Out of Denial’s Frying Pan, into the Fire

The Covid/Vax Disaster Reckoning, Pt. 3

Those who face up to the mounting evidence of widespread vax-harms are first of all to be congratulated, because they have freed themselves from the propaganda machine, and stepped into reality. 

Not that it is an easy reality, because the freed ones must now think about the possibility of an Era of Vax Death (see part one of this series, “Flock of Dark, Bowl of White”).  Moreover, it is predictable that most of them will gravitate towards one of two opposite ways of thinking about it, both of which edge into mental illness.   The first minimizes the possible harm, seeking to remain at peace with social reality as we have known it all our lives, the second maximizes it, longing for apocalyptic change.  

The first way is a new, albeit less-ill and less-blinded, way of Denial.  It dismisses any notion that the long-term and medium-term vax harms could amount to much more than what we have already undergone, as any alternative scenario is just too horrifying.  “Yes, we denounce the mandates,” those who adopt this path will say, “and the current cover-up of the existing deaths and injuries caused by the vaxxes.  But as to what you raise, no, we just cannot talk as if that is a possibility—the overall harm certainly cannot wind up being that bad.” 

There is, alas, no rational basis for that “certainly.”  It is a judgment based in desire, or at best, in intuition.  While there is a possibility, which we will discuss at greater length in the next part, that the fatal and most harmful adverse reactions might mainly be occurring within (or being revealed within)

¹

a half-year of injection, we can’t yet say that is likelier than the more alarming scenarios, in which longer-to-develop harms occur.

The second way runs right to other extreme, talking of the most apocalyptic of scenarios, where tens or hundreds of millions die, where only the “pure-bloods” may still beget children, where nations fall, mass insanity unfolds, etc. 

The choice to go there may derive, on the part of some vax-refusers who were hurt by employer mandates or by shunning by friends and family, from a desire for vengeance, for a kind of over-vindication.  It also often seems a function of believing that there must have been a Grand Conspiracy that intended the disaster, that wanted depopulation for the Great Reset or some other nefarious purpose.  But not always.  For it can stem from a desire for a Divine Rebuke, that is, for an Old Testament punishment to fall upon our modern nations--more precisely, upon the hubris of our scientists, the mendacity and power-grabbing of our politicians/elites, and the rights-surrendering and persecution-endorsing conformism of so much of our citizenry, all made plain by the last two years.  So this desire is often linked to a correct insight, namely, that we cannot tidily isolate a set of villains who orchestrated the Disaster, but rather, we have to see that regardless of how it might have been set in motion, it was enabled at every step by a majority of citizens as well as a much greater majority of our institutional leaders.  That is, it is not simply “Fauci and co.” that has been revealed as Corrupt, but our entire society. And that means that if we are to avoid a similar disaster in the future, a lot of things would have to be radically reformed, broad-sweep firings of top administrative/executive staff at key institutions would have to occur, and a large portion of our “fellow” citizens who endorsed the vax-mandates would need to get down on their knees, and repent.  I myself do call for all of those to happen, and Nuremberg-like trials too, while not expecting them to.

The Bible does endorse the desire for society-shaking/purging punishment when sin/corruption have multiplied this much:  “Let Justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”(Amos 5:24)  However, it also warns against this desire leading to a rebellious insistence about how God’s justice ought to work:  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” (Romans 12:19)   

In any case, insofar as one desires to see Damnation wreaked upon our modern world, and I actually suspect that wounded and bitter wish is more likely to grow up in the unbeliever’s heart than in the believer’s, one might bring oneself to want what my schema calls the Mass Depopulation Event. 

My schema, in “Flock of Dark, Bowl of White,” of five ever-worse scenarios of future vax-harm, hypothetically tabulated from an-end-of-2025 vantage-point, permits us to avoid the tendency of flying to one of these two extremes, of minimization or maximization.  In the next installment of this series, I will go into my reasoning for them in more detail; for now, here is an outline:

1.) Sub-Disastrous Possibility.  Vax-caused U.S. deaths (by end of 2025):  40,000 to 100,000.

2.) Mild Vax-Death Scenario.   Vax-caused U.S. deaths (ditto):   100,000 to 500,000.

3.) Public Health Policy Disaster. Vax-caused U.S. deaths (ditto):  500,000 to 1,000,000.  Includes some damage to overall fertility, or some signs that a significant portion of the vaxxed will prematurely die sometime in the post-2025 years.

4.) Catastrophe.  Vax-caused U.S deaths (ditto): 1 to 5 million.  Includes greater damage to fertility, and/or clearer signs that a significant portion of the vaxxed will prematurely die sometime in the post-2025 years.

5.) Mass Depopulation Event.  The vaxxes function as medium-to-long-term poison of an unstoppable kind to more than a fourth of those who received them, and/or they shut-down fertility in similarly extensive ways. 

Again, I am near-certain that first scenario is impossible, as I judge there to be firm evidence we have already exceeded 100,000 deaths.  We must remain open to the possibility of any of the four remaining scenarios, however, in this period of uncertainty, before we have a firmer sense of what to predict, and in which rumors multiply in the wake of a total abdication of duty by mainstream media

²

and top medical agencies to investigate. We have to begin making a number of speculations about how the Covid/Vax Disaster could reorient everything, and my schema provides a set of guideposts for doing so.

If we don’t enter into this kind of tentative predictive thinking, how can we give even basic direction to our actions?  How can we break the inertial pull of our habits and expectations, which, let us face it, were made for the pre-2020 world?

I am quite aware that there are other unresolved issues afoot.  The persistence of the Woke ideological insanity.  The Deep State.  China.  The specter of transhumanism. The ramifications of the stolen presidential election, and of nations like Canada, Australia, Holland, Austria, and Germany having ditched basic aspects of liberal democracy.  The total democracy-betrayal of MSM and top social media, exemplified by many things, but most vividly by their treatment of Canada’s Freedom Convoy. The real possibility of another Great Depression.  The much slimmer, but real-enough, possibility of NATO war with Russia.  The final crumbling-into-collapse of our higher education system, which promises the further corruption of all institutions staffed with the graduates of the system.  The loss of trust in primary and secondary education.  The collapse of marriage and reproduction among the Millennials and Z-sters.  The weakness of the churches.

But we can hardly begin to think about these major factors, without having provisional notions of what could happen with the Covid/Vax Disaster and the Reckoning about it.  The Disaster is by no means over--even the more-Covid part of it remains “on the march,” as we will all soon admit if the current patterns noticed in the UK become the norm for highly-vaccinated nations.  And as to the Reckoning, well, we can’t even begin to guess at what it could consist of, unless we have some way of thinking about what the overall toll and shape of the Disaster could be.

I get why many might resist a rational approach to all this.  As I came this February to believe in the likelihood of an Era of Vax-Death, I underwent the experience of feeling like a Jeremiah or a Cassandra, i.e., a person who knows before others that Doom is on the way.  So I have some sense why one would be tempted to do what the character James Cole (played by Bruce Willis) did in the original 12 Monkeys, to wildly swing from the cold normality-dismissal of “all I see are dead people,” to the let-me-embrace-normality denial of “none of this is real.”  (To clarify for those who haven’t seen it, in the second quote, the back-to-1996 time-travelling Cole denies the reality of his own future home-time and its knowledge of the late-1996 plague that will nearly wipe-out humanity, for the sake of embracing the “normal” expectations of pre-plague life.)

Of course, there is this key difference:  while in the fictional worlds of 12 Monkeys and the Aeneid, Cole and Cassandra were right about the coming disaster that will spare only a tiny remnant, we do not know, and cannot know, the destiny of our non-fictional world.  I think we have increasing reasons to think the Mass Depopulation scenario is less likely than the other three disastrous ones, but we do not know.  The very-far from fully-understood nature of these novel medicines, and the vast range of adverse events they have already caused, makes it impossible to rule out much.

As to the overall attitude we should adopt in this season of Doom-haunted uncertainty, we should recall that in the case of Jeremiah’s prophecies, eventually, a day of restoration came after the Captivity, a time when men like Ezra and Nehemiah, men who as much fit the role of statesmen as of prophets, had to take the lead.  That should prod us to realize that we have reason to be drawn in this time, not only to the examples of Cole, Cassandra, and Jeremiah, but to those of Xenophon, Phocion, Winston Churchill, and Raymond Aron, political men who kept their heads as disaster unfolded around them, and who thus became turned to when leadership was most desperately needed.  In Churchill’s case particularly, we see a man capable of deep emotion about Western civilization teetering on the brink of destruction, but one who didn’t let that overtake his duty to reason as soberly as possible about the best war-policy for his nation.

What sort of Fire are we in? 

We don’t yet know, other than to say that uncertainty about future vax-harms, including those involving Covid-19, is a major part of it, as is the temptation to “cope” by either minimizing or maximizing our expectation of harm.  These two coping mechanisms muddle our reasoning, and they betray a tendency to either cling to our connection to the pre-2020 world, or to hack it away as morally diseased. 

But we can still reason.  We can still say, with the Xenophon of Anabasis III.1-2,

³

that our danger will multiply if we lay in our tents either refusing to think upon our peril or inflating it into an-impossible-to-oppose size.  We are rather obliged to consider how we might best fight our way through the knowns and unknowns that surround us.  Some of these unknowns may turn out to be very dark truths to learn about—i.e., how many will suffer untimely death, what crimes were committed by the most depraved of our elites, whether a Grand Conspiracy that has the upper hand through technology really exists, or whether the “everyday” corruption at work in our 1990s-2020s systems was adequate to lead us into a disaster of such scope (and of such shame).  But we have no choice.  And we can still sing, with the Van Morrison of “Thank God for the Blues,” that the way out is the way through. 

1. This is a distinction key to the poor souls who have received a myocarditis diagnosis, who will have a threat hanging over them all their days.

2. On this issue, “MSM” includes Fox, WSJ, and most older conservative websites, such as Powerline, Instapundit, etc.

3. BTW, Pomocon contributor Pavlos Papadopoulos recently wrote a fine review of the new Landmark edition of Xenophon’s Anabasis for Law & Liberty. Check it out, although I do think that if you want to tackle that classic of leadership and Socratic political thought, you’d be better off with the Wayne Ambler translation/edition.