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.

The authorities involved in the COVID-19 response have come up short by that metric from time to time, though they are far from the only offenders or the worst of them.

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. On a less grand scale, the endless string of fake hate crimes, fake rapes, and manufactured monstrosities, often cooked up by people with real power (including celebrities such as Lena Dunham and Jussie Smollett) in order to discredit powerless political rivals (a fictitious campus Republican, a couple of equally fictitious gay-hating yahoos cruising around Chicago in the wee hours in MAGA hats and in possession of both a length of rope and a working knowledge of the cast of Empire, because, obviously) as an exercise in Kulturkampf. And now many people, myself included, think, “Huh, I wonder if that’s true?” every time some dramatic tale of bigotry makes the news.