In 2019, I Traveled Internationally With Pneumonia
How common knowledge made what was frowned upon then all but illegal now, plus more thoughts on how the internet is ruining humanity
“I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.”
—Charles Cooley
At the beginning of 2019, just days before I was supposed to fly to Toronto for my company’s holiday party, I got pneumonia.
The Z-Pack I was given guaranteed I wouldn’t be contagious by the party, but I’d still be contagious for the flight. Still, those I spoke to insisted I’d “be fine,” that I “wouldn’t want to miss the week,” etc.—basically, “Suck it up and get here.”
I admittedly wanted to go, but that didn’t make being told to fly internationally with pneumonia any less surprising. That said, it was early 2019—a full year before the pandemic. Doing so then was frowned upon, but it carried nowhere near the social stigma—not to mention legal repercussions—that it might today. So I agreed.
Before I left, I purchased masks. I wore one on the train, then another through the airport. I felt like a leper. People gave me a wide berth. Even the coworkers I was traveling with looked at me with a mixture of doubt and scorn.
Upon arrival, even though I was no longer contagious,1 I kept my mask on. I sounded terrible, and figured people would appreciate the gesture. I could not have been more wrong.
When I walked into the office, my boss took one look at me in the mask and laughed.
“Take that thing off, dude,” he said. “You’re gonna freak people out.”
Though I didn’t see it then, his rationale, aside from seeming completely insane in the COVID-19 era, actually made sense.
Consider that prior to the pandemic, at least in the West, wearing a mask anywhere was abnormal. Virtually the only reason someone would do so is that they were actually very sick.
I thought people would be freaked out by my cough, and wore a mask to be considerate. People, it turned out, could give a shit about the cough—it was winter; people are sick all the time—but they were terrified of the mask.
My anecdotal evidence for this is how I was treated while wearing it. What happened in Toronto happened at O’Hare, too; in both situations, people looked at me, then around at others, the same way they might if a belligerent drunk hopped on a bus with them. In both situations, people would be aware that some collective action might need to be taken. Looking around for support—that is, is anyone else seeing this?—is how they react before taking it.
Thus, my boss told me to remove the mask to prevent the creation of common knowledge—that is, information people know that other people also know. Had I kept it on, it would’ve quickly become clear to everyone that everyone else knew that I was sick enough to need a mask, even as I was only trying to be considerate.
This could’ve led to questions, or even caused unnecessary panic, both of which my boss was trying to avoid.
The irony here should be obvious—two years later, and the idea that panic could be avoided by telling someone to remove a mask is laughable.
After COVID-19 was officially designated a pandemic, communication exploded via the internet, and masks—once relegated to hospitals and construction sites—became the norm. Whereas a masked person might’ve once spooked passengers on an airplane, now, videos circulate of passengers shouting down those who forego them.
In other words, post-pandemic, no one gives masks a second thought—and common knowledge explains why.2
Incumbent powers, of course, have long understood the relationship between common knowledge and power.
As Eugene Wei writes in “The Age of Distributed Truth,”
“The first thing oppressive regimes facing rebels at the gates will do is cut off public communication channels like television, radio, and social media. If the opposition cannot communicate with each other, they do not know how many others will stand with them if they march on those in power, weakening their resolve.”
It makes sense, then, that the establishment of common knowledge preceded social movements like #MeToo and #BLM. People are more likely to act when they know with certainty that they have others’ support.
The opposite of this is also true. People will not act unless they know they have others’ support.
Consider elementary school. If the classroom is a “state,” then the teacher is its “regime.” Most teachers wouldn’t consider themselves oppressive, but given those they’re tasked with “governing,” they often have to be.
Further, everything about their position—standing while everyone else sits, not to mention that students can’t ask a question or go to the bathroom without their permission—implies that they are. In a lecture setting, expressed curiosity thus takes the form of questioning authority. Though it might not seem one, socially, this is very much a risk.
This is why teachers are constantly saying, “Ask questions, because someone else likely has that question.”3 This last part is critical. What matters isn’t what the teacher is saying, but what they mean—that is, “the rest of the class won’t think you’re stupid if you ask your question.” Even with this reinforcement, for many students, questions aren’t risks worth taking.
If nothing else, this illustrates that we are constantly assessing what others think. Our ability to know—or even guess well—is not some narcissistic tendency; it is a literal survival mechanism.
In his essay, “Ads Don’t Work That Way,” Kevin Simler—co-author of The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life—proposes that public health campaigns capitalize on our tendency to focus on what others think.
Consider this ad from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene:
As Simler points out, it would be easy to see this ad as making a kind of individual appeal—that is, “if you drink sugary beverages, you’ll get fat.”
Still, individual appeals don’t change behavior as reliably as peer pressure does. In other words, this ad would be more effective displayed in a public place, where people wouldn’t just see it, but would know that other people were also seeing it. It makes sense, then, that this ad wasn’t run in mailers, or online, but rather on the subway.
Simler refers to the mechanism by which the ad works as “cultural imprinting,” defining it as:
“The mechanism whereby an ad, rather than trying to change our minds individually, instead changes the landscape of cultural meanings—which in turn changes how we are perceived by others when we use a product.”
By Simler’s reading, the ad’s explicit goal wasn’t to convince you individually that sugary drinks would make you fat; it was to convince you that everyone else knew that sugary drinks would make you fat.
Still, I think Simler misses a few things here. It doesn’t matter if people actually believe drinking soda will make you fat; it only matters that people believe that other people believe it—and, critically, that there is a negative stigma associated with obesity. On the internet, where information transmission is instantaneous, we can take this a step further: it doesn’t matter if people believe that other people believe something; assuming a significant enough stigma, it only matters that people believe someone might.
Obesity certainly carries such a stigma,4 but in 2021, so do many other things—like, say, being conservative. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that a few weeks ago, there was a joke going around on social media that vaccinated people would keep their masks on to avoid being mistaken for conservatives. Never mind why, exactly, that would be such a terrible thing; the fact remains that there is a perception, among some, that a small minority believe it would, just as there is a perception that being labeled as a conservative might limit your social mobility, or your children’s opportunities, etc.
Critically, I am not saying this is or isn’t true.5 I am only saying that when information moves as quickly as the internet allows, we are rewarded—or at least, aren’t punished—for thinking it is; for imagining the worst way something could possibly be perceived, and acting accordingly. Done often enough, this naturally leads to resentment, and to thinking the worst of people, even as most of us are more reasonable than the internet gives us credit for.
It would do us well to remember that our tools shape our discourse, lest we come to believe that we’re all just assholes in search of the next person to cancel.
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Clarifying on timeline a bit here—I started taking the meds the day before I left. The following day, I flew to Toronto. That night, I stayed in the hotel. The following day was the first day in the office.
This also explains why Anthony Fauci cautioned against masks early in the pandemic; it wasn’t because he knew they weren’t effective, it was because he knew they were, but the limited supply needed to be preserved for hospital workers and first responders. Telling everyone that masks weren’t effective, then, can be seen as an effort to head off the creation of common knowledge that masks were effective, in order to preserve what was then a limited supply of them.
It’s also, I think, why so many teachers love curious students—or at least, that’s how it was at a lot of my classes in college. Those students are the ones who give other students permission to be curious. This is also why you can refer to a classroom as a positive or negative “learning environment”—that is, somewhere where it’s okay to be wrong, or to ask “stupid” questions.
“Do these pants make me look fat?!”
I’m also not trying to take sides. There are stigmas associated with virtually any political affiliation, though the conservative association with avoiding masks is one of the more potent ones, at least recently.