Excellent Links

David Roth, at Defector:

… In place of any actually ennobling liberty or more fundamental freedom, contemporary American life mostly offers choices. But since most of these are not really choices at all in any meaningful way, it might be more accurate to say that we’re offered selection. The choice between paying for health insurance and running up six figures of non-dischargeable debt because you got sick, for instance, is honestly less a choice than a hostage situation. But because the second outcome is still extremely possible even if you choose to pay for health insurance, it’s more correct to say that the choice is already made, and that the decision is more about choosing from an array of variously insufficient and predatory options the one whose name or price or risk you like most. Sometimes there isn’t even that, and the choice is a binary one between something and nothing. None of this is really what anyone would choose, but these ugly individuated choices are what we get.

A wide selection of products and political identities and their respective signifiers are also available. This long and stupid pandemic year has been miserable for basically everyone, but it has been great for those optional political identities and their attendant signifiers. It is maybe more startling than surprising to watch those partisan identities prove more durable, or at least more relentlessly assertive, than basic concepts of civic empathy or shared purpose, just given that the person who was president for most of this was himself more a collection of signifiers and grievances and curdled memetic selfishness than a whole person, and that the plague was interesting to him only in how it reflected upon and threatened him. There are, it turns out, tens of millions of people who are not just also like that, but whose single most deeply held value is that they must be permitted to continue being like that forever. For these people, having to do something other than whatever they want to do, at any moment and for any reason, really is a much more urgent threat than sickness or death; to be without the agency to make the same stupid non-choices, every day, is not fundamentally different than being killed, because making those facile choices is for them what it means to be alive.

You will not be surprised to learn that the same people who regarded being asked to wear a mask in the grocery store as the same thing as being imprisoned in a gulag are also those most unwilling to get vaccinated. With masks as with the vaccine, some minimal personal imposition delivers both personal and broader social benefits, but they just can’t get past that first part. The result is that the vast majority of people are effectively the hostages of the most selfish people the world has ever seen. The urgency of this is new, but the situation is not.

That minority’s inability to take anything in stride, or to sublimate even the smallest personal comfort for the most urgent and essential collective good, invariably winds up being political, but it is also its own pursuit and even lifestyle…

… It is hard to think clearly about our plague, because it is scary and big and the conversation around it is so full of bad science and bad faith. The government denied and elided and obfuscated about the pandemic even at its peak, and in the vacuum created by the lack of any coherent message or cohesive society the national conversation just reverted to its default settings. The broader complacent and unreasoned acceptance that props up our otherwise untenable status quo is shot through all these facile “it’s a private matter and a personal choice” formulations; if you have accepted that mostly useless choices between dreary outcomes are all you could ever get as a citizen in the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth, then you have also accepted that these choices are actually very important, and that making them is the thing makes you free. None of these personal choices actually make anything better for the person making them. In the case of the vaccine, those choices have devastating downstream impacts for all the people who glance off the choice-maker as they carve their personal hero’s journeys through the world. None of this matters as much as the idea that the choice is theirs to make…

Excellent Read: ‘Private Choices Have Public Consequences’Post + Comments (194)