Understanding social force
Understanding social force
My upcoming book, Expressly Human, gets to the bottom of how our wills can oomph
“Take a vax or you’re fired” is coercion. “Take a vax or you’re banished” is coercion.
Those suggesting that these don’t amount to coercion — because no one is physically forcing a needle into you — are gaslighting. They know it’s coercion. It’s the paradigm example of coercion.
But, as clear as it is that it’s coercion, why exactly is it so? How can pushy people get what they want without actually pushing? Getting at the philosophical and psychological foundations of this is difficult.
In our upcoming book, EXPRESSLY HUMAN (available for pre-order at Amazon), we provide a grand unifying theory of emotional expressions, and — among other things — explicate what we mean when we say someone is “forced to do something.”
I hint at these issues here in this new Moment video.
We are also a social species Mark, and we share a way of life that is threatened by things other than just tyranny against the individual. Things like pathogens. And things like misinformation. And cynicism.
We also have public goods and common needs and concerns other than what individuals may prefer to do in a given situation.
Of course public health policy is coercive if it is enforced by law, the question is whether that coercion is justified or not.
You’ve assumed the coercion isn’t justified and you’re dismissing any possibility of justification as if it were illegitimate in principle because it is coercive.
I respect your commitment to political minimalism but I don’t share it. I understand there can seem to be good reasons for cynicism but I don’t share quite that degree of it needed to assume there is some sort of unified false story driving public health efforts in general .
So the argument that any justification for public health measures is illegitimate and dismissible on psychological grounds seems profoundly undemocratic to me.
Do you see my concern here?