Why We Lost Before We Started.

OR Why We Don't Need Data

Why We Lost Before We Started.

Apart from masks and lockdowns which were more a la mode in the discourse in 2020 and 2021, from then to now most of the dissident argument could be summarised as “the vaccine is harmful”. This proposition is followed closely by “the vaccine does not prevent transmission”. Often in medical dissident circles the first is plumped up with endless talk about spike proteins, lipid nano-particles (and even graphene oxide) and the distribution, clearance and pathogenic sequelae of having these substances within the body. The latter proposition is often plumped up with talk of the kinetics of antibody titre rise and fall and endless tables accounting rates of infections/cases/deaths in unjabbed vs the same in the jabbed. Having concluded that the jab is both harmful and fails to prevent transmission, the dissident effortlessly slides into the conclusion “and so I should not have to take it”

Let us grant for sake of argument that they are correct that the vaccine is harmful and failed to prevent transmission, or to put it another way, that the recklessly propagandized claim the vaccine is “safe and effective” has been falsified. And let us further grant that these facts alone will soon be acknowledged by the powers that be, the resultant being a lifting of all mandates and a halting of further vaccine rollouts into perpetuity. I’ll wager that many a reader would consider such an outcome a victory for the dissident side, with the only resentment being that the vaccine was not properly evaluated in the first instance or amongst those who thirst after vengeance. Hallelujah. The right side won.  

Yet the dream of that longed for victory only fills me with dread, as it’s a dream only showing why we lost the ethical war before it started. Why? Channelling Hume, we could simply analyse the absence of logical connection between the descriptive “the vaccine is neither safe nor effective” and the ethical conclusion “and so I need not subject myself to it”. Yet this is not a problem in logic. Nor is it a problem of lack of imagination searching for logic. Logic is over rated. No the problem is lack of awareness of the poverty of an ethical landscape within which the problem is a desert on a single plane. Win lose or draw we are so deep behind post utilitarian post bio-political totalitarian lines that we cannot imagine any other way to formulate the problem but spike proteins and clots, numbers and corpses, case rates and another curve of y on x. I say post utilitarian as the talk is purely constrained to the question of a technocratic measure of harm with nary a glimpse of other considerations. And I say post bio-political as the harm revolves around the body as a vehicle of bare biological life within the body politic concerned and governed about the same. Bodies in health and disease. Bodies feeling pleasure. Bodies fed and sated of biological hungers. Bodies corralled. Bodies masked. All the bodies of the superorganism needed to be purged of the virus to “save lives”. And I say totalitarian as totalitarianism is both a noun and a verb. They do totalitarianism to us. They do it to us when the QR codes and propaganda are in the churches or at the entrance to the national parks. When the cover is so total we cannot imagine any other way we have been totalitarianized.   

You might feel the need to explain why you want to say “no” to the vaccine or the mask or the QR code or whatever. Is this need for yourself, to answer your own question for your own ethical and intellectual satisfaction? If so, then fine. Or is the need driven by a sense of obligation to account for your choice to another who demands it? If so then the enemy is already in your head. Their demand is your need and you have lost a part of yourself before the jab is in your arm. You have become a half person. From this we can understand their insistence you answer because they own the “you” that contains your introjection of them. After all, it’s in you as an unwelcome lodger. There is another way. Genuine liberty must begin with a sense of who you need to answer to, which is yourself alone, your God if you have one and perhaps members of your immediate family. Any reason you give another is not an obligation they can place upon you, nor is it one which you are to introject as a duty. Let your “no” be “no” and let your “no” be sufficient and final. Anything else is the gift you grant of conversation, either to educate and hone each other’s minds out of love or to argue out of egoistic drive. Any answer you need give another might provoke the question if the incentive is tyrannous.  

Same applies to the question of the vaccine being “safe and effective”. When I was giving speeches to community groups, the audience would probe me for answers to counter this propagandistic slogan. They wanted scientific evidence. They wanted a bio-political utilitarian answer. My answer was this. Imagine I’m holding a head of broccoli. Imagine I demand you eat it. Now I assure the audience that to eat the broccoli is to take within the body something which is biologically “safe and effective”. From this (natural) biological fact one cannot arrive at a (natural) law that one ought to eat the broccoli, not least because of the absence of logical connection between the two propositions but more because the two propositions are placed only on the bio-political plane. My answer was obvious. Safe and effective or not, my broccoli can be declined for the simple reason that their choice is sovereign. Self-determination transcends the biological plane. But you would think I opened up the America’s with what was a trivial answer, this because bio-political utilitarianism has seeped so much into our bones that the obvious ethical arguments of old has become novel again, so novel as to become alien. Forget about Hume, Aquinas and a hundred other thinkers before the bio-political age. Or worse than forget, they and their thoughts were never there.

Bodies are vehicles designed to transport water. We drink it here and pee it there. We are vehicles of nitrogen also. We consume it here and defecate it there. Eventually we decompose and more of it and other elements besides return into the dust of the Earth from which we came. We are also vehicles of genes traveling from the past into the future. Yet bodies are also vehicles of persons who are in turn vehicles of ideas and principles that more define the person than a molecule or gene ever could. These person embodying principles elevate the ethical landscape so as to make it a place worth living in, and a place worth dying for. But we can fill the valleys and flatten the mountains if we choose. What’s then the point of saving any bare biological life when that’s all there is to save, that and an emptiness filled with shallow sentiments and slogans given us by the propagandists? Grander visions of utopians might be foisted upon us too. Should we want for any texture to life’s topography the best we might hope for in a tyrannous society is to go with the flow, a host carrying others parasitic ideas and principles. Those we choose for ourselves wither within if they ever were to begin with.    

At the risk of overcooking the metaphor, the mountains of meaning we create are those we create for others also as example they might take to be their own. Freedom, autonomy, privacy; none of these are climbed without some quanta of risk. We climb them at our own risk and with others who value and risk the same. But we have a cowardly enemy who are not satisfied stay on the boring plane. They would stop us risking along with themselves. They would just as soon pull the shutters on the very idea of gazing at principles.   

The obvious counter arguments around the virus just won’t do either. “But your risk endangers others” they say with as much wanton ignorance as that goes into the evaluating the value of personal risk. My not wearing a mask or refusing to QR code or refusing bend the knee to the vaccine. Just who am I foreseeably, unavoidably, substantially harming? And all things considered, is any marginal increase in risk I add to their lives out of proportion to risks shared amongst anyone who comes into proximity with another. When two are in an alley there is a quantum of risk in being mugged. When there is one the risk collapses to zero. The egalitarian left might then infer it best no one be permitted walk down the alley. Mountains or alleys, life’s like that. If you’re not there you’re as good as nowhere.       

The remedy to all this is to reclaim principles unapologetically for their own sake. To look the enemy in the eye and say “life is risk and so what”. And might I propose a change in the center of gravity in our own sides discourse. This at least sometimes requires a deliberate understating or avoidance of “the data”. However much it may aid our cause now the vaccine has not been shown to be “safe and effective”, going after the science can win us the current battle whilst losing the war (against ethical impoverishment and technocracy). We need make clear the ethical priors and have the confidence they can hold up an argument all by themselves. They can if we let them.