USA society unable to comprehend non-fiction books from before events

Context:

1. Elon Musk on March 19, 2020 … “Musk predicted the country was headed toward “zero new cases” by the end of April”

2. Donald Trump on February 26, 2020 … "The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

Joe Rogan described: “I was a fan of his show and watched him get Twitter brain in real time. It was wild. Dude went from “I don’t use Twitter” to “I don’t scroll social media at night” to where he’s been at the last few years where he has to interject his parroting of right wing propaganda into every conversation and can’t stop mentioning posts that are going viral in the right wing twittersphere. Dude completely lost the plot, and since getting Twitter brained the overall quality and variety of his guests has gotten so much worse”

USA society unable to comprehend non-fiction books from before events

People would say “it’s just the flu”, “it happens every winter”, “no big deal”.

And I would produce this quote and emphasize to people the year it was published, 2014. Also keep in mind, I easily found these books, anyone could have referenced books about the 1918 Spanish Flu to have understanding of what to expect…

“In many ways, it is hard for modern people living in First World countries to conceive of a pandemic sweeping around the world and killing millions of people, and it is even harder to believe that something as common as influenza could cause such widespread illness and death.” ― Charles River Editors, The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak. Published October 10, 2014.

And time and time again I find people in USA society are unable to locate quotes like this from before events and connect the dots of how predictable the wrong answers are and the importance of not just trusting people like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump who speak in the moment in the style of conversation but are terrible sources of understanding and information.

It’s sad that people don’t give Bill Gates credit for warning society publicly in April 2015 (Ted Talk) that not being prepared for a pandemic would cause massive economic consequences. Nobody seems able to reference reliable high-quality information from before events once people get caught up the stream of consuming podcasts, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Facebook, Twitter, etc sources.