Anti-Mask League of San Francisco
Back in the 90&#x27;s, artist Jenny Holzer famously wrote, &quot;Lack of charisma can be fatal.&quot; The problem in the current pandemic isn&#x27;t the science, it&#x27;s that the quality of people in leadership roles is not sufficient for people to align behind them and move together. The explanation with the most predictive power in all of this is that the (mostly conservative) anti-mask people today are the visible face of what is really an anti-lockdown movement. They are revolting against what they perceive to be unworthy leaders, who demand they sacrifice their livelihoods and accept the direct consequence of generational poverty, to protect a group of people (upper middle boomers) who express open contempt for them.<p>Johnathan Haidt&#x27;s old &quot;Righteous Mind&quot; was one book that talked  about some of these values and mindsets. The mindset also means that they are willing to take a %0.003 risk of death to continue to provide prosperity for their families and communities, but accepting poverty for their families and communities at the behest of people they perceive as not taking the same risk is anathema.<p>They co-operated in initial stages of the pandemic when the viable action reinforced their cultural heroic understanding  of action, but leadership everywhere has forfeited that by using the pandemic as leverage for a pre-existing social management agenda, and now we&#x27;ve got anti-mask protests.<p>A few years ago, I had a conversation with someone from the Sierra Club about whether they thought better technology could resolve the climate crisis and whether they&#x27;d be interested in a VC model for investing in moonshot green tech. Their response was it wouldn&#x27;t matter because the technology would not provide mobilization for the true goal of global justice. That deceit ended my support. This same conversation is happening everywhere about the pandemic today.<p>The various conspiracy theories around masks are expressions of this underlying dynamic. If we want to contain the pandemic, there are absolutely ways to do it, but if people find their leadership is using deception against them, the pandemic will be the least of the risks our societies will face, in my opinion. It will have truly been a lack of charisma that was fatal.