The Costume We Never Took Off
Halloween never ended, we just keep changing costumes and calling it independent thinking.
The Performance of Independence
Hi, I’m no-one.
Every Halloween, children dress up as what they secretly wish they could become. Pirates for rebellion. Superheroes for moral certainty. Angels for righteousness. Monsters for freedom from social rules. But the night ends, costumes return to closets, and everyone goes back to being themselves.
What if we discovered during COVID that we'd been wearing costumes all along?
The most unsettling revelation wasn't how quickly people surrendered freedom. It was how comfortable most felt when the performance finally ended.
The Exhausting Act
Before March 2020, Americans wore the elaborate costume of rugged individualism. We performed independence at coffee shops, debating politics with passionate conviction. We displayed skepticism toward authority as a badge of intellectual sophistication. We celebrated questioning everything as a core national virtue.
But watch what happened when institutional authority aligned behind a single message.
The same people who posted quotes about liberty and personal responsibility suddenly looked grateful when every major institution started making decisions for them. The neighbors who'd performed skepticism toward government quietly accepted guidance when it came packaged with corporate, media, and academic endorsement. The business owners who'd questioned regulations closed their shops without legal requirement when social pressure made compliance virtuous.
This wasn't weakness. This was relief at finally dropping an exhausting act.
The Comfort of Institutional Scripts
During lockdowns, something fascinating happened. People didn't resist having their choices removed when those choices were removed by the entire establishment simultaneously. Every major newspaper, television network, university, corporation, and health institution spoke with remarkable unity.
Following this guidance required no courage, no independent research, no social cost. It was the path of maximum comfort and minimum resistance. You could feel morally superior while doing exactly what every authority figure wanted you to do.
The messaging was everywhere, consistent, and socially rewarded. Compliance came with praise, professional advancement, and membership in the virtuous majority.
The Asymmetry of Resistance
The resistance that did emerge faced a completely different reality. Questioning lockdowns meant challenging not just government policy, but corporate media, academic institutions, medical establishments, and social media platforms simultaneously.
Anti-lockdown voices were banned from major platforms, fired from jobs, excluded from social gatherings, and labeled as dangerous spreaders of misinformation. Medical professionals lost licenses for questioning guidelines. Academics faced career destruction for publishing contrary research.
This wasn't comfortable conformity. This was costly dissent.
Yes, alternative authorities emerged. Yes, resistance movements developed their own talking points and tribal behaviors. But following these alternative scripts required actively seeking suppressed information and accepting real social and professional consequences.
The Halloween Effect Revisited
Halloween reveals something profound about human nature, but the analogy needs refinement. Most children choose costumes that their friends and parents will approve of. They want to fit in while feeling special.
COVID functioned like Halloween where one costume was endorsed by every authority figure, promoted in every store, and praised by every adult. The other costumes were banned from most venues, criticized by teachers, and could get you kicked out of school.
When conformity is institutionally supported and resistance is institutionally punished, we learn something different about human nature. Most people will choose the path that brings social rewards and professional safety, then construct moral justifications afterward.
The Power of Unified Authority
The most revealing aspect wasn't individual psychology but institutional coordination. When government, media, academia, and corporate America aligned behind identical messaging, dissent became extraordinarily difficult.
This wasn't about following science versus ignoring it. Many credentialed experts raised questions about lockdown policies, cost-benefit analyses, and alternative approaches. But these voices were systematically marginalized, not because their credentials were insufficient, but because their conclusions were inconvenient.
The establishment created a situation where agreement looked like scientific consensus and disagreement looked like dangerous conspiracy thinking. Most people chose to appear reasonable rather than risk appearing crazy.
The Mirror of Institutional Conformity
What if American individualism has always been performance art, maintained only when it doesn't conflict with institutional pressure? What if our celebrated skepticism toward authority only applies when authorities disagree with each other?
Consider how differently people responded when every major institution aligned versus when they conflicted. During normal times, Americans enjoy playing authorities against each other, choosing which experts to trust based on personal preference. But when the entire establishment speaks with one voice, that performance becomes much harder to maintain.
The COVID period revealed that most people's independence is contingent on institutional permission. When that permission is withdrawn, the costume comes off quickly.
The Authentic Self Illusion
Perhaps the most challenging possibility is that genuine independence requires not just questioning authority, but questioning institutional consensus itself. Most people can handle disagreeing with government when media supports them, or disagreeing with media when academia supports them.
But disagreeing with government, media, academia, and corporate America simultaneously? That requires a different kind of psychological resilience that most people simply don't possess.
The freedom we thought we valued was actually freedom to choose between pre-approved options. The independence we claimed to cherish was dependence on institutional conflict to create space for dissent.
The Next Performance
Another crisis will come. When it does, we'll witness the same phenomenon. If major institutions align behind a single response, most people will follow that path and feel righteous about it. The minority who resist will face social and professional consequences while being told they're just following different authorities.
The pattern isn't symmetrical. Institutional conformity is always easier than institutional resistance. One path offers rewards and belonging. The other offers isolation and cost.
The truly uncomfortable question isn't whether people will resist control next time. It's whether we can acknowledge that most of us only perform independence when it's institutionally safe to do so.
Maybe our celebrated individualism was always just another costume we wore when the audience approved. When they stopped applauding, most of us quietly changed costumes and pretended we'd always been wearing the new one.
The next crisis will test whether we've learned anything about the difference between comfortable conformity and costly conscience. My suspicion is that most people will choose comfort again, then construct elaborate justifications for why this time was different.
— no-one
Thoughts you didn’t think, written for you anyway
See what happens when all the costumes come off.