Humanity has the memory of a goldfish

As I was reading the article Polio declared a disaster emergency in New York after more poliovirus found by Beth Mole (Ars Technica), the following citation caught my eye,

“Rockland County—which is notorious for generally low vaccination rates after battling a tenacious measles outbreak in 2019—has a polio vaccination rate of just 60 percent among children under the age of 2, who are recommended to have three polio vaccine doses.”

People are not vaccinating their children because they see the injections as dangerous. They do not see them as helpful. They do not remember. They are incapable of remembering. They decide for themselves whether to vaccinate their children. They decide not to. They become infected, sooner or later. These are solved problems. There are vaccines. It could work. But it won’t. Not without a lot better education/indoctrination or at least a little bit of authoritarianism.

Humanity seems to be incapable of addressing these kinds of problems, in general. Most people understand and continue to understand that vaccinations are the much lesser of two evils. Why are vaccinations evil? Injecting a serum into your body isn’t a very comforting thing, really, is it? You really, really have to trust that it will do more good than harm—and you’re very hopeful that it does not harm at all. But you don’t know. So, at the very least, it’s a psychological strain that we’d rather not have. Still, the upside far outweighs the downside.

So, we can’t keep people’s belief in viruses alive over more than one or two generations. As soon as we’ve conquered an enemy, people forget that that enemy ever existed and pretend that it can never come back. Two generations.

And then I hear about the think tanks that consider how to communicate with people 10,000 years in the future—e.g., to tell them where we buried our nuclear waste. This is literally impossible. Just give up. We can’t even communicate ideas about communicable diseases between adjacent generations. What hope do we have of communicating across hundreds of them?