Tuesday 24 November 2020
Saturday 21 November 2020
Someone Teach Boris Johnson Buffalo Mindset
On 16th March this year, serial liar, love cheat, sexist, homophobe, racist and somehow Prime Minister of the UK Boris Johnson reluctantly put the UK into a lethally-late lockdown in response to COVID-19 ravaging the country.
Instead of previously acting punctually to protect the country, there was an ‘oh, the scientists will save us’ cavalier attitude from Johnson and his cronies. (Spoiler- the scientists couldn’t.) During the initial lockdown period, the number of deaths per day soared, and eventually tapered off- but only to roughly the level we had at the start of lockdown before Johnson decided to open the bars again.
Shock: infection rates rose again.
On Sunday 11th October Johnson announced a dithering, dizzying 3-tier system for restrictions on each individual borough in the country, With all of Greater Manchester’s 10 boroughs being in the middle ‘High risk’ category.
All of this could have been so easily avoided. What is frustrating is that the amount of work needn’t have been more. It would have been the same, or less, in fact. All Johnson had to do was lock the country down earlier, and then keep us in lockdown until COVID-19 was at exceptionally low levels- not, as it turned out, roughly the same level as when we locked down in March. He literally gave himself more work to do, when he needn’t have. After all his dithering, when we needed him to not fuck with something, he goes and fucks with it.
My point is, he was going to have to place restrictions on the country again at some point. Which brings me onto Buffalo Mindset.
What is Buffalo Mindset? Buffalo Mindset is a psychological principle based on behaviour observed 200 years ago on the plains of the USA. I have read about this online, but typically, I now cannot fucking find the source material. Weirdly, I remember the guts of the explanation, and can recount it here.
The early 1800s: a group of scientists- presumably early zoologists- perched themselves on high ground of the American plains to observe the herds of buffalo. They noticed, quite repeatedly, that the buffalo had a strange reaction to incoming storms. When the clouds rolled over the plains, the buffalo would huddle together and charge directly at the oncoming storm, ultimately running through it, against the wind, to better weather on the other side. These scientists eventually surmised that these buffalo herds were behaving this way for energy conservation. The buffalo knew that the storm could be blown in any direction from where it was, dependant on the wind. The only place it wouldn’t be was exactly where it was. So rather than spending the day running from the storm, they ran right at it.
Hence, the phrase ‘buffalo mindset’ describes tackling the hardest thing first. It encapsulates the ideology of not running from a problem, that no matter how uncomfortable it is to do something, do it you must. And you must face it head on.
Now, back to our man-of-the-people Eton-boy millionaire Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. At what point would have been the right time for him to have imposed the initial lockdown?
A secondary school child can tell you that if a virus is set free, the cells will reproduce, and the virus will spread. The bigger time period a virus is allowed to spread, the further it will spread. Hence, it would have been better to have come across as draconian and paranoid, fiercely enforcing a strict, very early lockdown that would have come into place nationwide, when maybe there were only a handful of confirmed cases in very specific parts of the country. It would be better to be criticised for that, than for mindlessly allowing COVID-19 to run rampant across the country.
And yes, an early lockdown would have seen some damage to the economy… but that damage ended up happening anyway- more so after the lockdown was lifted and Johnson and his cronies practically coerced people into going out with the ill-advised ‘Eat-Out-to-Help-Out’ scheme. (That scheme, it’s suggested, may have caused up to a sixth of COVID clusters.)
A secondary school child could also tell you that, in the long term, it’s better to take that economic hit early on, and stamp out the spread of any virus with a prolonged lockdown, than lift it early ‘for the sake of the economy,’ only to find you’re forced into another lockdown some months down the line.
Hence, I doubt this ‘circuit-breaker’ will have much of an effect. Instead, you’d need buffalo mindset- we all would- to see off COVID-19 once and for all.
Tuesday 17 November 2020
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