It’s some kind of social capital thing. They know that if they do the risky thing and others don’t they risk being ostracized. People will shun them. I mean who would invite someone to their home if they refused to take even the most basic precautions against a deadly virus?

So it’s very important for them to make their high risk behavior seem normal and reasonable and to make the behavior of more cautious people seem extreme and unreasonable. Hence all the “You have to live your life!” “You’re being controlled by fear!” “vaccines are a silver bullet!” stuff going around.

There’s also just good old social conformity going on. Any difference will be severely punished. In group out group violence. Idk, lots of sociology and anthropology stuff I can only dimly remember. People are routinely punished for being visibly different from what is “normal”, especially when it challenges society’s beliefs about what is normal or natural or “unmarked”. The same general principle is at work with transphobia, where the mere existence of trans people refutes societal norms about gender. Or disability and mental health problems, which directly challenge people’s belief in a Just World and Calvinist notions that working hard is evidence that god loves you and not working is evidence that god hates you. Taking Covid precautions challenges the belief, established by the Bourgeois at great expense, that the pandemic is over, the risks are low, the disease is mild, “we have to live our lives” and a dozen other things.

Basically; Free will isn’t real and we’re all just simple animals defending our social standing according to rules we’re not consciously aware of. Not meaningfully different from chickens pecking each other to death to establish hierarchies, or Hyena’s licking each other’s penises, or whatever other dominance establishing rituals.

It’s interesting to note that for many people the risk of being viewed as part of the out group is assessed much, much higher than even the risk of immediate physical harm, which is why you can pretty reliably bully people in to doing horrible or high risk things. Probably related to the bystander effect but again, Uni was a long time ago and I got yelled at for telling people to wear masks bc that makes me an “extremist” so I’m just kind of feeling shitty and nihilistic about it right now.