Haidt has a different story. His metaphor is the elephant and the elephant rider. The perceiving self is the elephant rider. That is the conscious entity you are interfacing with if you are communicating on social media with an opinionated friend, relative, or stranger. He sees himself a the helm of this mighty beast, steering him this way or that after considering the optimal course of action. In Haidt's story, though, the stubborn elephant is not so easily controlled. The elephant might be nudged this way or that, but the ornery beast basically goes where it wishes. The elephant rider is not deeply introspective after all, but tells himself a little fib. Rather than actually steer the elephant, and rather than admitting he is not in control, the elephant rider tells himself, "This is exactly what I wanted to do." It's not done consciously or cynically. In fact, there doesn't necessarily need to be any Orwellian editing of the past. It's rather that the elephant rider's mental model of what he wants, what he actually wishes to accomplish, is incomplete. It isn't fully articulated ahead of time. He finds himself being dragged in this direction by a power outside his control, so he steers it as best he can and convinces himself that this is where he really wanted to go.
I see this all the time, but recent events have really brought it into stark relief. Prior to May 26th, the "correct" opinion of all right-thinking people (left-thinking people?) was that protesting was too dangerous at a time like this. (If anyone is reading this in the far-off future, note that I am posting during the coronavirus epidemic of 2020.) There were some people protesting prior to May 26th, but they were mostly protesting the government lockdowns themselves. Opinions neatly fell into the right-left paradigm, and the reaction of outspoken people was predictable based on their politics. The protesters tended to be right-leaning, some of them actually wearing "MAGA" hats holding pro-Trump signs. (David Henderson, a libertarian who organized such a protest, described his annoyance at some of the protesters for wearing MAGA hats. Something to the tune of, "Don't make this about something it's not. You're pushing away potential sympathizers.") Some protesters were openly carrying firearms. The left-leaning viewpoint was that everyone should be strictly observing the lockdown, and that these protests were potential "super-spreader" events for the virus. Then everything flipped. Suddenly it was okay to protest. It was not even okay to question the wisdom of the protest. Public health officials issued statements in support of the BLM protests. I'm just noticing this now, but they were actually still condemning the prior protests in the statement that supported the new ones. This is bizarre. The virus does not care if the thing you're protesting is a worthy cause or not, so the public health recommendation for both should be the same. One possibility is that public health professionals got together and conducted a thorough cost-benefit analysis. They determined that precise effect of both kinds of protests on public health, somehow quantifying the likelihood of each protest to affect public policy and also quantifying the effect of those new policies on various morbitities and mortalities. No such study was ever done, of course. If those same public officials had been asked about the wisdom of massive protests before they were actually happening, I'm sure most of them would have advised against it. And of course it's not just public health people, it's everyone. Enormous numbers of people flipped their opinions simultaneously, without much discussion or thought, certainly without any ability to explain the flip after the fact. No, the elephant riders found themselves being suddenly jerked in one direction, opposite the one they intended. Swept away by an overwhelming force beyond their control, they simply rationalized the direction they were being pulled.
No doubt, this was happening in both directions. I saw a hilarious post on Facebook pointing out the hypocrisy of a right-wing supporter of lockdown protests, who'd Tweeted in support of the first set of protesters but insisted after May 26th that everyone should stay home because "it's not safe yet." The contradictory Tweets by the same person were shown side-by-side. I doubt if the person posting this noticed the irony. They they had flipped too, and they were just as much a hypocrite.
It seems that you can have one of two opinions: protests are justified or they aren't. If they are, then the early protesters are owed a debt of gratitude. They were fighting for the right to protest before it was cool and trendy. The right to protest during a pandemic is a hard-won right...the result of the prior protests! If protests aren't justified during a pandemic because of public health concerns, then both the first and second set of protests are unjustified.
There is an attempt to justify the different treatments by appealing to the importance of the things being protested. Read the letter linked to above, which couches justification for the latter protests in the language of public health. Paraphrasing: White supremacy and racism being great evils, protests against them are therefor justified. I'm not buying it. It's not the magnitude of the problem you're protesting that justifies the protest, it's the balance of costs and benefits. If protesting had no effect whatsoever on culture or policy, and we end up back to where we are now in a few months, we would have had a few super-spreader events for no benefit. Some people are claiming to possess an almost god-like command of the relevant social science and epidemiology, most of which is not known. As I alluded to above, justifying or precluding a protest on the basis of public health requires a sort of "bank-shot." One would need to know the effect of protests on policy and then the effect of policy on the health outcomes, and weigh these benefits against the increase in COVID-19 cases. (That's assuming the expected benefits are positive, which might not be the case because of blow-back.) The knowledge required to adjudicate this does not even exist.
I am not against either set of protests. I think the government was overplaying its hand when it locked down businesses too strictly and for too long. It has also been overplaying its hand with respect to overly aggressive policing, and we are seeing the nation convulse in moral outrage over this going on for far too long. Still, I am disturbed by the ability of people to get so thoroughly swept away that they can completely contradict themselves without even noticing that they're doing it. I see the exact same things happening with respect to the "Abolish the Police" movement. I was told that it means "exactly what it sounds like" and that it means "abolish the police, and then reconstitute the police", by the same person on the same day. (Sorry, that's not what "abolish" means.)
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If you're reading this an think, "Yeah, I hate it when people do this," then you missed the point. We're all doing it. I do it. I'm probably doing it right now. It's something we all have to be extremely vigilant about. If you see the "elephant rider" phenomenon as something that happens to other people, you haven't usefully absorbed the lesson.
I'm thinking of two recent experiences where I showed people their own printed words that contradicted what they were saying to me at the moment. I have a long, unforgiving memory. People get apoplectic when you do this. It's a disturbing thought to realize you aren't steering the elephant.
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