Progressivism and the Covid-19 Vaccines

The psychological and ideological background behind the mandates

On Friday, October 8, 2021 Iceland announced it had suspended use of the Moderna version of the Covid-19 vaccine, citing worries over increased risks of cardiac inflammation. This followed in the wake of announcements by Sweden and Finland that they were banning the use of the Moderna vaccine in people under thirty years of age. This story received little if any coverage in the United States, as the Biden administration stubbornly persisted in its controversial policy of “vaccine mandates,” even though it meant risking the loss of tens of thousands of critical workers in an economy that is already reeling from labor shortages. When questioned by reporters, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh admitted that he was “perplexed” by the shortages; yet the administration, along with their shills in the mainstream media, insist that the mandates aren’t contributing to the growing problem. As shelves in grocery stores become increasingly patchy due to supply chain disruptions, the nation’s ruling elite has its collective head firmly ensconced within the moist folds of a bodily orifice normally reserved for very different tasks. 

Given this dire threat to basic needs and services, why is the Biden administration (and various state governments, such as in New York and California) so insistent about enforcing vaccine mandates? These mandates have led to the firing of thousands of health care workers in an industry already pressed by staffing shortages and overworked personnel. Then there’s the issues we have experienced in recent weeks in the airline industry. Thousands of flights have been cancelled in the last month or so, allegedly over weather concerns, but in reality due to debilitating effects of eighteen months of lockdowns coupled with the Biden’s administration inflexible mania for getting everyone vaccinated. It’s possible that thirty percent of airline pilots could quit as a consequence of the mandates.

Why is the establishment—essentially the ruling class of the country—so insistent on mass vaccination? Don’t they understand that the harm they are doing the economy far outstrips whatever benefit (per implausible) might result from leaving a third of the country unvaccinated? Why is the jab so critical to these people? Why are the nation's political leaders, scientists, doctors and pundits destroying the economy in order to force experimental vaccines upon those who, for very good reasons, wish to abstain from these potentially harmful injections?

The ultimate causes of these vaccine mandates lie deep in the psychological roots of progressivism—which has in recent decades firmly ensconced itself as the dominant ideology of the ruling class. Progressivism is, to borrow a phrase from evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad, an “idea pathogen”—one that is far more deadly than Covid-19. But this is a pathogen that does not afflict everyone equally. Certain personality types—especially those high in novelty seeking and low in consciousness—are especially at risk.

At the core of the progressive ideology is the drive toward novelty—which is to say, neophilia, which constitutes a psychic force of enormous magnitude, animating those who suffer from it with an all-consuming desire for constant change. Such individuals always have to be pushing “forward,” even if in reality they are going backwards. This psychology achieves its fullest expression in the doctrine of universal progress, eloquently limned by the philosopher George Santayana:

This war [i.e., World War I] will kill the belief in progress, and it was high time. Progress is often a fact: granted a definite end to be achieved, we may sometimes observe a continuous approach towards achieving it, as for instance towards cutting off a leg neatly when it has been smashed; and such progress is to be desired in all human arts. But belief in progress, like belief in fate or in the number three, is sheer superstition, a mad notion that because some idea—here the idea of continuous change for the better—has been realized somewhere, that idea was a power which realized itself fatally, and which must be secretly realizing itself everywhere else, even where the facts contradict it. Nor is belief in progress identical with belief in Providence, or even compatible with it. Providence would not have begun wrong in order to correct itself; and in works which are essentially progressive, like a story, the beginning is not worse than the end, if the artist is competent. [Later Soliloquies, “The Progress of Philosophy”]

Santayana is here describing the doctrine of progress—that is, the ideology of progress as it is typically rationalized—rather than the underlying psychology that inspires its acceptance in the first place. This psychology, as has already been mentioned, involved an impoverishment of conscientiousness coupled with novelty seeking (which in terms of the Big Five personality traits corresponds with being high in openness). These impulses combine to feed and intensify neophilia. Lowness in conscientiousness help fosters an instinctive bias against following tried-and-true principles while openness to experience enhances novelty seeking and belief in never-ending progress.

It is important to appreciate the fact that these various psychological traits manifest themselves as motivational impulses. They are not the product of rational thought or a carefully reasoned out philosophy. When given full sway in the individual’s character or within a society’s ruling elite, these motivations, precisely because of their non-rational origin, can lead to preposterous conclusions. We can see problematic manifestations of these motivations, for example, in the arts. Consider the “progress” of the art of painting, which leads us inexorably from this...

...to this:

The first painting, from the Sistine Chapel, is by Michelangelo, the master of the grand style. The second is from the abstract modernist “artist” Jackson Pollock. It is one of Pollock’s notorious “paint drip compositions.” One such work (not the one shown above),” No. 5, 1948, sold in 2006 for $140 million—which, at the time, made it the most expensive painting ever. Imagine spending $140 million for a work of “art” consisting of little more than the random accumulations of splashes, drops and scrawly lines of paint, all of which have been incontinently drizzled over a piece of fiberboard. The painting’s buyer was the Mexican investor David Martinez who earned his money as a speculator. Among his many accomplishments, Martinez was instrumental in restructuring Argentina’s colossal public debt in 2005. He is obviously a man of refined intelligence and genuine practical capability. How, might we ask, could so distinguished an individual drop $140 million on a fraud as palpable as the Pollock travesty? Obviously, powerful psychological forces must be at work in the sorry business. Martinez must suffer from strong neophiliac predilections, which predisposed him towards swallowing the entire modernist narrative in a single delusive gulp. 

Martinez is hardly the only neophile to have been misled by his psychology into accepting the absurd modernist valuations of Pollock’s work. Many people, often evincing high levels of intelligence in other domains of experience, eagerly embrace the preposterous notion that Pollock deserves a place alongside the great masters. To quote one panegyric typical in this respect:

[Pollock] created a new scale, a new definition of surface and touch, a new syntax of relationships among space, pigment, edge, and drawing, displacing hierarchies with an unprecedented and powerful and fabulously intricate self-generating structure…. Pollock's defiant refusal to stay within traditional bounds, violence, exasperation and stridency, all were paradigmatically New World. At a time— and in a guise that absolutely nobody expected—these were the unlikely characteristics that finally came together to produce an American Prometheus. [Italics added.]

Note how often the word “new,” along with various expressions meaning much the same thing, shows up in this passage. When it comes down to brass tacks, Pollock is a great aesthetic hero of modernism, not because he produced extraordinary art on par with the old masters, but because he did something completely “new” and “unprecedented” and absolutely unexpected. This is neophilia on steroids. The actual intrinsic quality of the work is dismissed out of hand by those inflicted with this psychology. All that is important is novelty—new for the sake of being new and for no other reason. 

I once asked a neophile art music aficionado whether it would be permissible to compose music in the style of Mozart and Beethoven. He was shocked by my suggestion. Such music, he insisted, would be “wrong,” because it would not accord with the music of our time. In his mind, music can never sit still—it must progress and evolve. I inquired whether he would like to see more music created in the same style, and comparable in terms of depth and quality, to Bach and Brahms. He vehemently shook his head. His ravenous hunger for novelty would not allow for such horrid compromises. The only new music he could tolerate was the aural equivalent of Jackson Pollock—that is, music without melody, harmony, or significant meaning: which is to say, purely atonal music merging into mere random noise. Again, quality is not the issue; everything must be new, new, always new. It is novelty at any price, without compromise or rational control or adjustment to practical realities.

In the early stages of a civilization, the propensity for novelty may actually encourage positive developments, since when a society still has room and scope for legitimate improvement, the quest novelty can provide beneficial motivations leading to path breaking innovations. But a civilization will inevitably reach a point where genuine improvement becomes increasingly difficult, after which true progress becomes increasingly difficult. A similar pattern is found in the arts. In the early periods of an artistic culture, the movement towards novelty creates opportunities of genuine progress and discovery. But eventually, the sources of compelling novelty become exhausted, and the pursuit of new modes of expression simply lead to decadence and aesthetic quackery. Thus the representational art of the great masters devolves into the vacuous abstractionism of talentless hacks. 

We see similar developments within politics. In a democracy, the factions of neophilia will inevitably drag the nation further and further to the left. For the neophiliac, there is no resting point, no social arrangement that can be regarded as a terminus point. Always there must be change, progress, and development into something new. And so if you attempt to coexist, through the give-and-take of democratic compromise, with political factions dominated by neophiles, over time they will drag you deeper and deeper into their decadence and dysfunction. Take an issue like marriage. When neophiles first began trying to change this institution, their efforts seemed almost reasonable. Back in the nineteenth century, particularly in England, it could be nearly impossible for a couple to divorce, regardless of how miserable their marriage had become. Neophiles led the charge for relaxing the divorce laws and thus enabling bad marriages to be dissolved. But they didn’t stop there. Eventually, over the next century or so, the neophiles pushed to make the conditions of divorce so prejudicial to low status men and so easy for women that, in the latter half of the twentieth century, large numbers of children in the west found themselves raised by single mothers. Then began the campaign for “marriage equality”—that is, marriage between people of the same gender. When at last this particular desideratum was achieved, rather than finding satisfaction in what they had achieved on behalf of the gay community, the neophiles lept head first into the mire of transgenderism. While issues involving gender dysphoria might not deal directly with marriage, they obviously involve biological sex, which is related to marriage. And since neophiles never stop, we have every reason to believe that at some point, when they have at last tired of agitating on behalf of gender dysphoriacs (as they inevitably will), they’ll move on to something even worse. Whether that turns out to be plural marriage, child marriage, or marriage to animals remains to be seen. Such developments are almost inevitable because individuals afflicted with neophilia can’t help themselves: they must keep moving “forward”, even if that eventually leads them into the very throes of hell. Their hunger for change lacks the restraints of any kind of deeper understanding of the nature of man and his relation to God and the universe.

The neophile’s belief in the doctrine of progress also predisposes him toward atheism and secularism—and this for obvious reasons. God is not a neophiliac—He is not some demented spirit seeking constant change. That would be a description more appropriate to the devil—that is to say, to a spirit seeking to overturn eternal truths and to inflict the chaos of endless “progress” upon a haplass world. When the neophile rejects God, this results in a God-shaped hole within his heart and psyche which he must fill through secular nostrums.  

Many atheists will, of course, deny the existence of any such hole. They will insist that the desire for God is little more than wishful thinking—a jejune yearning for a universe that cares about each individual human being. A fully mature adult, an atheist of this sort would contend, requires no such spiritual crutch. He accepts life and the universe as they really are. Since there exists no “scientific” evidence for the existence of God, then God cannot possibly exist. Human beings are merely pathetic blobs of matter invested with a thoroughly epiphenomenal, and hence volitionally useless, consciousness. Finding ourselves as sentient beings in an indifferent (or perhaps hostile) universe, we must make the best of it. Through the use of “rationality” and “science,” we should seek to make ourselves as comfortable, happy, and fulfilled as material conditions will allow. This is to some degree possible because science and rationality lead to practically useful results, whereas faith in religion (or so we are told) is mere blind superstition which can only lead to misery and unhappiness.

The trouble with most atheists is that they lack the courage of their convictions. They cannot bring themselves to fully accept all the deeper implications of a godless universe. If you remove God from the world, what is left? What does an aethetistical cosmos look like? Isn’t it little more than a vast inexplicable cauldron of hot, furious, energy-driven matter, going through all kinds of random, and hence utterly senseless and gratuitous motions as it gallops and careens headlong toward heat death and obliteration? If the sentient creatures who, for reasons nobody can explain, populate so inhospitable a cosmos should suffer great misfortunes and injustices, what redress can they seek from the universe at large? Nothing of course. The child who dies of leukemia at six years of age or the young girl who is raped, tortured and murdered by gangs of marauders have no choice but to bear the horrors of their fate. A godless universe is incapable of caring for the terrors it inflicts upon its unfortunate victims.  What then was the purpose of their brief sojourn in this vale of tears? Why did a universe so destitute in meaning breed such senseless, miserable creatures? 

There might be a kind of stoical nobility in acknowledging as a brute fact a cosmos so destitute of dignity and purpose. It takes great courage to admit that a secular life offers little beyond useless suffering and relentless injustice. The typical atheist, however, evinces little such courage. He faces a godless universe by trying to convince himself that the world's ills can be alleviated, if not cured, through “progress.” This involves a great deal of artful legerdemain, if not outright evasion.  Matthew Arnold, in his famous poem “Dover Beach,” describes a godless world as one that “hath neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” Atheists, intent on proving Arnold wrong, must find secular means by which to compensate for all these deficits. With God and the promises of an afterlife removed from the equation, this is quite a tall order. Undoubtedly through rationality, science, and the pragmatism of everyday life, some level of joy, love, light, peace, and even help for pain can be secured, at least for a little while. But in a world governed by the treacherous inconstancy of men and the blind forces of matter, human flourishing can easily elude the grasp of all but the lucky few. A godless universe is a world that was not made for man’s benefit, but which exists for no discernable reason whatsoever. 

When atheism is combined, as it often is, with neophilia, the result is that the ideology of progressivism, which started out as a series of semi-plausible political nostrums, mutates into a secular religion. The desire for constant “change toward something better” becomes deified into a religious principle. A more impracticable and vapid principle of guidance for man and society can hardly be imagined. We have already seen how an endless quest for novelty must eventually devolve toward greater dysfunction and decadence. Novelty soon exhausts itself and the neophile finds himself chasing will-o'-the-wisps. Now envision turning this principle into an object of worship—that is, into something sacred and inviolable. 

To give this impossible creed an aura of plausibility, the claim is made that progressivism is ultimately based on “rationality” and “science.” Such claims, however, are at best half-truths, which means they are at least half lies. Science may seem, in a superficial kind of way, to be an adjunct of progress. It is through science that advances in knowledge about the world and technology are achieved—all of which constitute a progress of sorts, although a progress within very specific limits. The kind of progress embraced by secular neophiles—a never-ending progress toward nebulous, ever-shifting goals—is contrary to both science and reason. Scientific technology, however marvelous and extensible, has definite limits within the structure of physical reality. There are, for example, physical—one might even say quantum—limits to how fast we can make computer chips, which explains the development of multi-core processors. Even advancements of knowledge, although seemingly unlimited, are not infinitely extensible. The finitude of both the cosmos and human experience serves as a brake against the endless accumulation of facts. Therefore science cannot be brought forth to defend progress ad infinitum, since no such progress is possible. 

Now progressives could at this point raise the objection that the doctrine of progressivism, as it is limned in books and articles, does not actually endorse progress without end, and that I’m guilty of straw-manning their position. But in making such an objection, they fail to get my point. Undoubtedly the doctrine of progressivism, as it finds itself embalmed within an explicit ideology, does not unequivocally support anything so stupid as progress ad infinitum. But I’m not talking of the doctrine of progressivism—rather my focus is on the psychology behind the doctrine. And the psychology of progressivism, precisely because of its never flagging desire for novelty and change, pushes the individual toward what, in practical terms, is little distinguishable from belief in endless progress.

Doctrine is one thing, psychology is something else. According to progressive doctrine, rationality and science should be our guiding principles. But is this true for most progressives? Not in the least. Progressivism, being a secular religion, contains extra-empirical elements which are contrary to a rational, scientific mode of inquiry. How do progressives grapple with this dilemma? They just ignore it. Psychological motivation is nearly always stronger than honesty and truth. Nothing is easier than faking reality. When progressives wax eloquent about reason and science, they are engaging in theater. They could care less about logic, truth, scientific experiment, or factual data. These things only engage their interest when they can be used to bolster some part of their progressive ideology. When this ideology contradicts science and truth, then science and truth are sedulously tossed aside. But not the pretence of science and truth. The progressive still, even to the bitter end, insists on his rational and scientific bona fides.  

What the progressive wants most from science is not its acumen or truth, but the persuasive ambience of its prestige. Science constitutes secularism's greatest achievement. Thanks to science, we have witnessed, over the last few hundred years, enormous improvements in the comfort, health, and well-being of billions of people worldwide. The average lifespan in western nations has more than doubled in the last hundred and fifty years. Travel to nearly any place in the world, which through most of human history was extremely difficult and time consuming and well beyond the reach of most people, is available to nearly all. Communication across the globe, either by audio or video, has become an everyday occurrence. All this is made possible, not through traditional religion, but from advances in science and rational inquiry. Progressives, taking notice of this, eagerly seek to convince themselves and others that their ideological strivings are fundamentally no different, and rest on the same foundation, as the great discoveries of modern science.

As a consequence of their inveterate alienation from reality, progressives end up ruining virtually anything they get their hands on. This is especially true in the case of rationality and science. Instead of forcing their ideology to accord, as best it can, with the dictates of science, progressives reverse the causation and prostitute science to their ideology. Some of the leading progressive sages, taking note of the immense achievements of scientific “progress,” have convinced themselves that if all domains experience could somehow be brought under the direction of scientific inquiry, that would enable the enormous gains in sciences such as physics and chemistry to be extended into other realms of experience, such as morality and social development. Hence we find such progressive luminaries as Sam Harris arguing that a universal morality based on rationality and science is entirely within the realm of the possible. Harris even goes so far as to suggest that moral questions are intrinsically no different from questions of biology:

I believe that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions in the same way that there are right and wrong answers to questions about biology [opines Harris].... All of this implies, of course, that morality is a potential branch of scientific inquiry—not merely that science will one day describe our moral judgments at the level of the brain, but that science may one day be able to tell us what is good (that is, it will tell us which psychological intentions and social practices are truly conducive to the deepest happiness).

This is reductive materialism at its most uncompromising. Whether Harris consciously realizes it or not, he is basically contending that all forms of knowledge, including moral knowledge, are reducible to the subject matter of the physical sciences. Now this is clearly not the case. Attempts, for example, to make disciplines such as economics or philosophy more “scientific” have only made them worse. Both economics and philosophy deal with the subject matter of sentient, volitional human beings, and such creatures don’t behave with the regularity and predictability of the chunks of matter that occupy the scientist’s inquiries. At most, human beings might exhibit tendencies of behavior which can be laid bare through various psychological experiments; but such tendencies can hardly be placed on the same level as the so-called “laws” of nature. Uniformities discovered in matter, once established through scientific testing, often exhibit a dependability that goes well beyond what we find among human beings. 

To get around these objections, Harris argues against free will:

Free will is an illusion [Harris insists.] Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

You can change your life, and yourself, through effort and discipline — but you have whatever capacity for effort and discipline you have in this moment, and not a scintilla more (or less). You are either lucky in this department or you aren't — and you cannot make your own luck.

...choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior — but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter — and there are paths toward making wiser ones — but I cannot choose what I choose.

The advantage of such a view for the progressive is that it opens up the possibility for placing all knowledge, including knowledge of human and spiritual matters, under the thrall of physical science. If human beings can be reduced, in the materialist manner introduced by Harris, to the subject of physics, chemistry, and/or neuroscience, this opens the possibility adumbrated by Pierre-Simon Laplace, who argued that, in a world governed by absolute causal determinism, in which everything, including human action, was caused by something else in an infinite chain of causation, then it would be possible for a super-intellect, assuming he could determine all the “forces that set nature in motion,” to map out everything that ever has or ever will happen. Now while I’m not suggesting Harris believes in Laplace’s super-intellect, such a notion serves as an unacknowledged backdrop to much of his thinking about the great issues of life. This sort of extreme materialistic reductionism, although seemingly the most atheistical of all ideas, is ironically one of the most religious as well, for it secularizes a characteristic that properly belongs to God but which is here surreptitiously transferred to science (and by implication to practitioners of science, the so-called experts)—namely, the idea of omniscience. If, as it is claimed, all experience, including thinking and willing, are reducible to the subject matter of the sciences, then it is at least logically possible that one day science will achieve omniscience. Like Laplace’s demon, it will know everything that ever has or ever will happen. This form of extreme epistemological reductionism transforms science into a kind of quasi-religious oracle—a word from on high. Science, when it has once assumed this deified guise, becomes a kind of secular god. The scientist, in taking part in this god’s mysteries, shares in its lofty omniscience—which means the scientist’s pronouncements become something holy and sacred. To challenge this idealized form of “science” is to engage in a heresy against the progressive religion—something that should never be tolerated or allowed. When once this kind of deified “science” utters a definitive pronouncement concerning any subject with its purview, that is the end of the issue. Or, as Al Gore once put it, the debate is over.

To fill out this picture of the progressivist religion, we need only consider the peculiar dilemma of its votaries. Once the individual with a strong predilection toward progress repudiates God and an afterlife, he essentially has placed all his hopes and dreams on solutions realisable within the rather confined and narrow parameters of the material universe. Like the reckless gambler, he has placed all his chips on what can be achieved only through secular means. Now there are obvious advantages to this approach, which have already been mentioned. Technology and medicine do provide some help for pain, and science provides a dusting of certitude. But as the deepest sages have known throughout human history, the secular world is a vanity of vanities. As Sophocles, in his play Oedipus at Colonus, somberly expressed it:

Not to be born at all

Is best, far best that can befall,

Next best, when born, with least delay

To trace the backward way.

For when youth passes with its giddy train,

Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils,

Pain, pain forever pain;

And none escapes life's coils.

Envy, sedition, strife,

Carnage and war, make up the tale of life.

—Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

Arthur Schopenhauer, the most brutally honest of all atheist philosophers, describes the life of man in the following harrowing terms:

Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, [the individual finds himself] in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, erring; and as if through a troubled dream it hurries back to its old unconsciousness. Yet till then its desires are limitless, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of its heart. Then let one consider what as a rule are the satisfactions of any kind that a man obtains. For the most part nothing more than the bare maintenance of this existence itself, extorted day by day with unceasing trouble and constant care in the conflict with want, and with death in prospect. Everything in life shows that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated or recognised as an illusion. The grounds of this lie deep in the nature of things. Accordingly the life of most men is troubled and short…. Life presents itself as a continual deception in small things as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little worth desiring were the things desired: thus we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for.... Happiness accordingly always lies in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud which the wind drives over the sunny plain: before and behind it all is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. The present is therefore always insufficient; but the future is uncertain, and the past irrevocable. Life with its hourly, daily, weekly, yearly, little, greater, and great misfortunes, with its deluded hopes and its accidents destroying all our calculations, bears so distinctly the impression of something with which we must become disgusted, that it is hard to conceive how one has been able to mistake this and allow oneself to be persuaded that life is there in order to be thankfully enjoyed, and that man exists in order to be happy. Rather that continual illusion and disillusion, and also the nature of life throughout, presents itself to us as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing at all is worth our striving, our efforts and struggles, that all good things are vanity, the world in all its doings ends bankrupt, and life is a business which does not cover its expenses....

The trouble with the material world is all the comforts and joys it provides are transitory—here today, gone tomorrow. According to science, human beings are the mere products and playthings of evolution, which seeks to propagate little bits of DNA through the farcical exploits of natural selection.  The human being, in other words, does not exist as an end in himself, but merely as a vessel to spread his DNA far and wide. Happiness and joy are merely nature’s motivators for manipulating its creatures to conform to the imperatives of this blind purposeless quest. 

The progressive secularist, committed to finding happiness in so vain a world, operates under an enormous burden to convince himself that his great gamble—his choice of matter over God and moral expediency over transcendental verities—will pay off in the end. This puts immense pressure on his ideology to provide the hope and solace formerly provided by God. Rationality and science—the very rationality and science that progressive intellectuals disfigure and pervert in their demented quest to turn them into handmaidens of their delusions—must deliver the goods; for if they fail, as of course they inevitably will, the atheist will be confronted with the imprudence of his choice. Hence we find the progressive atheists doubling down on the ability of “science” to provide  “help for pain.” The pathetic spectacle of the Covid-19 vaccines, which unhappily fail break down in effectiveness after only a few months, presents plenty of evidence to the lengths that progressives will go on behalf of any measure they deem supported by their twisted version of “science.” The typical mentality of the progressive is that the vaccines must work, because that’s what his ideology demands. We are in the presence of a religious faith so intense that nothing can shake it. When Lancet published an observational study which documented that the effectiveness of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine plummets from 88 percent a month after receiving the double-dose to just  47 percent in six months, all we heard from progressives was crickets. They don’t fundamentally care about the evidence or the science. They have already decided, based on an ideology which is itself a product of seriously unhinged psychological motivations, that the vaccines are the only way to conquer the disease and make their godless world once again a safe space in which they can feel at home.

In the early days of the pandemic, progressive resolutely lined up behind the economically risky lockdowns and steadfastly ignored or downplayed the differences of risk profiles between the healthy and those suffering from various comorbidities. If progressives actually believed in rationality and science, they would have focused the nation’s efforts on saving those most at risk instead of locking down the healthy. But of course they did no such thing. In some cases they did the opposite, as we witnessed in blue states like New York, Michigan, and New Jersey, where infected people were sent into nursing homes, spreading the disease to those most vulnerable, while the entire economy was turned upside down in order to keep the healthy and strong locked up in their homes. 

When the vaccines came down the pike, progressives initially expressed skepticism. Ironically, they were the first to be “vaccine hesitant”—but that was because in the early days of the pandemic the vaccines were being developed through Trump’s Operation Warp speed, an ill-advised venture to rush potentially dangerous medications to market in order to put an end to the disastrous lockdowns. Progressives’ early mistrust of the vaccines was inspired by Trump, toward whom they evinced an unhinged hatred. After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 Presidential election, the progressives immediately took over his vaccine initiative and made it their own. 

For sensible people with a more or less normal psychology, the sheer novelty of the mRNA vaccines would constitute an objection. An untried medical technology requires extensive testing over a long period of time before it can safely be inflicted upon millions of people. But for a progressive, with their novelty-seeking psychology in full display, the fact that the vaccines were using a new and not thoroughly tested technology, far from being objection, was actually a very large point in their favor—for the progressive instinctively, as we have seen, tends to believe that what is new is always better. And since the vaccines were based, at least in theory, on “science,” this was an added point in their favor. Covid-19, if it had been allowed to go on unchecked, presented a potentially catastrophic challenge to progressivist weltanschauung—because if no secular measures could be found to stop the spread of the disease, it might have proven the essential vanity of the entire progressive project. Hence the religious character of the progressive’s advocacy of mass vaccination. 

To some degree, progressive support for vaccination could be regarded as a kind of a religious test for these people, like the handling of snakes is for certain extreme fundamentalists. Of course, even people of blind faith reach a point where denying reality presents insurmountable challenges. Snake handlers usually get bit in the end. Progressives, however, show a determination in sticking to their guns even in the face of catastrophe that’s breathtaking to behold. Instead of acknowledging the failure of the vaccines to maintain any kind of immunity toad the SARS-CoV-2 virus, progressives have opted to blame the failure of the vaccines on the unvaccinated. And so instead of calling for an end to mass vaccination—as any rational person would—they insist on additional jabs: the so-called “booster” shots. Strange logic to address the failure of the vaccines by calling for more vaccination! One or even two doses are never enough: we must have as many doses as it takes, even if it means hundreds of the infernal shots. 

Yet this is not the worst of it. Even more ominous is the refusal of progressives to take the potential side effects from these doses seriously. From the VAERS database we get reports of hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions to the vaccines, including 17,619 deaths,  86,542 hospitalizations, 130,795 office visits, 94,163 urgent care visits, 32,305 severe allergic reactions, and 27,277 permanent disabilities. What if these statistics are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg—that underneath these figures lies a vast pool of death and despair that is being unreported because of censorship against any information seen as prejudicial against that holy of holies, mass vaccination. From the population at large one hears all kinds of anguished murmurs—a huge vast pool of anecdotal noise—detailing disturbing reactions to vaccination: stories of people, who, after receiving their respective jabs, suffer all manner of mysterious symptoms—chronic malaise, autoimmune disorders, disturbed menstrual cycles, and even cognitive decline. What happens when the numbers of those who have been afflicted by vaccination become too great to safely ignore? When a vast chorus of pain and outrage rises from an abused populace and cries: “Enough! We can’t take anymore of this!” While it is true we haven’t quite reached such a point, there is no guarantee we won’t. Even if just one percent of the American population suffers serious long-term damage from these jabs, that would amount to nearly two million people—or about three times the number who have died of Covd-19 in the U.S. And bear in mind: we know absolutely nothing of the long term effects of these injections. So if the vaccines fail, not just in terms of effectiveness against Covid-19 (which has already occurred), but in terms of severe, long-lasting side effects as well—how will all these progressives, who have so inflexibly insisted upon the absolute necessity of getting everyone, even very young children, vaccinated, react? Will they acknowledge the depth of their errors? Will they beg their victims for forgiveness? Will they promise not to behave with such determined and militant recklessness and irresponsibility ever again? Of course not. When did progressives ever own up to the evil they do? More likely, they will triple down in their mania for vaccination, scapegoating anyone who dares stand in their way. When confronted by actual victims of the vaccines, they will merely sneer and hiss between their teeth the word “anti-vaxxer.”  These people have no shame. They have lost all touch with reality and nothing can stop them short of legalized force. 

We are witnessing what happens when men of ignoble character and worse psychology take over nearly all of society’s most important political, economic, scientific and cultural institutions. A nation in thrall to such people is a nation heading toward it’s doom. If the republic is to have any chance of preserving itself going forward, these people must be removed from their positions of power and influence, and this must be done as quickly as possible.

Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.