Social Contract theory — rebel, rather than ask permission to operate livelihoods — during the COVID pandemic?

© 2020 Peter Free

 

10 August 2020

 

 

Remember the Social Contract concept?

 

Lexico describes it this way:

 

 

An implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection.

 

Theories of a social contract became popular in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries among theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a means of explaining the origin of government and the obligations of subjects.

 

© 2020 Oxford Dictionary, social contract, Lexico.com (visited 10 August 2020)

 

 

The most basic idea is . . .

 

. . . that Government popular governs by popular consent and only by following through on providing us with things that we cannot otherwise do for ourselves.

 

 

So . . .

 

What has most visibly happened to the Social Contract idea, during the COVID-19 pandemic?

 

Yes, it's completely gone:

 

 

Today, we've got Government telling us not to go out — or, if we do, to wear masks — with some hints that we will soon be ordered to wear masks inside our own houses.

 

We're not to open many of our businesses, if they're of the kind that crowd people together in historically normal ways — and — if we do open our livelihoods — we're told to make radical changes that will reduce their economic sustainability by at least 75 to 80 percent.

 

By no means, should we travel from some states to other states because, you know, some of us are vermin who carry disease.

 

We also have to be willing to accept police interference in our to-and-froing, wherever those outside forays might go.

 

 

What are we getting in return for subjecting ourselves . . .

 

. . . to this Liberty-crushing onslaught?

 

Blazing incompetence, flaring lack of concern, and the escalated destruction of Freedom.

 

Amid a growing economic depression that Government and Oligarchic Establishment constructed entirely by themselves.

 

In short, we've got the most incompetent, unmotivated and dictatorial bunch of Robber Baron and Mussolini types running most of the American COVID episode.

 

 

Now, ask yourself the obvious question

 

 

If the plutocratic establishment:

 

 

refused to prevent and prepare for

 

such an exceedingly obvious biological possibility

 

despite

 

the threat's glaring national security implications

 

and if

 

government additionally refuses to investigate

 

COVID's actual epidemiology of transmission

 

as well as

 

its true (and not made up) severity indicators

 

such as

 

contagiousness, morbidity, mortality and rates of maiming . . .

 

 

. . . does it make any sense (at all) that Government subsequently be allowed to violate Constitutional principles, so as to offset its own willful incompetence?

 

Hmmm?

 

 

Do you see even a trace of bargain — and popular consent to it — in this state of affairs?

 

Our freedoms have gone by the wayside.

 

We no longer have a right to make a living.

 

Or to go much of anywhere, without worrying about the American Gestapo descending in its full military gear to thwart us.

 

You and I, my friend, exclusively exist to serve Government and the Capitalist Super-Predators who own it.

 

Of this general situation, J. D. Tucille at Reason wrote:

 

 

[S]ubmission is harder to come by when the stakes are so high.

 

The government is actually ordering people to refrain from earning their keep, and instead to humbly submit to bankruptcy and beggary.

 

To some, submitting to the rules can look foolish and suicidal—like baring your throat to a predator.

 

© 2020 J. D. Tucille, Americans Are Growing Less Willing To Beg for Permission To Make a Living, Reason (10 August 2020)

 

 

Sturgis is an example of Mr. Tucille's observation about refusal to submit

 

I have mentioned before that American Authorities' response to COVID have been so blazingly lame and inexplicably idiotic that the United States is essentially running a series of uncontrolled, unreasoned public experiments in SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology.

 

The 250,000 person — mostly maskless and not at all socially distanced — Sturgis motorcycle gathering in South Dakota is merely the latest of those inadvertent pandemic experiments.

 

 

The moral? — It would be "us" against "them" . . .

 

. . . if many of us were thoughtful and courageous enough to accurately separate the two.

 

With regard to that question, Jamie O'Neill — a partisan Democrat from what I can discern — recently wrote a clever column that applies to the entirety of the mostly quiescent American public.

 

It takes Martin Niemöller's "they came for . . ." form.

 

I recommend the blurb, even if I interpret it more broadly than O'Neill probably intended:

 

 

Jaime O'Neill, They Fucked Up Everything. And We Did Nothing, Smirking Chimp (09 August 2020)