By Blaine Stum
When I hear someone say, “I don’t vaccinate my kids because it is no one else’s business,” I cringe. When I hear someone say, “Vaccines are a personal decision,” I cringe. I cringe because what both of these statements reflect is the sick underbelly of American culture: our propensity to veer uncontrollably toward selfish individualism.
You see, vaccination is not just a personal choice: it is a public choice. Your decision not to vaccinate can mean the difference between someone else, or someone else’s children, remaining healthy or coming down with an illness that could scar a person for life or even kill them. This is well known. This is what all public health agencies warn against; refusing to acknowledge that your decisions impact others. The foundation of public health rests upon the presumption that we have a duty not just to care for ourselves, but to ensure others are cared for as well. Somewhere along this windy road we’ve traversed, we have lost sight of that. We have lost sight of community.
Some will undoubtedly answer that humans, like all creatures, are evolutionarily hardwired to be selfish. There is a small kernel of truth to that: all of us want to survive another day of course. We fight for our own safety. We fight for our lives. We are also a social species however; meaning like all other social species we have the capacity to be altruistic just as much as we have the capacity to selfish. Rather than recognize this truth, we construct a culture that reinforces the worst in us, to the detriment of everyone.
Trade out “vaccinating your kids” with “engaging in promiscuous sex” or “engaging in conspicuous consumption” or “failing to purchase health insurance” or … Does the argument still hold up?
Hi Robert,
Yes, it absolutely does. If someone engages in risky behavior without thought to those around them, that’s no different. In the case of sex for instance, if someone knows they have an STD but fails to use protection when having sex with others, that shows an utter lack of regard for the health and welfare of others. If someone consumes without giving thought to the needs of others, that shows an utter lack of regard for their peers. Consciously deciding not to vaccinate is no different: unless there’s a legitimate medical reason not to have it done, you’re only thinking of yourself, and putting other people’s health at risk.
Robert, the sin of American individualism is to convince people that our decisions don’t have an effect on others. I can’t think of many decisions we make that affect no one else in any way. It’s a spectrum, a matter of degree. Other cultures see all people and all lifeforms, really, as interconnected. I think our lone cowboy/Ayn Rand/libertarian individualism is a dead end.