The order of the West is that your personal freedom stops where my personal freedom begins. That’s a rudimentary philosophy but serviceable in today’s circumstances. It implies that there’s a principle of cooperation between the two freedoms.

This order means that my branded cattle are not your cattle, and vice versa. My grazing land is not your grazing land unless there’s an agreement. My mineral rights are not your mineral rights, although you can use my mineral rights if there’s a deal. Same with water rights.

Another order of the west is that we can agree to help each other when what you do is necessary to the health and welfare of the rest of us. So, for example, taxpayers agree to support farmers’ crops with tax money because there’s an understanding that what farmers produce is essential to the welfare of everyone. Farmers agree to the deal because it keeps them in business when crop prices fall or crops fail. That is, we recognize that farming is an economic niche where the principles of free markets that derive from personal freedom don’t precisely apply.

In these instances, the order of the west includes more than personal freedom and individual liberty. The west is a harsh environment that requires continuous cooperation among people for personal freedom and individual liberty to exist at all yet alone thrive. In other words, cooperation is the ultimate principle and individualism is the penultimate principle, or cooperation is the antecedent to personal freedoms.

These orders play out in today’s COVID world. In the past, individuals with killer infectious diseases were quarantined — in medieval times for 40 days, hence the quar in quarantine. The personal freedom of infected persons gave way to the cooperation needed to protect the larger community. Small pox, typhoid, and plague were examples of scourges that produced quarantines.

Today’s COVID produces quarantines when individuals are known to be infected because the disease is a killer. School districts, schools, classrooms — depending on the scope of infection — close due to COVID penetration. Businesses have employees quarantine to protect other employees and customers. These are examples of cooperation overriding personal freedom.

When society develops tools to reduce the need for such challenging limitations as quarantines, people typically cooperate by adopting these tools to ultimately increase personal freedom. Examples are many: small pox vaccination eliminates small pox, polio vaccination shuts down polio, measles vaccination takes out measles, etc. Taking advantage of these medical miracles allows personal freedom to thrive.

Is COVID somehow different? Is COVID some sort of special infectious disease that doesn’t require cooperation to ensure personal freedoms are possible?

COVID’s new to humans and our bodies have never produced antibodies against it so we’re susceptible to its aggression. That’s like new world Indians’ susceptibility to small pox and old world Europeans’ susceptibility to syphilis. Those were ugly contagions that wreaked havoc among people.

COVID is taking advantage of natural selection to become more virulent. That’s predictable. It’s likely that the virus’s virulence will continue to grow until, like small pox and polio, enough people cooperate with vaccination to eradicate the diseases. Nothing new about this. And possibly like the flu, this virus will require annual vaccine to keep it at bay. Nothing new about that either.

The arguments around personal freedom and individual liberty and COVID cooperation cut to the heart of the uneasy tension between cooperation and freedoms.

Some have decided that personal freedom means the personal choice to not wear a mask and not get a vaccination. These decisions prolong the day when vaccines and masking will release us from the scourge of the COVID contagion and allow personal freedom to thrive again for everyone.

The decision to reject COVID protections harms not only those who choose vaccination, as incomplete protection as it may be, but also every business that needs customers to feel unthreatened by the risk of infection. Here’s a partial list of Colorado businesses in that risk bucket: restaurants, retail outlets, mountain resorts, entertainment venues, airlines, hotels, food processing industries, medical facilities, colleges and universities, k-12 schools.

Only cooperation supporting COVID protections gets us to enabling personal freedom. Let’s get moving on cooperation.