David Roth has a good write-up about COVID vac­ci­na­tions and base­ball. It swings real­ly quick­ly into big­ger ques­tions of per­son­al free­doms and col­lec­tive soci­ety. Speaking about polit­i­cal iden­ti­ties edg­ing out empa­thy and shared pur­pose, he gets to the me/us/them prob­lem and the self­ish­ness that has spread in American society.

[…] 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.

Private Choices Have Public Consequences

I think widen­ing our cir­cle is the next evo­lu­tion­ary hur­dle. Moving from self-interested indi­vid­ual units to a con­cerned col­lec­tive might just be the Great Filter. You have to change the ques­tion “What ben­e­fits me?” into “What ben­e­fits us?” and then also expand who is includ­ed in that ‘us.’ Your answers to lots of ques­tions will change if you can think of ‘us’ as includ­ing every human being and ecosys­tem on this planet.

It involves per­son­al sac­ri­fice which is the antithe­sis of self preser­va­tion. It requires restric­tions to accept sus­tain­able growth instead of unfet­tered expan­sion. It takes con­trol­ling the nat­ur­al course of life and cre­at­ing our own preda­to­ry pres­sures to shape sur­vival — for every­one, not just the fittest.

Anyway, go get vac­ci­nat­ed as soon as you can. I’m get­ting my first dose tomor­row 2021-04-16.