The Pathologization of Reason, Logic and Knowledge Will End Western Civilization
Pulling a page from the CCP playbook, according to some, now you're mentally ill if you question the official narrative. From 2021 onward, your brain is the battlefield. Protect it at all costs.
A free full article, as always, full of links to reference material.
Two years before COVID-19, I warned that Pharma would work via our institutions toward mandating psychotropic medicines for the general population. With this article, I am ringing that alarm bell again. This a battle over rights, yes, and our brains are the battlefield.
Foundational knowledge - the basis of our understanding of reality - is not just in decay. It is being destroyed, systematically, by those who profit massively from imposed ignorance via censorship and the thought police. Without freedom of speech, there can be no freedom of thought. That’s one of the points that Benjamin Franklin made, writing as Silence Dogood, when he penned in the New England Courant (1722):
“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.
“This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.”
The realities that I, and others, had been reporting on as early as February 2020 are now vividly obvious as fact to nearly any thinking individual. During the past two years, your thought processes - your knowledge - your understanding - of the reality of disinformation campaigns about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines, and COVID-19 treatments has become pathologized in the biomedical literature to an extent that is difficult to imagine. This #PopularRationalism article chronicles that gaslighting in detail cataloging and characterizing their various methods of pathologizing dissent.
The number of articles, studies, letters to the editor, and online medium reports that represent thought processes of rational skepticism and critical analysis of clearly fraudulent messaging is stunning.
From early 2020 onward, hundreds of individuals bent on spreading their belief and faith in Fauci’s multifaceted misleading messaging attempted to pathologize (that is, turn into clinical psychiatric disease) vaccine risk awareness. Vaccine risk awareness is one of phrases I offered to counter the label “anti-vaccinism”; it was made popular in 2015 by a mention by Del Bigtree on The Highwire. Vaccine risk awareness is the knowledge of vaccine risk coupled with the knowledge of programs designed to minimize the public’s perception of risk).
There seem to be multiple approaches to the pathologization of vaccine risk awareness - and with it the best tools we have as a society for a rational and scientific basis for a stable future. Based on my deep dive into the issues, these include:
Association of mental illness with vaccine skepticism. The best examples of this include an April 2020 report from the UK’s University of Manchester that claimed that children of mentally ill others are less likely to be vaccinated. The article claimed that since 1/4 of mothers in the UK are mentally ill, 1/4 of the children in the UK could be a risk. The report did not seem to be bothered by their own statistic that 1/4 of mothers in the UK are mentally ill.
Armchair Psychology. This is exemplified by articles that list - and apparenly just make up out of thin air - “facts” about those who understand better than others the risks and lack of benefit of COVID-19 vaccines - such as “The 9 psychological barriers that lead to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal” from TheConversation (Sept 29, 2021). Among the “psychological” barriers listed? Mistrust of ingredients. “Crisis of confidence”. “Dependency and conflict avoidance”. “Sense of rejection and exclusion”. “Anxiety and denial”. “Feeling of helplessness”. Read the article and see if you agree with me - these are not psychological barriers. “Sense of rejection and exclusion?” Yes, pretty much if you’re fired from your job or excluded from your community by the majority who vaccinated - and who now still get and spread COVID-19, you’re going to initially feel a sense of rejection and exclusion because that’s what the f- happened to you. Any crisis of confidence is really a problem for those perpetuating the con.
“Studies” attributing vaccine risk awareness directly to mental illness.
A good example is the review article “Psychological factors affecting COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy” (May 2021, Irish Journal of Medical Science). The authors write:
“The concept of “vaccine hesitancy” is seen by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “one of the top ten threats to global health.” It is wondered whether the COVID-19 outbreak, which can be defined as a global and emergency situation, will solve the vaccine rejection problem that is worrying for public health for the last few decades [3]. Most of the current literature on vaccine hesitancy and resistance focuses on the clear causes individuals exhibit against a particular vaccine or vaccination programs in general [4]. Identifying psychological processes that distinguish vaccine-hesitant and resistant individuals from vaccine-sensitive individuals will be a guiding approach [5]. This approach may also provide the opportunity to adapt public health messages in accordance with the psychological tendencies of these individuals [6]. To date, many psychological structures have been investigated in relation to vaccine hesitancy. For example, altruistic beliefs [7]; personality traits neuroticism and conscientiousness [8]; conspiracy, religious, and paranoid beliefs [9]; distrust of authorized members of society such as government officials, scientists, and healthcare professionals have been associated with negative attitudes towards vaccines [12].”Note the target is “psychological structures”. The authors fail to explore or relay the legitimacy of the basis of any of these factors, notably the well-earned mistrust of what they call “authorized members of society”… the authorities who have been shown to be wrong on just about every knowledge claim they have tried to make. Their mixed bag of alleged vaccine-risk related psychoses themselves are detached from reality: most are examples of confirmation bias based the false presumption of vaccine safety.
Another example is the article in BMJ Open that linked “vaccine hesitancy” to childhood trauma. I’ll summarize how I interpret the results first: People who have experienced childhood trauma are less easy to gaslight. No surprise there. Again, the authors suggest perception manipulation, not correcting what’s wrong with the vaccines or the studies hiding early treatment efficacy:
“A better understanding of how to increase their trust in health systems and compliance with health guidance is urgently required. Without consideration of how best to engage such individuals, some risk being effectively excluded from population health interventions, remaining at higher risks of infection and posing a potential transmission risk to others.” -BMJ
Other examples include those in an entire Special Issue of the MDPI Journal Vaccines to “Psychological Aspects of COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake: Principles and Empirical Strategies”, with Editors Efrat Neter (Israel) and Karen Morgan (UK). Their call for papers reads, in part:
“As you are all well aware, developing a vaccine for COVID19 is our best hope for successfully confronting the current global epidemic.
However, coming up with an effective vaccine (or several of them) is not enough: People need to actually take the vaccine. To achieve a more extensive understanding of recent scientific knowledge as it applies to possible COVID19-related vaccines (emphasis added), this Special Issue will focus on the critical issues, challenges, successes, and new ways of thinking about uptake of a COVID-19 vaccine.”
How about fixing what’s wrong with the vaccines? There is little doubt that the journal would ever publish any paper that reports the facts (a) that the explicit assumption for the justification of the Special Issue has been shown to be false (see c19study.com), (b) the fact that manipulating people into taking a worse-than-useless vaccine moot and is highly unethical and is, indeed reckless - as evidenced by all of the real-world data on negative efficacy, and Dr. Fantini’s results on antibody dependent enhancement.
Another example of a “study” that points to psychological factors determining vaccine risk awareness (I’m sorry, I meant “vaccine hesitancy”) is: No psychological vaccination: Vaccine hesitancy is associated with negative psychiatric outcomes among Israelis who received COVID-19 vaccination. The authors claim that their results demonstrate that among vaccinated individuals, higher levels of VH were related to higher level of anxiety, depression and peritraumatic distress. It’s a weird “study” because, well, true vaccine risk awareness is not represented in their sample (the study participants were all vaccinated), and the authors seem to have suspended the law of causality: if people are vaccinated and become “vaccine hesitant” and have new anxiety, new depression, or are suffering from peritraumatic distress, might one reasonably look to the vaccine as a potential contributor to these mental states? The authors’ full conclusions:
“The results demonstrate that among vaccinated individuals, higher levels of VH were related to higher level of anxiety, depression and peritraumatic distress. These findings support the notion that holding ambivalent attitudes toward vaccination are related to mental health morbidity (Fusick et al., 2020). Furthermore, it seems that receiving COVID-19 vaccinations does not eliminate the effect of VH on psychiatric morbidity, and that some individuals who report VH continue, despite their decision to receive the vaccine, to demonstrate clinical levels of anxiety, depression, and stress, possibly due to their fears regarding its safety and long-lasting effects (Palamenghi et al., 2020).”
What a contortion of logic. Basic, simple logic tells us that when people who are vaccinated are told they will still need to mask; they will still need to vaccinate over and over, after being promised a return to normal - well, many if not most people would feel distressed, put-upon and otherwise gas-lit.
Re-Re-Labeling. Articles describing vaccine resistance various as “vaccine hesitancy” are well known, but do you know of the attempt to shift that terminology to “vaccine anxiety”?
Here’s an article from September, 2021, that proposed that “Anti-vaccine protesters fueled by existential anxiety”, citing a psychologist from Acadia University (Joseph Hayes) who also suggest that the best way to convince people protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates was to “promote the idea that getting vaccinated will help people regain the freedoms they had before the pandemic” and also “‘the personal value or heroic nature’ of getting vaccinated”. Of course, we all now know that COVID-19 vaccines do not stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, and Hayes does not know about Dr. Fantini’s findings that vaccination against the Wuhan variant could, after Beta, lead to antibody-dependent enhancement. Hayes is a psychologist who studies some interesting aspects of how people respond to threats, but he is none of the following: a vaccinologist, an epidemiologist, a virologist, an evolutionary biologist. This person is willing to speak about things beyond his area of expertise, offering a clearly manipulative manner, holding personal freedom out as bait for self-exposure to risks that were, in Sept 2021, abundantly evident.
This move to recast rational skepticism as “anxiety” associates existing (established) clinical anxiety with vaccine refusal. Here’s an article from Ilene Rush, a freelance essayist and fiction writer: “How to Handle Coronavirus Vaccine Anxiety”. She offers “While widespread vaccination offers the best hope to end the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health stressors (call it COVID vaccine anxiety) are making some people less willing to receive a shot.” Rush cites Thea Gallagher, PsyD, assistant professor and director of Outpatient Clinic at the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety (CTSA) in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania thusly: “The best way to combat vaccine hesitancy from anxiety is with reputable data” - in other words, accept the narrative in spite of fraudulent studies allegedly “showing” that ivermectin is not effective; in spite of the fact that the data from Israel, Barnstable County and elsewhere showed negative efficacy, and in spite (again) of Dr. Fantini’s remarkable results that show that ADE has been occurring since December 2020 - right from the start of the vaccine program.
Gallagher believes that she has the solution for vaccine anxiety. First, she says cite “reliable sites” for “valid information”…
“‘Among reliable sites she recommends for valid information are the Centers for Disease Control, which works to put out clear data as quickly as possible. Or, refer to a trusted infectious disease specialist such as Dr. Anthony Fauci or a vaccine expert such as Paul Offit, MD. Or contact your own doctor or an infectious disease doctor you trust to talk about your fears.”
I doubt the fallacy invoked here needs to be explained.
She then offers other “tips” to “combat anxiety” over the COVID vaccine, including, literally, per her direction, restricting your thought (of course):
“Check your imagination (emphasis added): COVID vaccine anxiety is often fueled by ‘what-if’s’—imagined scenarios of the many ways events can head south. For example, if you fear getting the vaccine because you might have an allergic reaction, consult the facts: one study of the Pfizer vaccine showed that allergic reactions occurred about 11.1 times per million patients. Know that before you receive a vaccine you must complete a questionnaire on your history of allergic reactions from earlier injections. (emphasis added). In addition, you will be asked to remain at the vaccination center for 15 to 30 minutes to assure a reaction does not occur. (JLW: “Check your imagination” means “do not use the powers of logical inference that we normally use: If it happens to others, it might happen to me”.
Regarding allergy, ironically, she is medically negligent per CDC’s Table 4
Under her advice, you will still be vaccinated, with no concern over long-term chronic problems with anaphylaxis that occur in some people following vaccination).
“Run a risk-benefit analysis: Thinking of the vaccine in terms of risk vs. benefits may help reframe your COVID vaccine anxiety since the risks of contracting COVID-19 are much worse than any risk posed by vaccines. “Remember that pregnant women are currently receiving the vaccine because the risks of coronavirus are much worse than taking the shot,” says Gallagher.
Here she ignores the fact that any risk-benefit analysis on vaccines and public health requires perfect correspondence between the messaging on risk and the actual risk itself, with all evidence pointing to vaccine risk, injury and death denialism and risk perception minimization as the M.O.s to increase vaccine uptake.
Stay in the moment: In practical terms, Gallagher suggests setting up a clear plan: map how and when you will get to the vaccination center, how you will get the shot, how you will sit afterward to wait for any negative reaction. “Work on what you need to do to follow through with each step and avoid anticipating the worst,” she advises.
After telling you to shut down your own forecasting, she then wants to tell you the imagining - the forecasting and planning - you are allowed to do. Incredible.
She then recommends therapy, completing the pathologization message (if you don’t agree the the mainstream narrative, there’s something wrong with you and you need clinical help):
“If anxiety continues to keep you from getting a shot, or if you’ve researched everything from reliable sources and you’re still too scared to sign up for a vaccine, or if you’ve made an appointment and avoided it, then you might need to see a therapist for help,” she said.
Blaming “Vaccine Anxiety” on “Misinformation”. The Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care published a Letter to the Editor entitled "Misinformation induced anxieties and fear affecting vaccination programs" by two authors. These authors attribute “vaccine hesitancy” to
“high levels of psychological dispositions such as (i) needle/blood sensitivity (anxiety), (ii) need for cognitive closure (lack of tolerance to ambiguity), and (iii) desire for moral purity (feelings of disgust) are related with vaccine misinformation and hesitancy. The people on first two were more susceptible to vaccine misinformation, and the third was less likely to be affected by misinformation. While vaccine refusal or hesitancy may be associated with the mentioned factors, some emotional factors may cause hesitancy, such as choosing to suffer negative consequences of rejection rather than the adverse effects of getting vaccinated.”
and they suggest that
“Social psychology can play a significant role in transforming the attitudes and perception of people, reminding them of social norms where people see getting vaccination is a norm and using social psychological theories in altering the behaviour of people.”
Again, their solution is to manage the perception of risk, but do nothing to mitigate actual risk. All they have is denialism. And in this one, the act of “suffer(ing the) negative consequences of rejection rather than the adverse effects of getting vaccinated is portrayed as a risk for spreading COVID-19. If people understand the risks, the cost of the cited “negative consequences of rejection” must be considered to be small compared to the cost of acute and chronic adverse reactions. How can this be so, if the world is blanketed and carpeted with disinformation about vaccine risk?
Conflating Reason and Logic Based on Knowledge of Personal Rights with Affective Thought Processes. The NYTimes and Becker Hospital review both dredged up a 2017 study “Association of moral values with vaccine hesitancy” that reported significant associations of purity and liberty with hesitancy. Rather than applaud parents’ knowledge of their rights to informed consent and the constitutional rights to bodily autonomy, Becker’s Hospital Review reported “It's about beliefs, not knowledge: Set of psychological traits linked to vaccine skepticism” and the New York Times reported “Vaccine Skepticism Was Viewed as a Knowledge Problem. It’s Actually About Gut Beliefs. Identifying those psychological traits may help health officials convince the sizable minority of Americans who don’t want a coronavirus vaccine. Simply sharing information hasn’t worked.”
To consider knowledge of one’s own rights as “deeply held psychological beliefs” is beyond reproach. It’s consistent with the pattern in which one party in an argument attempts to move the discussion to an emotional realm by provoking their opponent. The approach by NYTimes parroted by Becker Hospital Review was subtle: label a person’s knowledge of rights as “moral intuition” - affective, not based on the fact of law - so they might portray them as spurious.
From Becker:
“In 2018, scientists found similar patterns in a broad sample of vaccine-hesitant people in 24 countries.
‘At the root are these moral intuitions — these gut feelings — and they are very strong,’ said Jeff Huntsinger, PhD, a social psychologist at Loyola University Chicago… ‘It's very hard to override them with facts and information. You can't reason with them in that way.’”
You mean you can’t fight facts with falsehoods, Jeff?
Put simply, the vaccine risk perception manipulation program has failed. Each of the resources cited started with the false premise “Everyone knows COVID-19 vaccines are the best way back to normal” or similar - some even before the vaccines were developed - and then went on to portray as mentally defective anyone who holds any of the following personal understanding of the risk/benefit equation:
(a) the relative risk of vaccination is higher than the personal benefit of vaccination, or
(b) the risk of vaccination of not sufficiently well-known and/or the potential personal benefit is not sufficiently well known, or
(c) my perception and understanding of either the risk of vaccination or the benefit of vaccination has been manipulated, and I therefore do not trust any claim of benefit > risk, or
(d) my perception and understanding of either the risk of vaccination or the benefit of vaccination is based on solid information because I did my due diligence and found other evidence ignored by those who promulgate the official narrative.
Anyone with these positions has a perfectly rational argument for refusing COVID-19 vaccines based on knowledge, logic and reason. Where do you fall? Drop a comment below.
This Is Part of a Larger Battle Over Our Minds
The oligarchs in charge who have replaced Western allopathic medicine with Public Health see the battle to make rational thought and inference a psychological disorder as necessary, otherwise, their beloved vaccination programs will not be able to continue. They act befuddled in the face of the downward spiral in public trust of the CDC. As I’ve explained elsewhere, every injured person, every dead parent or child killed by vaccines awakens more people to the legitimate responsibility of making one’s own health choices based on verified information. The public trust in “authorities” is gone because they have betrayed that trust, time and again; the use of overt propaganda on COVID-19 has largely cemented distrust in the CDC, Pharma and MSM.
Their second-to-last-best gambit is “now, if you disagree with the core narratives, you are mentally ill”.
Their last-best gambit will be to accuse individuals who decide to not vaccinate of putting other people's mental health and lives at risk. This is a tactic taken from China’s “first mental health program”, which empowers the CCP to prosecute an individual charged with endangering the mental health of others.
Once the pathologization of logic and reason is complete, we’ll see a new society in which people will not be able to go to school, work, get married, have children, etc. unless they can pass the State’s “Normative Belief and Understanding” test. They will be drugged up, subjected to re-education to “normalize” their cognitive processes. The use of psychotropic medicine in the US is off the charts - in 2012, APA reported that one is five, or 20% of adult American citizens are now using at least one form of psychotropic medicines. That estimate has varied every year since then, until 2021 when CDC reported that 1 in 5 adult American citizens are using at least one form of psychotropic medicines “amid COVID-19” (allegedly up 6.5% from previous years). Pharma is not doubt chomping at the bit to find ways to get the rest of us - the 80% not yet on psychotropic medicines - on their consumer list.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization made one of its 30-points about mental health considerations a decree that all should “Ensure availability of essential, generic psychotropic medications at all levels of health care”.
The association of rational skepticism with a treatable clinical conditions is just a first step toward clinical enforcement of specific modes of cognition. We’ve seen this in so many sci-fi pieces - from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, among others.
Evidently, the globalists and their allies in Public Health did not get the memo. These dystopian sci-fi stories were offered by their authors as warnings, not as prescriptions.
Like what you’ve read? Consider taking full-semester courses with Dr. Lyons-Weiler and other faculty at IPAK-EDU! Registration is open for the summer term and Fall Semesters! You won’t regret it!
Related:
Notes:
In 2021, Nature magazine published a survey study entitled "Psychological characteristics associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and resistance in Ireland and the United Kingdom" with the following rather interesting results (emboldened traits are those that many in the vaccine risk aware community will freely admit. Others listed by the authors are those that many are seeking to pathologize):
“In the Irish sample, the combined vaccine hesitant and resistant group differed most pronouncedly from the vaccine acceptance group on the following psychological variables: lower levels of trust in scientists (d = 0.51), health care professionals (d = 0.45), and the state (d = 0.31); more negative attitudes toward migrants (d’s ranged from 0.27 to 0.29); lower cognitive reflection (d = 0.25); lower levels of altruism (d’s ranged from 0.17 to 0.24); higher levels of social dominance (d = 0.22) and authoritarianism (d = 0.14); higher levels of conspiratorial (d = 0.21) and religious (d = 0.20) beliefs; lower levels of the personality trait agreeableness (d = 0.15); and higher levels of internal locus of control (d = 0.14).
In the UK sample, the combined vaccine hesitant and resistant group differed most clearly from the vaccine acceptance group on the following psychological variables: lower levels of trust in health care professionals (d = 0.39), scientists (d = 0.38), and the state (d = 0.16); higher levels of paranoia (d = 0.27) and religious beliefs (d = 0.21); lower levels of altruism (d’s ranged from 0.17 to 0.22); higher levels of social dominance (d = 0.21); lower levels of the personality traits agreeableness (d = 0.22) and conscientiousness (d = 0.17), and higher levels of neuroticism (d = 0.11); higher levels of internal locus of control (d = 0.16) and belief in chance (d = 0.17), and lower levels of beliefs about the role of powerful others (d = 0.19); lower cognitive reflection (d = 0.14); and more negative attitudes towards migrants (d = 0.11).”
Thank you James. This is such important work!!! A stunning article. And I can confirm that in my case, having overcome severe abuse many years earlier made me see through the bullying and the gaslighting that was thrown at us in 2020. I finally knew why I had to go through the horror I went though. It finally all connected. Immediately I thought, "Wait a second, where did I hear this messaging before? Oh, it was my abusive ex! I see!!!"
And so by April 2020, I was done with the fear. https://tessa.substack.com/p/the-physical-world-is-the-only-world
“Vaccine risk awareness” is a brilliant reframing! We need to push that out into the mainstream.
Similarly, I’ve just detonated the next “mass formation” thought bomb (minus the Rogan effect but aided by the Malone, Yeadon, and ZeroHedge effect) by blasting the concept of menticide into the zeitgeist, along with a 12-step recovery program:
• "Letter to the Menticided: A 12-Step Recovery Program" (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-menticided-a-12-step)