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.