Where is our Social Conscience?

What do we owe to others?

Yesterday, the Florida surgeon general Joseph Lapado, M.D, Ph.D., issued a statement advocating the elimination of all vaccine mandates for school children in Florida. He said:

“All of them All of them. Evey last one of them is wrong and drips with distain and slavery. Who am I as a government or anyone else? Who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what to put in your body? What your child should put in (their) body? … I don’t have that right.”

This time it is about vaccines, and yes, it’s a decision that screams hypocrisy when put up against the GOP’s demand to limit birth control pills, mifepristone and reproductive health-care decisions. But that is not my topic for today.

I want to explore a larger question:

When did we decide that the highest form of freedom is individual freedom?

When did it become America’s truth that any rule that constrains or controls an individual’s right is an unfair infringement on their liberty? When did we stop believing that we owe one another public safety, public heath, public anything? What happened to the underlying social conscience that makes real democracy work, and provides the structure for making the American dream a possibility for us all?

I feel it slipping away not only in our politics, but in our communities and families as well.

Some blame should fall at the feet of my own profession. Psychology has described and elevated the individual’s right to be parented well, the need to be lovingly nurtured, the expectation of support in their young adult dreams so fully that it would be hard for most ordinary families to measure up. We have defined excellence effectively. But have we made “perfect” the enemy of real life?

We now need a plethora of books about family estrangement, children and parents who have no contact, no communication for months or even years, because of disappointment or failure to meet those expectations. Self- help books talk more about setting boundaries than they do about building resilience.

In more than 40 years of clinical practice and teaching, I’ve seen that side. When the trauma, abuse, and consistent pathology of a family system cannot be endured, or modified, or even managed. I’ve said those words “You must let go.”

But I’ve also counseled compassion, perspective, healthy limit setting and loving confrontation before we got to them. I’ve taught bridge building skills and strengthened the muscles of emotional resilience. Daily now, I hear or read of people who skip those steps, and move quickly to define the imperfect as abusive, the inadequate as neglect, and the ignorant best effort as deliberate failure.

I deserve, I demand, I am entitled to. Psychology has taught these concepts well.

But do I owe my parents/children only what they have earned or deserve? I challenge that idea each day in my office by saying some version of this. Do not let someone else’s failure limit who you are. Others may not have earned our kindness, our care, our compassion. The person in the mirror decides. Who do I want to be? Move beyond guilt and obligation to find your own conscience, your own integrity, and decide with that. What kind of parent/son/ daughter do I choose to be? it’s not just the right question to ask, it’s the only one that will bring you peace.

And more broadly, how do we decide what we owe the group, the community, the public forum?

Organized religion offered a backstop for generations, teaching that we owed one another what our beliefs guided us to do. Kindness, generosity, compassion. But absent religion, a humanistic democracy also supported the notion that creating health and social infrastructure, safety nets for the less fortunate, and at least minimal financial security was beneficial to us all. It was a social good.

The pendulum has swung so far back toward the individual that a Florida Public Health Physician who knows the science of vaccines stands with a microphone telling Floridians that it is their choice, and only their choice that matters. That if others die, or get sick, or cannot handled the germs they bring into the classroom, they need not feel any guilt.

I don’t believe that’s who we are as Americans.

I believe we are better than that.

His approach fails scientific rigor, but it also falls short of any standard of psychological wellness I can find as well.

Self-regard is only part of the wellness equation. Relationships with others comprise the other part. Being committed to a family, or tribe, a community that matters to you. Putting their needs above your own and sacrificing in the service of the group. Believing in something, or someone beyond yourself. All of these are elements of emotional wellness, and life satisfaction.

Freud defined wellness as the ability to love and to work. Pretty simple

Keeping one another alive seems like the bottom rung on any Ladder of Loving I can imagine. Let’s find our social conscience again.