Perceiving Mask and Vaccine Mandates as Oppression is Psychological Displacement

Covid protection measures are something people feel they can do something about.

Throughout the past 18 months, there have been lots of loud ongoing discussions about freedom, in public venues and on the internet. At the center of these discussions are safety measures like masks and vaccines. While some people have advanced this argument on its face, claiming that mask mandates or vaccine penalties in and of themselves are oppression, others have created elaborate conspiracies to justify the belief, positing that health agencies are misinforming people to facilitate overreach or even going so far as to claim covid-19 doesn’t exist, no pandemic has ever existed, it’s all a genocidal plot.

At the heart of these beliefs is a feeling that people are being exploited and the social contract is breaking down. This feeling is not wrong, it’s very valid. However, the source of this feeling is something that feels larger than people’s ability to change. Central to self-esteem is to feel like we can direct our life to some degree. Covid protections are something people can protest which they feel they can impact in some way. Covid protections feel like a part of the environment that is amenable to change.

By contrast, restaurant workers getting paid 2.13 an hour by law is not something that feels possible to change. Who do you even go to about that? It’s not the restaurant manager’s fault, it’s the law. The law has decided that this sector of the labor force is worth the least and barring the charity of customers to subsidize that wage, restaurant workers can be paid a pittance.

Food has been getting more expensive, and if you read the trade magazines, you’ll find they are full of stories about the major food producers getting sued over price-fixing and wage-fixing. People are going to jail over it. Unfortunately, it’s confined to trade publications, so most people don’t even know. Probably because of advertisers that larger media companies don’t talk more about this story. But if the public did know that our major food producers are driving down wages and driving up prices, and mostly getting off with a nominal fine, what could we do? Who do we go to about being ripped off at the supermarket? It’s not the supermarket’s fault, hell, the supermarkets are some of the people suing, even Mcdonalds is suing.

We know that Exxon has been lobbying morally pliable senators to fight environmental legislation. We know that Chevron has weaponized the legal system against a lawyer who led a class action suit against them, getting the lawyer disbarred and placed under house arrest, so far. Turns out Chevron has its own judges. Like Goldman Sachs who used the legal system punitively against a former programmer. Whistleblower for the NY Fed Carmen Seggara described a judge partisan to Goldman Sachs in her own case wherein she was blowing the whistle on the NY Fed for being biased towards Goldman Sachs. What are we supposed to do when judges aren’t impartial? What can we do when the justice system is compromised?

It’s cliche to talk about the rising wealth inequality, the wages that stagnate while the prices skyrocket. A fifteen-dollar minimum wage isn’t even enough, but it’s too much to get passed by the senate, apparently. Decades of legal concessions to businesses that have allowed increasing consolidation have led to monopolistic positions, which is why we have price-fixing and wage-fixing in agriculture. It’s also why air travel has become a worse experience and banks have consolidated to become too big to fail no matter what crimes they commit. All the protections of the people put in place since the depression have been effectively neutered, the oversight has been captured sector by sector so that industries can police themselves. Insurance doesn’t have to insure anymore, they can delay, or sue, not to fulfill the single reason for their existence. However, predicated on the existence of the insurers, hospitals run by finance are pricing our health care at whatever price point they think the market, distorted as it is by private insurance, will bear. So we have insane drug prices, insane treatment prices, a person who survived a bear attack described dealing with her insurance as the hardest part of recovery. What do we do about this culture of profit-seeking regardless of the human toll? What can we do?

Central to the behavior being described is the demonstration, in action, that our lives don’t have value in and of themselves. The structure of society shows us that our value is only measured in numbers; that if we are too expensive for our insurers they would rather see us die. That the people who employ us will see us dead before they treat our lives as more important than the stock price. We will get fired so that the wages saved can be used to buy back stock. How does anyone confront that?

It’s not like they literally “see” us, and that’s the central part of the issue. It’s easy to make these kinds of decisions if all you see are numbers. It’s easy to lie to yourself about the human cost of your choices if you never see them; if all you’re doing is math and clerical work.

What we can confront is the cloth or paper we’re being asked to wear on our faces. That’s within our immediate control. We can confront the minimum wage employees who are telling us about company policy. We can choose not to take a vaccine. We can look at everything resulting from the pandemic and find a reason for our feelings and suspicions that seems approachable. The same with blaming the government in isolation for our economic exploitation.

The cause of our problems is the ideology of a caste. It’s the “Enronization” of business. Pharmaceutical companies will just sell us prescription heroin. Insurers will hold our lives hostage for something we can’t even control; it’s not people refusing to pay premiums that are the issue, it’s insurers not wanting to act as insurers because they don’t want to spend money; its hospitals administered by financial instruments who have no interest or knowledge about health care beyond its money-making possibilities.

A central tenet of the ideology is that management is the same across any industry. Your hospitals can be run like your movie studios which can be run like your prisons which can be run like your universities which can be run like your snack companies which can be run like your oil companies. It’s all perceived to be the same through the simplification that making the stock price go up and enriching the executive caste is the only thing to think about. As long as stock prices go up you can sell heroin, you can kill people, you can enslave people by paying them subsistence wages and taking all their time, so they have no time or material ability to build anything and are too afraid for their survival to complain.

But this doesn’t feel possible to do anything about. It’s a whole sector of society, colluding together. It’s a whole caste of CEOs and executives and bankers and a government that they are buying. When they cross a line, they pay a fine, which is nothing, always, a small percentage of what the crimes bring in. So the crimes are always worth it and the government is effectively getting its take. In reality, the crimes cease to become crimes, they’re only crimes on paper at that point. The caste has its own judges, its own prosecutors, its own senators, its own law enforcement.

It’s not exploitation purely by wages, it’s also our time, the commuting at our cost, the 40 hours doing a job that can be done in 20, maintaining a low amount of staff so that the existing employees can work 60 hours rather than 30. Our time isn’t respected, which is a harder thing to articulate because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that time is something that can be sold. It’s easier for us to say that the time isn’t being compensated adequately than to say that the premise of selling time, in and of itself, is unnatural and immoral. Your time is your life, all you have is your time. Your time cannot be adequately compensated by money. It’s not the same thing to sell your time as selling your labor or the products of your labor, but it’s been labeled as the same thing.

We feel the effects of all of this but it’s hard to face in total because it feels like something we can’t do anything about. And not being able to do anything about something that’s causing negative feelings is bad for our self-esteem. What does feel like something we can get our arms around is being told to do something, being told to wear a mask, or take a vaccine. And if it’s not rational on its face to protest health measures, we can reason it into being rational, we can find spokespeople for whatever opinion we want to have. That’s how self-esteem works.