I have never seen anything like it: the shouting down of someone from across a store, the confrontational attitudes on display from normally pleasant individuals, the bullying, the intimidation, the abuse, the altercations that more often than not turn physical, the reporting to police or other authority, all over a useless piece of fabric. The dehumanizing treatment of the maskless is one of the most tragic developments of COVID hysteria. My issue isn’t even about whether the masks even prevent the spread of COVID, it’s the psychological reversion that millions of people seem to have undergone over the past year. There is something tribal and prehistoric about it, and it is frightening. The mindless lashing out at outsiders is something that our species engaged in in the distant past, but something has triggered this suppressed instinct in far too many people. And once that genie is out of the bottle, how to put it back in?
The great danger lies in the apparent willingness of the mask cultists to have non-maskers punished in some way: jail, fine, impoverishment, indefinite internment, etc.. You can see the hatred in their eyes. Not all of them certainly, but enough. And they become angrier the more you point out evidence that proves masks to be ineffective. It’s the reaction you get from a religious fanatic when you begin poking holes in their dogma.
One thing I’ve noticed of just about every mask confrontation caught on video is that the person on the receiving end is almost always a woman who is either shopping by herself or with her children. The abusive mask cultists are either male or female, but there is almost always more than one. And they feed off each other’s energy, escalating their vitriol against the hapless individual woman. This is the behavior of the caveman, of the acolytes of a pseudo-religion or cult, of a superstitious mob, not that of a civilized person with the capacity for rational thought.
