How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur

Author:Michael Schur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Small Sacrifice, Huge Reward

It’s not always easy to know the difference between harmlessly breaking rules and sending ourselves down a slippery Overton window–shifting path. Plenty of great TV shows and movies involve people making tiny bad decisions and then spending the rest of their lives making more and more of them to try to make up for the first one, eventually becoming irredeemable monsters. It’s unlikely any of us will, say, decide to start cooking crystal meth like Walter White in Breaking Bad and one day find ourselves running a New Mexican drug empire. But if guilt is how we police ourselves, we need to allow ourselves to feel that guilt, and we need to listen to our guilty consciences when they give us pause. That’s one of the biggest hindrances to making use of our individual guidance systems—too many of us just don’t pin those slightly damning receipts up on our cubicle walls so they can remind us of these little bad things we’ve done. Again, I can’t help but think about the Covid-19 “mask problem.” The people who’ve refused to join the team here—the ones who decided that they simply didn’t have to (or want to) follow this new rule—often get extremely indignant when store owners or workers ask them not to be “free riders” and go maskless while everyone else covers up. “How dare you,” they say. “This is America! I can do what I want, because of liberty! The Constitution guarantees us Freedom of Face, and also Don’t Tread on Me and George Washington and Bald Eagles!”15 Thanks in part to this attitude (and in larger part to the craven media types and politicians who fostered it), we all watched helplessly as the virus ripped through the country in wave after wave. Even worse were the states where authorities decided not to require mask-wearing—either for similar ideological reasons, or because they feared the wrath of those who held that ideology, or both, or both plus ignorance and stupidity.

The widespread lack of guilt among mask resisters feels like a gut punch, to me. Because again, it’s such a minuscule ask—wearing a mask falls roughly at the “don’t jaywalk” level of individual sacrifice. Imagine we were in that Hot Day Jaywalking scenario from earlier—it’s 103 degrees and the crosswalk is a block away, so we intend to just hustle across the street. Now imagine that someone said: “Hey, I know it’s annoying, but if we all agree to head on down and use the crosswalk instead of jaywalking, we can save a hundred thousand people from dying in auto accidents.” Imagine how easily we’d make that call! Okay, it’s a little hot and a bit inconvenient… but 100,000 people? It’d be one of the simplest calculations we’d ever made. And yet here I sit, writing this book, watching the case count for the nation skyrocket because too many people think their own Ayn Randian right to unfettered selfishness outweighs the sum total of literally everyone else’s happiness and safety.

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