By Todd Hayen, PhD

“Wearing a mask is an act of love.” I have about a dozen similar little snippets of wisdom collected over the recent weeks, as I am sure most of you have also witnessed if you are a frequent visitor to Facebook.

If wearing a mask is an act of love, what would not wearing a mask be an act of? I have often heard it directly referred to as an act of extreme selfishness, among other equally shaming descriptions. Early on, mask wearers described those they encountered who did not wear masks as “dismaying, confusing,” or “selfish”, these descriptions have now evolved to “hateful, moronic, disgusting,” or “unconscionable.” Wearing or not wearing a mask no longer seems to be a medical choice — something to ward off Covid-19 transmission, but it has become more of a social, or political, statement — a device to indicate “who is with us” and “who is against us.”

In 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter was published. The story was set in mid 17th Century puritanical Massachusetts and presented what is possibly one of the first tales of public shaming to come out of the Americas. A young woman in Boston has given birth to a child with no identified father. She is brought before the public and, through a decree brought down by the community authorities, is required to wear a scarlet letter “A” prominently displayed on her clothing whenever in public. The Scarlet Letter is meant to mark her as an adulteress, carrying all the shame and humiliation the designation “adulteress” would connote during that particular period of religious fundamentalism.

Humans, probably since the earliest of times, have always gravitated toward the identification of “other” in their culture — in primitive, less civilized times, certainly due to the potential danger of warring, or conflicting, tribes in close proximity. A fear of “other” has been etched in the collective unconscious, and we certainly have seen examples of this in our recent, and not so recent, history. However, differing from ancient times where close contact with a group of people who could very well hurt you in a variety of ways, today such a great threat does not generally exist; therefore, there is no real purpose behind identifying those who “don’t fit in,” yet we still are anxious to do so.

In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, the protagonist of the story, must be perceived as the enemy before she can be publicly shamed. Birthing an illegitimate child, or more precisely, engaging in the sexual act with a man she isn’t married to, goes against the religious mores of Prynne’s culture. There is, then, a weak appearance of “reason” to fear her otherness, and thus to then shame her, or to even hate her. She is marked due to her violation of a cultural, in this case also religious, standard of the time. She herself, however, is not shameful. Her shame is placed upon her due to an external doctrine. The reason to shame her becomes secondary to the idea that the people who are shaming are searching for “other,” compelled by a collective unconscious and archaic need to establish safety and control through the identification of the “unsafe” — the “other.” If you can identify them, then you can project hate and disgust on that individual or group, and thus feel a modicum of control — your immediate environment is a bit safer if you feel you have some control over it.

When applying this idea to the problem of wearing masks, and the identification of “unsafe other” to those who don’t wear masks, don’t mask wearers have a valid point in castigating that nonconforming group? If it is so clear, according to the mainstream narrative, that Covid-19 is spread predominantly by people who do not wear masks, why in the world would people choose to not wear a mask, and thus selfishly spread their disease to everyone they come in contact with? This supposition does not stand up to scrutiny for several reasons; the first and foremost is that not everyone has disease to spread. In order to transmit a disease, with or without a mask, you must first have it. This first problem is easily solved by the mainstream narrative’s efforts to make sure we understand that you don’t have to have symptoms to be a carrier of virus (some reports I have read say 45% of all disease is acquired by asymptomatic people, how they came to that conclusion is beyond my logic reasoning, but most people seem to believe this), thus everyone is then a potential carrier.

Regardless of what the mainstream media has to say, there certainly are people who don’t buy into their rhetoric, and quite possibly many non-conforming anti-maskers are among these people. Therefore, an anti-masker very likely may not be selfish at all. If they don’t believe they have the virus, then not wearing a mask won’t hurt anyone. But this question is never asked, and thus the noncompliant become identified as “unsafe other” — evil, selfish, moronic, idiotic, (fill in the blank). Thus they are a person who doesn’t care about anyone but themselves. They wear the scarlet letter “No Mask” and are then designated as the one to hate, the group to disown, the ones “not for, but against.” They become the group to, eventually, be destroyed. To the destroyers, for good reason. Never mind the disease, the good reason to destroy them is that they are in the group to hate, to fear, and they are easily marked — they are “other.”

The mask wearing phenomena is interesting on several counts; one is that it seems to be a completely artificial concoction. Another is the opposing idea that there is a good logical argument for wearing one. It does look like to many that there is a conscious manipulation of an archaic psychological complex (the innate fear of “different” deeply seated in a very old truth about the potential danger of neighboring tribes), i.e., “taking advantage of a psychological, although illogical, propensity” in order to push along the agenda of the manipulators — but who or what is the manipulator? We again have seen historically the manipulation of a populace to hate “other” that is fabricated by the state. The most obvious in recent years is the Nazi vilification of the Jews. Even more recently Muslim’s have been similarly targeted as “other to be feared” by the US Government. Mexicans and immigrants in general have been as well. Many people believe that other marginalized peoples, races, people of certain sexual orientations, other religious groups as well as women, have been purposely and maliciously marked as “other” by the state. The rationalization for this action generally comes under the insistence that it is for the “good of the people.” Therefore, the groups identified as dangerous are to be avoided, chastised, abused, shamed and even violently harmed for being the “enemy”.

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung made popular a phrase, “participation mystique,” which had already been invented by Lévy-Brühl, a French scholar and philosopher who lived in the early part of the 20th Century. Roughly, and simply speaking, “participation mystique” refers to a collective human compulsion to project an identity onto a group of people that is largely imaginative or symbolic. This is probably where a concept like “herd mentality” originates, or even a more common phrase we are hearing these days, “sheeple” — people who seem to blindly follow an official narrative. It also applies to “conspiracy theorists,” “tin foil hat wearers,” and in the context of this article, “selfish anti-maskers.”

This projection that Jung speaks of is generally unconscious, or at least the impetus for it is. What becomes the basis for fear, hate, disgust, or whatever other derogatory term and emotion that sputters forth when confronting the object of the projection is again unconscious and archaic in origin. It is all but universally clear that this projection of the “unsafe other” onto no-maskers is a result of the nefarious agenda of the “powers that be,” although if history is any validation of this probability, we certainly have many examples to support it. That being said, however the “powers that be” wish to manipulate their success, the method of their manipulation is supported by clear psychological tendencies that human beings have possessed probably since humans walked the earth: it is very easy for those in power to manipulate our mass psychology to their benefit. We of course must all strive to be more conscious, more aware of the powers that internally or externally, propel us into behaviour that is not only consciously irrational, but unproductive and ultimately quite dangerous.

Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology.

Originally published by Off-Guardian Jul 19, 2020 and is reprinted with permission