Freedom and the Anti-Vaxx Movement

   A thing like a global pandemic brings out both the best and the worst in us.  The best, as we increase cooperative ventures, pitching in, volunteering, solving problems on the run, in order to  save lives and keep essential services going.  The worst, as individuals retreat within themselves, and create an echo chamber for their own fears and prejudices, both falling prey to, and actively participating in the spread of disinformation on the internet.

The issue I want to focus on is the anti-vaccine movement.  One of the largest components of this movement is made up of young men, age 20 -40, which suggests a group of people who are in good health, feel somewhat invulnerable, and don’t yet feel the full responsibility of raising a family.  They claim that they are motivated by freedom - they wish to be free to act however they want, without being told what they can and cannot do.  This is also a perennial adolescent theme, a theme that originates from being in a protected state where one is free from heavy responsibilities. Since the adolescent is old enough to see opportunities, but is not used to assuming responsibilities, he is not happy with any kind of constraints on his freedom.  So he naturally resents the constraints that his parents impose on him. Once he builds his own life, gets a partner and starts to raise a family, he then should willingly adapt to constraints, because he has now committed himself to being in a relationship and becoming a parent. Or, he rejects those commitments and stays unattached - and thereby becomes more fodder for the anti-vaxx movement or countless other on-line conspiracy theories.

Freedom is what is known as a “contested concept”, a concept that means very different things to different people.  It is a key idea for political ideologies,  as well as for philosophy. The fact is, once we come to interpret freedom in a specific way, we’ve already committed ourselves to an ideological stand; and this works politically as well as philosophically.  In contemporary  conservative ideology freedom is always the individual's; the emphasis is on the individual and his rights: the right to privacy and private property, the right not to be interfered with, and so on. But this relentless focus on the individual downplays the less visible but more widespread costs of certain kinds of individual decisions, such as deciding not to get vaccinated.

Liberal ideology, in contrast, is much more about thinking in terms of systemic causes, emphasizing social institutions such as corporations, governments, class hierarchies,  legal systems and educational systems,and how  they function as barriers or facilitators for the exercise of our freedoms.  It was this definition of freedom that Martin Luther King was using when he alluded to the spiritual line “Free at last” in his famous “I had a dream” speech.

By living in and growing up in human societies, we come to agree to voluntarily limit our behavior for the sake of the common good.  We come to understand that freedom does not mean the freedom to do anything we like.

This “young man’s argument” against vaccination only makes good sense if we view freedom as something that belongs to individuals and don’t see the important context of systemic factors.  Modern populists can easily get away with ignoring systemic factors because, unfortunately for democracy, pandering to ignorance and prejudice  works really well with certain groups of people. The fact is, trying to grasp these systems just makes understanding more complicated - kinda like reality, unfortunately.  In effect, political operatives can get a lot of mileage out of oversimplifying social situations and putting the blame on a convenient target like a low status group. If you stop to think about it, this approach of oversimplifying things is also very attractive to the adolescent mind. To repeat:  adolescents live in a protected environment where they lack experience assuming responsibility and being part of, or interacting with, most (non-educational) social institutions. Ideas about “Public Health” involve understanding the behavior of groups in society, and “infection control” involves knowledge of how the infection is spread in groups, and how targeting certain aspects of group behavior can make a difference to better outcomes.  The idea that we have to take into consideration unanticipated effects of our individual behaviour on other groups of people is anathema to a group of immature individuals who, as it is, are having enough trouble just trying to fit in in their high schools.  

• The recent gate crashing of Canadian Remembrance Day Ceremonies by anti-vaxx groups is a further indication of this aspect of immaturity.  If you don’t understand the importance of pitching in for the public good, then you are  all the more likely to be clueless about  respecting a group of people who have made important sacrifices for their country.  

The contemporary conservative approach of over-emphasizing individual freedom deliberately evades our moral reality.  Adolescents are considered to be not yet adults because we believe they lack the level of maturity required to be fully morally responsible adults. They can resist parental guidance and complain loudly about their lack of freedom, but that comes with a lack of experience of what it means to be morally responsible.  Criminals too, can complain that the laws limit their freedoms.  Whereas adolescents lack the experience and maturity to make good moral judgements, criminals simply don’t care about the negative consequences of their actions.  That’s a good reason not to always take their complaints about limits to their individual freedoms too seriously.

Politically, populists are doing something analogous to adolescents and criminals.  They emphasize individual freedoms and ignore our responsibilities when it comes to the consequences of our actions. Their actions imply that they believe that they should be free to spread lies and misinformation on the internet, and to not get vaccinated, and they just ignore the consequences of these actions when more people get sick with Covid, our hospitals are strained beyond their capacity, and more people die.  This is an actual political strategy of some Republican governors and senators in the United States, and people have died because of it.  

People who don’t trust the government - something very common in the United States - are often the same people who believe in conspiracy theories - those two things - distrust of authority and belief in conspiracy theories, go together.  These are also the same people who are easy marks for Grifter politicians - leaders who have no moral compunctions about spreading lies and undermining democracy in order to gain power.   These so-called “leaders” will bandy about the words “freedom” while totally ignoring or dismissing the negative consequences of their lies. It ends up that the people yelling the loudest about “our freedoms” are the same people who are doing the most to facilitate a one way ticket to  tyranny for the rest of us.