Covid and the Free Choice Manifesto

The Free Choice Manifesto is all about a trade-off between a selfish individual free choice and a compassionate socially responsible coerced choice. Compassion is an emotion that promotes bonding between people while selfishness is an emotion that promotes conflict between people. Both compassion and selfishness are necessary emotions for survival, but the balance between compassion and selfishness is a never ending dialog. While Marx's Communist Manifesto represents an extreme compassion of the Chinese government to coerce social responsibility, in contrast, the Western individual Free Choice Manifesto represents selfish individual free choice.

The Covid shutdown is an example of government coerced choice justified by the compassion of social responsibility in limiting the Covid spread. The coerced Covid shutdown tests the limits of free choice...does the social responsibility of Marx's Manifesto justify the coercion of Covid shutdown or rather does the selfish individual Free Choice Manifesto win? Some suggested that Chinese government coercion was inherently better able to control Covid than Western individual free choice.

In our discrete causal universe, things really don't happen inside of a universe of space and time, but rather the universe of space and time emerges from the universe of things that happen. The over arching universe of outcomes from precursors is the universe of things that happen and the universe of space and time emerges from things that happen. Our lives emerge along with space and time from the families of outcomes from precursors and from the unpredictable free choices that we make. Those choices all trade off the risk of an anxiety about the unknown with the pleasure of discovering knowledge about the things that happen. So free choice is not the result of life, rather life is the result of free choice. When coerced choices happen in our lives, like the Covid shutdown, we still make unpredictable free choice to obey or not based on the tradeoff of the risk of an uncertain infection with pleasure of avoiding infection.

Wisdom emerges from our classical knowledge about what we know is not false, from reason that tells us what is not true, and from quantum intuition giving us our feelings of what is uncertain. Instead of knowledge being what is true and reason telling what is therefore false, knowledge tells us only what is not false and reason tells us only what is not true, because there are also uncertainties and unknowables in knowledge and reason. Our quantum intuition is what makes free choice uncertain and unpredictable since we cannot know everything about quantum phase and therefore about how we feel. Even though every free choice outcome has a precursor feeling, there are precursor feelings that we simply cannot know and yet are still part of the universe as quantum unknowables. Thus we cannot know everything about free choice even though we often rationalize with reason our feelings after we make a free choice.

Covid is very infectious and seemed at first to also have a higher mortality than the flu. Covid models then incorrectly predicted insufficient hospital capacity and those predictions resulted in much anxiety. Models incorrectly predicted that Covid would overwhelm U.S. hospitals, but that really did not happen and was overblown. Now that we know the risks of Covid as a chronic and endemic infection, individual free choice instead of government coerced choice determines our outcomes.

People with new knowledge of the Covid hazard can now freely choose an acceptable level of risk and yet succeed in life just like people must accept risk from many other common hazards. The Free Choice Manifesto of the individual once again shows the fallacy of Marx's Communist Manifesto of government coercion. People don't first of all need government coercion to succeed, people first of all need free choice to succeed in a universe of things that happen.