The Mask Debacle

Mask mandates are a microcosm of a key failure of our pandemic response:
the poor climate for public discourse fostered by an elite culture whose overconfidence led to a prolonged strategy of undermining open discussion
in a vain attempt to prove that complex questions could have only one universal and immutable answer.

From the beginning of the pandemic, technocratic elites have offered us a dubious bill of goods.
Aided and abetted by the media and by many academics, politicians proffered—indeed, likely believed—
the idea that the pandemic would go away if everyone just did as they were told.

Today, the plerophory of elites—born of hubris and unbridled self confidence—is bearing bitter fruit.

For some, the overselling of policy has led them to religiouslike zeal and dogmatism about particular interventions.

For others, it has led to a complete loss of faith in institutions like the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH, which depend on public trust in order to fulfill their missions.

Mask mandates offer an object lesson in how overconfident, unnuanced messaging conditioned us to assume that all dissenting opinions are misinformation rather than reflections of good faith disagreement or differing priorities.

In doing so, elites drove out scientific research that might have separated valuable interventions from the less valuable, and corroded much needed public trust.

even more salient is an elite belief in technocracy and perfectionism.

The “follow the science” mentality wrongly framed issues that involved complex judgments, suggesting the existence of a singular, oracular science that could dispassionately decide complex policy issues which invoked nonscientific domains.

Even more fundamental than suggesting elites had all the answers, it also suggested that all problems were solvable, which was never going to be true in a pandemic.

And by leaving decisions to an elite few, and by labeling even good-faith backlash as disinformation, it inhibited the development of much-needed public trust—a resource whose value elites seemingly discounted.

Just as elites led us into this mess, the way out is unlikely to come from “experts” or the elite institutions
that have fostered a climate of close-minded authoritarian disregard for the nuances of scientific work
and openly show their contempt for people who hold opposing points of view.

Instead, we see hope in the voices of dissent.