The Biggest Problem? The Lies of the Government

I was listening to NPR this morning and heard an interview with John Barry, the author of The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. It was a fascinating interview, full of details and anecdotes that make me want to purchase the book.
One on-air observation, though, struck me as so important that it deserved to be pulled out of the interview and talked about on its own:

(John Barry:) Hundreds of people a day in Philadelphia were dying, and they finally closed all schools, banned all public gatherings. The public health director in one of the newspapers actually said, "This is not a public health measure." (...)

(Steve Inskeep:) Why were authorities lying and lying and lying?

(Barry:) Primarily it was because of the war, and their whole goal was to keep morale up. But, of course, once people discovered that they were being lied to, they couldn't trust anything they were being told. Personally, I think society is based on trust. Trust broke down, and frankly, in some parts of the country, society began to disintegrate.

He goes on to say that because of this wide-spread lack of trust in what officials were saying, people began dealing with the epidemic on an "every man for himself" basis, which just made things much, much worse. People starved to death because their own family refused to bring them food -- a direct result of the government lying about how bad things were.

He points out that in San Francisco, the government and business leaders told people the truth, and the city rallied together to take care of the sick, in contrast to the leaders in Philadelphia noted above.

Barry concludes with a quote from Victor Vaughan, serving in the war effort as the head of the Division of Communicable Diseases:

"If this continues its current rate of acceleration for a few more weeks, civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth." And he wasn't really referring to the disease itself; he was referring to the way society was beginning to disintegrate.

The lesson from the 1918 flu pandemic, then, isn't about the flu -- it's about the need for truth in leadership and trust in society. Society is built, at least in part, on trust in each other and trust in our leaders. Here's hoping that our leaders in government, business, church, and society at large are paying attention.