Talking past each other: the individual, the collective, and the rules in between
December 23, 2020· updated September 27, 2026
I wrote this in December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and never published it. Reading it again almost six years later, I noticed something: almost everything I argued is not really about the pandemic at all. It is about how we talk past each other whenever one word has to carry two meanings. So here it is, lightly reworked — with a short retrospective at the end.
Talking about the pandemic, about policy, rules, regulations, freedom, risk and consequences — we often didn’t have rational discussions. We talked about one thing, but meant something else, and we never checked to see if we were talking about the same thing.
Two levels, one phrase
There is the individual level, which often involves thoughts about the personal risk of infection, about limited freedom and loss of experiential options — parties, gastronomy, culture, travel — or economic restrictions, up to losses and fear of existence.
There is the collective level, where we have politics, epidemiology, ethics, regulations, and solidarity, among many others.
Most arguments I witnessed put one person’s individual lens against another person’s collective lens, with both sides convinced the other one was simply being unreasonable.
| Individual level | Collective level | |
|---|---|---|
| Core question | “What happens to me?” | “What happens to us?” |
| What’s at stake | Personal risk, freedom, experiences, livelihood | Dynamics, ethics, solidarity, regulation |
| “Stay at home” sounds like | A threat to my life options | A shared effort to change our course |
| Breaking a rule feels like | Personal punishment for nothing done | Free-riding on everyone else’s restraint |
| Winning an argument means | My freedom is recognized | The curve is bent |
The same three words — “stay at home” — sit in both rows. That is the whole misunderstanding in one table.
Why “stay at home” addresses everyone
“Stay at home” was directed at collective behavior, mostly: stay at home so we have a chance to reduce the pandemic dynamics, together. It doesn’t differentiate between contagious and not-contagious people, because unless we test, we cannot differentiate. So by ethics and simplification, it addresses everyone.
But of course, when individual risk is at play, it is also a “stay at home, because we might lose you if you get infected.”
And of course, you as an individual who is healthy, and who would only act based on the risk of getting infected — because you “know” you are not contagious — feel that the collective rules make no sense. So you fight, because the rules are only punishment for something you have not done.
Both readings are honest. That’s what made this so corrosive: it wasn’t bad faith on either side. It was two dictionaries for the same sentence.
The spiral
It’s between the individual and the collective that this crisis of humanity, communication, friendship and misunderstandings lived. And it had a shape — a loop that ran the same way in family chats and in parliaments:
- The state knows that plain messages will not move enough people to change the course of the pandemic.
- So the state makes rules, closes businesses, and tries to regulate individuals.
- Any action to maximize what is possible might feel righteous on the individual level.
- But if everyone does it, it shows that the arbitrary limits set by politicians were too lean — and they must be made more severe, so the collective impact can be achieved.
- Which makes the next individual restriction feel even more like punishment.
- Which produces more individual maximization.
The spiral begins here: immature actions require more severe policy changes. Each turn of the loop made both sides more convinced they were the reasonable ones.
Kind adults
But we had a different option. Instead of being immature teenagers, we could become kind adults who know that the behaviour we show must be more considerate of collective goals. Show kindness. Restrict your inner teenager, and stay home, have fewer contacts. Become leading examples.
We were in this to get there, and if everyone had just stayed home for four weeks, this pandemic would have been under control. Which is the perversion of those times: the mathematically simple solution was socially impossible. ZeroCovid was possible if we all worked together. Any other alternative might maximize individual freedom — and create extra pain and damage collectively.
I want to be honest about the trade-off in that paragraph, because it cuts both ways. “Be a kind adult” puts the load on the individual and can slide into moralizing — telling people to restrict themselves while structures stay broken is not solidarity, it’s a discount coupon for policy failure. The honest version needs both: rules that are as lean as possible and as strict as necessary, and individuals who don’t treat the gap between the two as an invitation.
Six years later
What held up: the framing. Whenever a topic touches both what happens to me and what happens to us — masks, then vaccines, then how we organize events, communities, and platforms — the same two dictionaries show up. A lot of what looked like a factual disagreement was a level mismatch.
What didn’t hold up: the four-week optimism. Vaccines and wide availability of tests arrived, and with them the thing the original logic had been missing — the ability to differentiate, at least partially, between “a risk to others” and “a risk to myself”. The blanket rule’s core justification got softer over time, and rules that don’t update with their justification lose trust. I think that part deserved more honesty in December 2020 than I gave it.
What it keeps coming back to: in tango we navigate exactly this all the time, in miniature. The ronda, the cabeceo, floorcraft — they are individual behaviours that only work because everyone runs the same collective protocol. One dancer maximizing their own freedom on a crowded floor produces precisely the spiral above, just with more cortinas. I wrote about the bigger version of this — what tango offers a loud, exhausted world — in when the world gets too much, people need tango.
What would be a first starting point?
Before disagreeing with someone about a rule, a recommendation, or an organizer’s decision: check which level the argument is actually on. Ask “are we talking about what this does to you, or what it does to all of us?” — and then answer on that level. It won’t dissolve the conflict. But it turns a fight about dictionaries back into a conversation about trade-offs. And trade-offs, unlike dictionaries, can be negotiated.
Did I miss anything? If you watched this spiral play out in your own family chats, I would like to hear where it broke.
Abrazos, Daniel