Vance and the Vaccine

Food for thought.

In Servants of the Wankh, author Jack Vance has the main character, Adam Reith, describe religion as a way for people to impress their personal worldview on the blankness of the unknown, impressing their reality with their own volitions and attitudes. Reith further asserted that the religious fanatic becomes so upset and violent at contrary attitudes because skepticism about those beliefs are an attack on the fanatic's personal self and their identity, threatening their existence. In contrast, atheists see things, including the unknown, as they actually are.

Given that anti-vaxx hysteria is akin to a religion - and there is a correlation (from my observation) between religious belief and anti-covid-vaxx ideas - Vance may have been on to something. These ideas have become so dominant for the anti-vaxxers that they have become part of their identities and so they become existentially outraged over opposing views.

Of course, given the overall decline in religious belief in the West, political views, particularly SJW views, have become a secular religion, and so part of the identities of the adherents. Thus, this explains the venomous outrage toward those who differ, opposing views threaten the SJW in an existential manner. Rightist atheists would seem to be the most objective and well-adjusted people according to this paradigm.

In the same book, Vance describes a young woman behaving in the following manner toward a young man: "...beguiling and provoking, teasing and tormenting."  Vance knew many things, it seems.

Gabsters:

1. When their children are sent to die in foreign wars, they either cheer or say nothing.

2. When their nation is flooded with non-White alien immigrants, illegal as well as legal, who are given preferences over them and their children, they say nothing.

3. When they suffer enforced racial integration, so their neighborhoods are destroyed, they are victimized by crime, and their children are terrorized in school, they say nothing.

4. When their culture is destroyed, their history mocked, and statues of their heroes torn down, they say nothing.

But let someone tell them they should get vaccinated during a pandemic and they respond by screaming that their precious "freedom" is being violated.