One More Kick To The Horse Corpse

I had been hesitant to write anything about masks for some time now, figuring that horse corpse had been sufficiently beaten. But when I saw the governor of Oregon is now pushing for a permanent mask mandate, I thought I might give that horse a kick or two more to the ribs.

Bad ideas spread like viruses, particularly to those not yet inoculated from stupidity. Though this permanent mask mandate has begun as a whisper in a damp corner of the United States, it is quite possible other Democratic controlled states will now be in a race to outdo one another in insanity. Since I live in such a blue state, I want to share just a few thoughts on why we should toss the mask thing stat.

Emotional Disconnection

Iain McGilchrist wrote a fantastic, and fantastically long, book entitled The Master and His Emissary (Yale University Press) where he compares and contrasts the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Each hemisphere has a specific way of viewing the world, almost as if they are separate personalities, which share their perceptions with the other to form an integrated understanding of the world. 

In general, the right hemisphere is open to the world, sees itself in relationship to it and allows the complex realities which it finds to exist in suspension, in a constant state of flux and nuance. It is always looking for new information, new thoughts, even ones which are seemly contradictory to each other. Part of what it takes in it shares with the left hemisphere via the corpus callosum for processing and verbalization. Understanding happens in the right brain along with our sense of connection to the outside world, other beings and our environment. One of the ways it establishes this position is by perceiving others’ emotions through nuances of body posture, inflections in voice, connotations of meaning and metaphor.

The left hemisphere, on the other hand, can only process what it is given by the right and makes the most use of itself by articulating what the right brain understands. Speech is largely in the left hemisphere (97% for right handers, 60% for lefties). The left is unable to deal with this more ethereal part of experience and take meanings to be literal, specializing in analysis and repetitive tasks. Schizophrenia and autism both tend to be dysfunctions of the right hemisphere leaving the left sided analytic, hyperreal experience which is indicative of both pathologies. 

As pertaining to our attention, the right brain is a powerhouse, able to process large quantities of information at one time and does so wicked fast. It is responsible for the 97% of the visual field which makes up the peripheral vision. This manifests literally by its peripheral awareness – where such things as predators, food, and other relationships are most likely to enter our worlds – and figuratively, by looking for new information, ideas, thoughts, and connection of the self to the world at large. The left hemisphere has the central 3% of our visual field, which focuses on a specific task, whatever is in front of us.

In conjunction with connecting the self to the world, the right brian also takes the leading role in communication – not the explicit, verbal communication, but the implicit, non verbal. For example, if you and I are having a conversation, before you speak your right brain would pull from your emotional state and manifest those emotions in facial expressions, posture and tone of voice. My right brain perceives these micro manifestations of your emotional state and has processed them at a lightning fast 1/10th of a second. A flare of the nostril, a knitting of the brow, a clenching of lips, and my right brain is on it. I may not know the reason for your emotional state yet, since you haven’t said anything, but our right brains have already set the mood of the conversation long before any situational analysis can take place by the left. 

It gets a little crazier. Just 1/10th of a second after my right brain interprets your emotional state, my right brain mounts an emotional response and arranges my 43 facial muscles, body posture, inflection of voice and communicates back to your right brain. So just after 2/10ths of a second and our right brains are engaged in conversation. This type of conversation between right brains is called primary process communication and is the most important thing happening in any conversation, more than any words that are shared, especially if the conversation is meaningful and deep. No words need be spoken for this to happen.

Imagine you and I engaged in conversation, your right brain speaking the deep things through subtle movements in lips, chin, eyes and brows, and my right brain receiving and connecting empathically to you, reciprocating the emotion through my own facial expressions to create a moment of shared understanding between us. This incredibly intricate, meaningful and relational moment is the foundation of interpersonal relationships which is how we come to know ourselves and others.

Now imagine we are wearing masks.

Face Flag

Flags are symbols of a country’s values. They are carriers of meaning. Our own flag, the “Old Glory,” has 50 stars representing 50 states and 13 stripes for 13 original colonies; the white, red and blue colors stand for purity, valor and perseverance, respectively. The American flag is a symbol of our shared history, pride and values. The mask is the new American flag, burgeoning with symbolism of its own. Others have made this point first and I echo this sentiment. 

Replacing the red, white and blue, the national colors of this new flag are yellow, grey and black standing for the cultural values of fear, credulity and submission. Black representing our commitment to the fear of death, grey for the naïve trust in feckless leadership, and yellow for our fawning submissiveness. We have constant reminders of these cultural values on every half face we see.

Masks force us to see our fellow humans as nothing more than vectors – organisms which transmit disease. Every cough is the cocking of a shotgun, every sneeze is a spray of nerve gas, and every person is an unpinned grenade. We cannot shake a hand, open a door, or stand in line without wondering who is carrying what disease around us. All we can think about when we see a mouth is the covid coming out of it. Breathing is disease venting; laughter is happy coughing; sneezing, a small of act of genocide. And don’t get me started on singing. So the mask is a symbol of the disease carrier, a new fundamental identity which we are all mandated to acknowledge.

We wear masks because we don’t want to die. I want you to wear a mask so I don’t die. We each wear this mask to symbolize our solidarity of commitment to this crippling fear. Masks are a constant reminder of this fear of death that perches on our shoulders like an inky black raven, whispering fear with a gurgling croak. They are representative of the new value of our commitment to not dying ever.  

Grey is the color of a childish credulity. An alcoholic, if he remains in his state for too long, will burn bridges and destroy trust in his relationships. Not only does his family have the right not to trust him after repeated failures, to continue to do so would be enabling behavior, good for neither the drinker or the daughter. Similarly, the federal and some local governments have destroyed trust through the politicization of the virus, using as their mantra “never let a good crisis go to waste,” while they soak up all the power the people spilled as we clutched for our pearls. 

If we can remember back to the beginning, waaay back to March of 2020, the purpose of masks was to spread out the infection rate so as to not overwhelm the healthcare facilities. They were never meant to keep people from getting covid, mostly because they can’t. Apart from a few major cities, hospitals were demonstrably not overwhelmed. In fact, in my neck of the woods, large off site facilities were built to handle the heaps of coughing covid patients, only to be disassembled a few months later, unused. Some would call that decidedly underwhelmed.

In fact, the moving of goal posts has been the only consistent message we are receiving. We went from masks are unnecessary, to 14 days to flatten the curve, then it was trumped up to social distancing and lockdowns, canning “non-essential” businesses, and limiting access into the few that remained open. When the glimmer of hope that was the vaccines came on scene, the goal post was changed again and masks continued despite falling numbers, bored hospital employees and a survival rate which, if it were a senior’s GPA, would have the student giving the valedictorian speech at graduation and heading off to the Ivy League school of their choosing on a full ride.

Not to stray too far from the point, the mask is a symbol of credulity in a government which has squandered the country’s trust. Another word for this is gullibility. The face flag is an assent to a level of trust and belief in the government which it lost a ways back, and to continue to act as though they did not lose it is insane on our part.

That last color of the new flag is a canary yellow. Despite the repeated failures and earned disobedience of the leaders, we still dutifully abide by the rules. Even when we are conscious of the inanity of the masks we still wear them, thinking this self awareness we carry around inside as a small act of resistance. But it is not. The point of masks is not for you to agree to them, but to obey them. Keeping convictions cowering inside yellow hearts is no kind of conviction at all. To wear the mask is to fly the colors.

Flags identify the country of origin to those who fly them. They divide the citizens from foreigners. The division caused by the simple choice to wear a mask or not has transcended race, culture, church and even within families. It is the latest in the line of self-righteous products available for immediate use, and reveals those who are countrymen in solidarity with the flag, and those who are enemies in the ranks. 

Risk Compensation

When we perceive an activity to have risk, we sometimes employ safety measures to diminish the risk. We wear a seatbelt when we drive, elbow pads when we rollerblade, etc. However, this can have the opposite effect as well. Increasing the safety devices can cause a phenomenon called risk compensation, where we increase the risk commensurate with safety features added. So a kid riding his Huffy helmetless on the sidewalk, with the addition of the helmet, will now try to negotiate a 3 foot ramp. The helmet does not offset the risk, rather increases it through false perception of safety.

If masks are as useless as seems to be clear with long term, real world studies, then masks may indeed have the opposite effect intended. An old lady with a frail immune system may attend church, pacified by the perceived safety of a masked congregation, and in fact run into the reality of the ineffectiveness of masks when she gets the VID. On the other hand, if it was clear up front that masks were not mandatory, she would have a clearer and more accurate ability to assess her true risk. 

Now I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t put my sin in some of these masks, so dirty they are. How often do you think half of America, reluctant as they are to wear masks in the first place, actually wash their masks? Some of them are as old as covid itself and have been lung-hocked, sneezed into, infused with nasty burp vapor, spackled with bits of spittle, and whatever funk from the ground they pick up when they are dropped on the floor. Then we adjust them on our face just before we touch the door handle to the auditorium, the sweet, silver haired octogenarian right behind us, coddled with the overabundance of safety in the masked faces around her.

Think again, grandma.

Shut up

The universal symbol for “shut up” is the hand over the mouth. Covering the mouth is symbolic. I may be accused of equivocating here, and that just to cover the mouth with a mask does not in any way imply speech is equally being silenced. They may be right. It may be a complete coincidence the ubiquity of face masks has gone step in step with the parabolic rise in cancel culture, social media silencing and removal of dissenting opinions from the public square. 

I would encourage those who would accuse me of equivocation to walk into a bank wearing a ski mask. Yes, it covers your face, but that doesn’t mean it is symbolic of anything. Geez. Just don’t make any sudden movements and you should be fine. 

Conclusion 

We can look back at the beginning of covid as a time when we were gathering information and chose to err on the side of caution. Such an approach in the face of the unknown is not only reasonable, it is the right thing to do. But as the months crawled by and the death rate was static and our understanding of the disease deepened, the first order of business should have been to get back to business as usual, while maintaining the mask and quarantine protocols only where absolutely necessary, as defined by who was most susceptible.

As the mandates ripened and rotted on the vine, the mask grew into a symbol more than a piece of PPE; it is an identity. It represents solidarity with like-minded individuals petrified of death and a tender footed credulity towards leadership that not only have hoodwinked, but made it clear what they were doing in the meantime. What interactions we do have with each other, are hampered by the sluggishness of verbal exchange, lacking the depth of connection and emotional reciprocity afforded by the right hemisphere.

So what is this going to take? I do not think permanent mask mandates will be a thing nationwide. Not because the current regime isn’t willing, but because they always have a finger to the wind and some of the funky smells their policies have created are starting to waft back toward them. If they want any shot at 2024, they know they need to back off on something, take their victory laps, and move on over to the next existential threat they can scare us with.

Politicians see votes, business see money, and so once we plebeian get our acts together and start running the show again, those other two will follow suit. Taking a stand with thoughtful, respectful disobedience is the only way to inoculate the country from this viral spread of panic.