Individual Liberty as a Big Giant Lizard Strategy
“We have to remember the enemy is the virus. Not one another.”
Thus spake the governor of Michigan as the protests against mandated government shutdowns begin.
Consider a theoretically ideal balance between economic health and the war against the coronavirus. The theoretical ideal would likely accomplish having a predictable stream of Covid-19 cases at a rate that doesn’t put health care professionals and resources at risk. It basically flattens the curve “enough,” whatever that means. Workers would be allowed to work as much as possible within that constraint. It might be marked by differing restrictions across groups.
So imagine this Theoretical ideal and get your head around the idea of it existing even though it only exists in theory. Imagine we all agreed on what it was.
Achieving this theoretically ideal balance costs individual liberty. Again and again individuals will have to suppress their needs and their family’s needs for the benefit of the group; and those individuals will not generally agree that small deviations from agreed behavior — their solving family needs — represents a significant enough cost to the theoretical ideal to justify the cost to their liberty.
This is almost exactly the problem with efforts to prevent climate change. We don’t see that our individual contribution to the solution or to the problem is large enough to move the needle. Our behavior feels like a detail the big policy objective could and should overlook. Our individual liberty is a massively important to us, and its impact on the ideal group outcome are small.
We have basically a game theory problem where the right decision for each individual is at odds with the right decision for the group.
This will mean individuals put pressure on the theoretical plan which means there is a 100% chance the US will be too aggressive with reopening our communities, defining “correct” timing in terms of that earlier agreed theoretical Ideal balance.
This is what I meant when I said that the worse this virus scenario ends up being, the better for China (see The Worse the Pandemic, The better for China" in the SEAL BRAIN PINATA ARCHIVES: https://tinyletter.com/danceattakjg/archive ).
China can more closely achieve the theoretical ideal without stepping on their nation’s currently established values—their values include the idea of individuals surpassing their own needs for the good of the party. The US cannot succeed in that same way. We are running this particular race against China with weights on our legs— because we as individual Americans deeply value individual liberty.
It makes me think of how certain evolved advantages are successful in one environment and then less successful when the environment changes. For example, when a meteor hits, giant lizard turns out to be a less successful strategy than itty bitty rodent mammals.
“Communal commitment to the cause” is a better strategy right now than individual liberty. But that doesn’t mean the US will adopt communism. We will try to, briefly, adopt these ideas of “be a hero: stay home.” But ultimately our individual liberty will drive us back out into the world early, and we’ll get kicked in the face by rising coronavirus curves again and again, and I can’t see a better scenario for us than that because of how we are and what our closest held values are. We never have been a nation that does what works; we’ve always just done what we do, and recently, the past couple hundred years, it’s been working. For a bit here, it's not gonna work as well as it had been.