It is ingrained in human nature, for whatever reason, to do the opposite of what one is told–particularly if that form of telling is severe or threatening. Sure, of course, there are those token groups of lemmings that happily comply with whatever they’re instructed to do, for it’s much easier than thinking for themselves or going to the trouble of making their little heads hurt in so doing. But, for the most part, rebellion seems to be encoded in the collective DNA (unlike, say, an immunity to coronavirus). The innate need to go left when one is told to go right, to do what’s bad for them specifically because they, like Simba, laugh in the face of danger. It’s a means for them to test and push boundaries, the same way children do when they bait their parents to react, thereby ascertaining how far the “limits” can be stretched.
Perhaps that irksome child-like nature within each of us never really leaves. The one that seems to switch on instantaneously when an authority figure–in this case, the government–tells us: “Don’t you fucking dare push that button.” At which point, we immediately do. Because, to boot, some part of us always feels as though we’re being lied to by our government. A skepticism that surged within American consciousness after JFK was assassinated (just ask Bob Dylan about that) and only appeared to augment as time went on. Case in point: the present. At which time pretty much everything in every major city has been shut down. Yet somehow, the people still find a way to defy the “strong message” their government is sending them (though it will never be as necessarily strong as locking violators in cages, Philippines-style). Because, in essence, telling people not to go outside is the new telling them not to smoke (we’re talking analog smoking because vaping is just too much bullshit to incorporate). They know it might (and probably will) kill them, but it just “feels too good” not to (which goes to show how lackluster and monotonous sex is in terms of being a reason to motivate denizens to stay inside).
The graphic warnings that have only become all the more graphic (namely in Europe, with images that could cause nightmares) over the years on cigarette packs offering such “fortune cookie”-like statements as, “Smoking reduces blood flow, which can cause erectile dysfunction,” “Smoking reduces blood flow to the limbs, which can require amputation,” “Smoking causes type 2 diabetes, which raises blood sugar” and “Smoking causes age-related macular degeneration, which can lead to blindness.” To the person still smoking and going outside in the current climate, there can be no denying how much they’re splooging over the thrill of a double “fuck you.” Especially since smoking leads to the sort of underlying conditions that beckon to COVID-19.
So why this overt insurgence? Maybe it pertains to what Don Draper in Mad Men insisted wasn’t–couldn’t be–true (at least with regard to how to sell the masses shit they don’t need): that most people have a latent death wish. As the psychologist brought in for research marketing tries to explain to a balking Don, “Before the war, when I studied with Adler in Vienna, we postulated that what Freud called the ‘death wish’ is as powerful in life as those for sexual reproduction, and physical sustenance.” So yes, perhaps, on the one hand, people want to die and just get this impossible puzzle called life over with. Or, maybe even more than that, they want to prove to themselves that they are immune to death. That the reaper has no authority over saying when they go, just as the government (at least in America) has no authority to tell a person what they can and can’t do. The bottom line for humanity has long boiled down to two things: 1) don’t fucking tell me what to do and 2) don’t talk to me about my mortality.
Where the U.S. is concerned, an additional stratum to the problem of trying to “control” anyone by telling them to self-quarantine stems from the long-standing “Ayn Rand philosophy” that has thrived there whether anyone wants to address it or not: society is tailored to the individual not the community. For that, in large part, is why capitalists do so well in the “Land of the Free.” Furthermore, individual success cannot thrive when one is concerning himself with the well-being and safety of others (of the classification Rand would file under “moochers”). But obviously, as this pandemic has shown, without a community able to buy, the individual has nothing to sell, rendering him just as useless as he believed the peons to be before understanding the full weight of their “symbiotic” relationship to him.
The Objectivism that has rendered coronavirus as a blacklight on the cum-stained economic and health care systems in the pay-by-the-hour hotel that is America directly correlates to the other reason so many are flouting the “harsh warnings” not to go out. That reason being: they’re all lonely and searching for a connection they still think can be found in the face-to-face interactions that, if you’ll remember correctly, could also leave one feeling just as hollow as before. Yet, another Psych 101 condition of human nature, apart from pressing the button one is not supposed to, is that anything forbidden automatically becomes more desirable. Sure, humans talked a good game about not needing anyone else but now that they can’t need someone even if they wanted to, such a notion looks all shiny and new again.
So no, just as you could not talk a smoker out of smoking (remember Debi in that 90s PSA where she smokes her cigarette out of a hole in her neck?), you cannot talk an American out of going outside in the midst of a pandemic. For, in the end, it is always via “the hard way” method that humanity prefers to learn (despite being accused of a general laziness in the twenty-first century). Because more than masks and PPE, it is a straightjacket and a cage everyone needs to keep them out of harm’s way. Alas, returning to the Mad Men point above, Betty Draper died of lung cancer after continuing to smoke in the face of the warnings, so what does that tell you? The death wish is as preprogrammed as defiance.
