The Difference Between Refusing to Wear A Mask and Civil Disobedience
We are clearly mired in a cultural misunderstanding. Let’s clear it up.
Disobedience is key to the establishment and maintenance of good government.
Disobedience is often the weight-lifting that develops strong muscles in our ability to decide between right and wrong. The locale of this musculature is conscience.
The ability to assess right and wrong is practiced from a young age and we mature in the strength of conscience as we exercise both obedience and disobedience.
However, if the natural process of maturity is stunted by trauma or disruption, disobedience functions outside of conscience.
The interruption of moral maturation forces this process of questioning authority away from the sensitive regard for justice and equality.
When we are disconnected from the empowerment of developing conscience or “becoming”, we find power in control. When personal sovereignty is exercised without sensitivity to justice the result is a “power over” dynamic.
Controlling behavior requires the tender conscience be silenced.
When conscience lay dormant, these controlling behaviors become hardened habit. A power center develops which mimics the substance of conscience. This is ego.
Henry David Thoreau made both conscience and disobedience famous when he refused to pay taxes in support of slavery and war, and articulated his defiance in an 1849 essay, Civil Disobedience.
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislation? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”
This document, although no longer studied as widely as Instagram, has infused a certain flavor into our recipe for American civic action. And just as over time, most teachings develop a cultural component that molds and reshapes the original revelation, so Thoreau’s idea of civil disobedience has undergone a few too many ingredient substitutions to retain its original and impressively formative flavor.
The same way Taco Bell has sold us the flavor of Mexico, the idea of civil disobedience has been hijacked by substituting ego for conscience. American civic action has exchanged the raw and open dialogue of tenderness to equality, for bloody self-will. We have traded the struggle for equal rights for the strife of individual control.
“I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward”.
Men first. What is a man if he is not first a neighbor or brother? What is a man if he is not first considerate, magnanimous? Are men not beholden to one another’s well-being first, before they are bound by a government? Before they are subjected to nationality?
This sentence seems to have undergone a few substitutions of intent in the several generations since publishing. It now somehow sparks fantasies of freedoms enjoyed and warranted by acknowledging that the individual has the right to harm the collective. I think Thoreau would LMAO at the substitution of ego for conscience.
Defiance of an order to wear face-covering is being sold as a noble struggle for justice. It is not.
It is a situation in which rules legislated on the collective, are deemed second to the “deeply held moral decisions of the individual”.
This simply isn’t so. The conscience, or center of deeply held moral decisions, is a function of the sensitive regard for justice and equality. An act of civil disobedience that harms the innate rights of others is a violation of conscience, not a demonstration which strengthens it.
An act of disobedience which degrades the rights of others is a function of the ego. Self- will, self-justification, and blindness to compassion are the ingredients available to many Americans whose moral maturation has been interrupted or abandoned.
We have become mired in a state of confusion about civility itself. Protecting the rights of the individual does not obfuscate or harm the collective. This is a mistake. Let’s fix it.
Anything in American civic cultural literacy that justifies or substitutes the flavor of harm to others, for the substance of conscience, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Is a lie.
When we disobey the rules we call for change. We speak in a loud, persistent voice. We often risk imprisonment, shame, financial penalty when we dare to stiff-arm the power over us. If this is done by ego, it will harm every time. If this is done as a function of conscience we will all go up higher, breathe easier, live longer.