COVID’s a bitch. It’s fucked with our lives in gloriously horrible ways.
One of em’s the two philosophies that divide our already-tense world.
The First Philosophy:
Save lives and keep people healthy above all else. Any restrictions that do this are absolutely the compassionate, enlightened, right thing to do.
Yes, masks, lockdowns, financial strain, business failure, virtual schooling, remote work and vaccine mandates are all are big impositions that sum to a bigger sacrifice. But we owe it to the most vulnerable among us to do everything in our power to make sure they have the best possible chance of staying healthy and surviving. Everything else is repairable or replaceable… lives aren’t. Full-stop.
More than that, think about the pressure COVID’s putting on our hospital system. Nurses and docs are burning out at record rates. The last thing we need is to strain an already-strained system, or worse, run out of beds. So we do whatever we can to stop the spread.
And remember, pandemics are tricky. If we don’t take proper precautions, there’s the ever-looming possibility of COVID spiraling out of control. And that’s a world-stopper.
All that’s… pretty fucking inarguable. There’s no pain like the chronic sickness or death of a loved one. It’s a gaping, gushing, soul-level wound that stirs the worst and uncomfortably numbs. A height of suffering to be avoided whenever and however possible… well-worth some inconvenience. People are resilient – we’ll manage.
The Second Philosophy:
Masks, lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations, virtual schooling and other restrictions are well-intentioned overreactions that do more harm than they prevent. While every life lost is a tragedy, those lives have to be weighed against all of the damage and suffering these restrictions impose on all of humanity… and the latter outweighs the former.
…
Let’s break that down.
Masks force your own hot, stale, sometimes-stank breath back up your nose and against your cheeks… continuously shoving vented waste back in your face. This sucks, though it’s tolerable for a few minutes at a time, a few times a day. But for the many, many millions of people who have to keep masks on for hours at a time while working hard and/or having to be polite in the process, this is way more than a minor irritation. It’s a constant, grating frustration lumped on top of an already-demanding responsibility that makes everyday life materially-worse. Enduring this day-in and day-out over weeks/months/years is going to have an ongoingly cumulative, increasingly negative effect on anyone’s mental health – it’s mindfuck by a million paper cuts.
More than that, masks prevent us from seeing each others’ expressions. This sounds minor, but most of our real communication (including the best, most important parts) is non-verbal – done through body language and subtext. It’s what conveys emotion, intent and vibe – i.e. the feeling fuel of relationships. When you take away a person’s ability to see another’s face and force them six feet apart, you’re taking away a LOT – preventing communication and connection that could’ve otherwise happened. It saps something beautiful from life… something that makes it truly worth living.
Then there are the lockdowns. We’re inherently social creatures, so forcing distance and isolation on us is toxic. On top of that we’re already a connectively-stunted, distanced generation, so legally imposing more separation is basically like fire-hosing rocket fuel on a social dumpster fire.
Lockdowns have also financially devastated millions and destroyed hundreds of thousands of businesses. While it’s easy to say “money-is-replaceable-but-lives-aren’t” from a comfortable distance, the real, ground-level morality of this isn’t so simple.
Most people are living in debt, paycheck-to-paycheck. The next-largest group has maybe 1-2 months of savings. These two groups represent most of humanity.
So most people literally can’t afford lockdowns. They make getting life basics much harder (or impossible), drive them deeper into debt and result in all kinds of crushing anxiety and other thought-darkeners. If you can’t afford what you need to not suffer without having to constantly hustle and fear creditors, your life isn’t really your own – it’s a never-ending series of urgent obligations and looming disaster. Life like this isn’t an inconvenience – it’s misery.
Destroyed businesses are even worse. People who build their own businesses infuse huge parts of themselves… of their souls… into them. They eat, sleep and breathe them. These businesses are much more than a simple means of making money… they’re profoundly personal extensions of self. When they go under, the owners aren’t just losing livelihood, they’re losing purpose… part of their essence. Telling people who’ve gone out of business “that-sucks-but-don’t-worry-you-can-rebuild” is tone-deaf whitewashing of suffering and an epic missing of point – technically true, but realistically false.
Next there’s remote schooling. Expecting parents and children to peacefully coexist in-house, all day, while parents remote work/parent and kids remote school/kid isn’t just unreasonable… it’s savage. Brutal even. Not only is it a worse way of educating and socializing children, but a pressure-cooker of parents who can’t reasonably be expected to effectively work & parent simultaneously. The rules governing family and work/school life are very different from each other (and tend toward opposite)… expecting people to continuously switch between the two without a critical loss of attention quality is folly (and quality really matters here). Force-intermingling work and social life is rarely a good idea, but imposing it on parent-child relationships is poetic 💩.
Next are the vaccine mandates. Even if you agree that legally compelling vaccination is the right move now, it sets an amazingly dangerous power precedent. Humanity is reliably terrible at governing itself. We’re… not good with power. At all. We’ve shown relatively little responsibility, competency, accountability or maturity growth wielding it over our ~5,000 years of written history. Forcing people to get things injected into their bloodstream is a slippery slope. It WILL be abused in the future… and not for the greater good.
Finally there’s the utter lack of data we have on mRNA vaccines, because they’re a brand-new technology. Using newborn tech to interact with our genetic code… isn’t a great idea. Fun fact: it usually takes humans a few passes at new technology to really get it right… and making even one mistake with genes is potentially disastrous.
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So, the real question:
Which philosophy creates less suffering?
It’s…
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The ultimate pain caused by every single COVID sickness and death, multiplied by every COVID sickness and death on Earth,
*PLUS*
The severe strain on the hospital system and the ongoing danger of overflowing emergency rooms,
*PLUS*
The looming possibility of COVID spiraling out of control if we don’t take adequate measures to stop it.
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VS.
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The cumulative psychological effects of masks on the millions of people forced to keep them on under stressful conditions for hours at a time, days/weeks/months in a row,
*PLUS*
The sapped communication and millions of missed/ruined opportunities caused by masks and social distancing,
*PLUS*
The mental and emotional health damage done by forcing isolation on millions/billions of people,
*PLUS*
The financial strain/devastation/ruin of millions/billions of people,
*PLUS*
The financial AND personal devastation of the millions of people who lose their businesses,
*PLUS*
The decreased effectiveness and increased social isolation remote schooling imposes on millions of kids, at critical points of their development,
*PLUS*
The stress and psychological strain of forcing millions of parents to work & parent simultaneously (remembering that these are very different, mostly-opposite social sets),
*PLUS*
The dangerous precedent vaccine mandates set,
*PLUS*
The as-yet unknown effects mRNA vaccines will have on the millions/billions who will receive them (remembering that we’re not great with brand-new tech and that genetic manipulation has a razor-thin/basically-zero margin of error).
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🤔
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😬