This extract from Will Storr's book on status is required reading if you want to understand Covid minimisers.…

This extract from Will Storr's book on status is required reading if you want to understand Covid minimisers. For 'events', let's use 'anti-lockdown crusades'. /1 https://t.co/1Wc9ZiCQJa

"Events like these are often described as moral panics. Whilst this is surely correct in some cases, our investigation suggests an alternative possbility: that much of their explosive energy can derive not form panic, but desire for acclaim." /2

"They happen when games suddenly find ways of generatingh out-sized volumes of status for their players. When a rich seam is discovered, more and more individuals are attracted to the game, with a precondition for play being acceptance of its beliefs,..." /3

"...no matter how unlikely. Status is earned with active belief. As the games grow, and suck in satellite games around them, their beliefs come to seem increasingly mainstream. More players playing means means more status being generated, and so the game's..." /4

"...sucking power becomes more monstrous still, and so on and so on in a runaway process, the whole thing becoming self-sustaining, self-expanding, with it eventually becoming sufficiently massive to be felt right across the culture." /5

"In such scenarios, the status on offer can become vast and almost irresistibly seductive. Individual players transmute from being ordinary people living ordinary lives to becoming mighty and noble changers of worlds." /end