> When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to pr

> When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to prevent scientists from discussing it, spend months preventing solutions from reaching the consumers because we can't figure out how to issue permits, institute policies guaranteed to make the problem much worse, rally against solutions that could make it less bad because it allows us to take cheap shots about political opponents, lie about various aspects of the problem because it looks to us more convenient if people behaved as if they believed the lies, institute draconian policies that make absolutely no sense but allow the politicians to declare they are "serious about it", allow the same politicians to blatantly and constantly violate the same policies, dial the censorship to 11 to suppress public discussion of these policies, spend enormous amounts of money on things that do not work, distribute even more enormous amount of money to fraudsters, because we don't have time to bother checking who needs help and who doesn't, and so on, and so forth... Yeah, you are right, as a society we did a lot. We shouldn't have done most of it, but there's no denying it, it is a lot.