Parsing Out Dystopia: Freedom and Face Masks

Hard to believe, but here we are, some 20 months into the pandemic, still collectively unclear about whether masks are effective against the spread of the virus.  From the beginning, “scientists” disagreed.  The meager data available was often contradictory and, for that reason, there was an initial failure of consensus among scientists regarding face masks.

Right there, in that moment when the specialists hesitated, in the beginning when no one knew how bad this virus was yet, before American deaths began to surge, we were debating face masks.  It did seem silly to mandate everyone wear a mask when not very many people had died, even in Wuhan the number of deaths were far from shocking.  At first, China denied that any deaths had occurred.   Even when China had no choice but to acknowledge that the unknown virus was deadly, the news reported that almost everyone survived their illness.  Still, at the time, that wasn't as clear as it is today.  

As far as human health is concerned, pandemics are never good things.  They kill a bunch of people up front and then they never go away.  The common cold is basically a mutation of a virus that crossed over from birds about 200 years ago.  (Think about that.  When America was first populated the common cold did not exist.)  Just a century ago, the Spanish flu killed about 500 million people worldwide over two years.  Just over 4 million have died globally so far from COVID-19, in roughly the same a mount of time.

Part of the lowish death number lies in our remarkable capability to keep cases of severe infection alive.  I had an uncle and an obese friend my age both contract it.  Both had previously had heart by-pass surgery.  Both were admitted to the hospital.  Both survived thanks to front-line American medicine's spectacular and under-credited response to the unknown without any real leadership or even, to begin with, the necessities of protection from the killer disease.  Where are the stories of this overwhelming triumph of America's often-maligned healthcare system?

Don't tell me about how heroic any twenty-first century soldier has been.  Whatever it collectively amounts to is nothing compared to the assistants and nurses and doctors seeing more COVID-19 cases than they could accommodate...and most of the cases surviving.  That is heroic beyond all heroism.  And it happened, mostly at different places and times (thankfully), all across America.  

The other part of the low death numbers is that, for all its many complications, COVID-19 does not make most people sick.  Most of those who catch COVID-19, including the presently scary Delta-variant, are asymptomatic.  My guess is that this is true in about 70% of the cases.  My brother caught it last Christmas and his biggest symptom was boredom as he quarantined.  For every horror story you see in the news, there are 5 or 6 stories like my brother's.  Common people see the disease sweep through their family with maybe a few fevers, aches and sneezes and kill no one.  Few people have someone in their circle of family and friends die from the virus.

So, the virus is rather wimpy and ambiguous, a perfect ornament for the landscape of dystopia.  Since, so far, it does not kill that many people, since our healthcare professionals are exceptional, we have the ludicrous privilege to debate whether or not our freedom is curtailed by wearing face masks.  The debate has continued and now morphed from a scientific discussion into this hideous culture war symbol, which only proves Albert Camus's point, life is absurd. 

In their bumbling toward disagreement while they learned about the virus, the scientists have lost control of the debate.  In America, face masks today are a symbol of conservative or liberal values.  Masks have been sucked into the cesspool of our national bipolar neurosis.  But, that's not what I'm here to lament.  The politicization of face masks is yet another example (Vietnam, war on drugs, etc.) of American decadence.

I'm here to lament that our scientists were inept at understanding the critical importance of how they were perceived by the general public and, thusly, by politicians in the early days of the pandemic.  The data were always clear from the beginning about one thing regarding masks.  But, rather than broadly and firmly get that specific unquestioned message out, almost nothing was said other than the scientists were “disagreeing” on face masks.

It is easy to understand their confusion.  Sure you could mask everybody up but the virus can and does enter the body through the eyes as well.  What are the degrees of its viral load?  How far could droplets disperse?  Exactly what is the point of wearing a mask out of doors?  Was a safe distance 6 feet or 26 feet?  Didn't we need to know all this before we announce guidance for masks?

The one thing about masks that has never been in doubt but is now almost completely obscured in the haze of dystopia is that face masks will without question significantly reduce the amount of virus the wearer emits into the air.  In other words, it isn't about whether the mask will protect you from contracting the virus.  That is the wrong debate and I blame scientists for this because they delayed the strong message of certainty in favor of disagreement and confusion over what the breath intake advantages may or may not be.  

Though it is advantageous to have your nose covered by the mask, you are actually wearing your mask more for your mouth than your nose. That has always been the case as this article in The Atlantic from April 2020 shows.  It remains the case today.  Remember all those slow-motion videos featured early on in the pandemic showing the radius of droplets in a sneeze without a mask?  They compared the same sneeze through various facial coverings from a handkerchief up to an N-95 mask.

You can see one such video produced on the Mayo Clinic website here.  That link also features another video discussing how wearing masks reduces droplets in the air from a scientific perspective.  At one point the narration clearly states:  “It is important to note that the mask you wear primarily protects those around you and their mask protects you.”

The purpose of the mask is not really to keep you from breathing in the virus.  It is to keep all those many asymptomatic people freely walking around in society, feeling perfectly fine, from breathing out the virus by talking, laughing, yawning, sneezing, whatever.  You don't wear the mask for yourself.  You wear it for others and they wear it for you.  That's always been the right message.  Why didn't the scientists just agree on that and state it?  Further, why didn't mass media hammer the fundamental fact home from the start?

Currently, the debate centers on 1) are face masks effect protection against inhaling the virus and 2) at what point are our individual freedoms encroached upon when it comes to wearing a face mask? 

Yes, masks help prevent you from breathing in the virus.  I'm not saying they don't.  It is just a much more problematic issue when you try to scientifically qualify this.  There is evidence that masks won't stop the spread through your eyes.  Evidence that certain “viral loads” will penetrate all masks but for N-95's.  But that is my point.  The clarity of how masks prevent the spread does not primarily lie in your nose but in your mouth.  Everyone has forgotten this.

There is plenty of reason to mandate masks without knowing how much viral load people can effectively be exposed to.  During a pandemic, particularly if you are seeing cases rise in your hometown,  you never want anyone to laugh or sneeze near your face without wearing a face mask.  That is clear.  That is the truth.  And yet nobody even looks at it this way.  What a total and complete dereliction of civic responsibility everyone has displayed on this straightforward issue.  Shame on us all.

Now look at this mess.  You have governor's of states (Florida and Texas, Arkansas just wisely reversed course) banning face mask mandates.  Camus's absurdity again.  Would I go to my governor if I had a fever or so much as a toothache?  And they are going to tell me that places where the virus is rampant in my state can not locally mandate face masks?  

This appears to me to be the biggest malpractice opportunity in human history.  Any politician who is not a doctor and bans face mask mandates is denying effective treatment to a epic disease.  To calmly accept such power as legitimate is to join in the parade of clowns.  I want to see class-action malpractice lawsuits by the citizens of Florida and Texas against their governors.  That would be an interesting political development.  Failing that, maybe they could get them on practicing medicine without a license.

Conservatives are big on banning face mask mandates.  They do so because, they claim, it is a violation of my individual freedom for any authority (political, corporate) to tell me that I have to wear a mask.  Apparently, it's all about freedom.  Since the virus does not kill everyone that catches it, we have the luxury of not wearing masks.  (For the record, if COVID-19 ever starts killing 75% of those who catch it, face masks won't be an issue.  Those who choose freedom in that scenario choose death and matters become clearer.)

That last point is important.  The advocates of freedom probably won't die if they don't wear a mask.  So, it is easy for them to proclaim their freedom.  The objections of others can be contextualized against the fact that this pandemic so far has not been a sea of death in America.  Over 620,000 deaths, a tragic number, does not affect most of us because most of us didn't know any of those people.  So, it is an relatively easy thing to claim freedom when death is predominantly at bay.  It is also egregiously selfish. 

It is true, government mandates restrict individual freedom of choice.  As I have posted before, the largest measure of “freedom” lies in what other people are free to do with which I do not agree.  It is clearly a broader freedom to include choices I don't agree with inside that freedom.  That is BIG freedom.

So, this pandemic has presented me with a challenge regarding freedom.  Given my definition of freedom, Rand Paul, Jim Jordan and all the others should be free to not wear masks and to point out the restriction upon freedom wearing masks creates.  How could it be freedom if we force them to wear masks?  That's not freedom.  That is forced compliance which pretty close to the exact opposite of freedom.

Rather than do harm to my view of freedom, however, this actually helps qualify what freedom actually is.  Freedom is too often viewed as a bastion unto itself, a lofty thing in isolation, that dictates our ability to live the lawful rights that we choose.  Oh, liberty!  It is easy to see why freedom is always perceived this way.  It is the most obvious and natural expression of human freedom.

But, as I also previously blogged, liberty means nothing if you can't breathe the air.  Literally, a person who is on a ventilator in America (and there are thousands of them right now) is not free.  That person's freedom is meaningless as they fight to simply breathe the air.  And they got there probably because some maskless unvaccinated person laughed at their joke or spoke excitedly sharing an experience.

That is how this virus actually works.  Now, that ventilator person may or may not have been helped by wearing a mask.  It depends on the viral load and other factors that make science so nebulous and disconnected from the reality of most Americans.  It is not necessarily important whether the ventilator person was protected by the mask they were (or were not) wearing.  What is important, and what contextualizes freedom, is that the person who laughed would have spewed significantly less of the virus into the air if they were wearing a mask.  That is not even debateable.

Human liberty is controlled by more than just human permissiveness.  If freedom is always and forever lofted above all other considerations then we forget who we are, frail animals that die out over 80 years or so.  That is what we are.  Freedom is a way of living, but it does not come with, nor is it guaranteed by, living itself.  That depends on things that have nothing to do with freedom.  Like disease.

Cancer, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, these have nothing to do with freedom.  Such things are completely indifferent toward your life.  So, too, is a global pandemic no matter how wimpy it is historically.  The fact is that we restrict the freedom of others when we refuse to wear our masks for other people.  In absurd, dystopian fashion, the very people who proclaim "freedom!" from masks are the one's restricting the broader society's freedom. 

At one point in the classic film Cool Hand Luke (1967), the chain-gang warden looks at Paul Newman's character, Luke, and says in a slow southern drawl: "What we have here is a failure to communicate."  It is one of the great one-liners in American movie history.  It applies today.  Except the virus can punish those who don't "listen" far worse than what that warden dished out to Luke.

It seems so simple to me.  This mess is largely brought on by our collective failure to communicate the only indisputable fact about face masks.  Which has led to politicians pretending to be experts on masks as we all pretend that this is perfectly fine.  It is not an error in judgment so much as it is a collective hallucination about and dereliction of politics and viruses.

It is absurd that we live in a country where freedom is considered the right to breathe viruses on other people during a global pandemic.  By allowing the virus to spread and, more importantly, by enabling its future mutation, we are restricting the freedoms of everyone who contracts it from the freedom of others.  It should be obvious that, in this case, BIG freedom requires us all to be more responsible for each other. Antiquated thinking has it that individual rights are more important than collective rights.

“Are you suggesting, Senator Paul, that Americans are free to breathe the virus on each other?”

“Are you suggesting, Congressman Jordan, that mandating that you wear a mask for the safety of your fellow Americans is a violation of freedom that surpasses the deaths of over 620,000 of your fellow Americans?”

There's really no debate to be had about face masks.  As I said, if the virus were a lot deadlier, as with past plagues, then face masks would not even be an issue.  But even as deadly as COVID-19 is, we don't want it to keep mutating.  And the best way to do that and preserve the greatest amount of freedom, is to wear face masks for others when your situation so advises.  

And it is OK for some places to force you to wear a mask whether you want to or not.  Fighting for your right to not mask-up for the benefit of others is quite obviously elevating a narrow freedom over the broader safety (and, therefore, freedom) of others - which is kind of the opposite of how to run a free society.  It is impossible for an unsafe society to be free.

Dystopia emerges where individuals remove all sense of the collective out of freedom.  It is freedom in isolation.  Freedom in uniqueness, even distinction.  It is an Ayn Rand view of freedom.  Which is not to be dismissed, there genuinely is a form of freedom here that should not be fundamentally threatened by others.  In his way,  John Galt is the mascot of freedom.

But wearing face masks is not fundamentally threatening to anyone.  In true dystopian fashion, precisely the opposite is true, not wearing them is the threat.  The more we wear our masks the more freedom others will have to breath the air.  

I should live in a world where Ms. Rand would wear a mask if local circumstances warranted it. Her philosophy of Objectivism is in no way diminished by this fact.  Still, she would likely insult my intelligence and then proceed to elevate her maskless face as some great human feat.  But, if you are truly objective about the impact of masks for the benefit of others then obviously, you can only have self-righteous reasons for benefiting yourself literally at the expense of everyone around you. 

Oh, freedom, where is thy sting?