Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured

From William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.  Its Isabella speaking.  My emphasis.

Could great men thunder

As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,

For every pelting, petty officer

Would use his heaven for thunder;

Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt

Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak

Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,

Would all themselves laugh mortal.

Makes me think of the useless. malign and dangerous response of the Mandarin Class to the Covid-19 pandemic.  A new virus, possibly man-made, of low mortality rate but treated as an emergency requiring the Mandarin Class to infringe freedoms and coerce actions in order to be seen to be doing something.  And all to no avail.

We don't know what is going on with Covid-19.  We have all along not known what is going on with Covid-19.  It will be a while before we have enough reliable data to understand what we did right (very little) and what we did wrong (quite a lot.)  

And made worse by

proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.

 

This touches on something pointed out in The Weirdness of Government Variation in COVID-19 Responses by Richard Hanania.  

This illustrates something that has surprised me throughout this pandemic, which I haven’t seen anyone else discuss.

Usually, countries and regions that share a cultural legacy and the same political system don’t differ too much in the ways in which they respond to events in the real world. Like in Europe, the corporate tax rate varies from 10% in the lowest country to around 30% in highest. Basically every country in Europe likewise spends between around 0.2% and 2% on the military. Basic stuff like the number of hours kids spend a day in school, how to fight crime, etc. tend not to be that different across the continent.

But imagine at the start of the pandemic, someone had said to you “Everyone will face the existence of the same disease, and have access to the exact same tools to fight it. But in some EU countries or US states, people won’t be allowed to leave their house and have to cover their faces in public. In other places, government will just leave people alone. Vast differences of this sort will exist across jurisdictions that are similar on objective metrics of how bad the pandemic is at any particular moment.”

I would’ve found this to be a very unlikely outcome! You could’ve convinced me EU states would do very little on COVID-19, or that they would do lockdowns everywhere. I would not have believed that you could have two neighboring countries that have similar numbers, but one of them forces everyone to stay home, while the other doesn’t. This is the kind of extreme variation in policy we don’t see in other areas.

The same challenge to Mandarin Classes around the globe and, not knowing what to do, they have all done different things with just about the same long term outcome everywhere.   

The Mandarin Class everywhere, dressed in a little brief authority, has been most ignorant of what they are most assured.