Excerpt:

What explains this perverse attachment to self-smothering? In the US, masks are a badge of tribal allegiance — Biden/Harris T-shirts that you tie around your face. They confer virtue and dedication to communitarian suffering. They create the illusion of control (‘I can’t get sick! I’m wearing a MASK!’). They provide the happy opportunity to denounce the recalcitrant and to force the begrudging to do something they dislike. Having socially withdrawn during this period of isolation, some mask-lovers don’t want a return to face-to-face encounters, which have come to seem frightening. These hermit crabs treasure not being seen. They’re used to hiding, and they want to keep hiding.

Ubiquitous masking also perpetuates the atmosphere of emergency to which some people have grown addicted. ‘Look, we live in a special, perilous time, and we obey strict protocols with heightened moral urgency.’ The prospect of relinquishing this exhilarating sense of the exceptional could seem deflating.

It’s a cliché now that masks have become a religious symbol. The very poverty of the scientific evidence for their efficacy may help explain the fervidness of their adoption. Masking is not a matter of knowledge but faith — or superstition. One masks to ward off evil. Post-pandemic, a goodly number of folks will still cling to their polypropylene nosebags like rabbits’ feet.

The strange theatre of mask-wearing