Someone on that thread mentioned my own argument there and had this to say about it:

Someone elsewhere in the thread brought up the Chinese Long March and the dedication necessary for that. That comparison would be apt if masking was widespread, but masking while no one else is is about as useful as trekking through the Tibetan plateau alone.

It’s since been removed by a mod, and I couldn’t reply to it when I initially saw it because the thread was locked, but I think that my comparison is kinda silly at its face and they have a point so I feel the need to elaborate.

Yes, we are trekking through the Tibetan plateau alone. The social costs of COVID are absolutely monstrous and the fact that I wear a mask is only meaningfully protecting me, not the people around me, because they are constantly exposed to others who do not mask and whose probability of being infectious is already orders of magnitude higher than mine. The difference I make as an individual is measured only in the respect that I am a bridge between the outside world and my parents, who are both retired and go to indoors locations with less frequency than me. What benefit does me masking have? A significant one for my family, an infinitesimal one for society.

But let’s get back to the point. “that comparison would be apt if masking was widespread” is a phrase that caught my attention, because masking was widespread worldwide, then gradually became decidedly-not-widespread. What were the social forces at play during the transition from the state where masking was widespread, and now? Each individual person makes a calculation, subconsciously, between a number of costs and benefits. Masking has a discomfort cost, a social appeal cost, and an economic cost. It has a perceived health benefit, a social health benefit, and a social appeal benefit. When one person perceives that most people around them are masking up, there’s a force that compels them to do the same to fit in, and the opposite is true. The personal and social health benefit from masking is proportional to one’s perceived risk of catching COVID. All the others are approximately constant. So, which of these changed in that transition? Perceived health benefits dropped off because COVID minimization was the prevailing narrative in media. More importantly, the social appeal cost replaced the social appeal benefit as a function of how many other people stopped masking. This led to a self-perpetuating positive feedback loop where the perceived benefits of masking dropped off more and more as other people stopped masking.

But there’s an interesting insight we can draw that pertains to what an individual’s choice is when inside this system: there’s a point where the costs outweigh the benefits for me, but when I decide to change my behavior, that has a marginal effect on the calculation for everyone else who’s still masking. It means that everyone who stops masking during that transition is part of a chain reaction, the spread of a memetic pathogen.

However, the dynamic works backwards, too. Telling people around you about Long COVID, recent COVID deaths, wastewater data, information about the effectiveness of N95 respirators, etc etc is essential because it increases the perceived benefits of masking for them. If they start masking, and spreading information about why others should, then it has the same chain reaction effect, but backwards.

So, starting with a small number of people who are dedicated to a long struggle, who rely on making their case to others about how they can benefit from joining in that struggle to eventually grow into a popular resistance movement? Is this not dissimilar to the July 26th movement, who started with 22 people after regrouping from their first failed landing in Cuba, but achieved victory over the Batista regime? Isn’t our role as socialists to be that vanguard, that can synthesize scientific knowledge of social realities with the necessary tactics to affect social change? Aren’t we the ones that should be committed to engaging in that long struggle against overwhelming odds?