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The other day, I was chatting with some friends about what to do about America’s new, alien mask culture: How can we drive it from our country, why it hasn’t been rejected yet, and what responsibility each of us bears for transforming this mere hope into a reality.

At one point, a friend shared this short clip of Jordan Peterson. How would he answer the question, “Whose fault is it that the safety-above-all-else mask culture persists?”

Peterson does not lay the blame on Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, the legacy media, the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, or the Chinese Communist Party. His answer?

It’s your fault.

I admit I was a little bit taken aback by this, even though I’ve listened to Peterson ever since he burst onto the scene in 2016 by cooly talking sense to irrational social justice warriors at the University of Toronto. I think that’s probably because, while his “rules for life” always seemed correct in the abstract, it also seemed to me that opportunities to live them out would be rare, perhaps even something for others to do. But now, I no longer think that—not when the once-clownish totalitarians, confined to campus safe spaces and given Play-Doh and dogs to pet because of “stress,” are steering my country into dangerous waters.

But even so, can it really be my responsibility to end this? Am I really obligated to be a kind of Solzhenitsyn, to stand up, alone (if that’s how the cookie crumbles), against officialdom’s many reigning institutional power centers, and flip them the bird, bare-faced?

I think yes and no. Peterson is certainly on to something. We are in desperate need of more courage from ordinary people. In the past, I’ve criticized what I call “gilded cowardice”—the dressing up of one’s lack of courage in the garb of “prudence” so as to rationalize one’s failure ever to take a stand for or against anything when even the slightest personal cost might result. That pathetic practice has to end. And there is a real sense in which this kind of dehumanizing, pointless regime can only exist (and expand) to the extent that we the people allow it.

Risks (and Rewards) of Resistance

But there is, at the same time, a nontrivial case to be made that for any mere individual to stand up to “Mask America” amounts to a kind of pointless self-destruction, a martyrdom complete with pain, humiliation, fear, and negative consequences but bereft of a (heavenly) reward. Given this is the case, we need leaders to speak to, shape, and mobilize public opinion so that we can move toward this maskless destination.

Angelo Codevilla has often made this point:

[D]uring the Occupation in the 1940s, Charles de Gaulle warned the people against individual acts of resistance. This is something I’ve pointed out before: Don’t do these things individually [in this case, de-mask at Walmart or wherever], do them only as part of a larger national political enterprise led by . . . well, at that time, Charles de Gaulle.

There is a tension here, though Peterson and Codevilla make good arguments for their respective positions. How do we resolve it? What should we who believe that the dangerous safety-ism represented by this new “wear yer damn mask!” culture must go?

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