated. The #ThankYouScience tag is no longer cool. However, this pattern was until recently only noticeable among politically active people. What's new now is that a mainstream figure whom everyone loves has come out as a conspiracy theorist. It's safe to say that Woody is unvaccinated, and that is apparently sufficiently cool to say out loud on TV.

Woody's joke has pushed people's perception of the unvaccinated from acceptable to cool. That's a huge change from only a little over a year ago when supermarkets were preparing to deny the unvaccinated access to their stores, and states were operating quarantine camps and handing out stiff fines to unvaccinated people leaving their house.

If Woody had told his joke two years ago, it wouldn't have been aired, and Woody would almost certainly have become an outcast. His status as unvaccinated was a secret until just a few days ago. His strategy has in other words been to stay low yet firm until the worst of the storm has passed, and then come out all the stronger afterwards.

This happens to be the recommended strategy we find in the Bible, namely to be meek in the face of adversity.

Also illustrated by this pivot is the way nature, aka God, operates in a different fashion from evil, aka Lucifer. The deception and push for universal injections was intense but relatively short lived. The pressure could only be sustained for so long before cracks started to appear, and the old narrative was suddenly changed once the war in Ukraine broke out last year. This is because Lucifer must constantly change in order to keep us distracted. God, on the other hand is like a rising tide. He may not look like much to begin with, but He's unstoppable.

As for those who got themselves vaccinated, we see in their behaviour a classic example of miscalculated risk/reward due to high time preference and recency bias. Most people are both impatient and inclined to think that whatever happens in the now is likely to persist into the future. Hence, they got themselves vaccinated out of a belief that we were entering some kind of new normal where only the vaccinated would be free to live normal lives.

Considering the enormous misalignment between the minuscule risk of dying from Covid and the considerable risk associated with a brand new and largely untested medical technology, we now know for sure that most people are terrible at risk/reward analysis. They are trend chasers that believe that whatever happens in the present is likely to persist for ever.

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