Rugged American Individualism is a Myth, and It’s Killing Us

Katherine Wasson

Hastings Center

Originally published 4 June 21

The starkest picture of rugged American individualism is one we learned in school. A family moves West to settle the land and struggles with the elements.  Yet, even in these depictions, settlers needed help to raise a barn or harvest crops. They drew on the help of others and reciprocated in return. In the 21st century few Americans live in any way close to this largely self-sustaining lifestyle. Yet, the myth of rugged individualism is strong and persistent.

The reality for all of us is that none survive or flourish without the help of others. Whether it is within a family, peer group, school, religious institution, or wider community, all of us have been helped by others. Someone somewhere encouraged us, gave us a break or an opportunity, however small.  Some have experienced random acts of kindness from strangers. The myth of rugged individualism, which often means “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps,” is outdated, was never completely accurate, and is harming us.

Holding tightly to this myth leads to the misperception that an individual can do (or not do) whatever they want in society and no person or, perhaps especially, government entity can tell them otherwise. People say, “As long as my choice doesn’t harm anyone else, I should be able to do what I want.” How they know their action does not harm anyone else is unclear and there are examples from the pandemic where personal choice does harm others. In bioethics we recognize this view as an expression of individual autonomy; the freedom to govern oneself.  Yet, such blinkered views of individual autonomy are misguided and inaccurate. Everyone’s autonomy is limited in society to avoid harm to the self or others. We enforce seatbelt and drunk driving laws to these ends. Moreover, that we rely on others to function in society has been made very clear during the pandemic. We need others to provide food and education, collect our garbage, and conduct the scientific research that informs our knowledge of the virus. These contributions support the common good.

We have seen rugged individualism on full display during the coronavirus pandemic. It can lead to a disregard for the worth and value of others. While many people observed public health restrictions and guidelines, others, including some elected officials, refused to wear masks and are now refusing vaccination. Those who cling to their individualism seem to view such restrictions as unnecessary or unacceptable, an infringement on their individual rights and freedoms. They are not willing to sacrifice a degree of their freedom to protect themselves or others. The result has been 33,264,650 cases and 594,568 deaths in the United States and counting. 

The info is here.

Your Ancestors Knew Death in Ways You Never Will

Donald McNeil, Jr.
The New York Times
Originally posted 15 July 20

Here is the end:

As a result, New Yorkers took certain steps — sometimes very expensive and contentious, but all based on science: They dug sewers to pipe filth into the Hudson and East Rivers instead of letting it pool in the streets. In 1842, they built the Croton Aqueduct to carry fresh water to Manhattan. In 1910, they chlorinated its water to kill more germs. In 1912, they began requiring dairies to heat their milk because a Frenchman named Louis Pasteur had shown that doing so spared children from tuberculosis. Over time, they made smallpox vaccination mandatory.

Libertarians battled almost every step. Some fought sewers and water mains being dug through their properties, arguing that they owned perfectly good wells and cesspools. Some refused smallpox vaccines until the Supreme Court put an end to that in 1905, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts.

In the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, many New Yorkers donned masks but 4,000 San Franciscans formed an Anti-Mask League. (The city’s mayor, James Rolph, was fined $50 for flouting his own health department’s mask order.) Slowly, science prevailed, and death rates went down.

Today, Americans are facing the same choice our ancestors did: We can listen to scientists and spend money to save lives, or we can watch our neighbors die.

“The people who say ‘Let her rip, let’s go for herd immunity’ — that’s just public-health nihilism,” said Dr. Joia S. Mukherjee, the chief medical office of Partners in Health, a medical charity fighting the virus. “How many deaths do we have to accept to get there?”

A vaccine may be close at hand, and so may treatments like monoclonal antibodies that will cut our losses.

Till then, we need not accept death as our overlord — we can simply hang on and outlast him.

The info is here.

Cultural evolution, Covid-19, and preparing for what’s next

Michael Muthukrishna

London School of Economics
and Political Science
Originally posted 22 April 2020

Here is an excerpt:

A recent analysis suggests that countries with efficient governments and tight, norm-enforcing cultures have the slowest rate of increase in Covid-19 cases adjusted for population size and the fewest deaths controlling for GDP per capita, inequality, and median age, weighting for time. Together, these explain 41% of the variance. Put another way, societies with institutions that advocate behaviours that reduce caseloads and citizens who conform to those behaviours are successful in managing this outbreak. Countries with institutions with behaviours that do not reduce caseloads and citizens who conform, and countries with institutions who advocate appropriate behaviours, but citizens who do not conform have worse outcomes. In addition to general government efficiency and a tendency to enforce norms, past research has implicated a package of behaviours classed as “collectivism” as having evolved as an adaptation to material insecurity, including pathogen prevalence, and other pressures that required avoiding individualistic behaviours that threatened the group welfare or challenges that required collective action. That is, collectivist cultures may have evolved a suite of behaviours that are well adapted to epidemics: less mouth-to-mouth romantic kissing and physical affection in general, more vigilance of others, even in-group members, social learning, conformity, obedience to authority, avoidance orientation, and so on. Indeed, a quick and dirty re-analysis of Gelfand et al’s models replacing tightness with collectivism, shows that collectivism alone predicts 36% of the variance, and together with the controls, predicts 48% of the variance (see Table 1).

The info is here.

Heuristics and Public Policy: Decision Making Under Bounded Rationality

Sanjit Dhami, Ali al-Nowaihi, and Cass Sunstein
SSRN.com
Posted June 20, 2018

Abstract

How do human beings make decisions when, as the evidence indicates, the assumptions of the Bayesian rationality approach in economics do not hold? Do human beings optimize, or can they? Several decades of research have shown that people possess a toolkit of heuristics to make decisions under certainty, risk, subjective uncertainty, and true uncertainty (or Knightian uncertainty). We outline recent advances in knowledge about the use of heuristics and departures from Bayesian rationality, with particular emphasis on growing formalization of those departures, which add necessary precision. We also explore the relationship between bounded rationality and libertarian paternalism, or nudges, and show that some recent objections, founded on psychological work on the usefulness of certain heuristics, are based on serious misunderstandings.

The article can be downloaded here.

The Federal Right to Try Act of 2017—A Wrong Turn for Access to Investigational Drugs and the Path Forward

Alison Bateman-House and Christopher T. Robertson
JAMA Intern Med. Published online January 22, 2018.

In 2017, President Trump said that “one thing that’s always disturbed”1 him is that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) denies access to experimental drugs even “for a patient who’s terminal…[who] is not going to live more than four weeks [anyway.]”  Fueled by emotionally charged anecdotes recirculated by libertarian political activists, 38 states have passed Right to Try laws. In 2017, the US Senate approved a bill that would create a national law (Box). As of December 2017, the US House of Representatives was considering the bill.

The article is here.

How Silicon Valley is erasing your individuality

Franklin Foer
Washington Post
Originally posted September 8, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there. But if you listen hard to the titans of tech, it’s clear that their worldview is something much closer to the opposite of a libertarian’s veneration of the heroic, solitary individual. The big tech companies think we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence. They invest their faith in the network, the wisdom of crowds, collaboration. They harbor a deep desire for the atomistic world to be made whole. (“Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community,” Zuckerberg wrote in one of his many manifestos.) By stitching the world together, they can cure its ills.

Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the “user” — but their worldview rolls over it. Even the ubiquitous invocation of users is telling: a passive, bureaucratic description of us. The big tech companies (the Europeans have lumped them together as GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) are shredding the principles that protect individuality. Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship, with their hostility toward intellectual property. In the realm of economics, they justify monopoly by suggesting that competition merely distracts from the important problems like erasing language barriers and building artificial brains. Companies should “transcend the daily brute struggle for survival,” as Facebook investor Peter Thiel has put it.

The article is here.

The Implications of Libertarianism for Compulsory Vaccination

Justin Bernstein
BMJ Blogs
Originally posted April 24, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Some libertarians, however, attempt to avoid the controversial conclusion that libertarianism is incompatible with compulsory vaccination. In my recent paper, “The Case Against Libertarian Arguments for Compulsory Vaccination,” I argue that such attempts are unsuccessful, and so libertarians must either develop new arguments, or join Senator Paul in opposing compulsory vaccination.

How might a libertarian try to defend compulsory vaccination? One argument is that going unvaccinated exposes others to risk, and this violates their rights. Since the state is permitted to use coercive measures to protect rights, the state may require parents to vaccinate their children. But for libertarians, this argument has two shortcomings. First, there are other, far riskier activities that the libertarian prohibits the government from regulating. For instance, owning and using automobiles or firearms imposes far more significant risk than going unvaccinated, but libertarians defend our rights to own and use automobiles and firearms. Second, one individual going unvaccinated poses very little risk; the risk eventuates only if many collectively go unvaccinated, thereby endangering herd immunity. Imposing such an independently small risk hardly seems to be a rights violation.

The entire blog post is here.

Direct to consumer genetic testing and the libertarian right to test

Michele Loi
J Med Ethics 2016;42:574-577

Abstract

I sketch a libertarian argument for the right to test in the context of ‘direct to consumer’ (DTC) genetic testing. A libertarian right to genetic tests, as defined here, relies on the idea of a moral right to self-ownership. I show how a libertarian right to test can be inferred from this general libertarian premise, at least as a prima facie right, shifting the burden of justification on regulators. I distinguish this distinctively libertarian position from some arguments based on considerations of utility or autonomy, which are sometimes labelled ‘libertarian’ because they oppose a tight regulation of the direct to consumer genetic testing sector. If one takes the libertarian right to test as a starting point, the whole discussion concerning autonomy and personal utility may be sidestepped. Finally, I briefly consider some considerations that justify the regulation of the DTC genetic testing market, compatible with the recognition of a prima facie right to test.

The article is here.

Doctors, Patients, and Nudging in the Clinical Context-Four Views on Nudging and Informed Consent

Ploug T and Holm S
Am J Bioeth. 2015 Oct;15(10):28-38.

Abstract

In an analysis of recent work on nudging we distinguish three positions on the relationship between nudging founded in libertarian paternalism and the protection of personal autonomy through informed consent. We argue that all three positions fail to provide adequate protection of personal autonomy in the clinical context. Acknowledging that nudging may be beneficial, we suggest a fourth position according to which nudging and informed consent are valuable in different domains of interaction.

The entire article is here.

Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians

Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, Peter Ditto, Jonathan Haidt
PLOS | One
Published: August 21, 2012
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0042366

Abstract

Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview. Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes.

The entire article is here.