Days of the Virus: The Cost of Individualism

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground,
Mother Earth will swallow you,
Lay your body down.

-- Stephen Stills, from "Find the Cost of Freedom" performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

As of this writing, there have been nearly 29 million cases of COVID-19 and more than half a million deaths attributed to it in the US alone, according to the Washington Post.  Google reports that, worldwide, 2.59 million have died and there have been 117 million cases.  Think about those numbers:  the US represents about 4% of the world population, yet we carry nearly a quarter of all cases and over a fifth of all deaths.  

Anyone paying attention to our country's response to the pandemic should be unsurprised by this.  Every other country with the means to protect itself has done so with a hunger and fear appropriate to the situation.  However, the United States covets its individualism to a degree that has led it deeply into the territory of denial and unnecessary death.  

This phenomenon is not new.  Our body politic organized itself on principles of self-determination.  We've fought wars over an extreme version of this, a perceived "right" to do as we please, regardless of the consequence to ourselves or others.  A quarter to a two-fifths of our population continues to value that "right" above all others.  It's no accident that we struggle with self-preservation that requires behaviors based on collective values.  

Our species evolved out of a tension between the individual and the collective.  Survival strategies based on strength in numbers and being as community are useful; they make attack on and defense against the community very difficult for individuals, which are easily overwhelmed.  Creating cohesive communities, however, tends to reduce variation across the individuals comprising the group, so a weakness in one individual is likely also to end up being replicated across the group, leaving the group vulnerable.  On the other hand, a certain amount of individual variation can counter this by supporting innovation, whether genetic or behavioral, within the group.  A group whose members are not all alike benefits from the varying strengths of its members while reducing the cost of the weaknesses, in a kind of tag-team effect.  That said, variation, in turn, reduces group cohesion; too great a variance within a community and that community falls apart.  Thus, the robustness of a collective is dependent upon a balance between empowering the strengths of the group and those of the individual.  

We, in the US, are far out of balance, as evidenced by our behavior and performance during the COVID-19 epidemic.  The culture of the United States is, according to solid research, the most individualistic (as opposed to collectivistic) in the world, and has been, I believe, since such measures began (around the 80s or early 90s).   Even in the face of an outrageous and unnecessary fraction of our people dying, we seem unable to change.  

Let us consider the cost of our so-called "freedom."