Self-isolation will always require more policy than personal responsibility. Or rebranding.

What if we created the Self-Isolation Drinking Game? Would that help convince Americans (and others) to stay home, without being forced to?

Rule 1. Place car keys in a safety vault that can only be opened with a Breathalyzer.

Rule 2. Any time you head out your front door for anything other than a job you have to be at, food, medicine, a doctor’s visit, to check on a sick friend or relative or to walk a pet, take a shot or swig. Soon you’re too drunk to stand, much less walk.  

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee yesterday announced a statewide stay-at-home mandate after tracking people’s movements through their cell phones. The data showed that the average distances Tennesseans traveled began rising mid-March, and kept rising.

How the mandate will be enforced isn’t entirely clear yet, but it’s not surprising that the individual responsibility that Lee encouraged, then implored, cannot — does not — replace civic duty. Because whether we’re 25, 45 or 75, we’re still trying try and get away with as much as we did when we were five.

Last Sunday afternoon, while driving in the bubble of my car from the bubble of my home to the bubble of my boyfriend’s house, we turned down a popular Nashville street which on a beautiful spring day is usually so full of people that traffic is more stop than go. Not this time.

Yet there were still too many people hanging out just a couple of feet apart — waiting to get takeout or in front of a (non-essential) shop. And the small park at the end of the street was spotted with picnickers and sunbathers. At mostly decent distances, but still there.

People in countries under lockdown for weeks or months can’t believe that not only are our parks still open, we’ve been actively told to go to them. Herein lies the problem, which is so much greater than a park recommendation.

A lack of strong restrictions from the top signals that the situation isn’t that bad. So even those whose better angels tell them “Stay home, it really is that bad,” give themselves a pass. Because it isn’t natural or advisable to cut ourselves off en masse from friends, family, society — much less work.

It’s so unnatural that a national lockdown and 13,000 deaths in one month were not — are not — enough to keep all Italians self-isolating. Fines of thousands of euros and serious threats of jail time have been introduced there, as in various countries, to keep people inside for all but “essential activities” (see Rule 2 above).

Because even in the best of us, individual responsibility cannot — does not — replace civic duty. That’s why we're not just told not to steal from, hurt or kill one another; we’re punished if we do. And the more we recognize the equal value of each human life, the more laws we create to protect individuals and communities from harm.

We must always question the fairness of those laws and punishments, and who bears the brunt of them. But emergency times calls for emergency measures.

We have definitive proof — in real time — that the novel coronavirus is exceptionally and indiscriminately good at harming us. That as vectors we are exceptionally and indiscriminately good at spreading it. And that the threat and devastation are visible, even if the virus is not.

This isn’t like slavery or domestic violence, which tragically took centuries of shifting social ideals to outlaw. (“Wife beating” only became illegal in all US states about 100 years ago, millennia after marriage was invented.)

We don’t have centuries to abolish the novel coronavirus, but we also don’t need them. Because the behavioral sea change of self-isolation, which comes with any pandemic, doesn’t last that long.

That’s not to say the economic and emotional consequences won’t be profound. But even as we swear we’ll be forever changed by COVID-19, we will forget its lessons, just as we did those of the 1918 Influenza. And the same debates will break out at the next pandemic, over the gravity of the threat; the same wasting of precious time.

Our ability to forget individual or collective suffering is our superpower; life would be unbearable without it. It’s also our Achilles heel.

The irony is that to refute the magnitude of the crisis is to practice self-isolation, from the tragedies around us. The American strand is the kind of individualism we usually take pride in; others increasingly see it as an inability to protect our most vulnerable citizens.

That’s what this pandemic is, at its core: a test of our ability to protect one another. What it is not, regardless of how it seems, is political. The virus does not give a damn where you stand on abortion rights or fracking. Just so long as you stand close to someone.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote, “individual rights must sometimes give way to the greater good. After all, when it comes to disease, we are not just individuals but also one big bio-mass.”

A bio-mass battling an enemy that loves social interactions even more than we do. Can we rename self-isolation “indoor individualism” in America, and drink to that?