Any debate over vaccinating against COVID-19 is built on a false premise. That individual freedom is half of the conversation.
We all know the concept of playing the devil’s advocate as the best antidote to group-think. A person takes a position to argue against the majority to help us all get at the best possible decision.
Now we abuse the idea.
In the 16th Century, the Roman Catholic Church began appointing a lawyer to argue on behalf of the devil against the canonization of a proposed saint. Not because they thought the devil needed an advocate, but because they thought devil didn’t have any.
In a practical sense, they were concerned that everybody would go along with the process so they wanted to make sure at least one person was thinking clearly. Just in case.
The thing about the Devil’s Advocate is it assumes group-think will happen. And in deeply hierarchical systems with intense power-structures at the top, it does. If the pope wants somebody to be a saint, he’s going to be made a saint because who has the power to say no?
The Devil’s Advocate wasn’t simply an antidote to group-think, but an intentional check to hierarchical power.
The real power came, not from one individual rebelling, but giving one person the open license within the system to say no to the one in power.
But again, this only truly matters when there is nobody else in the system saying no. The Advocate can say “no” without retribution.
In other words…
It was only necessary when nobody would oppose it.
There are very few places in the United States in which a Devil’s Advocate is needed. In fact, there are an overwhelming number present in nearly every situation. The Devil doesn’t need so many advocates!
We’re seeing the opposite in the pandemic.
So many people playing skeptic for the sake of skepticism. Not because there is proof that masks are ineffective. But for the sake of individualism, liberty, sovereignty, or any other label of dissent we might attribute.
It is easy to mount an argument for a right to not be vaccinated. However, as rights go, it’s a pretty weak one (for it is just as easy to construct an argument for a right to be protected from the unvaccinated). A position which suffers under the weight of actual history. But even this is not the real argument.
The point is that we possess an overabundance of skeptics, heralding their virtue as necessary and celebrating their defiance as an expression of liberty.
We’re offering the individual as a binary partisan position. In other words, we have a whole group claiming to be unique individuals.
Opposition isn’t inherently virtuous
Always in mind, however, are the actual numbers: what percentage of the population is required to make herd immunity possible. Nothing less than 70%. The better low-end guess is 85%. That’s one out of ten, three out of twenty, that can skip the vaccine.
Entertaining every skeptic with their individual liberty doesn’t get us there. It’s like doing a group project of putting together a 1000 piece puzzle and third of the people are just sitting on half the pieces. And claiming they have a right to roll around all over the puzzle we’re trying to do together.
And even more to the point, it isn’t my job to persuade tens of millions of Americans to take one for the team. My job is to get vaccinated. And so is theirs! It is just that one of us is doing his job and the other wants half of the people to be the exception. An exception big enough for no more than 15%. Not 50%.
Imagine if the church didn’t appoint a Devil’s Advocate, but half the people show up to argue for the devil anyway. People on God’s side just up and choosing to argue for the devil, “just because”. There would be no objective reason to fear group-think. Much the opposite. More than group-think would be abolished. So would any progress.
When half of us are advocating for the devil, there can be no saints.
When it comes to eliminating the burden of the coronavirus, the only path is herd immunity. And the only way to achieve that is to make nearly everyone immune. Joining tens of millions in opting out isn’t an expression of personal liberty. It’s collectively gathering to condemn the whole population to suffering.