A man with a case of Bright’s disease – kidney inflammation
– visits his doctor, who prescribes a daily quart of buttermilk. The man takes
the remedy obediently at first. But after a few weeks' choking down buttermilk,
the man returns to the doctor and reports: “Doctor, I’d rather have Bright’s
disease.”
The moral is, you cannot make a person drink buttermilk. I
don't know why anyone would want to, but you cannot do it. So don't try it. Ok?
Now to current events. In 2021, Dr. Tony Fauci prescribed
regular doses of Covid vaccine to Candace Owens. Well, to Owens, and to all his
other 330 million patients. After considering the doctor's advice, in January
2022 Owens reported that she, too, would rather have the disease than this
particular cure. "I am not getting this vaccine," said Owens. "I
don’t care if I’m on my deathbed and they say it can save you, I’m not going to
get it."
We already knew that you can't make Candace Owens drink
buttermilk. And if you can't make Owens drink buttermilk, then you sure as hell
can't make her take a vaccine. I don't know why anyone would want to, but you
cannot do it. So don't try it. Ok?
What follows is a long essay, so here is what I would like
to tell you. There are people in high places, like Dr. Fauci, who want to
control you. I doubt whether they want to make you drink buttermilk, exactly,
but there are definitely people with Dr. Fauci at headquarters who want to
force you – gently or otherwise – into getting a vaccine. I am not here to tell
you not to get the vaccine. But what I am here to tell you is, do not take
direction from the man at headquarters – do not listen to any person who
professes certainty. Instead, we must learn to live in doubt, and to steel
ourselves against the men at headquarters who prey on doubt, for doubt easily
gives way to fear, and those who fear are easily controlled. Unless we learn to
doubt courageously, we will be bullied into fear, carried away from our friends
and families, and taken out of God's plan for our lives, to beat a cowardly
retreat – to die, perhaps, or to live, in fear, under modern savages.
And what I mean by that, and what I will explain to you is
that, in the end, the man at headquarters is not interested in human health –
he is interested in human sacrifice. A mandated vaccine is not medicine. A
doctor says, take two of these and call me in the morning. But Dr. Fauci does
not take calls from his patients in the morning. Dr. Fauci neither asks nor
wants to hear from his 330 million patients. Dr. Fauci mandates his vaccines on
the population for the same reason he would mandate vaccines on pets: for
social reasons, not medical ones. Dr. Fauci does not serve the interests of his
patients, he serves the interests of headquarters, and the business of
headquarters is, in the end, animal control.
I will talk more about the man at headquarters later. But
let's stay with Candace Owens for a moment longer.
The
Heresy of Certainty
Owens, for one, is not going to take direction from the man
at headquarters. Still, something about Owens' line in the sand – that she
would rather die than take a vaccine – seems a bit off. She is right, of
course, if she means no one should try to force or manipulate you into
medicines or treatments or buttermilk. And she is right, of course, if she
means that there are risks associated with any medical treatment. Even
prescribing healthful buttermilk is folly if you are not going to bother asking
first if the patient is lactose intolerant. In each case, the patient bearing
the risks must consent to them – and consent freely and knowingly, not with his
life or his civil rights hanging in the balance.
But here is where Owens loses me: While you might come to
the same choice as Owens (I will volunteer that I have), Owens apparently comes
to her choice in certainty. Owens seems just to know which choice is the
correct one. And when you are claiming certainty, choosing is easy. Indeed,
when you are certain about something, choosing hardly comes into the picture.
One would find it odd to think of “choosing” to believe that fire burns, or
that cold freezes. One is not quite free to disagree with certainties. To
propositions that are certain, we are, in a sense, slaves.
I do not know if Owens is actually certain about the
vaccine, or whether that is just an affect. But I neither have certainty nor
profess to have certainty. While Dr. Fauci holds out his buttermilk as the door
to life, and while Ms. Owens warns it is the door to death, most people know
that neither of them can really be quite as certain as they profess to be.
And most of us know another thing, too: we know that no one
should try to be that certain. We know that there is something elusive about
certainty. That it is something off-limits, something we ought not lay our
hands on. Possibly, certainty is even something reserved to God – in which
case, to profess certainty may be a form of blasphemy. Certainty is the chariot
of Helios, which his son, Phaeton, in his deadly rashness, insisted on having
for himself. Certainty is the power that the ancients at Babel hoped to gain at
the top of their tower.
Even Jesus, though being God himself, would not overwhelm
the minds of people by the use of miraculous “signs and wonders.” Luke says he
regarded the incessant clamor of the people for “signs” as itself the sign of
“an evil generation”: “[T]hey seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it”
(11:29). And in telling the story of Lazarus the beggar and the wicked rich man
(Lk 16:19-31), Jesus makes it clear that it is preferable in God’s eyes that
men show faith by listening to the holy truth, and by accepting it and
following it, rather than by waiting for signs and miracles to convince them.
By contrast, the claim to certainty, that draught of the
gods, is a challenge to the heavens. It is to boast that we will not be content
with mortality. He who claims certainty, who would clutch at the crown that
Christ resisted, is the mark of antichrist.
This is something that we normal people feel intuitively,
and it is something that the special people of the world – the elect, the
elite, the men at headquarters – can never know: that certainty is heresy, and
that there are some things we can't know, and shouldn't know. And while this
thing we know is just one, and what the special people know is legion, the
thing we know is a great thing, because the one thing we know that the specials
do not, gives us powers that the specials cannot have. To wit: those who will
forswear certainty are rewarded with humility. And those who toil with the hard
decisions in this life, in humility, become practiced in courage.
And so it will prove with the Covid vaccine: those who
choose, and act, without claiming or demanding certainty, but who rise each day
and look doubt in the face, will attain courage.
There are many who doubt the vaccine, is what I am getting
at. And they may be having trouble getting over those doubts. I am writing to
you who have doubts. If you are struggling with doubt, if your doubts about the
vaccine are making you doubt yourself, I am here to buck you up. I am here to
tell you that your doubts are for a reason. Whether by nature or nature's God,
you are endowed with the capacity and the right to doubt, the same as your
capacity and right to think, and to speak, and to worship, and to defend
yourselves.
My message to you is: Do not deny your doubt, but doubt
courageously.
There is still an ongoing concerted effort to nudge and prod
and coerce vaccine doubters to get the vaccine. Or to get the second vaccine.
Or to get the booster. Or to get another booster, and then another, and so on.
There are many who, like you, have doubts. Even if you do not have doubts,
surely you know people who have them. Where should we doubters seek answers?
Not from doctors. California lawmakers proposed legislation that would discipline doctors who speak against the vaccine,
or against any of the rules of headquarters. Not from journalists. Alex
Berenson, an independent journalist who reports on studies and statistics about
the vaccine, was banned from social media, pour encourager les autres.
Doctors, too, have been censored and banned on social media. Even if an Elon
Musk-owned Twitter reinstates them, doctors and journalists will have to reckon
with ideologically-activated medical boards, not to mention the truth ministry
in Biden's new Disinformation Governance Board. We cannot even expect honest
answers from public health agencies: The CDC has official statistics about the
effects of the vaccine, but the agency will not share them with us because they
are looking quite bad just now and we may get the wrong idea.
Our doubts are meant to be resolved, in other words, in only
one direction. The curators of data are attuned to our doubts. And they know we
are looking for good, hard information to resolve our doubts. So the one thing
we can be sure about is that the collection of medical and scientific
information allowed for distribution will not be, to put it gently, on the
level.
As we cannot have confidence in the approved collection of
medical and scientific information, I am going to give you a different kind of
advice. It is not medical advice, and it is not scientific advice. The kind of
advice I am going to give you is the only sort that is really decisive here
anyway. Here is the advice:
Get the vaccine. Or do not get the vaccine. But do not be
bullied into it either way. If you doubt, doubt courageously.
And this is why I can only concur in Owens' defiance. I can
only concur because her defiance seems, to me, the product of certainty.
Owens is certain of the vaccine just as Dr. Fauci is certain. And that
certainty is alien to me. No, it is worse than that. To me, certainty is worse
than alien – it is odious. Certainty is vicious. Certainty is cowardice. One of
Owens' great qualities is that she is bold and clear. But while these qualities
would be credited to her as courage were she to admit of any doubt, they are
something else if Owens insists on making her stand in certainty. The honest
man does not require certainty. The honest man requires only humility and courage.
Certainty is a substitute for courage, and a tool for those who would seek to
rule others. And it is hubris. The spirit of certainty says: I have decided,
and my conscience and pride will not permit that I be proven wrong. The honest
man in his doubt says, as Epictetus had it, "I am bound to say what seems
right to me," against the threat of the certain man who says, "But,
if you say it, I shall kill you." And so in the face of the violence of
certainty, the doubtful man must have courage: "When did I tell you, that
I was immortal? You will do your part, and I mine. It is yours to kill, mine to
die without quailing: yours to banish, mine to go into exile without
groaning."
The choice is not whether you would die of a vaccine or of a
disease, but whether you would die for your beliefs. The courageous man stands
ready to pay the price for his beliefs – even as the certain man stands ready
to exact it.
Ok, I have had my say about Candace Owens, and about the
need to display doubt, and humility, and courage in the face of the man at
headquarters, who confronts us with certainty, and confidence, and control. But
now I need to tell you something about the stakes.
Death
in Aleppo
I have said that courage is to live with doubt, so now I
should say a word about doubt. When it comes to Covid-19 and the vaccine, let
me offer a pair of questions: Will the Covid-19 vaccine protect against harm or
death? Might the Covid-19 vaccine itself, in some cases at least, cause
harm or death? The fair answer to both of these questions is: maybe. The
protections offered by the vaccine have been, to put it mildly, less impressive
than advertised. And while the extent of side effects and deaths following the
vaccine have not been well-studied or well-reported, that risk exists. So if
the Covid-19 is not certainly safe, and it is not certainly effective, then
what?
My answer, as suggested above, is that doubt provides us the
opportunity to exercise courage, both intellectual and moral. We must study,
and reason, and ask questions, and pray, and in the end, decide for ourselves
and our families. This is how free men and women live.
But this is not, you may have noticed, how we have been
encouraged to decide. The men at headquarters do not admit of any doubt. And
they do not accept that you have any legitimate doubts, either. Your doubts,
rather, are derided as something else entirely. Did you know the CDC employs
people specifically to promote "concern, anxiety, and worry" about
not getting vaccinations? Glen Nowak was the CDC's director of media relations
in 2004, when he gave a presentation about increasing uptake of the flu
vaccine. According to Mr. Nowak, people will only choose to vaccinate when they
have a "sense of vulnerability" about "dire outcomes." On
behalf of the CDC, Mr. Nowak rejects the suggestion simply "to inform and
warn people" to get them to take appropriate actions, because, without
"actually making them anxious or concerned," Mr. Nowak goes on,
"this is not possible. This is like breaking up with your boyfriend
without hurting his feelings. It can't be done."
If it concerns you when the CDC inflates the death figures
for diseases, then you may have missed the memo. Dr. Peter Doshi apparently
missed the memo when, writing in the British Medical Journal, he complained the CDC was frustrating our chances
"for a sound discussion and public health policy." The good doctor
has the right idea, but the man at headquarters is not interested in
discussion. The CDC's objective is not to spread information, but to spread
fear.
For the man at headquarters, there is no such thing as doubt
– there is only fear. Those who urge the vaccine will admonish us to overcome –
not legitimate doubts, which they will not allow exist – but our fear of
the vaccine. In this inversion, those who profess certainty live in the light;
the rest of us, in darkness. Our courage is mocked as cowardice. Our virtue is
condemned as vice.
And how are we to overcome the darkness of fear, so-called,
of the vaccine? The key to overcoming that darkness, reason the men at
headquarters, is to embrace an even greater darkness: fear of disease. This is
why everyone knows the official number of Covid-19 deaths, and why there is no
official number of Covid-vaccine deaths. A few years ago, when the men at
headquarters in California wanted to mandate measles vaccines, commentators
were censored who would assuage our fears of the disease by reminding us that
the number of measles deaths was paltry, on par with the number of
falling-in-the-shower deaths. The man at headquarters would not have this: he curates
and nurtures our fears, so that useful fear of headquarters’ enemies will
overcome our doubts about headquarters’ cures. By fear, we may have certainty. By
the power of darkness may we eliminate all doubt.
Let me tell you a story to illustrate. This is one of my favorite
parables. It comes from T.H. White's The Once and Future King. It is a
parable Merlyn tells Arthur about facing fear and doubt:
"In the East, perhaps in the same place which that
Rabbi Jachanan came from, there was a certain man who was walking in the
market of Damascus when he came face to face with Death. He noticed an
expression of surprise on the spectre's horrid countenance, but they passed one
another without speaking. The fellow was frightened, and went to a wise man to
ask what should be done. The wise man told him that Death had probably
come to Damascus to fetch him away next morning. The poor man was
terrified at this, and asked however he could escape. The only way they
could think of between them was that the victim should ride all night to
Aleppo, thus eluding the skull and bloody bones.
"So this man did ride to Aleppo—it was a terrible ride
which had never been done in one night before—and when he was there he
walked in the market place, congratulating himself on having eluded Death.
"Just then, Death came up to him and tapped him on the
shoulder. 'Excuse me,' he said, 'but I have come for you.' 'Why,'
exclaimed the terrified man, 'I thought I met you in Damascus yesterday!'
'Exactly,' said Death. 'That was why I looked surprised—for I had been told to
meet you today, in Aleppo.'"
Here are the lessons we might take from the story of Death
in Aleppo: Reminding us that fear may be the very agent that delivers us to
Death, the story warns that the clever schemes of the wise, and the bold deeds
of the cowardly, are the very tools of Death. One must not substitute fear
for courage, or boldness for doubt, because one who doubts in fear, or takes on
a false boldness, succumbs to the failed plots of wise fools. In bold fearfulness
does a man ride at midnight to Aleppo in hopes of cheating Death. But in
courageous doubt of the scheme will a man make his stand. Stand and bid Death
come, or charge, with eyes fixed on Death's countenance. But the tragic death
is Death come in running away.
Lest I be misunderstood, by doubt I do not mean we
eschew knowledge. While we who doubt do not claim certainty, we do not take a
vow of ignorance. If Death should come by way of Covid, we may know some of the
signs. Covid is a disease, caused by a virus, and we understand something about
how viruses work. The deadliness of a virus, for example, has a way of getting
winnowed down. Strains of viruses that kill all their hosts will die, leaving
behind strains less deadly. The deadliest among those strains, in turn, also
will die, leaving behind strains still less deadly. And this natural winnowing
process goes on until the disease is more or less a minor nuisance. In this
way, a deadly virus is a weak virus, and while its run is horrifying, it is ended
relatively quickly by natural selection.
But if we should flee Death in fear by way of a vaccine, we
may fare no better than the man who rode in fear to Aleppo. For unlike a virus,
there is no such natural winnowing process that guarantees a harmful cure will
not go on harming its victims. So long as there is a supply of victims kept
ignorant of its harms, that cure is both more deadly and more deathless than
the disease. There is no natural defense to a deadly cure. The only defense is
a doubtful and critical mind. One can avoid the harms of the cure altogether –
unless one volunteers.
There is something else. For me, life is from God. It is a
gift, yes, but as important, life is a charge. In this life, I am running a
race, and I mean to win it. I should enjoy the race, surely, and I should not
want that it be made shorter, but neither does one win a race by making it
longer. And certainly I will not win it by volunteering myself to harm. Life is
sacred, and the sacred is not improved by hanging more days on the end of it. I
can pray to God. I can make myself strong against a disease. I cannot make
myself strong against a cure. Harm might find me, but yet, it might not. I am
invincible until God is finished with me. And when He has finished with me, and
I have gained a thousand years in His courts, what inducement does this dying
world offer?
But perhaps by now you have grown concerned. How is it
better, you might ask me, to sit and wait for death when there is a way of
avoiding it? The answer, I think, has to do with accepting something I cannot
change, to not be like the man who rode to Aleppo. The man who rode to Aleppo
took himself out of God’s story. He allowed himself to be written in to another
man's story, the town's wise fool who thought he could devise plots to defeat
Death.
And now, at last, we come to the man at headquarters.
The
Man at Headquarters
Dr. Fauci loves You. I don't mean that Dr. Fauci loves you,
personally. He doesn't even know you. When I say Dr. Fauci loves You, I
mean that he loves You in the sense that there are 330 million of You. And when
I say love, I mean that Dr. Fauci would do anything to protect You. He loves
You, corporately, so much, in fact, that he is even willing to kill you,
personally.
From time to time, public health advocates will acknowledge
that "some deaths are going to happen after vaccines – it's
inevitable." This quote, a rare slip by Hastings law professor and
vaccine-mandate advocate Dorit Reiss, was edited out shortly after initial
publication. (Again, the folks at headquarters are in the business of eradicating
doubts about cures, and in this program, candor does not factor.)
The analysis is simple, really: it is better than one man
should die than the entire nation be destroyed. This is difficult for regular
people to understand. Regular people are used to caring only for very small
communities – their families – nothing like the tens or hundreds of millions
that are the concern of men at headquarters. Families are too small to serve as
a model of the morality of headquarters. Each member of a family is loved as an
individual, and individual love crowds out the potential for group love. For
the sake of just one individual, an entire family will submit to suffering.
That is not the morality of headquarters. Far from it! Dr. Fauci loves the
group, and he will not allow that any individual should cause the group to
suffer.
I have not told you yet what the wise man in the town did
next. At last, I shall tell you the story about the man at headquarters.
The wise man, of course, thought that his plot had
succeeded. He thought that the daring ride to Aleppo he had orchestrated had
delivered his patient from Death. And so the wise man determined to build a
train to Aleppo. One should not have to make daring and dangerous midnight
rides to Aleppo, so the clever man devised that other townspeople could evade
Death simply by paying a fare, and making the journey in ease and comfort. Townspeople
who caught a glimpse of Death were eager to be hastened off to Aleppo. The
demand for fares became great, for the journey to Aleppo became a form a
sacrament: Death, it was believed, was confounded by the disutility of the
trips to Aleppo. No longer could Death expect to find farmer at his plow,
carpenter at his lathe, mother tending her children, but instead the natural
patterns and directedness of their lives were now variegated by their comings
and goings of wanton journeys to Aleppo.
The wise man, with the help of the other men at
headquarters, reasoned that the excursions improved the welfare and prolonged
the lives of the townspeople. And so eventually, all residents were required to
take trips to Aleppo, upon order of headquarters.
One day, however, the train to Aleppo lost control. The five
passengers on the train hurtled helplessly toward a bend in the track, facing
imminent death. The operator, however, spotted a couple with two children
walking across the bridge connected to the adjacent track a short way ahead.
The operator, observing the rules established by headquarters and performing
quick calculations, activated a switch that sent the train onto the adjacent
track, into the path of the trapped family. The mass of their flesh and faces
and bodies would be enough to slow the train and bring its passengers to
safety. The parents and their older boy, who had been laughing and gamboling a
moment earlier, could not climb the high rails separating the track from the
abyss, and were crushed to death. The younger girl, who had already run ahead
to the end of the bridge, had stepped off the track. There, another train
worker, an usher, ran to the screaming girl. Just as the slowing train reached
them, the usher pushed the girl onto the track in front of the train, which,
after crushing the girl to death, came at last to a stop. All of its passengers
were safe.
There was a great clamor afterward. The townspeople were
terrified at the train accident, and horrified at the usher's act of pushing
the little girl in the way of the train. They gathered outside headquarters and
raised their voices. Eventually, the wise man emerged from headquarters and
addressed the people. Here is what the man at headquarters said:
"We have long known that sacrifice is necessary to the
continuation of our way of life. From our earliest history, we sacrificed
innocents to the corn gods to ensure bountiful harvests. We sacrificed
innocents to the gods in recompense for our transgressions. But we know now
that there were no such things as the old gods. Those gods were created by my
forebears, the wise men of old, the race of the elect. The gods were needed to
convince people of the need for sacrifice. And why did the elect preach the
need for sacrifice? I am sure you will find it quite obvious. It was even
possible to make it obvious to the ancients. The principle is simple: The elect
used a small sacrifice, a sacrifice of a single innocent, for example, to save
the whole community from famine, or from pestilence, or from plague. For less
reward than the whole community, the elect reasoned, the sacrifice would not
have been made. And for the sake of the entire community, even the ancients
would not deny that the sacrifice of a single innocent was justified.
"The principle of human sacrifice, then, is quite
simple: one, for the sake of many. And you will agree, of course, that its
rightness is too obvious to be denied.
"But over long centuries, through progress and
discipline, we learned the science of sacrifice. One person is nothing; that is
simple and undeniable. The community is all. And if one person is nothing, then
what are two people? They are likewise nothing, if by their sacrifice we can
save the entire community. And if two are nothing as against the community,
then certainly three or four human sacrifices, and so on, also are justified to
save the whole community. Who among you can doubt it?
"And what do we mean by the whole community? Even where
famine and pestilence and disease do not threaten the entire community, they
threaten a great number. Perhaps less than all, but a great number. So if the
lives of four are nothing if their sacrifice will save the whole community,
then in the same way they are nothing as against any larger share of the
community. By following the ancient principle handed down to us, then, we
learned the science of democracy. And by these principles of democracy we know
that the lives of four human sacrifices – who are mere individuals – are
nothing to the larger share of five – who stand for our whole community.
"In this way, then, through science and democracy, we
have perfected the principle of human sacrifice. For we no longer rely on
miracles as the ancients did. We do not require the sacrifice of one innocent
life to save all lives. We have learned the principle that the few must be
sacrificed to save the many, that the few stands for the individual – that
which is weak, imperfectible, mortal – and that the many stands for the
community – that which is strong, perfectible, eternal."
"But the little girl!" came the cries from some
parts of the crowd. Hearing this, the man at headquarters took on a softer
tone. He went on:
"It is right that you should weep for the little girl.
Of course, it is intuitive why pushing a little girl to her death seems
horrible. But it is for this very reason that the act is heroic. For if
sacrifice is the life of the community, as you have seen, then performing the
sacrifice is a life-giving act, the very breath of God! Who am I in comparison?
I am powerless. Sitting in my offices, I only write the rules directing the
sacrifices. From my headquarters, I never see the sacrifices themselves. I
cannot ensure that the sacrifices, so necessary to save the community, are
faithfully performed. And even the operator, too, perhaps, feels his act of
killing was not quite direct, for he merely put the train into the path of the
sacrifice, and could not ensure against an intervening act.
"But the usher who pushed the sacrifice – a most
innocent sacrifice – onto the tracks, his act was the perfection of the
principle. Without killing, there can be no sacrifice. And not only for the
sake of our community was the sacrifice required, but for the girl's own sake.
The sacrifice is not an end, but a continuation. Sacrifice is release. The
usher released the girl from an existence of certain pain, of misery in the
absence of her mother and father and brother. She is released from a life of
dependency. The sacrifice, you see, redeemed the girl. The one who releases is
Savior – not of the community only, but of the sacrifice herself. My usher
understood my will best of all, and executed it faithfully. As you approve the
will of the man at headquarters, so you must approve the one who executes his
will."
What is the meaning of this parable? You may think of the
mandatory train rides as mandatory vaccinations. You may think of headquarters
as our public health regime, and the man at headquarters as Dr. Fauci. You may
think of the family as the victims of the Covid vaccines suffering
blood-clotting, heart attacks, heart inflammation, etc., whose injuries and
deaths must – must – be embraced as the cost of a greater good. And you
may think of the townspeople as those among us who, terrified of the hand of
Death, assent to their lives being put under the hand of headquarters, even as
it means volunteering their innocent neighbors to be sacrificed.
This, then, is the moral of the train to Aleppo: Death settles
all its accounts. Those who will not accept what Death cannot change, may
change it only by trading one life for another. Fear is a mimesis of disease, a
mimicry of any natural threat to life: the community will coalesce around its
fear of death, and will send Death to take the lives of our neighbors, if only
Death would spare the rest of us.
The morality of the man at headquarters – the morality of
technocratic man, the man of science, of pragmatism, of sound social policy –
is the morality of the pagan religions. The man at headquarters is not
ideological about killing. Killing is just another tool of social policy: if,
by killing some, a greater number may live, then this is no different from any
other decision that comes up in the administration of men.
But this morality, a humanitarian morality, was replaced by
the sixth commandment against shedding innocent blood. There is a difference
between the Mosaic commandment, which says you must not kill, and the
perversion of the commandment, which says, to preserve life, you must kill. The
two are not the same, because, sometimes, preserving lives – which is good –
requires killing innocent lives – which is evil. Not all death is evil, but
many ways of avoiding it are evil.
The man at headquarters would teach us that the commandment
against killing is, ironically, a suicide pact, because unless some lives are
taken, many more lives will be lost. And that was the thinking of the ancient
religions, which sacrificed innocent lives to corn gods to ensure a bountiful
harvest. Today, no one believes there is a corn god – or, if there is, no one
thinks that a corn god is impressed by human sacrifice. But that does not keep
us from offering human sacrifices. Worship of the corn gods has been replaced
by worship of the men at headquarters (and this is why dissent from the decrees
and will of the men at headquarters is regarded as the equivalent of blaslphemy).
The Mosaic law was a revolution, because it taught both the sanctity of human
life, and the limits we must impose on our own powers to preserve it.
This is the undetected lesson of the commandment against
killing. Scholars debate whether it enjoins merely murder, or the death
penalty. But Yahweh had already answered these questions by his covenants with
Cain and with Noah. The sixth commandment's injunction against human sacrifice
taught that the individual shall not be subordinated to the community. Humanity
is not greater than a human. Abraham knew the principle of human sacrifice. He
knew that all men sacrificed their sons and daughters to the gods. So how, when
the angel of Yahweh, the most high God, the I Am – the foothold of existence
itself – commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, could he refuse? Yet in the
end, Yahweh commanded that Abraham not sacrifice his son, that even the creator
of the universe does not demand the blood of innocents in sacrifice. This
commandment remains still: You shall not take up the knife that Yahweh bade
Abraham lay down.
The culmination of the man at headquarters – the man who
directs the sacrifice of individuals for the sake of the group – is Caiaphas.
Caiaphas, as high priest among the Pharisees, said this of Jesus: “You don’t
seem to have grasped the situation at all; you fail to see that it is better
for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed.”
As John relates, Caiaphas "did not speak in his own person, it was as high
priest that he made this prophecy that Jesus was to die for the nation – and
not for the nation only, but to gather together in unity the scattered children
of God. From that day they were determined to kill him." John 11:47-53.
Ironically, in obeisance to the commandment against "killing," the
Pharisees would not kill Christ themselves, but handed Him over to Pilate, who
could kill him lawfully, as a criminal. Pilate's hands, then, were clean. It
was the Pharisees who violated the commandment, for they did not hand up Christ
to be killed as a criminal, but as a human sacrifice.
This is why the man at headquarters loves the law. For while
the man at headquarters wills human sacrifice, he dares not carry it out
himself: he would be stoned by the people. But as Pilate and his guards were
permitted to execute Christ, the usher was permitted to execute an innocent
girl. The men at headquarters set up nice rules by which another man takes on
the very sickle and the black robe: his hand has become the very touch of
Death. Modern man has put Death in the employ of headquarters.
I submit that the man at headquarters is the spirit of antichrist.
His is the spirit that rebels against God's commandments to send an innocent
Christ to his death. It is the spirit of fear, a fear that overcomes will, our
very humanity, which Christ understood when he asked God to forgive his
tormenters, for they knew not what they did. And it was the power of this
spirit that Christ humiliated when he rose on the third day. And so ever since
then the spirit has taken on other forms. Today, the spirit is at work in the
man at headquarters, who declares, with certainty, rules that will save the
community from their animalistic fear – if only we will accept that some of
their neighbors – mere individuals – must be sacrificed.
The man at headquarters perpetrates this added inversion as
well: that while the ancients practiced group fear and sacrifice of the
diseased, the man at headquarters curates and directs the group's fear against
the healthy. The example here may be found in the Gerasenes, of the country of
Decapolis, who cast men possessed by evil spirits into the tombs outside the
city, binding them with chains and fetters. The Gerasenes had no trouble
committing this violence against their neighbors, whose demoniac possession
threatened them. They must have taken some satisfaction in this ritual, for
when Jesus cast the demons out and healed the possessed man, the townspeople
asked Jesus to leave. In René Girard’s thesis, the strife and disorder inherent
in all groups has always been quelled and ordered through ritualistic violence
against such scapegoats. This is why the Gerasenes did not welcome Jesus’s gift
of peace. Their violence and sacrifice were prompted only nominally by the demoniac
possession. The more important role played by their violence and sacrifice was
control – fear and division were at the heart of social order. Peace was alien
to them. Peace comes through faith, and faith requires a man to relinquish
control. The Gerasenes, in casting out He who cast out their demons, preferred control
to peace.
Dr. Fauci's vaccine represents a further perversion of the story
of the demons of Gerasa. The Gerasenes cast out those possessed by something
unnatural and evil. We can understand this initial desire even if, after the
passage of years transformed this defensive act into a ritual of control, the
Gerasenes made themselves into evildoers. For by then, they had become victims
of their sinful natures: their fear and pride had overwhelmed their conscience.
Through the process initiated by fear they knew not what they did. It is this
cycle that Jesus asked the Father to forgive, even those whose fear and pride
crucified him, for they knew not what they were doing. Our man at headquarters,
however, does not fear sickness or demoniac possession. The object of his ire
is not the man fallen under a curse or a disease, but the man who is not cursed
or diseased. The man at headquarters does not hate war, but peace. It is no
accident the man at headquarters has come to the height of his power in
America, in the 21st century. In the nation founded, as Patrick Henry had it,
"on the Gospel of Jesus Christ," which, after fewer generations than
those between Adam and Noah, purged itself of the ancient divisions of race and
tribe and class, to live, at last, in peace and prosperity, does the man at
headquarters rage over old divisions, and even introduce new divisions, and new
afflictions, so that now after the work of many millennia God's people, under
the hand of the man at headquarters, casts out not the sick, but the well.
The man at headquarters must be resisted. He feels his
weakness, for he knows that he has no power in himself. He could not kill
Christ, he could not even kill a small child, if he could not put others under
the spell of his rules and laws and formulas. So it falls to the people on whom
the man at headquarters depends to carry out his will, to resist the wickedness
of the man at headquarters. And he who must carry out human sacrifice to serve
humanity has the better evidence, for he has the evidence of his own body. The
usher who pushed the girl onto the tracks must have felt the protest in his
bones, in his sinew, in his ligaments, as he conscripted them into action. He
must have felt his very limbs resist as he placed one foot behind him for
leverage, bent his knees and crouched to lower his center of gravity, and
positioned his arms and hands for the fatal push. His conscience must have
screamed, from some recess within him, as he forced his mind to perform the
calculations, glancing with his eyes from the approaching train, back to the
track, back again to the train, to determine just the right moment. And then at
last, it must have wrenched his heart as he took a breath, his blood pumping in
protest, united his body with the sacrifice, grappling, shoving, arms, face,
and shoulder planted into her flesh, legs driving, a dance of death, until at
last the sacrifice's resistance faltered, and she was away, to the tracks and her
death, the human sacrifice completed.
Pushing someone in front of a train to save its passengers
is human sacrifice. Steering a train in the way of someone to save the
passengers is human sacrifice. Ordering that another person drive a train into
a person, or to push the person, is human sacrifice. There is no difference
between these acts, only the evidence for the latter may more easily be
ignored. Yet each of these men at headquarters know the same rule against
killing. Why should we think killing a person by pushing a button is permitted,
and that only killing by shoving is forbidden? Those who approve the mandates
of the man at headquarters, but disapprove their execution, have misjudged the
commandment. They have replaced the law against killing with a law against
dancing.
And for the same reason, ordering a person to take a vaccine
who will die as a result is human sacrifice. A vaccine administered
indiscriminately across a healthy population is not medicine: it does not cure a
disease, or correct a disorder, except in its implicit assumption that humanity
itself is diseased or disordered. And in view that the vaccine carries risks of
injury and death, administering the vaccine without screening against these
risks amounts to a wrongful assault or killing, regardless of the supposed
social benefits of vaccination. Both the ancients and the moderns believe blood
must be spilled for the greater good. The modern merely stopped believing in
magic. But a savage who stops believing in magic is still a savage.
Civilization is not attained by subtraction. Finding error is not the same
thing as seeking truth. Man repudiated magic centuries ago, yet he has gone on
with human sacrifice, because he has not replaced his error with truth.
Those among God's people afflicted with illness should study
carefully, and consult upright physicians. But most of all, we should pray:
pray that God would heal us, yes, but more than that, pray that He would use us
for such time as we are meant. What we must not do is to seek to reverse the
curse of Eden, to build a tower of Babel to immortality. This is not a hard
choice. In fact, this is the American creed. We could only fit "In God We
Trust" on our tender, but the rest of the verse is: "This I know: God
is for me. ... [I]n God I trust; I will not fear. What can man do to me?”
Psalms 56:9-11. What, that is, can a man do to you against your will? Nothing.
But if you collude with him? Then you have taken yourself out of God's design
and put yourself into man's design. You are invincible until God is finished
with you. Or until you make a spectacular midnight ride, only to meet Death in
Aleppo.
In the end, all things are permitted that are done
prayerfully. Study, and pray, and then be vaccinated, or not. But this I say
with confidence: God calls on no one – no one – to coerce his neighbor to
accept a cure he does not want. This is to take up the knife Yahweh bade
Abraham lay down, to go through with the human sacrifice. But in the final
analysis, the greatest doctor goes to hell. It is wrong to do anything to an unwilling
man, even for his own good, even to save his very soul, because that way lies
Babel. The perfection of creation is reserved to God.
Modern man is a savage actuary. He is scientific in his
methods, but he remains pre-Christian – indeed, pre-Abrahamic – in his
morality. But the savage has never had courage, and neither has the savage
scientist any. The man of Christendom does not yield to the savage in his love
of science. But he seeks no contest on grounds of scientific certainty. The
contest instead is to preserve the right to doubt, and to preserve the
principle that man is a man – he is not a piano key – and that he will protect
himself and his family, and that he will pray to God for help in his task, but
that he will neither ask nor permit the man at headquarters to take his cup
from him.
I might get a vaccine, if I am satisfied it is healthful,
and not harmful. I have a history of vaccine injuries, so I am not lining up
anytime soon. I do not fear death, but I will not be frightened into leaving my
wife and children and the mission God has set for me, to ride to Aleppo, where the
man at headquarters may offer me up as a human sacrifice.
