On January 15, 2021, the New York Times reported that
Arizona had the highest 7-day daily average per
capita of deaths and new cases of the new coronavirus, covid-19.[1]
On one day, Arizona had 11,324 new cases.[2]
“We’re the hottest spot in the U.S. and among the hottest spots in the entire
world,” said Keith Frey, the chief medical officer for Dignity Health’s Arizona
division.[3]
“If we don’t slow this down over the course of the next days and weeks, then we
will be fully into that crisis zone,” he added.[4]
It would be a crisis of the state’s own making, and thus preventable but for
the local culture at least in the Phoenix metro area. In other words, the
crisis did not happen to Arizona; rather, the crisis was in large part homemade,
and can thus be used as a window into a dysfunctional culture in the United
States.
In spite of county and municipal laws and company policies
on wearing masks in stores and on public transportation (buses and the light
rail), many stores and the mass-transit company forbid employees from even
asking incoming customers to wear a mask (or wear one correctly over the nose
and mouth). Grocery stores were particularly problematic, with even their own
employees walking around with impunity without masks on (properly). “We don’t
enforce that requirement,” a grocery-store director told me. How, then, can the
policy be considered to be a requirement? “It just is,” a store manager told
me. That wearing masks was not only a company requirement, but also a city and
county law was of no interest to the manager. “We don’t enforce the law,” he
quipped. “But you are violating it by letting people in who are not wearing
masks,” I retorted. This was not his concern.
The Phoenix metropolitan mass-transit company, and thus its
two subcontracted bus-operating companies, also had a policy forbidding
employees from enforcing the company’s own requirement and the local law. Some
bus drivers would even not wear a mask or wear one without covering their noses
and mouths! Some light-rail security employees subcontracted by the
mass-transit company wore their masks over their chins too, as did a significant
proportion of the rail passengers. Some security employees asked passengers to
wear their masks correctly, while most of those employees did not. The notion
that masks were required on the trains was a farce, and yet notwithstanding
this, the company’s representatives had no problem defying logic itself by
insisting that masks were required. It
was as if the company policy and the county law mandating masks on public
transportation simply did not exist, and yet they did. “It’s not really a law,”
a customer-service employee told me. Why? Because the county doesn’t have a
legislature and only one of them can pass laws. The county board was apparently
extra-governmental in nature.
Both retail and the mass transit were exploiting an
exception, that of medical exceptions, to invalidate the rule. Incredibly, the
stores and mass-transit company used this exception to justify refusing even to
ask customers and passengers, respectively, to cover the nose and mouth area
with an existing mask. People with medical conditions exempting them from
wearing masks would not have masks on. The absurdity of allowing an exception
(e.g., a medical condition) to condemn a requirement was permitted in the
dysfunctional culture and amid a lack of accountability by regulators.
The problem was exacerbated by the political extremism that
was salient in the state. A steadfast refusal to obey the law on wearing masks had
a significant role in the number of people not wearing masks in stores and on
public transportation. Such people could easily exploit the managerial
incompetence both in retail and mass transit. It does not take long to realize
that an intentionally-unenforced requirement is not a requirement, even if this
point is not grasped by company managers. Yet the managerial dysfunction enabled
this condition to go on for almost a year as of January, 2021. In such a
political culture wherein a significant proportion of residents believe they
are justified in breaking the law and ignoring company policies, it can be
reckoned as inexcusable for companies to follow the invalid logic that the
existence of an exception invalidates a rule (or requirement). In other words,
it is negligence pure and simple. The lack of accountability, which was
well-ensconced in the culture within companies as well as between businesses
and local and state government, enabled the corruption that gave the virus the
upper hand. It was as if the locals could not help themselves.
Moreover, the local culture wherein political extremism was
salient allowed for the erroneous belief that the public good is simply the
aggregate of individual wills. Where enough wills decide not to wear masks
indoors in public and on public transit, the aggregate public good falls short
of being above the ability of the virus to spread. The public good as merely
the aggregate of individual wills thus is not good enough; it falls short of
what the public good actually is (e.g., being greater than the ability of the
virus to spread). The understatement of the public good can be understood too
as the belief that the general will (e.g., Rousseau) is reducible to the
aggregation of private wills.
The good of the whole, I submit, is more than
the sum of the individual parts because some parts may even detract from the
public good and thus understate it if it is taken to be merely the aggregation of
individual wills. That the market value of a product is determined by the
aggregate supply and demand does not mean that the public good is likewise
determined. For one thing, the market value of a product is in a closed system
(the aggregate supply and demand) whereas the public good is open-ended. In
other words, the public good can be higher than the aggregate of the individual
wills would have it because enough private-benefit-only wills can detract
appreciably from what is the good of the whole. If enough people refuse to wear
masks indoors in public places, and stores and even governments look the other
way, the result is significantly below the good of the whole, which in this
case is stopping the coronavirus. By its self-inflicted crisis, Arizona was
functioning well below its own good, and a highly dysfunctional local mentality
is to blame.
1. Jordan Allen et al, “Coronavirus
in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” The New York Times, January 15, 2021.
2. Alicia Caldwell and Ian Lovett, “Arizona Is America’s Covid-19 Hot Spot and on
the Brink of Crisis,” The Wall Street
Journal, January 15, 2021.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
