Last week, I drove past a university campus on my way home from an appointment. My timing was bad for getting home efficiently but great for people-watching, as I arrived during a class-change window. Around a third of the students and three-fourths of the professors I saw were wearing face masks.
Signaling fear of a virus—willingness to be controlled by fear, up to and including willingness to hide one’s face and let the symbol of that fear stand between you and the world, and thus be all that other people see of you—is now a marker of status. A luxury belief.
Luxury Beliefs
The concept of “luxury beliefs” was given to us by
(whose forthcoming book I reviewed). Luxury beliefs are those beliefs that elites signal to demonstrate their superiority to the lower classes. Crucially, they are beliefs that impose a cost on the lower classes, while rarely imposing a cost on the elites proclaiming them.For a thorough understanding of this topic, order Rob’s book. Here’s a quick-and-dirty handful of examples: belief that marriage is unimportant is espoused by elites, yet they rarely have children out of wedlock. Sexual promiscuity, which elites refuse to judge in the name of being cosmopolitan, is how lower-class men end up with a suspended driver’s license, due to back child support. And it’s how lower-class women end up on welfare trying to feed children on minimum wage. Support for open borders lets elites signal their compassion and virtue, but those borders are not ushering in people with MS or PhD degrees who will work as college professors, nurse practitioners, or software engineers for far less than the elites currently earn.
In 2024, a willingness to be controlled by fear, and to advertise that willingness, is a luxury belief.
Working Class Kids Learn to Manage Fear
When your parents have to work very hard just to keep you clothed and fed, they prepare you to stay home alone—saving them buckets on babysitters—at an earlier age than wealthy kids, who get to spend their after-school hours being tutored or getting instruction in archery, martial arts, or tennis.
When you spend the first twelve years of your life being supervised nearly every minute, other kids grabbing the toy out of your hands, saying something rude about you or your family, or otherwise provoking you, get reprimanded by the supervising adult—so you don’t ever have a physical fight.
Learning to be in a scary situation, refrain from panicking, think through the right way to handle it, and then handle it—these are skills that working class kids learn, by necessity, while they are still kids.
Working Class Adults Facilitate Luxury Virtue
Early in lockdowns, the phrase “laptop class” became popular, referring to people whose jobs were adaptable to working from home. The classes for whom that was never an option include the register-runners, the haircutters, the medical office receptionists, the plumbers and DoorDash drivers and Instacart shoppers.
The phrase “front line workers” popped up to refer to everyone whose jobs were not adaptable to working from home. These are the people who never had the luxury of staying home because “I’ve got a runny nose and it hasn’t been long enough to test for COVID yet—you never know, better safe than sorry, right?” These are the people whose lives changed during 2020 and 2021 in mostly two ways: fewer cars on the road and the closing of schools causing them massively complicated childcare problems.
Working class adults are, with a few exceptions, the ones who never had the luxury of letting fear of a virus change how they lived and worked.
Now everything is back to normal in most jobs—with one crucial exception.
The laptop class, the people who spent 2020 and 2021 signaling their virtue by using DoorDash and Instacart and performatively delaying their weddings, are still working from home, either totally or in a hybrid role. It’s not about COVID anymore; it’s about a societal shift that has made remote work an expectation in many industries.
Remote Work As A High Status Workplace Marker
From the reading I’ve done, this mirrors previous changes in workplace expectations, including most workplaces not permitting smoking indoors, a move that high-status workplaces made first, and later the move towards allowing people to keep their phones on their persons as a baseline norm—again, a move that happened first in high-status workplaces.
Five to ten year leases are common in commercial real estate, and I expect remote work to be fully normalized by 2030 when the very last pre-pandemic leases run out. It’s good for workers, yes. Indisputably, and especially for people with disabilities or other challenges. (As someone who lives with PTSD, I am infinitely more productive at home, where my environment is under my control and nearly-zero cognitive energy is required to manage my disorder.) But it’s also good for businesses. Their talent pool is much wider—they can choose the best person, period, not the best person who lives within commuting distance.
The pros and cons of remote work aside, the ability to work from home is still a status marker: it signals that you’re getting paid for what you know, as much or more as for what you are capable of doing with your body. It signals that your primary value is in your brain, not in what you can accomplish on your feet.
What Face Masks Signal In 2024
Face masks, in 2024, signal an important difference between the lower classes, the people who always had to work in person, and the wearer.
People who spent the pandemic wearing masks at low-status jobs did so because they had to. For the most part, they resented it. Clerks running registers hated having to repeat things when people like me, with hearing challenges, couldn’t understand them. They hated the constant reminder of an invisible enemy they needed to fear, and they were grateful to shed the masks and return to normal.
Choosing to wear a mask in 2024 is a signal of conscious effort to keep pandemic norms alive. Why would someone do that? What message does it send?
The Most Important Meaning of Face Masks
Most leftist messaging is contradictory on some level.
For example, leftists simultaneously believe that America is a vicious, snarling hellpit of racism and white supremacy and that virtue demands we have open borders to allow as many POC as possible into our country.
A consistent Left would have organizers at the border explaining that crossing into America would be crossing into systemic oppression and police forces who want nothing more than to shoot them for not being white, so they should turn back now if they value their lives and their children’s lives.
But face masks, in 2024, are remarkably consistent on messaging: it’s all about the virtue of being controlled by some type of fear.
Face masks signal the possibility of deserving compassion for victimhood: that the wearer is the victim of fragile health, one of the “immunocompromised” people for whom COVID poses the greatest risks.
Fear.
They also advertise the possibility that the wearer, if not “immunocomprised” himself or herself, is a good, virtuous person who is hyper-concerned about everyone who is.
Fear.
They signal a belief that the pandemic is ongoing, an invisible enemy still threatening everyone.
Fear.
And they signal a new baseline: our institutions can’t protect us—these people freely admit that their vaccines serve at best to prevent serious illness, not stop transmission—and thus, it is reasonable, appropriate, and virtuous to make decisions out of…fear.
What Makes Masking, and the Fear It Signals, A Luxury Belief
Luxury beliefs impose costs on the lower classes that the elites do not have to bear.
The college professors I passed were choosing to wear masks. Most of them teach three classes a semester, at most, and most in-person classes meet for 50 minutes three times a week. That’s seven and a half hours a week, at most.
These college professors can signal, during a total of, at most, less than one day’s work for the lower classes, their great virtue.
The rest of their time is spent under circumstances they fully control—control of which a farm worker, register runner, janitor, or line cook can only dream. They need not cope with wearing a mask over a hot stove in a restaurant kitchen or while using harsh chemicals to do industrial cleaning.
If they develop eczema or other complications from wearing their mask, a doctor’s visit and prescription are easily accessible.
If they have a student with hearing problems, the expensive see-through masks that facilitate lip-reading will be provided by their university’s disability accommodations office.
Signaling their fear, and the attendant virtue, costs them almost nothing.
Compare this to the life of someone who lives in a rough neighborhood. Ask a 21 year old woman from a difficult background what is likely to happen if she projects timidity, anxiety, and fear. Ask, but only if you want an answer that may haunt you.
The Important Questions
COVID, and our societal reactions to it, changed everything, and many of the changes seem to be permanent. But few of the changes are being well-examined.
In reading this essay over, searching for a conclusion, there’s a level on which I seemed, even to myself, to be elucidating that water is wet and the sky is blue. Masks signal that the wearer believes fear to be a virtue. Duh.
The important questions are why and how this happened.
I remember when the inverse was true—when Americans were people for whom not living in fear was the desired signal, the high-status belief.
I remember when fear was understood to be the province of children, something caring adults helped them outgrow, with patience and age-appropriate instruction in how to manage risk.
I remember when the idea of letting other people see that you were afraid was a signal of weakness that everyone wanted to avoid.
Hell, I remember when weakness and fragility were not desirable, high-status traits.
This is now reversed, and as masks are starting to pop up more and more in my (cobalt blue) area, I wonder if the trend will continue.
I would not be surprised to see a “new variant” this summer, something just severe enough to require 2024 voting to be done mostly by mail.
Will there be “We voted” signs or symbols for houses who’ve mailed their ballots in, making fear a signal of patriotism as well as virtue?
Will the current generation of college kids go home for the summer and get their parents—notorious for desperately seeking to be their kids’ best friends—masking again?
Will fear-as-virtue spread even further?
I don’t know, and I doubt anyone else does, either.
But it seemed like someone needed to ask.
So I’m asking.
What do you think?
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Fear as virtue, like many things, is on-its-way-out.
I could see Democrats pushing the fear through media to get people to do the mail-in voting to try to turn the election in their favor. That seems like something that could be done, especially since you've literally seen people masking again when people where I live would laugh at that.
But I don't know how it will turn out. I feel like a lot more people have had enough of the mandates and seen through the cracks in the story that the media might not want to do that. There could be real push back this time, the kind of pushback that I thought we would see the first time. And I don't know that they are prepared to deal with this pushback. I think things would go very differently if they tried that again.
I could be wrong though. This is a gamble. I wouldn't want to bet my life on an answer. People shocked me in 2020, so they could shock me again.
It's interesting to me though that the lower classes raised more competent children than t he higher "laptop class" did. I know I had to stay home alone (well, with my brother) after school as my mother worked two jobs. So I get the idea that I had to take on a lot of responsibility for myself and become tougher than someone who was pampered. I feel like there could have been a happier medium. But I'm glad I wasn't pampered and living in fear of COVID in 2020.