IT WAS June 27th, 2020; 125,000 Americans were dead of COVID-19; and Daniel Maples was in a Costco, a uniquely American institution. Modern supermarkets typically offer anywhere from 15,000 to 60,000 products for sale. While not endemic to the United States, they have grown notorious within the cradle of its signature excess. Queen Elizabeth, on a 1957 visit, insisted on an impromptu trip to a Giants Foods in suburban Maryland. After a detour to a Texas supermarket during a 1989 visit, Boris Yeltsin, “for the first time...felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.”

Costco’s ethos, like its country’s, is one of scale: boggling bundles, cheese puffs bulked by tonnage, enough toilet paper to last a geological age. The rows stretch up and on, towering over the consumer, promising near-limitless possibilities. In exchange for a small buy-in, you could have more.

Once earned, liberty—to choose, to live massively—can be awesome. 

In the background of the now-viral seventeen-second video, you can spot rows of checkout lines, pallets of bulk items stacked chest-high, even a glimpse of the legendary Costco food court (at which point can then pause in amazement as you consider that the hot dog/soda combo still costs just $1.50). You can hear the beeps of scanners, the muffled chatter of masked shoppers—and, most immediately, Daniel Maples. 

We now know that Maples, bare-faced, has repeatedly been asked to wear a mask while in the store and refused to do so. But as the video starts, all we hear is the cameraman tell him, "We are six feet away from you.” Maples responds, "You are harassing me and my family." He begins walking toward the camera, yelling, "I feel threatened!" The cameraman replies, "You're coming close to me." Maples doubles down: "Back up! Threaten me again! Back the f--- up. Put your f------ phone down!"

Impossible to ignore, almost too on the nose, is Maples’ tee-shirt: Running the World Since 1776 in bold text, beneath it a map of the United States colored red: a global leader currently boasting 4% of the world’s population and 20% of its confirmed COVID-19 deaths. 

Ruthless and exact, social media users identified him within hours: Daniel Maples; 42 y/o; native of Fort Myers, Florida. He was fired from his position as an insurance salesman within the week.

Mr. Maples has since faded into the annals of viral COVID-era screaming matches; and, 300,000 deaths later, the whole episode seems almost quaint, seen through the red fog of hindsight.

I haven’t been able to confirm it, but I can only assume that his Costco membership has since been revoked. 

THE United States’ failed pandemic response begins with an anemic understanding of liberty, an all-American virtue currently choking on a curdled national selfishness pawned off as exceptionalism. Through everything from grocery store mobs to outright lethal violence, millions of Americans have shown that their interpretation of individual liberty reads something like this: Any regulation of my behavior whatsoever in order to protect the safety of others is nothing short of out-and-out tyranny.  

Liberty, though, when at its best, embodies the potential for individual growth within a greater society. It requires the sacrifice of some personal privileges in exchange for the possibility of becoming more within a group than one could ever become alone; because no one can wholly divorce themselves from our social order, the contract that ensures, shelters, and enshrines liberty; because the frontier is dead, John Wayne is a myth, and we are all, hopelessly, stuck with one another. 

In a moment defined by needless death and long-needed social reckonings; by pandemics both new and old, both viral and native; we must realize that our present crises arise from a fundamental misreading of liberty. 

In our obsession with freedom from all constraints, we have overlooked what we owe to each other and what we cannot be alone. We have confused the absence of sacrifice with the presence of liberty. We have forgotten that there can be no liberty in any form without life and that the preservation of life today is asking slightly more of us than usual.  

In demanding total individualism, we have lost the power of our collective: the very union, people, and pluribus that so many purport to cherish, the fertile ground in which the awesome excess of the American supermarket can flourish.  

And, in failing to confront the hollow myths of our founding, of liberty-for-all and equal opportunity, we have allowed a seed of rot to spread within the heart of our fragile project. We have sowed and sowed a beautiful story, thinking that hypocrisy would never flower. But ours is a season of sprouts. 

At last, we will never be more—never be able to be more—until liberty is truly known, its delusions finally uprooted, and a nation no longer dependent on the enforced illiberty of some for the inequitable elevation of others is realized.    

IT WAS Halloween, 1958; McCarthy was fading on one horizon as Vietnam dawned on the next; and Isaiah Berlin, philosopher and pluralist, was speaking at the University of Oxford. In Two Concepts of Liberty, a subsequent pamphlet based upon the lecture he gave that day, Berlin proposes a binary. 

He begins with negative liberty, which he defines as the lack of constraints upon individual action. This liberty concerns itself with absences—of tyranny, oppression, mask mandates—and is most associated with autonomous actors. 

By contrast, Berlin’s positive liberty refers to the potential to act in order to maximize one’s own life. This liberty comes as a presence, a set of conditions like a favorable climate in which life might grow ripe—a town with a functional sewage system, for example, or a city whose public resources are not determined by red lines—and it is most often associated with collectives. 

In short, one is the freedom from while the other is the freedom to. 

Make no mistake: Americans have never been a people to tamper our oratory, particularly when discussing our own immaculate self-conception. When we say liberty for all, we speak of positive liberty: a presence, not an absence; what might be, not what is not; the cooperation that built the Great American Grocery Store, not the individual right to drink spoiled milk sold without expiration dates.   

Our great tragedy lies in trying to achieve the promise of the positive through the devices of the negative. It is not enough to be unshackled—as we crest upon 600,000 deaths, many states will still let you walk into a diner. It is about seeing that your town, and your life therein, will be worse off once you’ve killed the waitor. 

IT WAS late in the hazy days of Reagan’s 1980s, the rich were getting richer while the poor were being jailed, and cultural psychologist Richard Shweder was mulling a hunch. It began with liberalism, and its aberrance, as far as moralities go. 

In a hasty nutshell, classical lowercase-L liberalism denotes a moral and political philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed, and equality under the law. You will have heard its Western proponents touting their “liberal democracies” and “liberal international world order.” These societies build themselves on autonomy; their essential unit is the individual; and, by Berlin’s standard, their titular brand is one of negative liberty. 

You are to live and let live. You are at liberty to risk death from any disease you please, so long as you make sure to die alone. 

The modern Western liberal society can also be called individualistic. Shweder was more interested in its inverse: sociocentric (or collectivist) societies, those primarily found throughout the “non-Western” world. Such societies situate units, like families or tribes, as their primary building blocks; they put the needs of the group ahead of the needs of the individual, rather than subordinating the former to the latter.

In 1986, Shweder began parallel surveys in Chicago, IL and Orissa, India. He and his team presented participants with hypothetical ethical dilemmas (e.g.: A boy was walking down the road and saw a dog. He kicked it. Judge the boy.) Questions ranged from the simple and clear-cut to the convoluted and ambiguous. Shweder then combed through the trove of value judgments, searching for motifs in the mores. 

He found that most American respondents based their judgments almost exclusively upon concerns of autonomy, employing a classic liberal vocabulary of harm reduction and independence. Indian respondents, however, displayed a much more complex moral fabric, weaving in a broader range of what Shweder called the “Big Three” ethics: autonomy, community, and divinity.

If moral sensitivities are a kind of flavor palate, activated differently by different ethical challenges, sociocentric societies recognize a range of spices well beyond the narrow self-sovereignty of the West’s lightly-salted chicken. Hypothetical actors that violated rules of familial responsibility, respect for authority, and sanctity of community were at fault. Those that betrayed the norms of productive interrelation had done wrong, simply and totally.  

Shweder’s findings helped sketch out the underlying moral frameworks upon which society’s cohesive norms are built. A people’s understanding of who is sovereign and what is owed dictates what they can imagine day-to-day, and what they can accomplish in times of crisis.  

As Shweder puts it, “The social order is a moral order.” 

What happens, then, to a nation ordered upon individual rights and their social mores that betrays that foundation from the outset? 

SINCE 1776, when it was by no means running the world, the United States has been declaring itself moral, and stumbling ahead with a morass of founding documents wherein that morality is supposedly located. These amorphous intentions have been centuries in the deciphering. They are clear, however, in their codependence. Liberal norms and the liberal laws they undergird prop one another up. Justice must be upheld to allow liberty; law must be upheld to ensure the pursuit of happiness. 

And when born in inequity, each will slouch towards its perpetuation. 

2020 introduced many to the nation that we have always been. From a gilded founding onwards, America has granted the protections of law and the subsequent capacity for life first and foremost to its favored sons. If the elite minority that made the declarations never had you in mind, you become lost in their native translation. If an individualistic society does not and cannot see you as fully human, you do not qualify for liberties of any charge.   

Finally, we are left with an entirely predictable product: a nation that tasks the upholding of its laws to a police force currently killing its Black citizens at 2.8x the rate of their white counterparts. A nation whose white households are worth roughly ten times that of its Black ones. A nation with the largest prison complex in recorded history incarcerating Black populations at almost three times the national average and then using a Constitutional amendment meant to liberate them to instead force them into legalized slave labor. 

Finally we are left with a nation working exactly according to plan, one whose liberties have been weaponized by a supremacist caste that believes life, and the pursuit of all that it might be, belongs to them most of all, them all along. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the accent of this certainty as a chosen son pronounces threatened. 

We cannot reframe a liberty that we never meant. We cannot repair a democracy that never was. 

IT WAS May 29, 2020; 95,000 Americans were dead; so too, victims of a more endemic strain, were George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmad Arbury and countless others; and Trevor Noah was at home, speaking to a nation in apparent decline—one whose Black citizens, at that moment, were 1.5 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than its white ones. 

Noah wears a dark green shirt with no tie as he speaks. He has let his goatee grow in and his hair curl out. He talks directly into the front-facing camera, like a quarantined relative on Zoom. 

“Fundamentally, when you boil it down, society is a contract... a contract that we sign amongst each other,” he says, echoing certain notorious classical-L liberals. “And as with most contracts, [it] is only as strong as the people who are abiding by it.” 

Gesturing as he goes, he pivots to that summer’s massive global protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and soon makes his way to the subsequent lootings scattered around the US which were being used at the time by some to discredit a movement they were hoping to ignore. 

“When you see George Floyd on the ground and you see a man losing his life... at the hands of someone who is supposed to enforce the law—what part of the contract is that?” 

He speaks without a script; lilting discursively; pacing, pausing. “What good does rioting do? How does it help you to loot Target?” he asks. Well what good doesn’t it do? How does it help you to not loot Target?” 

After a pause: “Because the only reason you didn’t loot Target before was because you were upholding society’s contract.”

Incredibly, those that America had most excluded from the promises of liberty, from the full potential of the society they had signed onto (had, in fact, been coerced into)—those with the most reason to reject the rotten deal had instead, for centuries, held up their end of a broken bargain. And now they were weighing their options. Now they were showing a lethally blithe nation the fragility of a house that builds itself on sand and insists it is on a hill.

Two months later, a police officer would shoot an unarmed Jacob Blake seven times in the back as Blake’s children watched from the car. Three months later, Breonna Taylor’s murderers would be acquitted, one of them receiving a slap on the wrist for having a bad aim. 

AS TRICK-OR-TREATERS gorged themselves on the far side of the Atlantic, Isaiah Berlin concluded that positive and negative liberty were incompatible. Their downstream effects are binary: a people defined by one or the other either come to see themselves as a society or a confederacy, a sociocentric or an individualistic union, a community responsible for rewriting its broken system or one in which the beneficiaries of a built-in supremacy fight to propagate it.  

Any meaningful reform, therefore, any attempt to wash out an individualism gone rancid, would require a fundamental reimagination. 

The scars of our willful ignorance run deep, and the attempt to build an aspirational nation on an oft-told and fiercely-wished lie has gnarled us. We seem to have doubled down when faced with the multiform brutalities of 2020, burrowing ever-deeper into solipsism, opportunism, and the easiness of what is known.

But what is known will not do. What is known has begat its own end, and self-delusion has always been unsustainable. 

It is a dark hour now, and our American inability to recognize our error, to see that a philosophy of absence cannot alone achieve the presence we need, has brought us to these compounding crises. New sicknesses stack upon old inequities. New perversions of our wishful ideals remind us of how little we have ever lived them. 

It may be too late. We may have wrapped ourselves so tightly around the lonely tools of autonomy that the Other has become unknowable, even wretched, to the point that millions will see any attempt to require masks or vaccinations or the basic consideration of others as dictatorial. We may even deserve it. 

Baldwin reminds us that, “We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self.” 

“This is also true of nations,” he adds. 

Everyone else in Daniel Maples’ video is wearing masks on that summer day by the food court. Multiple shoppers insist upon the regulations and later stand behind the battered cameraman. Hundreds of thousands of wage-earning employees have since continued to go to work restocking the wares we all rely on, even in the face of spittle and bile. 

Berlin’s contemporaries rationed during the second world war, turned their lights down low at night, gave up luxuries in order to preserve a union come under mortal threat. 

And, as Trevor Noah spoke, protestors across the world were linking arms, picking up those who had fallen, washing off those who had been gassed, even putting their bodies in front of bats and pellets—because they could, and so they did. Their American exceptionalism was full-throated and broad, uncurdled by brutal summer skies gone hazy with pepper.

At our extremes—birth, ecstasy, pain, death—we are, in fact, alone. And, “In order to conquer this continent, the particular aloneness of which I speak—the aloneness in which one discovers that life is tragic, and therefore unutterably beautiful—could not be permitted,” (ibid). 

Well the frontier is long-dead, we are far too old for the gruff lessons of brute conquest, and we all have to get on with living, forever stuck together in this unutterable world, forever self-righteous and self-wrought. The trick, now, lies in what to make of ourselves amidst self-made tragedy’s leftovers.