The collapse seems to be speeding up alarmingly.

I lived through one portent of the acceleration in late June, along with much of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, in the form of a heat wave that broke all records and jumped up and down on them. The peak here in Seattle was 108°, which frankly felt way too much like being the proverbial frog in the pot of water gradually heating up. If it can go from the seventies to 108 in a matter of days, what says it can’t keep going? It felt as if the planet is no longer our home but an enemy bent on cooking us.

It wasn’t reassuring that the entire town of Lytton, British Columbia, burst into flames and was mostly destroyed. It’s only mid-July now and the wildfire season is already raging, weeks earlier than usual; I hate to think how bad it will be by the time you read this. Meanwhile, we have learned that parts of the Amazon rainforest are now releasing more carbon dioxide than they absorb, which is terrifying news. The journal Nature summarized: “Atmospheric measurements show that deforestation and rapid local warming have reduced or eliminated the capacity of the eastern Amazonian forest to absorb carbon dioxide—with worrying implications for future global warming.”

I’m old enough to remember when the Amazon was a carbon sink, and now look what we’ve done.

So we have global warming, wildfires, a pandemic, and democracy trembling in the balance, but many of us are carrying on as if it’s all a big joke, or a joyous opportunity for political theater. “California’s on fire! The new strains of COVID-19 are filling up the ICUs and cemeteries again! What a glorious moment to stick it to the Libtards!”

There is first-term Representative Lauren Boebert, for instance, whose claim to fame and stepping-stone to Congress was ownership of a Colorado restaurant called Shooters Grill, where the staff is encouraged to carry guns, specifically to “open carry” them, like kids playing a TV Western but with real bullets. Boebert performed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas in early July, prancing across the stage exclaiming, “Don’t come knockin’ on my door with your Fauci ouchy—you leave us the hell alone.”

There is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former press secretary in Donald Trump’s administration and current candidate for governor of Arkansas, who boasted to Fox News that “If I’m elected governor here in Arkansas, we will not have mask mandates, we will not have mandates on the vaccine, we will not shut down churches and schools and other large gatherings because we believe in personal freedom and responsibility.”

It’s unsettling that the reasons for doing this—actively campaigning for people to mistrust effective vaccinations in the midst of a lethal pandemic—are so frivolous or cynical or both. How can Boebert and Sanders possibly think it’s worth it? How can they live with themselves?

One answer is just tribalism (for more, see Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene’s book Moral Tribes). Political parties are ferociously tribal as well as political, with the result that policy disputes that should be a matter of evidence and argument become instead a loyalty filter. It doesn’t matter what the facts are or what the best policy is, what matters is boosting our tribe and belittling their tribe.

Maybe that’s all there is to it, and it’s pointless to keep asking why, but the question still nags. Even tribes still share immense common ground; if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to live together at all. (Mind you, sometimes it seems as if we can’t …) We don’t have separate laws or traffic systems or food supply chains for each tribe. You’d think that stopping a lethal pandemic would sit squarely in that common ground where it’s just idiotic and suicidal to reject the best policy for tribal jollies.

The wild card here seems to be a warped and childish idea of “freedom,” the Ayn Rand-John Birch Society-Sarah Palin-Lauren Boebert brand that boils down to “I can do whatever I want to and you can’t stop me.”

The appeal of the libertarian ideology is obvious enough, since we all want to do whatever we want to do, but by the same token the flaws are equally obvious, since we learn as toddlers that we all want that and thus we don’t all get that at any particular moment. You want to play with other kids? Then you can’t take all the toys/cookies/prizes for yourself.

This applies to all of us. Even Lauren Boebert can’t have her restaurant, her guns, her truck, her new job as a pretend Member of Congress, without the vast social structure that makes it all possible. Sarah Sanders can’t run for governor of Arkansas without the help of mass media and transportation and security.

At this point one feels like banging a gavel and saying, “Case closed.” Why bother to say any more when it’s so obvious? Absolute freedom is impossible unless you live all alone in a wilderness, in which case (as Thomas Hobbes pointed out long ago) you die swiftly. We benefit from living in society, and we can’t live in society without any rules.

To be fair, this isn’t exclusively a left-right or Democrats-Republicans conflict, it’s a universal one—a me-you, us-them conflict. Freedom for me, following the rules for you. Autonomy for us, law and order for them.

But when it comes to rejecting effective vaccinations against a lethal pandemic, an element of perversity gets in: defiance for its own sake, because there’s no real reason to refuse, and a surplus of reason to comply. There are “anti-vax” campaigns in some majority-Muslim countries, too, with the result that the polio virus, which came very close to being eradicated, has made a comeback. There are news stories of “Fauci-ouchy” people winding up in the ICU with COVID-19 and begging for the vaccination now only to be told, “I’m so sorry, it’s too late.” Tribal disputes are becoming a luxury we can’t afford.