Hurricane Isaias made landfall Friday night as a dangerous Category 2 storm, striking near Destin, Florida. It brought damaging winds, heavy rain, and a life-threatening storm surge to the Gulf Coast, killing at least four people and causing power outages for hundreds of thousands. Remnants of the hurricane caused flooding and landslides in the same region of North Carolina that was hit hard by Hurricane Helene in 2024; forecasters warned that flooding could stretch as far as the Appalachians.
Here’s the part of the story that surprised me: Before Isaias made landfall, Yahoo! News reported that officials were “urging coastal residents from Mississippi to the Florida Panhandle to take the season’s first Atlantic hurricane seriously.”
Why would anyone need someone to encourage them to take one of nature’s most destructive phenomena “seriously”? The answers are relevant beyond Isaias and apply to us all today.
“Alarm fatigue” and “groupthink”
One reason people in the path of the hurricane could disregard official warnings could be “recentism,” the tendency to give more weight to the most recent events and news. An unusually strong El Niño contributed to a relatively quiet Atlantic hurricane season prior to Friday; by now there are typically fourteen named storms, with the first usually making landfall in August.
If a bad thing doesn’t happen when we expect it, we can stop expecting it.
Another is “alarm fatigue,” defined in medical context as “a consequence of sensory overload due to frequent nuisance alarms from physiologic monitoring devices.” In meteorological context, it refers to past warnings of storms that turned out not to be as severe as predicted.
If a bad thing didn’t happen when we expected it, we can stop expecting it.
And there is “opinion solidarity” or “groupthink,” which occurs when people prioritize the opinions of their peers over those of outsiders. If long-time residents are convinced that a hurricane won’t be as severe as predicted, we can choose their local experience over distant “experts.”
If people we trust say a bad thing won’t happen, we can stop expecting it.
Beware an escaped boa constrictor
Some warnings are easy to heed since doing so comes with little cost. For example, when officials warned recently that a seven-foot boa constrictor was loose in a North Carolina neighborhood, all residents had to do was stay away from the area. As one person noted, such snakes “don’t range far. Meters, not miles.”
Other warnings come at a significant cost. I grew up in Houston and remember times when my parents responded to hurricane warnings by boarding up our windows and taking us to stay in hotels out of the path of the coming storm. Since they were self-employed, time away from work affected our income. They also worried that our home would be looted before we returned.
In those days, however, people tended to believe what the authorities said. Those days are not these days. Unsurprisingly, partisan politics are affecting our trust in elected officials as well.
“His tragedy, in turn, became our own”
Since less than a fifth of Americans live in areas most vulnerable to hurricanes, our conversation thus far may seem less than relevant to you. But there’s more to the story.
Yale historian Beverly Gage won the Pulitzer Prize for her brilliant 2022 biography, G Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. In it, she charts the path by which the legendary FBI director fell from widespread public acclaim to his current notoriety.
Hoover served in eight presidential administrations and championed what we call “conservative” values today. From the Hays Code governing morality in movies to juvenile delinquency, anticommunism, free markets, and the importance of marriage and family, Hoover used the weight of his office and agency to advance ideals he considered vital to the nation.
As he warned in 1948, “Whenever the American people, young or old, come to believe that there is no such thing as right or wrong, normal or abnormal, those who would destroy our civilization will applaud a major victory over our way of life.”
However, after Hoover’s death in 1972, reports began to surface regarding his personal sexuality, racist views (he denounced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the country’s “most notorious liar”), and abuse of his office and its enormous power. Over the years, he has gone “from hero to villain” in public opinion. As Dr. Gage writes, “If there is a tragic element to Hoover’s story, it is that he failed to abide by his own best principles. And his tragedy, in turn, became our own.”
Our generational slide from absolute truth to subjective “post-truth” and from consensual morality to relativistic immorality illustrates her point.
“Praemonitus, praemunitus”
In a culture where you have your truth and I have mine, it’s easier than ever to equate opinion with reality to justify doing what we want to do. But reality is real, whether we recognize it or not. Hurricanes devastate those who ignore them more than those who prepare for them. The “sexual liberation” movement victimizes those who participate in it more than those who do not.
A practical way to think about this subject is to ask ourselves, What sins am I tempted to justify through the fallacy of “post-truth” tolerance today? As the Latin phrase praemonitus, praemunitus reminds us, to be “forewarned” is to be “forearmed.” If we then ask the living Lord Jesus to help us think biblically and live redemptively, he promises that his Spirit will “guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).
The theologian Jan Hus (1369–1415) was an important forerunner of the Protestant Reformation. When he was burned at the stake for his biblical convictions, he declared, “In the truth of the gospel I have written, taught, and preached; today I will gladly die.” He therefore had the right to urge us:
“Faithful Christian, seek the truth, listen to the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, adhere to the truth, and defend truth to the death.”
Will you be a “faithful Christian” today?
Quote for the day:
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.” —Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Our latest website resources:
Denison Forum
