In many ways, these defiant actions are really a form of flight rather than fight. We are scared and run away to a world that is not based in reality. In declaring that the next pandemic is something of a conspiracy that benefits political leaders or the medical establishment, we flee from the scene of the actual infection to a scene that is less immediate but ultimately more fearful. We shift attention from health and medicine to politics and business practices. At the very least, we declare that social distancing policies (or other changes in recommended social behavior) violates our individual freedom. This freedom, in turn, is not based in reality, for freedom without shared responsibility is nothing more than anarchy.
If we can’t win a fight and if flight leads us to a world that doesn’t exist, then the only real option is freeze. Without the viable option of confronting the virus with either fight or flight, we are left to remain still and quiet—like the rodents living on the African Savannah. Weak and small, when faced with the virus, we refuse to do anything different from what we have always done. We give up and just wait things out. We declare that we are free to do nothing. But this isn’t freedom—it is helpless freeze. Unlike the rodent, who unfreezes after several moments and shakes off the adrenaline that has been coursing through its body, we humans remain in freeze for a long period of time and rarely shake off the freeze once we are unfrozen. The tragic (and ironic) outcome of sustained freeze is that our body is stressed and increasingly vulnerable to many different disease entities –including viruses. Thus, by doing nothing, we are, in fact, doing something: we are exposing our body to the virus that threatens us. We are inviting the Lion to enjoy us for lunch.
These fight, flight and freeze variants on the third choice are clearly represented in the work down during 2020 by two Southern California physicians. They posted several You Tube videos that created major controversy—noting that many deaths reportedly caused by COVID-19 were attributable in fact to other causes (such as heart disease). They suggested that the reasons people who are infected with the virus die can often be traced back to poor lifelong health habits (such as smoking and obesity). These physicians proposed that the virus only accelerates a decline in health that has already taking place. Hospitals, according to these two physicians, were being encouraged (perhaps even forced) to ascribe the death to COVID-19. As is the case with the herd immunization advocates, these physicians declared that social distancing was only delaying the inevitable.
