I didn’t expect to be quite this affected by coming to a state where they don’t wear masks anymore. I nearly teared up just looking the cashier at the gas station in the eye. It’s like waking up from a bad dream.

Having to wear a face mask just to go about your daily business is undignified and dehumanizing. That is a reality of the world, not some arbitrary judgment: veiling ourselves line this makes us objects of inscrutable suspicion to one another; literally faceless ciphers.

Modern politics is completely incapable of taking facts like this into account: we disregard the real aesthetic experiences of actual human citizens because we think they’re subjective irrelevancies, inconsequential by comparison to the hard cold truth of numbers and probability.

Of course, though, the “certainty” of our predictive models proves time and again to be a vain illusion, while the things we neglect—the real feeling of what it is like to go about in the world under a decayed regime—are every bit as real as our conceited predictions.

The real kicker: the people who want us in masks forever are *also* expressing an aesthetic preference: the preference for naked and soulless power. They are communicating something to us by forcing us to gag ourselves indefinitely under an increasingly spurious threat of death:

That, too, is an artistic gesture with a message. The message is: your soul doesn’t matter; your face and your dignity are nothing compared to our spreadsheets; submit or die.

In response to such a message, there is only one honorable response for an American to make.