The ultimate logic of a market culture is the gangsterization of culture: I want power now. I want pleasure now. I want property now. Your property. Give it to me.

Even though the pocketbook is important, many Americans are concerned more about the low quality of their lives, the constant fear of violent assault and cruel insult, the mean-spiritedness and coldheartedness of social life, and the inability to experience deep levels of intimacy. These are the signs of a culturally decadent civilization.

There must be prescribed forms of public accountability for institutions that have a disproportionate amount of wealth, power, and influence.

Crucially, disinformation can turn into misinformation when people share disinformation without realizing it is false.

Purveyors of disinformation—content that is intentionally false and designed to cause harm—are motivated by three distinct goals: to make money; to have political influence, either foreign or domestic; and to cause trouble for the sake of it.

And although much is being made about preparing the U.S. electorate for the 2020 election, misleading and conspiratorial content did not begin with the 2016 presidential race, and it will not end after this one.

A 2017 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration concluded that less wealthy, less educated survivors are more likely to suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of disasters. In communities that already lack resources, the psychological fallout can be devastating.

The effect, Ellie said, was “mind-bending.” It can’t have helped that she was struggling with her own mental-health problems—the whole family was.

alifornia has long had a propensity to burn.

Someday not long from now—maybe this summer, maybe next year, maybe the year after—a new fire will ignite near Allison or her family.

Now it really does scar. The most fearsome modern wildfires don’t just burn overgrowth and excess; they incinerate entire ecosystems, and sometimes those ecosystems don’t regenerate on their own. Fire, once a natural mechanism of forgetting, has become an unnatural mechanism of remembering.

California as a whole faces a shortage of mental-health professionals, which the governor’s office has predicted will worsen in the coming years—and that was before the pandemic. In rural areas, it is especially pronounced.

Some wealthy Californians have hired private firefighting brigades to defend their estates; many poorer families lack the financial resources to take even basic preventive measures, such as trimming trees and clearing brush. When their homes burn, their insurance is less likely to cover the costs—if they have insurance at all. In the words of Rubinoff, from Legal Aid: “Recovery is not equal.”

Fire, of course, does not discriminate on the basis of race or class or ability, but that does not mean survivors bear an equal burden.

The panic of disaster resolves into the numbness of shock; the numbness of shock, into the pain of trauma.

She’d helped her children gather their things in case of an emergency evacuation, but she couldn’t bring herself to pack her own bags, because what are material possessions worth in a state that combusts on an annual schedule?

“People have that experience of revictimization because there’s an adrenaline after the fire of, like, Okay, we’re going to get through this,” Ronit Rubinoff, the executive director of Legal Aid of Sonoma County, told me. “Then that adrenaline fades and people realize … Jesus, I am no closer to even just putting a stick in the ground.”

These long-term challenges can even elicit PTSD symptoms in survivors who do not initially manifest them. A year after Hurricane Katrina, researchers found that more than 40 percent of survivors with PTSD had not developed symptoms until after the six-month anniversary.

After a wildfire, obstacles abound: the scramble for shelter, the competition for builders, the toil of the insurance process. Studies have shown that these ongoing personal, logistical, and financial difficulties often lead to depression. “Somebody goes through a trauma—if they’re going to then face a whole lot of continuing obstacles, then that maintains the stress,” says Joe Ruzek, a PTSD researcher at Stanford and Palo Alto Universities. “It becomes more difficult to put the trauma behind.”

Even for fire survivors who have been spared the imminent danger and acute fear, the weight of the loss—of homes, of communities, of memories—can be enough to induce trauma.

After a wildfire, the particular nature of the resulting trauma depends on the particular experience of the affected survivor. For some, trauma derives from the panic of a narrow escape. Studies have repeatedly linked fear for one’s life with PTSD, which is part of the reason firefighting takes such a heavy psychological toll.

sychologists sometimes say that trauma gets burned into the mind, like the imprint of a branding iron, and in a way it does. In truth, though, trauma is not so much a scorch mark as a flame, flaring up and dying down, inconstant. It burns in the mind. And just as some materials burn more readily than others, so too do some minds.

Ellie herself knows something of trauma: She has long suffered from PTSD and anxiety caused by physical and sexual abuse in her childhood, she told me; since the fire, her symptoms have worsened exponentially.

Watson says, it will grow harder for survivors in vulnerable areas to maintain a sense of hope. And much of California is a vulnerable area.

layered atop an already many-layered mental-health crisis. And while the virus will subside with time, the fires will not. According to the most reliable predictions, they will only worsen in the coming years. A 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that as long as there remains fuel to burn, “anthropogenic climate change will continue to chronically enhance the potential for western U.S. forest fire activity.”

A number of the survivors I spoke with described feeling “haunted” and “disturbed” by subsequent fires. As irrational as they knew it was, they felt as though the fires were stalking them.

The trauma is sustained and amplified by a distinctive characteristic of California’s wildfires: They recur, often in quick succession.

When a whole neighborhood or town feels these effects at the same time, the result is what one psychologist and fire survivor calls “community-wide trauma.”

Many survivors described feeling fragile and less capable of managing stress for years after a fire. Some recalled looking for incinerated possessions and breaking down when they realized they would never find them.

According to Patricia Watson, a psychologist at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 10 to 30 percent of wildfire survivors develop diagnosable mental-health conditions, including PTSD and depression. Another 50 percent may suffer from serious subclinical effects that fade with time. Studies have found that substance abuse and domestic violence rise after natural disasters.

Americans have come to know these well.

Even by California’s standards, though, recent years have been extraordinary. Nine of the 10 most destructive fires in the state’s recorded history have occurred in the 21st century—six of them in the past four years alone. In October 2017, the Tubbs Fire destroyed more than 5,600 buildings in Napa and Sonoma Counties, making it the state’s most destructive fire on record. About a year later, the Camp Fire supplanted it, razing the town of Paradise and killing 86 people. Just last fall, the Kincade Fire torched nearly 80,000 acres.

Its record of fire begins underwater, at the bottom of forest-fringed lakes, where ancient blazes left their stories in charcoal deposits.

notably fundamental attribution error, whereby, when assessing someone’s behavior, we put too much weight on his or her personal attributes and too little on external factors, many of which can be measured with statistics.

Instead, it has been devoted to changing behavior, in the form of incentives or “nudges.”

One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics.

The interface creates a feeling of simultaneity, and also of having to make choices in real time, that no book could reproduce.

It’s no coincidence that many of the best early digital narratives took the form of games, in which the reader traverses an imaginary world while solving puzzles, sometimes fiendishly difficult ones.

In Proust and the Squid, Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, observes that the brain’s limbic system, the seat of our emotions, comes into play as we learn to read fluently; our feelings of pleasure, disgust, horror and excitement guide our attention to the stories we can’t put down.

It’s a compelling analogy: in both cases, the conscientiousness of the enlightened few is no match for the negligence of the many, and the cost of shirking duty is spread too widely to keep any one malefactor in line. Your commute by bicycle probably isn’t going to make the city’s air any cleaner, and even if you read up on candidates for civil-court judge on Patch.com, it may still be the crook who gets elected.

Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are middle-aged; it’s lower among blacks and women.

It could be that voters take a cognitive shortcut, letting broad-brush markers like party affiliation stand in for a close study of candidates’ qualifications and policy stances.