WE'D BELIEVE YOU IF YOU DIDN'T CONDESCEND SO MUCH.

Kevin D. Williamson's "Fauci — and many others — went wrong by talking to us like we are stupid rather than ignorant" might have qualified as a Friday short Take. A follow-on piece of advice, however, merits repetition in full.

Every statement to the public regarding epidemic management and policy should begin and end with a disclaimer, something like this: “This is the best we can tell you based on what we know right now and conditions as we understand them. Don’t be surprised if our recommendations or our policies change. In fact, be surprised if they don’t change. This is a new virus and we are, in that respect, starting from scratch. We don’t have it all figured out yet, and we aren’t going to have it all figured out in the foreseeable future, but we think the best chance for our getting through this with the minimum degree of suffering, death, and disruption is for everybody to cooperate, to row in the same direction. And we say that even knowingthat we are going to be wrong in certain cases.”

Yes, and had the public health types recognized, two or three weeks into the scare, that it wasn't as scary as the initial fears suggested, they might have been fine.  Unfortunately, the public health types didn't show a little humility, and Our Progressive Betters engaged in their usual propensity to hector, condescend, and deplorable-shame, and now we have, for good or ill, more widespread questioning of Official Authority.  Which might not be a bad thing. 

On purely pragmatic grounds, the noble lie runs into predictable difficulties: One is that people such as Fauci, though highly expert in one field, are not actually very good at predicting how the public will respond to any given statement or directive. Another is that when the misleading statement is revealed as such — as it will be — trust in experts and institutions declines, and it often declines disproportionately as people irritated by clumsy attempts at manipulation write off entire agencies and enterprises as untrustworthy.

One of the problems is that agencies such as the CDC believe — wrongly, I think — that the more they present themselves as Olympians, the more people will listen to them and follow their advice. They believe — wrongly, I think — that if they admit the complexity of a situation, then people will ignore them. But civic-minded and responsible people — and those are the only ones we should really bother even trying to talk to, there’s no point in wasting time on the other kind — can handle being told that things are complex and subject to regular revision. They often sense when they are being condescended to and when they are not getting the whole story.

In addition, there's a pattern to who is engaging in the Noble Lies and the condescension, and it's not a pattern among Militant Normals. "We have seen environmentalists, to name one prominent example, justify misleading the public (mostly through exaggeration and alarmism) as a necessary measure to get people to support what they believe to be necessary climate policies — and, predictably, the result has been a persistent belief in some quarters that climate change is a hoax cooked up by power-hungry crypto-Marxists."  That has the effect of setting their cause back, which might not be such a bad thing.