All through the Covid pandemic, anti-mask and anti-lockdown demonstrations have taken place all over the world. While a solid majority of people support the pandemic measures, a vocal minority refuses to accept any restrictions, which they claim violate their notion of personal freedom. Like a lot of bad arguments, it's logically incoherent and consists of patently false assumptions.
One basic formulation of personal freedom is that you are free to do as you please as long as what you do does not impact the freedom and well-being of others. You might think it's your right to drive down to your favourite pub, slam back twelve beers and then drive home. But every society here on planet earth rightfully understands that you have no such right because there is a good chance you will kill someone. This conception of freedom is so basic that every Canadian should have understood this by the time they were in high school social studies.
When it comes to public safety and emergencies, we have given our democratic governments considerable powers to enact temporary measures that are outside the norm for free societies. Prior generations did this because they understood the reality and necessity of the common good - there are some things that benefit us all and require that we all contribute to them. Think of all the restrictions that were put in place during World War II - rationing, wage and price controls, enforced blackouts, etc. These were done so that all resources could be put into winning the war. The public went along because they understood that it was their obligation to aid such a monumental effort, and that their rights would mean nothing if the Fascists won the war and took over. Of course, those sacrifices make the anti-mask, anti-lockdown crowd look hopelessly pathetic. You were told to put on a mask, not storm the beaches at Normandy.
Somewhere in their fevered minds the Covid refuseniks understand this, so they hedge by denying that Covid is a serious problem. This gained a little traction early in the pandemic but as more facts emerged and the death toll mounted, it became a lot more work to deny reality. The result is now a bizarre mishmash of denial, conspiracy, religious fatalism and even social Darwinism, whereby the Musk-worshipping libertarians argue that since most people survive a bout with Covid unscathed, there's no reason or justification to do anything about it. If grandma dies, tough bananas. (It's funny how libertarians pride themselves on their hard-headed realism, all while espousing an absolute fairy tale ideology.) As further evidence that irony is indeed dead, many of the people in the US who refuse to wear a mask because they "won't live in fear" are the same ones who demand the right to carry a gun everywhere because they are afraid Liam Neeson might be coming to kill them.
The notion of freedom as rights without any corresponding obligations should instead be described as simply entitlement. It's entitlement that explains why the people moaning the loudest about freedom only care about what they themselves want and don't extend the concept of rights to what others want. I once received a Facebook meme that listed all the restrictions government had imposed since the 1950s. It was filled with inanities like gun permits, seat belts, fishing licenses. It never occurred to the person who sent it to me to consider the reasons behind those rules, nor did he spend even a moment to ponder all the real freedoms that other people were denied back then - most women couldn't work, we still had residential schools, gays had to hide in the closet, etc. Apparently none of these were as heartbreaking as the tragedy of having to spend a few bucks for a fishing licence.
Inherent in this attitude is a deep, illogical distrust of government , for which we can thank a 40 year propaganda campaign, mainly by the Right, which relentlessly attacked and belittled government and its role in our society, while exalting a self-serving, context-free notion of individual freedom. In this version of reality, government benefits only those who work in it, while doing harm to everyone else. These lies have been so effective it's almost impossible for many people to even conceive of the notion of any sort of shared hardship or common good. This derangement reached its zenith with Trump, whereby he and his supporters blamed every one of his many failures on the so-called 'deep state', claiming that somehow Trump was the persecuted victim of the very government that he headed. To call this line of argument infantile and delusional is a gross understatement.
But it isn't just the fault of the Right. We have had a steady erosion in political debate on all sides, where motives and character are attacked and facts are simply ignored or denied. One need only look back at George W. Bush and the Iraq war. Instead of simply attacking it as a policy mistake - which it absolutely was - the Left attacked Bush's motives and invented secret plots (they want Iraq's oil!). Debate is now little more than personal attacks and conspiracy fantasies. There is no search for truth, only the search for the next sound bite, meme or tweet that insults and mocks your opponents. In this sort of environment, everything gets politicized but nothing gets resolved or accomplished, and every day more people retreat into their own 'safe space' of wilful ignorance.
In his book Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes described a "war of all against all" as the condition humans were in before they organized into societies, and that life was "nasty, brutish and short." His argument was that there is no freedom outside of a society. The idea that we are naturally endowed with rights and the freedom to do as we please is a modern idea, and it is mostly false. While there are a few universal human rights we can likely all agree on, the rest has to be worked out together with our fellow citizens, and the best way to do this is through open, democratic societies. This process is always difficult and it demands that citizens educate themselves and participate to the best of their ability. Above all, it absolutely requires compromise. Our forefathers knew all this, but it looks like it's a lesson we need to learn all over again.
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