People Did Not Believe Cassandra's Warnings about the Trojan Horse, and People Didn't Believe Bill Gates' Warning about Viral Pandemics

Coronavirus, CDC Image

When Cassandra, a tragic heroine in Greek mythology, rebuffed the moon-god Apollo, he laid a terrible curse on her: she would always tell the truth, but no one would ever believe her. So, when she warned the people of Troy not to trust “Greeks bearing gifts,” they ignored her and brought the Trojan horse into their city. We know how that turned out.

Given my lifetime career specializing in persuasion and debate, I can imagine few worse fates than to tell the truth and never be believed. Yet such was the fate of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who gave a brilliant Ted Talk in April 2015 – almost 5 years ago – to warn us that a virus pandemic was coming and that we were not ready for it. As we all know, over the next five years, our government took too little action to prepare for a viral pandemic, while President Donald Trump rolled back much of what little progress we had made.

People didn’t take Gates seriously. And yet, Gates had everything going for him. He is articulate. He is respected by Republicans and Democrats alike. Billionaires recognize him as one of the richest among them. His Ted Talk was well prepared and brilliantly argued. Like Cassandra, he was ignored.

To gain the audience’s attention, Gates rolled out an enormous barrel and talked about his youth. He said, “The disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. That’s why we had a barrel like this down in our basement filled with cans of food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we will go downstairs down and eat from  that barrel.” He then warned that viruses pose a greater threat than atomic attack: “today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn’t look like this." pointed to the barrel. "Instead it looks like this.” He then showed an electron microscope photo of a virus. He continued: “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next two decades, it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war; not missiles but microbes.”

He argued that a repetition of the 1918 flu epidemic would kill 30 million people if it occurred today. He pointed out that, if we saw a Hollywood movie about a virus, a team of experts would swiftly move in to contain it. But, in real life, he explained that neither the world nor the United States has anything like that ready to go: “but that’s just pure Hollywood.” He continued: "The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more devastating than Ebola.” Gates explained that not just the United States, but Third World countries also needed to have access to vaccines and medical care. There is no guarantee that geography will confine a virus epidemic.

Gates pleaded that the world needs to “dramatically change the turnaround time to look to the pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that of pathogen, so we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system, and we need preparedness.”

As we look at the pathetic response that the United States, Italy, and other nations have made to the coronavirus, it is obvious that Gates’ warnings were never heeded.

Gates' conclusion was chilling: “we don’t have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement, but we need to get going because time is not on our side.” 

He was right. Time was not on our side.

Like Cassandra, Gates was right about just about everything. Like Cassandra, Gates watched in frustration as people ignored his warnings. He now says that we waited too long and can no longer avoid a coronavirus shutdown. What is most shocking is that, even this week, with catastrophe upon us, tens of millions of people continue to trust the outrageous falsehoods on conservative media, which went so far as to call the pandemic a hoax, and which were further promulgated by the president. Many people continue to support President Donald Trump's weak response to the pandemic even as they face death head-on.

In 1973, when I started graduate school at Northern Illinois University to study argumentation and debate, I took my first class from nationally-famous persuasion expert Charles Urban Larson. Like the naïve debate student that I was, I wrote a brief comment in one of my papers that logic was important in persuasion. When he returned my paper with a probably-undeserved A, Larson had penned a little note telling me that logic had nothing to do with persuasion. At the time, I was deeply offended. I now hereby apologize to Professor Larson. A world that was even minimally capable of logical thinking would have responded enthusiastically to Gates’ warning. Cassandra was right, but ancient Troy didn't listen. Gates was right, but the world didn't listen to him, either. So here we are.

Follow-ups for communication specialists: the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion does give us some reason to think that, under certain circumstances, logic and evidence can be persuasive. The issue seems to be that people need to feel that they are competent to think about evidence and have the time and motivation to do so. When people do not feel that they are able to examine evidence, they might instead listen to authorities instead of thinking for themselves. Unfortunately, too many people think that charlatans like President Trump and cable news hosts are authorities. So, as I said, here we are. Also, from a psychological standpoint, people don't take rare dangers seriously. They worry about next week's stock market, but don't worry about a hurricane or pandemic that strikes maybe once or twice a century.

I've blogged about the Elaboration Likelihood Model a few times earlier.

Here's a transcript of Gates' Ted Talk.