It is a truth universally acknowledged — well, okay, at least 98 percent acknowledged — that things can get rather awkward when you run into a naked person riding a bike. In early June, however, the organizers of Philadelphia’s annual Naked Bike Ride informed the Associated Press that this year the urban unclothed could have at least some anonymity: While riders will not be required to don shorts, nor any scrap of traditional clothing, nor even a really, really, really long pair of socks, they will be asked to wear a face mask. Naked. On a bike. Outside.

As Joe Biden might say in his more lucid moments, when he’s not off rambling about quasi-supersonic train travel or advocating financial policies that will likely turn our currency into Monopoly money or accidentally revealing that he’s “really gonna be in trouble” if he answers additional questions from the press, c’mon, man! Can this be real?

Call me a starry-eyed optimist, but I have trouble believing that, come August, hordes of naked and likely vaccinated Philadelphia cyclists will be required to dutifully strap on masks. On a bike. Outside. At some point, one would hope, the more egregious examples of virus-related kabuki theater will grind to an end.

But here we are, as America goes “back to normal,” and people are just as crazy as ever.

Witness a new survey from Gallup, in which 71 percent of Democrats agreed that people should “stay home as much as possible” because of COVID-19. If you feel a slight sense of bafflement upon reading those words, you should: This poll was taken in May of 2021, a time with widely available vaccines and plummeting American case rates, and not in May of 2020, when the media could still get away with pretending it was outrageous crackpottery and wildly offensive to suggest that COVID-19 could have been cooked up in an overseas lab.

Ahem.

Meanwhile, while a vast majority of polled Democrats recommended hiding in your house, an impressive 87 percent of Republicans took the opposite stance, noting that people should strive to lead normal lives. Even if you take this poll with a grain of salt — and if we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that we should take everything with a grain of salt — this divide is nothing short of stunning.

It’s also a great example of why people desperately need to get out and about. I live in the glorious state of Texas, where many people have been doing just that for a long time. Who could forget the panicked national pearl-clutching in response to the Lone Star State’s “Neanderthal” decision to eliminate its mask mandate, and the resounding sound of crickets when everything turned out fine? (Answer: most of the media!) Meanwhile, if you live in Florida, well, congratulations: On this round, you managed to out-Texas Texas.

Hiding in your house for no apparent reason is a terrible idea on multiple levels. Have you seen Grey Gardens? People can lose their marbles fast! Remember the spring of last year, when most of the country was on lockdown and we were all wiping down our groceries with Clorox Wipes? Well, you probably weren’t, but I was for at least two weeks, thanks to a viral video featuring a kindly western-Michigan doctor showing our great nation how to slowly go insane by segregating foodstuffs on the counter into clean and unclean areas, along with giving detailed instructions on how to microwave your Arby’s to annihilate any stray germs.

As my husband helpfully pointed out at the time, if the coronavirus was really so ridiculously contagious that people could catch it from stray celery and Amazon boxes and indestructible chemically enhanced takeout curly fries, weren’t we all inevitably going to get it anyway? So why even bother with all the extra work?

Update: He was right.

To be fair, we had limited information at the time. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: We almost always have limited information. Unless you are God, that is, but if God reads any of my columns, he knows this advice is not for Him. Communists tend to think they have complete information — now that I think about it, they also tend to think that they’re God — and we all know what happens when they’re in charge.

F. A. Hayek wrote extensively on this whole “know­ledge problem,” which should not only help guide policy-making but also steer us away from blind trust in our latest round of rul­ers, elders, and scribes. (Well, that, and the fact that our rulers, elders, and scribes often completely lose the plot and may or may not be engaged in various contradictions, conflicts of interest, and half-baked cover-ups.)

With new information, we can adapt. Earlier in the pandemic, for instance, I was fine with wearing a mask, at least while inside. About two seconds after I was fully vaccinated, however, I was ready to throw all of my masks into a Hawaiian volcano. This is a position that makes logical sense. In California, meanwhile — America’s national headquarters of Things That Do Not Make Logical Sense — the state’s “workplace safety” board recently announced that every single Californian must wear a mask at work until at least October, regardless of immunity or vaccination status, unless every single person in the workplace is also vaccinated.

How is this at all scientific? How does the State of California even have the power to decide such a thing? Who knows? Who cares? After public outcry, on June 9, the board withdrew the rule — at least for now — declaring that it would consider changes later in the month. We’ll see! Thank heavens for federalism.

In his famous commencement address, “This Is Water,” David Foster Wallace noted that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

Don’t despair, however: Like a horde of naked bike-riders, some of our important realities are fairly easy to see. Whether you can freely discuss them without people freaking out? Well, that’s another thing. Back to normal it is.