Fully Vaccinated [Revokable]

The question individuals and families not standing up for the unvaccinated today should ask themselves is: What if they, themselves, wish to forgo the boosters tomorrow?

The Immunological Outsider

I often forget that thinking in terms of power is not how most people operate.

Actually, I am not even sure if “thinking” is the right term. I am not speaking of the rational gymnastics of critical theory, for example, through which any given situation can be contorted to fit a universal script where one party has agency, and the other is doomed to perform the losing role in a ceremonial play-acted competition used to justify the first party’s success - the “rigged game” - a framework which for all its occasionally interesting insights essentially renders the meanings of “power,” and most other words, ephemeral at best.

Instead, I am speaking of power and absolute power in the simplest terms possible: Being able to make others do what you want - in the second case without limit.

This version of power can be defined. Arendt’s rendition, in fact, largely cannot be improved upon:¹

Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is "in power" we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name.

All that is missing from this description is what being empowered entails: And what being empowered entails, of course, is the prerogative of naming who is the group’s outsider. Thus, having “power” simply means being the individual who is most well-attuned to the group’s own contextually-defined standards of self.

But the contours of actual power at a given moment often cannot be determined or described. They cannot be explained in the million-dollar diversity seminars which purport to alert employees of the invisible lattices of oppression swirling all around them and magically sustained by tears. They are not at all like the eternal and template-bound structures such seminars would peddle; they are distinct in nothing so much as their fluidity. As Arendt wrote, they are a property of groups, and can change merely by the arrival or departure of a single individual into or from a given forum, even if that individual never has to speak up at all. On the scale of face-to-face contact, these, the contours of actual power, find expression in auras and action; on the societal scale they are expressed in emblems and absence. The diversity seminar host, for example - this person bears the aura and displays the action of actual power. All participants understand, if only after an example or two is first made, that during every interaction with the host, they may be declared the outsider at any moment - the host, superior to all others in her understanding of what divides insider from outsider, may deem them a scapegoat at any instant, and their peers will enforce this declaration, via eternal shunning. The host, therefor, has power.

Meanwhile, let us offer the palace wall strewn with monuments, the automated residential gate, or the tinted-window clad luxury car, as the means by which absence, accompanied by emblems, displays power and therefor makes power real on a societal level. To behold the monument on the palace wall is to understand that all of one’s peers are unwilling to deface it; they believe in the power, thus the power is real. The absent elite, whether it is a single emperor or a phalanx of nobles, thus speaks for the leviathan. Of course, the emperor himself is not always absent; he greets the public, the resulting jubilation followed by silence manifesting visibly the civic order which the state has delivered to the citizens who would otherwise be bashing each other’s brains in all day. But, critically, he always emerges to greet the public, the emergence itself a reflection of his default intangibility; and then only, of course, to quickly retreat into his black bullet-proof glass clad royal chariot, which afterward climbs off into the sky.

The emperor must disappear almost as soon as he emerges, or it will become clear how little aura he wields over his own courtiers. Meanwhile, he is often unable to dictate the terms of how his power is translated to action. The memes by which certain individuals may be declared the outsider in a given society seemingly always default to the same organic, face-by-face mediation that defines the eternal struggle for status within the school-yard. The emperor can only co-opt these organically derived divisions in social status; he cannot define them. The rules for who is unclean - who may be sacrificed to bid for the blessings of gods - these seemingly write themselves; and in this manner the power of the emperor is forever limited. He speaks for leviathan only for so long as he reads the script leviathan has already written out. He cannot write the script, and therefor he will never be leviathan.

But in the 20th Century a great advance was made in the power of the state, accomplished by the simplest of all possible means: The outsider was now defined as whoever possessed the wrong thoughts.² Since the state - or rather the Party - could define and re-define which thoughts were right or wrong - which were either advancing or retarding the statistically defined progress of society as a whole - the Party was now in charge of its own script. Scapegoats could be named at will; leviathan could be tranquilized and sterilized, its memes of insider-v-outsider stripped of all authenticity, rendering the power of the Party absolute.

In the 21st Century, we stand on the precipice of an even greater advance; a synthesis between the artificial absolute power of the Party, able to name citizens as scapegoats at will, and the organic memes of uncleanliness and purity of the vanquished populace the Party preys upon.

This is the era of the Immunological Outsider.

I was “being online” today, and encountered a comment by a parent whose teenaged child is enrolled in Catholic school. This context replaces the hopeless circumstances of dealing with public schools - the impossibility of turning over a school board all at once - with a different hopeless circumstance - the inaccessible, unaccountable authority of the diocese. At this school, unvaccinated parents and staff are already being subjected to numerous limitations, and mandates for students appear to be around the corner (though the FDA’s qualified approval still greatly limits the scope of such mandates, for the moment).

I replied with what I thought was the obvious advice: Unvaccinated parents and parents of unvaccinated children should not be attempting to sway the diocese, but their own counterparts - the parents of vaccinated children. They should ask those parents, what happens if, later, they no longer want to keep taking or giving their children boosters, after learning new information about long term effects?

How will they stop the school from issuing some future mandate, one for a drug they worry might harm their child? Quite simply, they won’t be able to. They will never have a choice in the matter again.

Parents of vaccinated children are ceding their own future freedom, by not defending the freedom of unvaccinated children in the present.

Citizens acceding to the rollouts of state penalties and mandates, meanwhile, are doing the same. Penalizing the unvaccinated, or forcing them all to vaccinate, might bring the vaccinated comfort today - but a door will have been opened. If anyone can be declared an outsider for "refusing vaccine X," then no one is guaranteed insider status in society for long; the state can arbitrarily add new vaccines to the requirement list on a whim. Vaccines that might not even be accessible to all.

Successfully excising Covid-unvaccinated from society, in other words, will grant the government total power over the only group that remains: i.e., the Covid-vaccinated.

Will this power be exercised? Oh, surely not.

The premise could be Covid vaccine “boosters” - meaning that no one who believes in the Covid vaccines today will have the right to change their mind tomorrow. Or the premise could be some novel mRNA vaccine - you can write new ones up just by letting a cat walk across a keyboard, after all! - whose eligibility requires some act of community “service” which individuals with disabilities, it may easily be imagined, are not even able to perform.

This is not merely my attempt to rehash the lessons of “First they came for the Communists.”

Racial and religious purges, for all their horrors, have organic limiting principles - they refer, in the end, to a final majority, even if that majority is only a plurality before the bloodshed. They achieve a state of rest; one which members of the future majority intuit will plausibly include access to the stolen wealth and status of their executed former brethren. The lesson of First they came…, in other words, is that claims by the future majority that exceptions will be made for majority-adjacent minority groups should not be taken as credible, and majority-adjacent minority groups should therefor rise up to defend the scapegoat.³

There is no organic limiting principle in an antibody-based biopolitics regime. Mandatory adult vaccination is a plug-and-play platform: anyone and any group may be targeted at any time; the purview of the state to regulate the “purity” of the “biomass” is unlimited. No one can truly be a “vaccine insider;” they will be, at best, only provisionally deemed not be an outsider, a status constantly reevaluated by an elite-run state which more or less sees its own citizens as superfluous to its own survival.

Therefor, all citizens should rise up to defend the scapegoat. Otherwise, no one will be protected once the scapegoat has been removed.

The current cold, but rapidly heating civil war over Covid vaccine mandates is not a conflict between the Covid vaccinated and the “refusers.” It is a conflict between the state and the people. And unless the Covid-vaccinated recognize this fact, they are among the ones who will be on the losing side.

But because I thought this was obvious, it only occurred to me to point it out after reading the recent essay by Charles Eisenstein, which itself pointed out something to me that was obvious, but which I have overlooked.⁴ This revelation may be summarized as:

Truth is often irrelevant, when a mob is scapegoating a group in order to declare it the outsider, and ritualistically purge it.

How could I have forgotten this was so? Not for the first time, I had fallen into the trap of imagining that the memory of the War on Terror era has not been totally erased from the collective unconsciousness. Under this misapprehension - the illusion that Americans remember that the state which in the modern, dissociated era promises to “protect” them is really only interested in controlling them, and erasing them when that control fails; the corollary illusion that Americans remember that the media will gleefully support the state in these efforts - under these illusions, it is not possible to model a theory of mind under which pro-Covid-vaxxers do not sincerely believe that the unvaccinated are actively warding off some imagined deliverance from our self-inflicted state of emergency. They couldn’t possibly risk granting the state so much power otherwise!

Eisenstein’s essay reminded me (though this is not his own characterization of affairs) that the ritual of scapegoating is seldom rational - it is a spiritual bid for the favor of a vaguely-imagined cosmic entity, one that rewards fealty to shared values, especially if demonstrated by the violent slaying of heretics.⁵ Under this model, pro-Covid-vaxxers are thus self-aware as they partake eagerly in the otherizaton of their fellow citizens - which means they have obviously not given the first thought to what will happen as soon as the slaughter of today’s scapegoat is complete.

The ritual sacrifice model is a powerful framework for forming a productive understanding of Covid vaccine fanaticism. If pro-Covid-vaxxers are referring to mRNA-encoded spike protein scripts that plausibly disperse throughout the entire body as a “literal gift from God,”⁶ after all, it is important to take them at their word. Those who would reject their God should expect, if not a mob armed with pitchforks and torches, at least a lack of support when the storm-troopers show up; and preaching one’s own “false god,” i.e. the actual apparent facts about Covid vaccine (non-) efficacy and risk, is only likely to intensify their animosity.

This is all well and good, if you’re vaxxed. But for those citizens who have in word or in thought blessed mandatory adult vaccination as the glorious adoption of a state religion to which they belong - and again with the government’s behavior during the War on Terror summoned up from the graveyard of memory - it must be asked: Where is the Good Book, for your religion? Where is the document set in stone, that says for all time which people are clean and which are unclean?

It does not exist - or rather, only the first page has yet been written.

And who will author pages 2 - 1000? Will it be them, who stood by and let the state purge their unvaccinated fellow citizens? When page 540 comes out and declares them, or their children, or their grandchildren “unvaccinated,” will they have any say in it at all?

Of course not. It will be the committees of experts who deliver their sermons through the cable TV news, who author these 1000 pages at will. And those who thought the Covid vaccines were a gift from God will have to tune in every night to see if they, too, have suddenly been deemed “immunologically obsolete.” They will be at the absolute mercy of these experts, from page 2 unto eternity.

These are the stakes, for this particular ritual sacrifice. There is a reason, after all, that it is often included in the first commandment:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me

Public, Enemy

Above, I proposed two scales for actual power: The face-to-face scale, where the contours of power are expressed in aura and action, and the societal scale where they are expressed in emblems and absence. These things, again, are often more easily intuited, than they are explained - perhaps they are better intuited when one has repeatedly been designated the outsider in a face-to-face setting.

When “thinking” in terms of power, the changes to these contours are likewise not really “thought” at all: They are physically sensed. On the face-to-face level, the decisions and changes to postures which would alter those contours - which would lead to one’s designation as the outsider, which would confer absolute power to another over oneself - these are felt like a gradient, fixing one in place, or driving one to move - even if moving often pits one into an impossible existential conflict with the group as a whole.

And once again, the stillness or the movements which on a societal level would confer sweeping changes to the power of the elite can often be sensed entirely in advance, though here there is a tendency for false positives.

The most notable false positive, of course, being the War in Terror itself: A grand, all-encompassing electronic surveillance state was put in place without protest, under the guise of “protection” - theoretically transforming America into an Orwellian dystopia from which there would be no recovery besides the eventual collapse of the empire, after who knows how many decades or centuries.

Yet it did not come about: Electronic surveillance of communication, it turns out, is not such a powerful tool after all. No agents descended out of nowhere on zip-lines, no matter how many times you called Bush or Obama a dirty name within earshot of your flip-phone. And while the government could still “make an example” out of a survivalist compound when it wished to - making clear and incontrovertible that to our elites, public enemy is a redundant construction - what was also demonstrated by this example was the limits of the government’s vision. China is currently setting out to repeat the same experiment, but this time the many-tentacled beast will wear the skin of social media. It won’t work. Translating algorithmically-defined warning signals of “dissent” into organic understanding - which can then be translated into state violence - is an incredibly labor-intensive process. Attempts to scale up an organic understanding of this electronic surveillance, by adding more human interpreters, only renders the central command more blind; the organic understanding itself thus becomes too bewildering to translate into violence. And the resulting arbitrary, inconsistent determination of dissidents only broadcasts a signal to citizens that there is no difference between actually committing a thought-crime or not, which leads to a proliferation of dissent, which destroys the previous calibration of the algorithm.

It is far more efficient just to rely on informants like the old days - but creating an informant-culture requires that the authoritarian state starts off with the purges, which was the mistake made during the War on Terror.

Thus spared from the upturning of all our liberties by mere chance, why would we be so brazen as to roll the dice again, barely more than a decade after exiting the previous spell?⁷ And yet, here we are.

Failure to protest and to overturn state penalties and mandates for adult vaccination - like the partial (retail-excluding) passport system announced for Ontario today - constitutes the erection of the palace wall. It makes the power real, just as our compliance with masks makes the power of lockdowns real. This could be, once again, a false alarm - perhaps another logistical failure will arrive to save us from the state wielding the absolute power we are mindlessly granting to it.⁸

But this time, the purge will be correctly performed during the inauguration of the regime; the distinction between a patriot and a dissident will be a simple binary, thoroughly documented and even testable via blood-draw; and the media adulation of the regime and all its violent works will be of a sincerity and enthusiasm that even survivors of the Soviet Union would probably find breathtaking.

I still think that Eisenstein might be wrong, in dismissing the possibility that most Americans still sincerely believe that the unvaccinated are somehow contributing to the perpetuation of the Pandemic™. This belief may itself be entirely religious in nature - essentially positing that the virus is an angry god, who will immediately be pacified once all citizens demonstrate that they “take it seriously” - but that does not mean there will not arrive a moment where collective faith in the Covid vaccines, because it is ultimately grounded to an expected real-world outcome, evaporates all at once.

This moment will arrive like the transformation of a character in an epic novel - only after a dozen completely valid grounds for changing their ways have been presented to them, and the reader is sick of watching them repeat the same mistake, and has ceased to even care whether they finally learn their lesson.

If that future moment does not exist, then continuing to counter the mainstream, semi-religious narratives around SARS-CoV-2 and the Covid vaccines is, yes, a waste of time.

If it does exist, then every stubborn study analysis, every analogy used to explain a sensible risk assessment, every censor-triggering proclamation that the Covid vaccines are not “vaccines” at all! - all of these serve to bring the moment just that much closer.

(The September Unperson Trilogy)

We Silly Rabbits - Fully Vaccinated (Revokable) - Reducing the Number

1. Arendt, H. “On Violence.” Collected in Crises of the Republic. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

2. A privilege which in America has heretofore only applied from the Federal government to state officials or to designated violent criminals, though it should be remembered that nothing is no longer not “violence.”

3. The poem, after all, is the product of various speeches by a member of the relevant surviving majority. The addition of the “they came” construction seems to be apocryphal, and distorts the actual context - it would be more accurate if rendered as “First we went,” or at least “First you came.” Niemöller’s own first rendition of this morality tale, however, uses similarly ambiguous language, and bizarrely implies that his own religion was in some way targeted - rather than the Jews.

4. See Eisenstein, Charles. “Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed.” (2021, August 1.) charleseisenstein.substack.com

5. Eisenstein summarizes Girard’s proposal that ritual sacrifice arose as a counter-measure to tribal violence, which I find implausible for various reasons; I would instead suggest that ritual sacrifice is simply what results when ceremony, a tool effective for altering the social status of a given individual, is combined with the societal adoption of causal narrative thought. North American Indian cultures, for example, were commonly de-individualistic in the sense that fearing death was as irrational as fearing wearing someone else’s shoes, as well as highly sophisticated with regard to ceremonial reification of changes in social roles - but they did not think in terms of strict causality, and so they did not engage in scapegoating and sacrifice to a great extent (truth was a pluralistic concept; if one failed in a hunt despite correctly calling for the assistance of animal spirits, for example, this was taken as the result of the success of an enemy in a rival tribe in having cast a curse using their own systems of belief).

6. From another comment recently encountered “online.”

7. And the rapid arrival of our resubmission to another propped-up “emergency” itself adds to the evidence supporting a “Grand Inquisitor explaination” for the mass psychology of our times. See “How to Lose at Backgammon / Natural Immunity in the Inquisitor’s Cell.”

8. In fact, this logistical failure is almost sure to come about in the form of a Praetorian revolt: Even if the masses are on board with mandatory vaccination, the police and armies of the West are bound to find the idea of such a regime so stupid that, at some point, they toss the emperor into a ditch. By which time, there will in America already have been a grand dissolution of the union, with only a handful of coastal states still acknowledging the Federal government in any form.