Originally posted on December 30, 2020. Reposted here without edits. There is a lot more to be said on the subject, and especially on the juxtaposition of “individualism” and “collectivism” in contemporary propaganda, both in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and as a more general phenomenon.
Let us establish a few core principles before this post gets underway:
- COVID-19 is an airborne pathogen. One key way to limit its spread, therefore, is to not breathe it in.
- Masks, even if not 100% effective, stop a substantial portion – perhaps most – of the virus from penetrating in either direction.
- As such, wearing a mask both reduces the chance of a healthy person becoming infected, and of an infected but asymptomatic individual from unknowingly passing the disease to others.
It is also worth noting that given the length of the incubation period for the virus, individuals become infectious for at least several days before showing any symptoms. As such, there is no way to know, absent proactive testing, that one is not, in fact, infectious. Mask-wearing thus becomes as much an acknowledgement of this fact, and about protecting others, as about protecting the self.
And yet, given all this, we have tens of millions of people in the US alone not just opposed to wearing masks, but virulently so.
At first I thought this was purely a function of politics. After all, if the various propaganda outlets for the Republican party, Fox News not the least among them, spend months downplaying the pandemic and being generally supportive of the view that wearing a mask somehow impinges on one’s personal and constitutional freedoms, there was bound to be a response within the Republican voter base. As well, it probably does not help that the US, unlike some other countries, did not really have a substantive encounter with a SARS-like epidemic in the recent past and as a result had not invested in any related public education initiatives.
And then I started seeing the same exact dynamic begin to play out in various European countries, most notably Russia. Masks do not work, masks infringe on one’s freedom, I am healthy and therefore do not need to wear a mask, the pandemic is a myth – talking points identical to what one might find in American conservative media – being shouted by random maskless Russians in public encounters posted on social media. With a similar level of hostility and aggression towards a random salesperson or bus conductor asking them to follow the rules and don a mask, as if the mere suggestion were a form of physical violation. Surely this cannot be a coincidence, and there is some kind of a unifying factor causing ordinary people on either side of the world to have a very similar response to being asked to inconvenience themselves for the sake of others around them.
My tentative hypothesis, which I am still mulling over, is that what we see here is an expression of consumerism. The ideal consumer in a capitalist economy is an infantile creature focussed exclusively on their immediate wants to the exclusion of any consideration of others, or of any long-term thinking. It is a two-year old who wants that toy, now, and will not take no for an answer. And, conversely, any attempt to impose rules or somehow inconvenience said two-year old provokes a tantrum – or a lashing out.
The behavioural model is just too much of a perfect fit, at least to my eyes, to be ignored completely or to be purely coincidental. I am not suggesting, of course, that every individual living in the West, or in Russia, has been reduced to this consumerist ideal. And yet, perhaps over time, we have driven the statistical average close enough to it that the moment a population is asked to wear masks and restrict their activities largely for the sake of others and for an indeterminate period of time, a noticeable section of it, well, throws a tantrum, or lashes out, including literally in some instances.
As well, one might point to certain Asian societies – China, Japan, and so on – where cultural collectivism is as yet strongly enough ingrained to more or less offset this infantile consumerist mindset1. So it used to be in Russia, by the way, at least during the height of the Soviet era, but I suppose 30-40 years of colossal cultural deconstruction and rebuilding in the consumerist mode works.
In any case, this is merely a hypothesis. One if correct, however, that does not exactly bode well for the future of either Western society or of any social – especially socialist – movements therein, since these are focussed on collective action to effect economic and social reform.
- Seared in my mind is a fairly recent documentary on the Japanese school system that shows some middle-schoolers jumping rope. The entire class jumping the same rope in unison.[↩]