My Mask: My Rights
face mask (feɪs mɑːsk)
NOUN 1. a mask worn to prevent the inhalation of fumes, or to avoid spreading germs
(https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/face-mask)
2. a symbol of oppressive force, equivalent to slavery and extreme social control, evidence that one is living in fear (unofficial definition - anecdotal only, emerged 2020)
More people have died in the USA than in the First World War. 1.87 million cases have been recorded in Brazil. Across the world, almost 13 million people are confirmed to have been infected by an incredibly contagious disease that attacks the body from every angle, causing pneumonia, heart failure, strokes, and lasting side effects.
Covid-19 has no cure.
Wearing a mask can reduce the distance of exhalations by 90%, which is quite a figure when a single cough can produce up to 3000 potentially disease-carrying droplets. Japan has recorded barely 1000 deaths from Covid-19. Why? Because of their cultural norm of wearing face masks.
And yet Phillippe Monguillot, a bus driver in Bayonne, France, was attacked and killed by passengers on his bus when he told them to wear face masks. Restaurants are being forced to close to prevent their staff from being harassed and threatened by would-be patrons who don’t want to cover their face for a few minutes.
When you remove the rhetoric and strip back the emotions it’s clear that the mask isn’t really the problem here. In what civilised society is asking people to be considerate and wear a face mask so inflammatory a request as to lead to murder?
Refusing to wear a mask is merely one of the symptoms. Requiring personal inconvenience to benefit the collective has revealed the very deep-set clashes of wider transnational attitudes to political power, the economy, cultural and social change, and even race.
Is it naive or is it stubborn to believe that the society in which we live is natural? That institutions of race, religion and politics are unchangeable truths rather than man-made, developed to maintain a status quo benefiting those who had power when it was designed?
I am privileged enough that, for most of my life, these have been questions to think on, read about, and be considered from both sides before reaching a conclusion. That’s part of the system; when even scientists perpetuate a theory developed by colonising countries in the nineteenth-century, what power do we have when we individually question the power structures of capitalism that built the world as we know it?
The foundations of twenty-first-century geopolitics were dug in the era of early ‘exploring’ (read, colonising and committing genocide), built in the nineteenth-century, and reinforced in the Cold War. It was designed to make the merchant and upper classes richer by maximising profit margins of human labour and, crucially, to ensure there were cheap and unending bodies for it.
It came with an intoxicating notion - that power and status are achievable for anyone through single-minded success and hard work. This is still the central message in free-market capitalism; You Can Make It Too! (just as long as you ignore all the systemic restrictions and inequalities that prevent people from ‘pulling themselves up by their bootstraps’ without a significant financial injection to get the ball rolling). In reality, the irony of capitalism is in selling the lie of accessible success. For a system that claims to champion the power of the individual, the structure is remarkably inflexible. Power, as Angela Saini writes in Superior: The Return of Race Science (Saini 2019, p8), is designed to make you believe that the ones with power should naturally keep it, and the ones without power deserve to be at the bottom.
There is a tendency in free-market rhetoric to assume the equivalence of morals as political issues. The propaganda of capitalism has made a persuasive case that poverty and minimum wage employment is an indicator of character flaws rather than the result of systemic inequality. While objectively there is nothing political in stating that during a pandemic there is a collective duty to do the bare minimum and wear a face covering, this imposed behavioural change conflates with the belief that buying power equates to moral superiority. When the power structure of capitalism - exercising individual power to achieve your own ends using the cheap human labour to your convenience - is adopted in the context of a cafe or a shop, these morals somehow become political. Requiring face coverings equates to a refusal to place the consumer above the human labour providing what they want - the antithesis of capitalism.
Then come the unfounded accusations of oppression, of ‘communism’, of ‘slavery’. Oppression does not just exist in terms of what you can and can’t do on public or private property, but the oppression of your own mind. Expert opinions and scientific advice are dismissed. It is another product of capitalist propaganda; when anyone can, theoretically, achieve incredible success above all others, then ‘expert’ advice is merely another competing opinion, bearing no more weight than your own. Being told that your opinion is worth less than the opinion of an expert based on evidence is, to some, akin to being silenced by a tyrannical despot.
Masks have become, in this strange world of 2020, a flashpoint of conflicting ideologies, and much more than a thin flannel for your face. Collectivism is the antithesis of capitalist success, which in itself has been publicly and dramatically floundering in its death throes since the banking crisis of 2008.
For those who still believe in the philosophy of free will and equality of opportunity, collectivist social changes fly in the face of everything positive about capitalism. For the rest of us, who have long been suspicious of or downright disenchanted with the myth of the self-made-man, wearing a face mask is an act of basic human decency to help protect others. In other words, as Matt Haig put it much more concisely; “if you won’t wear a light piece of cloth over your face to enter Tesco in order to save someone’s life, you might be a bit of a wanker”.
