You Do Not Have a Moral Imperative to Be Afraid
Fear is Not a Sign of Moral Health
In March of 2020, as the first wave of the novel coronavirus hit America’s shore, the impending pandemic seized our nation’s collective attention. For a period in March and early April, COVID19 dominated all online chatter and most in-person conversations (what few in-person conversations occurred during that time). News articles informed us about case counts, hospitalizations, and deaths. Scientific articles tried to explain what little we knew about the virus, while emphasizing how much we did not know about it. Public health officials and epidemiologists attempted to predict the coming months and years. A grim feeling of depression, fright, and sadness settled upon our nation.
In early March, we began hearing commentary urging first caution, then fear, then panic. A trickle in late February, this narrative exploded to dominate headlines in a matter of weeks. We heard conflicting messages across social media, in news and opinion coverage, and from the lips of public health officials and experts (both real and self-proclaimed). But one undercurrent, common to many (though certainly not all) of the messages, came through loud and clear. It came from media personalities. It came from public officials. It came from celebrities. It came from friends and family members.
“Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.”
Some spread this message unintentionally. Many simply passed along what they had heard from other sources. Some of those who spread this message did so out of their own deep fear. Panic is contagious. It spread exponentially last year. At the time, it was very hard to resist feelings of doom, dread, even outright despair. Many simply acted out of their own fear. Their written and spoken words made it clear that they felt scared. Some were hysterical and others merely frightened. In the clearest cases of this, though they ostensibly wrote (or spoke) with the stated purpose of influencing others, their reactionary rhetoric spoke more to their own state of mind. They told others to panic because they themselves had panicked, and because panic seemed natural to them, and because they could not control their own panic and what they said or wrote while in that state.
That is forgivable. Many people were very scared. Fear is a natural response to an unknown pathogen that spreads quickly and infects the entire world. It is understandable that some who spread fear acted out of their own fear and (though all people are responsible for their actions) in this case their fear-spreading can be excused.
But some who publicly spread the “Panic. Now,” message did so for more reprehensible reasons. Some had no good intentions. Others had misplaced intentions, and their misplaced intentions caused great harm.
First, some pushed the fear narrative for profit. Fearmongering for clicks. Doom sold, as a panicked populace devoured information that drove their panic level higher. In a vicious cycle, panic drove information-seeking, which furthered the panic. In the Internet age, negative emotions have long fueled doom-cycles of endless scrolling and endless searching. But this phenomenon manifested itself in a novel, society-wide, COVID-specific way in the early days of the pandemic. Those who crafted headlines designed to elicit a panicked click, or who encouraged the scariest predictions in order to generate ad revenue, may someday reckon with their consciences.
Another group supposedly had pure intentions in pushing public hysteria. They wanted to engender certain behaviors. They did so (mostly) out of a belief that such behaviors were good. They believed the behaviors that they hoped to induce would shorten the pandemic, save lives, and promote the public good. They believed they acted in the best interest of the general public. They hoped that fearmongering would cause people to stay home, avoid social contact, obey public health authorities, shun physical interaction, and comply with lockdown restrictions.
Many, of course, had mixed motives which include all of the aforementioned, along with other motives beyond the scope of this essay. Perhaps many do not fully understand their own motives and did not understand them at the time. Perhaps we should not seek to lay blame, or to ask anyone to account for their rhetoric. Instead, we should move on.
We should move on. What happened last March lies in the past. Individual actors have responsibility for their own words and actions. As we have already established, the message, along with the emotion both behind it and before it, was contagious.
But in order to move on, we must take one last look back at what happened. We need to examine more closely an underlying assumption behind the fear-messaging. Because that underlying assumption, which became a prevailing cultural current, does not stand on firm ground. In fact, it is baseless and harmful. And if we are to ever fully recover as a society, we must come to terms with that fact.
Those who encouraged fear out of a desire to influence public behavior did so based on the belief that fearmongering constituted the only way, or the best way, to ensure people would comply with restrictions on their behavior. They predicated their words on this belief.
This belief stems from a paradigm of expert-rule, the roots of which go back over a century and undergird many of the policy debates of the twentieth century. Rather than relitigate those fights, we should acknowledge that the position of rule-by-experts has both merits and (many) flaws, and instead move to the specific case of rule-by-public-health-experts during the coronavirus pandemic. Public health experts often did understand the pandemic better than the average person. It did make sense to follow their guidance, generally. (Occasionally, they lied and then changed their tune later, as has been acknowledged regarding the early guidance not to wear masks.)
Setting aside those moments in which public health experts (and experts in other fields) stepped outside of their expertise and in doing so cashiered any authority or deference due them, we will focus more narrowly on these authorities’ moralizing attitude and lecturing.
The paradigm of expert-rule, as applied to the coronavirus pandemic, held ordinary people incapable of understanding COVID-19, which therefore meant that public health experts had to hand down dictates to them from on high. This paradigm held the masses incapable of making educated decisions for themselves, which negated any need to educate them. In short, public health officials had to tell people how to act, because people would act crazily if left to themselves. This begs the question of whether human beings are capable of governing themselves. Which in turn begs the question of whether experts are capable of governing their fellow human beings if they share all the failings of ordinary souls, but we said we would leave the larger debate about expert-rule aside.
Certainly, many people did act crazily. And many people did prove themselves incapable of understanding the science behind COVID-19. (Although that includes many people on both sides of the fear and safety divide.) Many people also proved themselves incapable of self-governance, but that happens daily in families with teenagers.
People often meet expectations. If you set low expectations for people, they will generally meet them. If you treat people as adults, they will take some responsibility for themselves. If you treat people as children, they will act childishly. We saw plenty of childish behavior during the pandemic, which stemmed at least in part from the way those in positions of authority treated the powerless masses as children. The experts’ attitude toward the masses became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Many people did prove themselves incapable of understanding science by signing on to outlandish conspiracy theories (Plandemic, vaccine microchips, etc.). Perhaps if experts had from the beginning treated people with the respect due rational actors, we would not have heard so much idiocy later on about how the coronavirus was a fake plot to take away our guns (or similar nonsense). Neither the rabble, nor the experts, came off well in this whole mess.
Setting aside the irrationality of human beings, experts could have approached the public in a more open manner. Scientists and public health experts are not high priests, privy to some secret knowledge that laypeople cannot understand. Science is not a black box that only people with letters after their names can fathom. (Or if it is a black box for some people, perhaps that says something about science education in this country.)
This belief that people were incapable of making rational decisions led to the fearmongering. Scaring people would create the desired outcomes. We will return to this idea in a moment.
Morality:
Fearmongering was couched in the language of moralism. Our experts, public figures, media personalities, and social betters instructed us that it was moral to be afraid of the coronavirus. Bravery was reframed as foolishness. Bravery meant immoral behavior that would result in mass death.
This kind of moralizing pervaded down through the culture. People began to adopt fear as a badge of their morality. They imposed that standard on others, typically through social media shaming. This entire essay hinges on this point.
In our victimhood culture, people gain status for demonstrating their own powerlessness. People try to prove they are oppressed in order to gain social acclaim. They even gain a perceived, misplaced sense of honor for victimhood. (To the extent that any notion of honor still exists today.) Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, but especially in the early days, this meant that people gained status for demonstrating their concern. The more concerned you were about the coronavirus, the more status you gained (on social media, and within certain social circles). The more scared you appeared, the better you were as a person.
Those who showed great fear somehow took the pandemic more seriously than those who did not. In the early days of the pandemic, nothing could destroy a reputation faster than the idea that you might not take the pandemic seriously. Society’s moral betters shamed those who engaged in reckless behavior (perceived or actual). If you did not quake in your boots, you were not taking the pandemic seriously.
(This phenomenon is fear virtue-signaling: demonstrating virtue by displaying concern and panic about the coronavirus - or about anything else - out of the idea that only those who live in fear take it seriously. Parents who shame other parents about how worried they are about their children potentially meeting various misfortunes are engaging in the same behavior.)
Of course, because there were in fact idiots who did not take the pandemic seriously, anyone who failed to panic got lumped in with those who believed it was a hoax. Anyone who sought middle ground got lumped in with the wackos. (If you argued the virus might have escaped from a lab, you were somehow the same as people who thought it was a bioweapon.) If anything, the fear-shaming only encouraged the real wackos, who wanted nothing better than to defy elite consensus, and who were made angry by the virtue-signaling on the part of those who took the pandemic “seriously.” To some, negative attention beats no attention at all. (Recently, some people have even stated that they will not take a vaccine, not out of any real concern about the vaccines, but just to spite those who do. This is a prime example of how the moralizing backfired.)
It is not moral to be afraid. At least not of the coronavirus. It is not immoral either. In fact, it is perfectly natural to fear COVID-19. Fear is a natural response to a new and deadly pandemic. It is completely justified. But it does not make you a better person. It has little bearing on your moral character.
Fear of the coronavirus is amoral, meaning neither moral, nor immoral. Action matters. Action taken based on fear of COVID-19, or based on lack of fear, can have moral implications and real moral consequences. A person can take moral action out of fear, or immoral action out of fear. Another person can take moral action out of bravery (or lack of fear, which is not the same as bravery). Or a person can take immoral action out of bravery or lack of fear. One man’s fear might lead him to get tested for COVID-19, and stay away from other people when he tests positive. One woman’s fear might lead her to steal hand sanitizer from the pharmacy. One nurse’s courage might allow her to continue treating COVID-19 patients, even as she risks exhaustion, burnout, and infection. Another man’s lack of fear might lead him to purposefully continue mingling with others, even after he knows he has the virus.
(As an aside, if people “do the right thing” solely out of fear and a desire for self-preservation, and not out of a desire to do good, can it truly constitute a moral action? A question that philosophers have debated for centuries, and one we will table for now as beyond the scope of this essay. But one worth mentioning and pondering.)
Of course, inner life does matter in morality. Contrary to Bruce Wayne, it is not simply what we do that matters. Who we are on the inside also matters. But fear of the coronavirus certainly does not fall into that. Neither does fear of the government or fear of the law (though fear of the law might lead to moral action or at least prevent immoral action). Perhaps only one type of fear falls under morality (fear of God).
Some will still argue still fear made people “do the right thing.” In other words, stay home and social distance. They will argue that therefore this fear saved lives. They might even argue this means that encouraging that fear was morally good.
To examine this claim, we need to look into the actual effect that fear-spreading had. Was it effective in saving lives? What other side effects did it have?
We explained earlier that treating adults as children typically leads to poor outcomes. (At the same time, it makes sense to treat children as children.) To take this idea further, if you appeal to people’s regard for others, you end up with a better result than if you try to make them afraid. We saw this with mask-wearing and mask-defiance. When simply ordered to wear a mask, many people felt their human dignity injured. They often responded in childish displays of mask-defiance, with the attitude of, “you can’t make me wear a mask.” The response from authorities should have been, “yes, but we should not have to.”
(If you ask me to wear a mask to avoid potentially spreading the coronavirus to other people who may fall ill and die, I have more of a desire to wear a mask than if you try to scare me. If you instead treat me as a child, I feel strong anger and a desire not to wear a mask out of spite. Because I recognize the childishness of this impulse, I do not give in to it. Before I was vaccinated, I wore a mask when indoors and near other people. But I understand why the mask-messaging backfired so strongly and caused many people to act childishly in refusing to wear masks. Those who wore their masks on their elbows come to mind. For my part, I did not wear the mask in order to comply with some order, but rather out of a regard for others: I did not want to inadvertently spread the virus. I do not use myself as an example to somehow proclaim my morality. Instead, I use my example to demonstrate the idea that appealing to people’s regard for others might actually work better in getting them to comply with restrictions on their behavior and that trying to make them afraid or simply ordering them to comply might actually make them not want to do what you want them to do.)
We saw a similar phenomenon with restrictions that followed the science, versus the ones that made no logical sense and did not save lives but were rather punitive. Punitive ones include incidents of police citations for parking lot church services (despite the fact that you cannot infect another person with coronavirus when both of you are sitting inside your respective cars with the windows closed) and the arrests of lone walkers in the U.K. More common restrictions that did not follow the science included the mask mandates for the outdoors, or closures of parks and beaches (and especially playgrounds), despite the strong scientific evidence that outdoor spread of the coronavirus was negligible.
Treating people as children and trying to make them afraid, along with unnecessary or overly harsh restrictions that did not follow science, almost certainly contributed to the populist backlash against the restrictions. Including the childish behavior that may have furthered the spread. This certainly hurt the cause that public health officials tried to advance, along with their credibility.
Later on in the pandemic, we heard a great deal about pandemic fatigue. Pandemic fatigue led people to loosen their habits, let their guards down, and meet up in groups that may have contributed to spreading the virus (including the spike we saw late in the fall of 2020). Experts often lamented the onset of pandemic fatigue and wished for people to be afraid again, because at least then they might comply with the restrictions. However, that early fearmongering may have backfired. It may have actually contributed to the phenomenon of pandemic fatigue, thus resulting in greater spread of the virus late in the game.
Part of pandemic fatigue is emotional fatigue. People grew tired of feeling afraid. Their early fear may have encouraged their later risky behavior when they know longer wanted to feel afraid. Perhaps if public health officials, government bodies, and media personalities had appealed to moral emotions instead of fear, early in the pandemic, they would have done a better job of warding off pandemic fatigue and the attendant increased spread of COVID-19.
This is, of course, hypothetical and speculative. We cannot truly know how different messaging would have affected outcomes. We cannot change the past. We cannot fully know if fearmongering caused people to resist strongly or if it contributed to pandemic fatigue. But we can raise serious doubts about its effectiveness as a strategy.
At the same time, we do have plenty of data and evidence about the side effects of the fearmongering. Namely, the skyrocketing increase in mental health troubles. Calls to suicide hotlines skyrocketed early in the pandemic. While recent evidence appears to show that suicide deaths in the U.S. actually decreased from 2019 to 2020, suicides did increase markedly in certain localities. Notably, Clark County School District in Nevada saw 19 student suicides from the time schools closed in March of 2020 to February of 2021, a staggering increase over the same period the year before. Deaths from drug overdose also skyrocketed from 2019 to 2020. More people died from drug overdose in 2020 than at any previous point in the opioid epidemic.
Many factors play into these trends, including fear of the virus, grief at the loss of friends or family, and especially social isolation. For students, missed opportunities no doubt played a role. But the relentless onslaught of negativity in the news and on social media also played a role, especially during the early months of the pandemic.
Over-coverage of the rising death count, for instance, has a chilling effect on even a robust individual’s mental health. Media outlets seemed to hold a pervasive sense of duty in repeating that number ad infinitum up through the summer. During a certain period, almost every article at least mentioned the most recent estimate once. At a certain point, people do not need further reminder. You can only read that 100,000 people had died from the virus (and then 200,000 and then 300,000 etc.) so many times before you begin to feel depressed.
Headlines and tweets filled with constant reminders of doom and gloom send a not-so-subtle message that you should feel sad, scared, and even despairing. Even those who tried to ignore that message still felt its tug. We already knew that overexposure to bad news can cause real mental and social problems (both for individuals, and for American society), before the pandemic. Overhyped rhetoric encouraging despair only made the problem worse. The COVID-19 pandemic was bad enough without anyone trying to make other people afraid of it.
(Yes, news always tends toward the negative. We read about the planes that crash, not the millions that land successfully every day, and so forth. Human beings have a natural predisposition to engage with, and remember, negative events. An evolutionary necessity, but one with unfortunate consequences today. Without any nefarious purpose on the part of the software engineers, social media algorithms designed simply for engagement exploit this human bias towards negativity. Social media is filled with negativity not because of manipulation but because of human nature. All that is known. The point we are driving at in this essay is that during the coronavirus pandemic, this was turned up to 11. Something that already was a problem became much worse.)
While obviously coverage of the most important event in recent history was warranted, the problem was over-coverage and over-emphasis on the negative. And telling people to be afraid. Obviously, the pandemic was an incredibly negative event. But its disaster does not need to be exaggerated. It was bad enough and we did not need to overhype it or make it any worse.
Returning to Our Theme:
The relentless fearmongering actually caused pain and harm. It impacted mental health. It may have contributed to suicides (although we have no real way of knowing).
Do those who intentionally spread fear bear some responsibility? Probably. But I do not seek to lay blame or collect scalps. We should not seek to convict anyone for mistakes made in the past (at least in this case – obviously people should be convicted for past murders and similar crimes). Instead, we can point out that the fear-spreading was wrong, in order to counteract the pervading narrative that it was right. If it was neither moral nor immoral to be afraid of the coronavirus, it certainly was not moral to intentionally cause others to be afraid. If that was ever the sole intention, and if actions taken with that intention furthered mental suffering, then we might be able to say that it was immoral to intentionally make other people afraid. At the very least, we know that it was not moral. And it was not moral to be afraid of the virus, or to make moral judgements about other people’s level of concern, or to push the narrative that fear of COVID-19 had anything to do with morality.
We return to the overall point made by the title of this essay: there is no moral imperative to be afraid. Whether or not any single article, tweet, or piece of commentary suggested there was one, the idea that such a moral imperative existed was the overall theme of last March. It was the subtle current underlying much of online chatter about the virus. And it was wrong. Fear of coronavirus is unrelated to morality. The sooner we understand that, the quicker we can move on and attempt to rebuild our society in the aftermath of the pandemic.
One problem with the fear culture we now live in (which was a problem before the pandemic but has only been accelerated by it) is that there is no off-ramp. Many Americans (including the author) have lived their entire lives, during the cultural reign of safetyism. Safetyism fed on, and was fed by, the moralizing about fear that began in earnest last March. The cultural idea that fear was morality already existed, but the coronavirus pandemic took it to unassailable heights from which it now commands societal attention.
Safetyism does not end. Though its stultifying effect bears responsibility for some of the cultural wreckage we see in 2021, no cultural incentive exists to combat it. While many other cultural, social, political, and economic factors have contributed to the state of American culture today, the idea of “safety first” has certainly played an antagonistic role in the story of our decline. And by all accounts, “safety first” has gripped the popular imagination. The most common phrase we heard between March and August of 2020 was, “Be Safe.”
There is no exit from the state of fear we now inhabit. As conditions in the coronavirus pandemic demonstrably improved, some people began saying, “we will never go back to normal.” They tell others to get used to “the new normal,” which inevitably means that some level of masking, lockdown restriction, social distancing, and above all fear, should go on indefinitely. This ignores the incredible medical success that has brought us to this point: multiple vaccines that have proved extraordinarily effective against the virus by the standards of previous vaccines and which were developed in record time. Instead, we focus on the negative. Pessimism sells, but at a certain point, money can no longer be the main driving factor in the continued doomsaying. Rather, the cultural and social inertia of our current moment means that the narrative of fear will continue to stay in motion until acted upon by a new cultural force.
People say we will always live with this virus. And that the pandemic never ends. Technically, we will always live with this virus, but we still live with flu viruses, measles, and many other viruses without shaping our entire lives around them. But the pandemic does end. The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic ended without vaccines or effective treatments. We will not wear masks and social distance permanently.
Right now, the pandemic has not ended yet. But it will. In some ways, the fear has died down a bit. Even by June of 2020, the rhetorical climate had calmed down a bit from March. Panic, by definition, cannot last forever. Coronavirus stopped dominating all media and social media coverage after the death of George Floyd.
(Panic is a natural response to an immediate, existential threat, which is one reason panic never made much sense as a response to the coronavirus. Panic is a more appropriate response to an encounter with a saber-toothed tiger, while other types of fear might make more sense in response to a pandemic.)
But even with panic gone, fear, despair, and even depression remain. Some people still will not leave their houses. Reports from China give similar anecdotes. I realize that many people are going back to normal, and are no longer afraid. Even many that were afraid are relaxing. Pandemic fatigue set in late in the fall, or around the holidays, or possibly during the summer (depending on who you ask), and at that time many people stopped acting with the same level of caution or fear as they did early in the pandemic. Certainly, the phenomenon of wide-eyed suspicion in the grocery store receded after a couple of months. But in certain parts of the country, especially certain cities, fear very much remains entrenched.
Most people are not as scared as they once were. We have been able to have conversations on non-COVID topics. And to some extent, the doom and gloom is gone. But still we live in something of a state of fear. As previously mentioned, some people are still afraid to go outside. Some people still will not walk within twenty feet of another person. Some people still give dirty looks to passersby, as though they might spread COVID by stepping within throwing distance.
Even aside from the extreme examples, we have a prevailing phenomenon of “playing it safe.” This is the idea that public officials and individuals should always err on the side of safety. We hold this notion that we should err on the side of safety, even when it contradicts the science and the evidence.
Of course, the same people who will always err on the side of safety even in the face of overwhelming evidence will also claim that they are on the side of “Science,” “Evidence,” and the “Experts.” Or rather that, “Science” is on their side.
Yet they play it safe far beyond any measures recommended by “The Science.” They ignore science that we now know to be true. They actually deny science whenever it does not conform to the most restrictive, “safe,” and fearful measures. Their fear defies science. And it defies reason.
One example occurs in the fight over opening schools. The science, and the majority of public health officials and child psychologists, fully supported reopening schools for in-person learning, full stop. Yet the “safe” option was keeping them closed. It seemed like it might be dangerous to hold school in person. Because it “feels” dangerous, it must be, even if reality and science do not conform to that narrative.
Another example occurs in the incessant cleaning and the fear of touching contaminated surfaces. For a long time, the available evidence has disproven the view that COVID-19 spreads via contaminated surfaces, yet many people still fear surfaces irrationally. In doing so, they often pay less attention to the ways it actually spreads.(And they waste millions of dollars on cleaning supplies.)
Perhaps the most salient example is the fear of outdoor spread, which we have already covered. The idea that a lone runner could spread the virus to people in their cars was patently ridiculous from the start, but many people still give unmasked runners dirty looks. One problem in mainstream reporting about science is that when sham studies are debunked, only a fraction of those who originally heard about those studies find out. This includes the widely shared “study” that concluded that runners could spread COVID to people standing 30 feet behind them. This has been thoroughly disproven, and yet many people still hold on to an irrational fear of runners and cyclists.
Those who kept their heads from the beginning, and did not give in to panic, usually did a better job of “following the science,” than those who acted out of desperation. When “the science” changed (meaning it improved) they paid attention. Early on we knew very little about coronavirus and so we naturally feared it to a greater degree. Now, we understand it much better, and therefore the science on coronavirus is more solid than in the very beginning. Scientific understanding grows stronger with time as hypotheses are disproven. How can anyone think scientifically under the bias of panic, which is defined by its irrationality? Prudence and caution, not panic, were always the best attitudes towards the pandemic. Today, after more than half of Americans have received at least the first dose of the vaccine, irrational “playing it safe” grows ever more unscientific by the day. The people paying the least heed to “the science” now are not just the anti-vaxxers. They also include the people who refuse to leave their homes and douse their mail in bleach.
(Here are Hardihood Books, we actually do believe in science. Not in the way that people who display signs declaring that belief mean. We believe that people should educate themselves, including about science. We believe in the scientific method. And we embrace scientific skepticism, which we believe indispensable to truly understanding science. Those who think skepticism unscientific do not understand science. We embrace Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s distinction between science and scientism. I do not know if the word scientism originated with him, for the concept was certainly well understood, but it does a good job of explaining the exact phenomenon I am talking about.)
The End:
Ultimately, we will pull out of the pandemic. The day approaches when the vast majority of American will have received the vaccine. Even new strains of the virus will only delay the inevitable. If necessary, we will receive booster shots for the new strains. Someday, spread will drop to near zero. We will “go back to normal,” meaning that we will go on with our lives. For all the cries of those who say “we will never go back to normal,” most Americans want to put the pandemic in the past as soon as possible. We may see raucous celebrations. History may rhyme even more powerfully across a century with a second “Return to Normalcy,” followed by another “Roaring Twenties.”
But whatever the future holds, some fear will remain unless we come to terms with its grip on us. The pandemic only threw into sharper relief our ever-increasing fetishization of safety. If we want to believe, as our President does, that our best days lie ahead of us, we will need to put in work to make that a reality. And it will require risk. It will require not prioritizing safety above all else, but rather taking action that sometimes eschews safety. While we must take care not to throw all caution to the wind and engage in recklessness, that is unlikely given how ingrained “safety first” has become over the last four decades. Actions we consider reckless today once seemed measured.
The idea that it is moral to live in fear, especially fear of the coronavirus, is toxic. Continued fear-culture will destroy our chances of returning to any sense of normalcy, and will prevent us from building a future better than our past. America is at an inflection point. Like all great civilizations, our destruction can only come from within, and we have already sowed the seeds. We have a real chance, a chance that seems increasingly likely, of solidifying our decline within the lifetimes of Millennials. We still have a chance of avoiding the fate that we could bring upon ourselves, but it will require effort and risk. It will require physical, cultural, and societal rebuilding.
To do that work, and to really have a chance of avoiding a decline towards ultimate destruction, we must throw off the culture of fear. We must stomp out fear-shaming. We must end all fear virtue-signaling. But deeper than that, we must end the idea that fear is a virtue.
Here at Hardihood Books, we do not believe in going down without a fight. We will do our part to stem the cultural decay. We do not want to live in a world in which our grandchildren experience the final collapse of America, and death of the American idea. We refuse, as much as we can, to live in a world in which we will struggle to explain to our grandchildren what it was like to be born in a free and prosperous nation, at a time when America was the most powerful nation in the world. Like Dylan Thomas, we will “not go gentle into that good night.”
To that end, we refuse to accept the notion that fear of the coronavirus is a moral action or even a moral emotion. We will push back on any attempt to shame others into living in fear. While we no doubt believe in taking pandemics and other crises (including this one) seriously, as well as giving science its due and following proper precautions, we will not live like lemmings. We repeat to you that, “You Do Not Have a Moral Imperative to Be Afraid.” Relief should accompany that realization.