The following is an excerpt from Daniel Polikoff’s book, Apocalypse of the Modern Mind: Covid and the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The body qualifies as the original and paradigmatic piece of private property. Ownership rights to the body belong exclusively to the relevant individual soul, the identity of which the body is both physical vessel and visible insignia. This proprietary authority covers, as well, actions performed by the body. Actions express the will of the soul. Freedom—and therefore spiritual agency—is abridged when action is unduly coerced or restricted, as in the confinement and forced labor characteristic of slavery.
Still more primal, however, than coercion or restriction of physical activity is the instance in which some action is performed upon the body that the individual does not freely choose. Such represents, physically, psycho-spiritually, and politically, the most direct possible assault on the sovereignty of the individual because it most flagrantly robs the individual soul of its proprietary command over the physical vessel which belongs to that soul alone. As such, it represents a direct attack upon that freedom of will expressive of the spiritual identity of an individual; a direct attack, that is, upon the essence of one’s humanity.
Vaccination, when compulsory or in any way coerced, falls into this category. Any vaccination program involving any degree of coercion (and the greater the coercion, the greater the offense) consequently amounts to an assault upon the human spirit. Inasmuch as the sovereignty of the individual human being inheres in the unalienable (or natural) right to bodily autonomy, coerced vaccination imperils the liberty integral to the spiritual marrow of humanity itself.
In this respect, coercive vaccination is—practically and psycho-spiritually—not unlike the institution of slavery, which today is recognized as an intrinsically dehumanizing practice. Because, however, compulsory vaccination involves an act performed directly upon the body (rather than confinement of that body, or compelling its labor), its violation of autonomy is of a distinct kind.
The more forceful, invasive, violent, and dangerous the deed performed upon the body, the more powerful the assault upon the sovereignty of the individual person. Corporal punishment of any kind violates the inherent dignity of human beings. Torture aims to break the human spirit by abusing the human body, crippling its form and impairing its function so it no longer so readily stands, upright, as vessel of immortal spirit. By contrast, forced injection entails— no blows landed upon the surface of the body—but penetration of the physical interior of the person. Coerced vaccination forces entry into the figurative as well as literal bloodstream of the unwilling subject.
Physically or physiologically, such penetration with the injection of an unnatural substance poses real danger, carrying the possibility of death, or irreversible life-altering injury. Denial of the very possibility of such outcomes is counterfactual, and represents (not science, but) the blend of willful delusion and superstition characteristic of a religiously charged ideological formation. Moreover, adverse effects may manifest immediately or long after the injection itself, multiplying the psychological trauma inflicted by coerced vaccination. While short-term reaction or lack thereof does provide a preliminary indication of whether or not the subject will be negatively affected, she can never be entirely confident that she has escaped unscathed. This naturally holds, too, of a parent deciding whether or not to vaccinate their child.
On a psycho-spiritual level, too, penetration into the interior of a person who does not wish to be vaccinated constitutes a peculiarly devastating form of violation. Insofar as unwanted injection effects alien entrance into the interior space phenomenologically experienced as the abode of the soul itself, such a violation shares certain unmistakable features of rape. When coercively imposed by authorities at behest of the collective will (imposed on behalf of, and with the support of, the populace at large) the violation could be psychologically construed as akin to a kind of gang rape. The will of the many is imposed upon the will of the one, forcibly overriding the authority of the individual soul over the physical vessel that bears—or bares—its identity (in)to the world.
The analogy here, to be sure, is imperfect. Vaccination does not afford satisfaction of violently selfish lust on the part of the perpetrator(s); nor does gang rape proceed (as does vaccination) under the aegis of an act supposed to serve the general welfare; the good of the vaccinee as well as society at large. These significant differences serve to highlight the ideological underpinnings of compulsory or coerced vaccination. Deference to what is represented and imagined as a superior collective good justifies violation of what should be (in accord with the code of law requiring informed consent for any medical procedure) respected as a sacrosanct individual right. It is precisely this kind of social-scientific calculus—one inevitably vulnerable, as we have seen, to the willful corruption of relevant facts and perspectives—that has always served as the rationale for crimes against humanity committed by government authorities; crimes which often could not be ventured or sustained without popular support and collusion.
My perspective on these matters may seem extreme. Yet whole societies once viewed slavery as a perfectly acceptable practice. Many persons in such societies probably lacked the imagination to see themselves in the position of the slave. They were, in any event, subject to persuasive social, economic, and psychological reasons that disinclined them from even trying to do so. Similarly, many people today continue stubbornly to blind themselves to the physical, psychological, and spiritual violence written into the very idea of compulsory vaccination.
In the case of vaccination, those enabling reasons devolve from a regime built upon the myth of enlightenment. Practically as well as symbolically, the ritual of vaccination represents a rite central to the maintenance of what is both an economic and a religio-mythical system, It is coincidently the spearhead of the means by which those invested in that system compel others to recognize its authority and obey its edicts. Performed under the auspices of serving the public good, its popular sanction further supplies social confirmation of the sacrosanct character of the act. The rite of vaccination thus serves to seal the social contract in accordance with the terms set by technocratic powers-that-be.
If an infant is born into the community of the Catholic faith, soon after birth he or she will be welcomed into that community of believers by way of the rite of baptism, the first of the seven sacraments vital to Catholic religious practice. In the West, however, we have now long worshipped according to the tenets of “a new faith” (Tarnas). The baptismal rite of vaccination, performed soon after birth, consequently certifies the parents’ belief in the creed of modern science and (bio)technology, and the unimpeachable authority of its white-frocked ministers.
In many states in the US, performance of the ritual is required by law as a condition of attendance of public (and often even private) school. In five states, including California, the belief in scientism is politically so powerful that all children who wish to attend school are required to go through the prescribed ritual (and indeed repeatedly so). Faith in the truth and goodness thus enacted is so absolute, so immune from all reasonable questions, that no contrary beliefs are acknowledged as possessing legitimacy: no “religious exemptions” are granted.
To believe that this is wrong, to contend that the state should have no such authority over sovereignty of my or my child’s body, does not qualify as an opposing viewpoint worthy of respectful consideration. Rather, it is branded and prosecuted as unlawful heresy. The truth that vaccines are “safe and effective” at saving lives and alleviating suffering can no more be questioned within the context of this ideological framework than can the salvific power of Jesus within the context of Christian belief. It is, in the religious sense of the term, dogma.
Of course, proponents of the policy would claim that my line of argument here is specious, because it is no religious belief that authorizes the propriety of vaccination, but duly tried and tested scientific truth. Here I beg to differ, and do so with good reason—the same fact-based, enlightened reason that casts the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines in such grave doubt.
I do readily acknowledge one essential difference between a religious sacrament and the rite of vaccination. The latter bears a certain superficial resemblance not only to the act of baptism, but—insofar as both involve the taking of a magical substance into the interior of the body, and indeed one’s own lifeblood—to the act of communion. The rites of baptism and communion, however, qualify as authentically religious rites, because they are consciously performed as acts of spiritual transmission. Even while working with physical substances (consecrated bread, wine, or water, for instance) and so involving the body, these rites explicitly address and seek to nourish the human spirit. No one showers in a baptismal font or eats the host for breakfast.
The rite of vaccination, on the other hand, has no such explicit soul-spiritual intent. As befits the worldview it exemplifies, its purpose is the purely physical/physiological prevention of illness. The psychosocial implications of the ritual I have discussed are not overt or explicit, but covert. The resultant effects consequently are not so much authentically spiritual or religious (in which case they would need to be in accord with human freedom) but ideological in nature.
With the advent of the Covid pandemic, the Leviathanic powers-that-be upped the vaccine ante exponentially. No longer may parents restrict tribute to the God of Science by vaccinating their children with an ever-increasing number (currently 72 in the US) of injections. Now adults, too, have been required to pay obeisance by way of their own bodies, to bend their knee before the biotechnology-driven Machine that promises to protect us from death, disease, and each other, and “get the jab.” Only so could adult persons inhabiting Covid World certify, not only their requisite faith in scientific authority, but their moral integrity and social conscience, the respect for their fellow citizens that verifies (such is the consummate irony) their very humanity.
As we have seen, the “reign of quantity” (Guenon) helped set the Great Reset agenda in motion. The human body—that sacred temple of spirit, that privileged site of the sovereign freedom of the individual person—was mercilessly reduced to sets of numbers. Those numbers were calculated so as to translate into one unambiguous message: vaccinate, or suffer and die. If you did not follow that commandment, you may not have died a physical death, but would nonetheless have suffered social and professional decease, or exile, at the hands of all the duly faithful. Mass formation indeed!
So might the Matrix, the Machine, the Leviathanic Deep State that extends far beyond national borders, work its will. The vaccine campaign and all that went along with it ultimately prosecutes a war upon the bodies, souls, and spirits of human beings—all three, at once, in their integral unity.
Join the conversation:


Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.








