I'm young, face-masked and authoritarian
Young people are more comfortable with face masks, and more comfortable demanding the entire population wear one.
The Economist carried out a poll last week, and the contrast between young and old on face masks is stark.
Among 18 to 29 year-olds, more than twice the number of respondents strongly support mask mandates relative to those strongly opposing them. Whereas… for the 45+ the ratio is flipped, with about 1.6 times (or 1/0.6) the number of respondents strongly opposing mask mandates relative to those strongly supporting them (see above, and the two charts at the end of this substack for all the data).
We shouldn’t be surprised. We’re all happy mandating shirts, and don’t take ourselves to be authoritarians for that kind of mandate.
For the young and impressionable, however, faces became private parts, as I had discussed in December of 2020.
And, I suspect that, for the younger demographics, when they see a masked face, they don’t perceive the mask as a “censor bar” like I do, but instead as clothing, something I discuss below.
Once a taboo is “taken in” psychologically, one no longer sees its prohibition as a civil rights violation at all.
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IN the second graph there isn't a big range in the STRONGLY SUPORT group across all age groups. It is in the STRONGLY OPPOSE followed by SOMEWHAT SUPPORT that we see the largest difference in Age. So where as STRONGLY AGAINST goes up as Age increases STRONGLY SUPPORT does not equal increase as Age goes down.
How depressing! Although I suspect this is an American thing as here in the UK the youth appear to have mostly stopped masking. My American niece (18 years old) recently told her grandmother that she is scared all the time of everything. The wearing of a mask would fit into that fear. The damage that has been done to young people will never be fixed - they are damaged for life now. Even the UK youth who have discarded their masks are nervous of life and would undoubtedly put them back on if they were told to. The future looks bleak.