Freedom = Risk (or, Why Uncle Jerry Won’t Wear a Mask)

For many of us who think wearing a mask in a pandemic is the most sensible, obvious thing in the world, it’s perplexing and frustrating to watch mask-wearing become a political issue. How did this happen? As others have pointed out, it has to do with the way not wearing a mask gets equated with a certain idea of freedom that’s familiar to us in the U.S., one that has coalesced, for example, around guns. More specifically, though, I think it’s because “freedom” has come to mean “risk,” especially unnecessary risk, and that pro-gun rhetoric is one of the key places in U.S. culture where this transformation has taken place. 

(Quick note to fellow academics: These are new ideas I’m playing with so they’re still forming and fixing. I’m aware of many books on these topics that I’ve kept in the background (scholarly work on the “risk society” and neoliberal ideas of privatization and responsibilization, openness and citizenship), but I’m sure there’s also good work I’m not yet aware of. I’d welcome being pointed to them, if you’re inclined.)

The connection between pro-gun ideas of freedom and the no-maskers has been made by lots of others. In a NY Times opinion piece, Charlie Warzel spells it out like this: 

As in the gun control debate, public opinion, public health and the public good seem poised to lose out to a select set of personal freedoms. But it’s a child’s two-dimensional view of freedom — one where any suggestion of collective duty and responsibility for others become the chains of tyranny.

This idea of freedom is also an excuse to serve one’s self before others and a shield to hide from responsibility. In the gun rights fight, that freedom manifests in firearms falling into unstable hands. During a pandemic, that freedom manifests in rejections of masks, despite evidence to suggest they protect both the wearers and the people around them. It manifests in a rejection of public health by those who don’t believe their actions affect others.

The “no masks” crowd, like the “more guns” crowd, sees freedom so completely in terms of individual choice that it obliterates any sense of collective responsibility. This view of freedom kills any acknowledgment that one person’s seemingly private actions could have dire public consequences. 

But the deeper and scarier insight into this version of freedom is the idea that freedom equals risk, especially unnecessary risk. That is, to really be free, you have to be willing to put yourself (and your family) in danger. It’s a fun-house mirror version of how society works or should work.

That said, there’s an element of truth to the freedom = risk equation. To be free in body & mind you have to be willing to take risks: the risk of meeting new people and being open to them, of trying new things, of sampling new ideas that risk toppling your old ones. Throughout history people living under oppressive conditions have risked escaping to new places with more freedoms. In all these cases, though, risk is something a person goes through to get to a place of wider freedoms. But in the worldview I’m talking about, risk itself is freedom, not simply a road to freedom: the risk of carrying a gun when you’re not in danger, or the risk of not wearing a mask when you are.

This level of freedom = risk thinking comes partly from reactionary anti-government views. As Michael Lewis discusses at length in his most recent book, The Fifth Risk, the government’s main job is managing the incredibly complex risks of a society that drives, flies, mass-produces food and toys and heavy equipment, stores nuclear weapons, sets monetary policy, and on and on. All these things carry risks to individuals and groups, and the government acts to mitigate these risks. And since “freedom” has come to mean “freedom from government interference” for a large segment of the population, especially on the right, freedom also means rejecting risk mitigation and accepting higher risk levels.

But since it sounds crazy to come right out and say that you want your and your family’s lives to be riskier, the freedom = risk belief system requires some rhetorical sleight-of-hand, which has been internalized by many as a form of self-delusion. Nowhere is this more true than in gun culture.

Having a gun around is risky. Carrying a gun in your daily life is incredibly risky. Yet an entire industry exists to tell people that guns make them safe and free. Jump onto the NRA website and count the number of times you see “freedom” and “liberty” and you’ll lose count pretty quickly. The constant mantra of the US Concealed Carry Association is “stay safe,” with the presumption that carrying is the way to do that. But scratch the surface of either claim and it falls apart completely. Putting more bullet-shooters into society is obviously going to cause more people to get hit by bullets. Carrying a gun makes you less free because you can’t move, dress, or think in your usual ways. (I wrote an article about this). And yet, for millions of people, keeping a stockpile of guns and ammo at home and/or living an armed life is the height of safety, the height of freedom. Risk, dishonestly packaged as safety, is freedom. 

But the reason that the freedom = risk equation shows up in multiple places, from the more-guns crowd to the no-maskers, is because it has deep cultural and intellectual foundations. It travels easily from one domain to another because it’s a value many of us have internalized. 

In the economic domain, the fiction of bootstrapping and the racist demonization of welfare recipients have convinced us that financial risk is moral and free, while accepting public assistance comes from personal failings and makes us “dependent.” In other words: freedom comes from risk, and accepting something from the government that mitigates risk makes you less free.

In Christianity, personal sacrifice, even at the level of one’s death, is the ultimate expression of love for others. Risk is love. And while this particular equation (risk = love) doesn’t map easily onto no-mask logic, it does provide another example of the ways risk gets twisted into something good. A quick example: I get regular emails from the US Concealed Carry Association, and a recent one includes this line of reasoning, which I’ve seen repeatedly:

Carrying a firearm is an act of LOVE.

When you carry, you’re saying you love your life...

Your family.

And you’re prepared to defend them.

All these ways of spinning risk as a good thing point to deep pathologies in our culture, and they help explain why we’re failing so miserably at stopping the spread of COVID-19. 

Decades of conservative rhetoric – from both Republicans and Democrats – have worked to convince us to take on more personal risk and rely less on collective risk mitigation, with risk defined as responsibility. It’s your personal responsibility to take on mounds of debt to go to college, rather than the collective responsibility of society to make college less expensive. It’s your personal responsibility to own if not carry a weapon to protect yourself and your family, rather than the responsibility of the government to keep you safe. It’s your personal responsibility to own and maintain a car that you must have to travel to work, school, grocery, rather than a collective responsibility for safe & affordable public transport. All these supposedly make us more free, and all definitely put us more at risk in ways that are not strictly necessary. 

One of the darker upshots of all this is how risk connects freedom with death. As Warzel and other writers have pointed out, our reaction to more than 100,000 COVID deaths has been little more than a collective shrug precisely because the seemingly unsolvable problem of gun violence has made us numb to mass death. As a society we’ve decided that death – even of schoolchildren! – is just another item on the price tag of freedom. 

We’ve internalized the idea that extreme risk is not just a component of freedom, but that taking extreme risks is freedom itself.