In a 2021 AIER essay, “Liberating Yourself from Faucism,” I wrote: “The issue isn’t Anthony Fauci’s failings. The problem is Faucism, the fantastical belief that wise and beneficent experts should rule.”
Five years later, many remain committed Faucists — not just in support of Dr. Fauci, but in support of the failed idea that Americans should conform to expert rule.
John Stuart Mill would say Faucism took hold because, even before the pandemic, many Americans had already weakened the habits that make liberty possible: independent judgment, moral courage, and resistance to the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion.”
Dr. Scott Atlas, who, during the pandemic, served as a COVID advisor to President Trump, was one of those attacked by Fauci for holding a different view on pandemic policy.
In a recent speech, Atlas argued Fauci didn’t create moral cowardice during the pandemic; he exposed the rot that was already there. Atlas pointed out, “Institutions that existed to protect freedom instead suspended it, and did so not only from the top down, but with the willing compliance — often the enthusiastic compliance — of free people themselves.”
Atlas spoke not to “relitigate grievances… but because the silence that followed the pandemic malfeasance, silence that is still here today, is itself the real danger.”
I share Atlas’s alarm because I see the same moral rot in the unwillingness of many institutions to confront their capture by illiberal forces.
The Tyranny of Conformity
Atlas’s warning is powerful because it points beyond the failures of one official or one policy. It raises the deeper question that Mill spent much of On Liberty answering: What happens to a people when they become accustomed to measuring truth and conscience by the opinion currently rewarded by respectable society?
Mill observed that the impulse to impose our opinions on others “is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power.”
When we don’t have coercive power, we constrain ourselves, but that no more proves our character than claiming a person who never drives is a safe driver. We may feel certain about our opinions, but what do we do with those “certain” opinions when we have power over others?
When we think of tyranny, we think of the coercive power of government. But Mill warned that when society itself becomes the tyrant, its means “are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates.” When “penetrating more deeply into the details of life,” such “social tyranny” can be “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression” because “it leaves fewer means of escape.” This tyranny ends up “enslaving the soul itself.”
People stop developing and consulting their moral convictions and instead ask what opinion is required of them in their position. Mill writes that when going down this path of accommodation, “it does not occur to [us] to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” What happens next is that “the mind itself is bowed to the yoke,” until “by dint of not following [our] own nature, [we] have no nature to follow.”
There it is. If you have been wondering how anyone can still carry water for Dr. Fauci, Mill offers a penetrating answer: Prolonged conformity can leave people with little independent moral character to consult when it matters.
The Death of Independent Judgment
Mill is scathing. He argues that those who make no choices but follow “custom” lose their humanity: “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice.”
Mill reminds us of what should be obvious but to many no longer is: “The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used.”
What Faucism produces is not simply a nation of liars. It is arguably worse because it seems respectable: a nation of people who learn to put private judgment in one compartment and public speech in another.
People shaped by such a regime, Mill says, are “mere conformers to commonplace,” whose arguments on “great subjects are meant for their hearers” rather than drawn from their own convictions. Those who avoid that fate do so by shrinking their attention to small matters that are safe to discuss “without venturing into the region of principles.”
Consider the academic who says one thing in the hallway and another in the faculty meeting; the pediatrician who thought emergency vaccines and masks for children were a potential disaster but still posted the recommended language for public consumption; or the epidemiologist who had doubts about Fauci’s claims but stayed silent.
How to Recover Moral Courage
Liberation begins by recovering the human faculties weakened by conformity: judgment, conscience, and the courage to stand apart.
Don’t wait for others to go first. We increase our moral courage by recognizing our vital duty to humanity. Mill declares, “The mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.”
Be eccentric. Be noticed. Mill argues, “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”
Standing against the cheering crowd requires engaging the mind rather than surrendering it, because, as Mill pointedly writes, “He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.”
The Courage to Be Wrong
Dare to be gracefully wrong. Ultimately, the moral courage to stand alone is justified by the immense value of truth-seeking rather than the cheap pleasure of being “right.” I find Mill’s words inspirational:
To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow-creatures.
You may have noticed how few people, perhaps including yourself, are capable of being gracefully “wrong.” Our ego equates being wrong with losing its unique identity. Few of us have taken to heart David Hume’s great lesson that, since our self-identity is ephemeral, there is rarely a reason to get defensive about our opinions. We can argue our position, when necessary, but trying to control others to get our way is dysfunctional behavior. Worse still is harming others to get our way.
Beyond Tribal Loyalty
Surrender tribal loyalties in favor of classical liberal principles. Mill recognized that human beings naturally seek the comfort of their sect or party. Those who stood by Dr. Fauci when he proclaimed that criticizing him was “criticizing science” did a disservice to public health. Doctors who approved “transgender body modification requests,” even when doing so went against “their best medical judgment,” irreparably harmed vulnerable teenagers. Prioritizing tribal conformity over humanity is demonstrated by those on the right who ignore antisemitism cloaked in nationalist or conspiratorial rhetoric, or those on the left who ignore it when cloaked in anti-colonial or anti-Zionist rhetoric.
Mill understood that liberty is not sustained merely by laws or institutions; it is sustained by men and women willing to choose moral responsibility over comfortable conformity.
Faucism did not begin with Fauci, and it will not end with him. It will end only when enough people refuse to let prevailing opinion do their thinking for them. The foundation of a free society and a fully human life rests on our commitment to the independent use of conscience.
