On being forced to live by lies.
The Top Reason I Hate Masks Is Because They Force Me to Live By Lies. Joy Pullman, writing at the Federalist.
Being forced to wear a mask is being forced to communicate that I support treating COVID-19 as if it should take priority over everything else in life. That's not only false, but evil…
Citizens’ assistance to a lying and oppressive regime, Havel says, changes those who corrupt themselves in this way: “they may learn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable and, ultimately, so they may — with no external urging — come to treat any non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack on themselves, as a form of dropping out of society.”
In other words, falsifying reality brings about more of that falsified reality. It’s the same dynamic as gang initiations requiring initiates to commit crimes. Once people have compromised themselves, they are more likely to identify with their compromise, because it’s embarrassing to admit you were wrong. So instead, people double down. They heap onto their initial cowardice the additional cowardice of refusing to admit they could have been wrong.
This also helps account for the viciousness with which people often treat dissenters. Dissenters are living proof that everyone does not have to comply, that it is possible to live in the truth. This shames those who have chosen temporary comfort over noble sacrifice…
I wrote about similar themes in a May 5 email:
…Seeing how high “honesty” ranked [in a strengths self-assessment report from Via] helps explain why masking is so hard for me…
I feel like I’m lying with my face every time I interact with someone while wearing a mask, because it feels to me like wearing it is endorsing the positions that
a) it’s okay for the government to tell people what to do with their bodies and
b) there’s evidence that masking helps reduce infections,
both of which are false.
And not-lying is very, very important to me. So it’s a huge violation of my values.
