PLEASE FORGIVE SPACING PROBLEM IN FORMATTING.
My friend publicly stated, "Leave it up to the individuals."
I responded publicly with the portion below in italics. The rest is published here only:I remember a couple of weeks ago you saw a bunch of "individuals" doing that--and you being infuriated.
The core flaw in that individual approach is what you term, "selfish bastardness." The intent of mitigation is not protecting oneself, but rather protecting OTHERS and THE COMMUNITY. That's the flaw in libertarian/individualist thinking--it turns people so self-oriented that they literally, though often unwittingly, lose sight of that core factor.
This is part of why ALL libertarians--at least those who are not total sociopaths--are to some degree conspiracy theorists. Because reality blasts the viability of their self-focus to pieces, they have to come up with some reason why normally decent, rational, intelligent people sometimes do indecent, irrational, and/or utterly stupid things. And it has to be something that can be handled humanly--it can't be human nature or a Satanic influence. So they come up with two types of explanations:
1. Existence of various forces alleged to actually control people,
2. Stories that an alleged threat to the community actually isn't a threat.
In the current situation, Type 1 has gone so far as to deny the germ theory of disease. After all, if this virus is real and easily spread, then libertarianism/individualism collapses. So it CAN'T be real. Type 2, of course, is pointing to the flawed early models and motivations of certain "experts."
Type 1 is nuts. Type 2 makes very legitimate points--a few of which I agree with. I certainly believe certain people have a lot of questions to answer--preferably under waterboarding. The problem, though, is that the virus is real, and our elected leaders have set a public policy. You might have come to disagree with it, BUT the science of the policy is valid (based on information available at the time), and such emergency authorities do exist. It is wrong to lop in excesses by local yocal jerks or even state governors with legitimate mitigation guidelines. To do so is part of how the term "kneejerk" came to be associated with conservatives.
I won't try here to answer all the questions. I hope, though, that this short introduction to the subject will help in showing the fallacy that libertarian/individualist thinking has introduced into the subject.
