For starters, all that really happened with COVID was that some individuals wielded power over other individuals for, essentially, their own, I will say it, nefarious purposes. Otherwise, why would some individuals have been able to go about as they pleased (looking at you lot, Governors Cuomo and Whitmer and Newsom, and, of course, the self proclaimed personification of science, Anthony Fauci) while businesses were shut down and rights trampled. I am not impressed by their 'concern' for 'society'. Their concern was for power, nothing more.
Then too, such blithe comments as my good friend made inherently declare that folks such as yours truly don't care a fig about society. That's the real insult, quite frankly. Because myself and many of my peers thought the reaction to COVID overblown, then obviously we wanted people to suffer. We wanted Grandma dead. If that's not ham fisted arrogance I don't know what is. It deserves the rejoinder...well, I won't enunciate it. But you know the one I mean.
Third, I do not believe that society is greater than the individual. Indeed I quite heartily believe the converse: the individual is more important than society. Without good and reliably independent people we have no worthwhile society. To be sure, there are exceptions, times when the nation must be put ahead of the person. The Ukrainians are dealing with precisely that. But almost always, the person trumps the collective. His needs are almost always more important than 'society's', whatever you mean by that.
I am not and never have been a believer is President Kennedy's 'ask not what your country can do for you' cant. I think I speak for many, and that indeed I speak for the greater part of morality, when I say that the most important thing my country can do for me is to leave me the hell alone to my own legitimate business. If people can take care of themselves, the country will be well taken care of by them.
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