A Curious Incident at the Barber Shop

Guys stand on the steps of the Michigan State Legislature touting AR 15s with clips and bowie knives hanging off their belts yammering on about a COVID conspiracy and one world government but I didn't expect to meet someone like them, especially in a small B.C. town at a barbershop. But, that’s exactly what happened to me when I went for my first post-COVID-isolation haircut. 

 

I had just helped my wife start the laundry next door and entered the barber shop about five minutes after the local bait salesman. Waiting my turn, I was privy to a most bizarre conversation. Fearing that I would be invited for an opinion, I instead concentrated my efforts on using my phone to record the proceedings. As a consequence of my fumbling to find an application for recording, my offering of the conversation begins some time after it started.

 

Our two characters in this play are the barber wearing a full-face shield for protection and a large, sixtyish white man with a long beard and a very short hair, not wearing a mask, in the process of being cut even shorter. The conversation began with a reference to Donald Trump and the Republican Party in the U.S. Here is what follows:

Dude: The pre-election investigation found nothing on them. Then, there was the Russian hoax which failed. Then when the Russian hoax failed, they had to try impeachment. Then the impeachment fucking failed and that’s when COVID come along, right, and then COVID as a pandemic has failed and so that’s why the riots had to start and coinciding with the riots starting Hillary lost her appeal and has to testify about all her deleted emails on September 9^th and Rod Rosenstein’s testimony started that week and Obamagate started that week. So, MSN media didn’t want to have any of that in their newsfeed. Same thing that’s been going on since Day 1. It’s a covert war against humanity.

 

Barber: Mother nature is the real god damn creator of this world. We’ve had enough of you people. It’s time for an evolutionary change and you guys are gone.

 

Dude: It’s definitely we’re in the end times.

 

Barber: All I know right now is that if I want to stay open, I have to follow the rules.

 

Dude: Because they threaten you with punitive measures if you don’t follow the rules.

 

Barber: The other night, I looked it up it up on the website to see if it was against the constitutional rights to have them forcing us to wear masks and it’s not even in the constitution.

 

Dude: I just keep buying more ammo (laughs) As the UN and China have been staging troops in our country for a few years now, and they’re going to come into play at some point in the future.

 

The guys took a break before the conversation started up again.

 

Barber: Then they started giving me grief about not filing my taxes. I brought that up . .  . . Well, in my opinion, taxes are illegal.

 

Dude: If you manage this country right, we should be getting dividend checks, not having to pay taxes. They’re trying to destroy the country, so I’m not going to work for them.

 

Another pause in the conversation.

 

Dude: I haven’t done too much since mid-June. Doesn’t help too much when your chest gets cracked open.

 

A number of questions came to mind as I listened big dude’s diatribe. I will begin with his outrage at having to pay taxes which, he said later, hadn’t been filed in years. This was followed by a remark about “not having done much since mid-June” because he’d had his chest cracked open.

 

He was, of course, referencing heart surgery. Before leaving the barber shop, he provided proof of said surgery by unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a long scar extending the length of his sternum visible to both the barber, who was standing in front of him, and me, by way of the mirror. The question that came to my mind was, ‘if you don’t like paying taxes, isn’t it hypocritical to receive services from the public health system?’

 

The larger question I had in mind as I listened to his rantings was ‘wouldn’t your energy be better spent researching real facts rather than the creations of conspiracy theorists on the internet?’ His recall of misinformation was truly impressive. Couldn’t that memory be utilized for better purposes? Couldn’t he be educating the barber as to the true origins of the symptoms caused by SARS-CoV-2 otherwise known as COVID 19?

A possible answer to this query could come from studies made Daniel Kahneman and his partner, Amos Tversky who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their studies in behaviour psychology. The two questioned the rationality of humans and experimented with students to provide proof for their hypothesis. Their most famous and controversial was the Linda problem. Linda is a bank teller who is single, intelligent and who, as a student was very concerned with discrimination and social justice. Participants were then asked which is most likely: 1. Linda is a bank teller, or 2. Linda is a bank teller active in the feminist movement.

Eighty-five percent of participants chose answer 2. Kahneman and Tversky suggest that reason for their mistake is that Linda who’s not only a bank teller but also a feminist provides a more coherent narrative. The story starts with Linda as an intelligent student concerned with social justice. Wouldn’t it be natural that she’s both a bank teller and a feminist? Yet, it would take only a moment’s reflection for the participant to realize that Linda is a bank teller for answers 1 and 2 but answer 2 adds a condition to 1. Therefore it’s not the most likely answer.

 

Kahneman and Tversky explain that we have two systems of thought. The first is intuitive, heuristic and jumps to conclusions. The second is deliberate and rational. However, the second requires work and so, we easily fall into the System 1 trap. My personal history leads me to accept a scientific narrative as explanation for COVID 19 epidemic and the resultant advice of such experts to prevent its spread.

 

However, I have difficulty understanding what draws the dude to the conspiracy narrative. Obviously, he’s got an affinity for the president of the United States and the crazy explanations he’s provided with respect to the pandemic and possible cures. I have to wonder, in what way is this a failed pandemic? In what way is it connected with the “riots” taking place in the U.S.? How does this relate to China and the U.N. staging troops in Canada? How similar is his thinking to the anti-maskers in Alberta who state that wearing a mask is a personal choice? Why is the conspiracy explanation so much more coherent to their personal narrative? Perhaps it's time to engage our System 2s. It could save lives.