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Robotic-like consent

I recoil from groupthink. I’ve always been independent-minded, while ultimately balancing it with subscribing to a healthy sense of cohesive community and being part and parcel of a larger framework. I was never looking to undermine the actual framework of community I am part of. To the contrary, I have a great appreciation for it and am proud to be part of it.

But ideologies like Marxism, socialism and communism, even a whiff of putting them in practice, are anathema to me. Jokingly, some friends and I sometimes overlay communist terminology like plebeian or apparatchik to current day political situations.

I subscribe to basic conventional science and Western medicine — I’m grateful for it! Yet I balance it out with a more integrative approach, and definitely believe in the preventative measures of wellness, taking some info from big pharma with a healthy grain of salt.

Making these personal choices for myself really had no bearing on the community at large when times were stable. The foundations of our society were blessedly stable.

A couple of decades ago, a new philosophical approach began making its way into the mainstream: “my truth,” “subjectivity,” etc. An approach that negates absolute truth versus absolute falsehood, good versus absolute evil. At the center of the new approach was the truth and experience of an individual — how one saw the world. Truth, falsehood, good, evil, etc., were suddenly up for grabs. The idea was that there is no one who has a hold on the absolute truth; rather, each person, with his or her experiences of the world, molded “truths” they held for themselves. As the saying goes, “one man’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter.”

At first, this relativism was confusing to me. On a deeper level, it bothered me, especially when it came to moral truths about evil that caused actual harm. As time passed, although I held fast to my beliefs, this idea of subjective truth eroded certain held boundaries that had always existed in society. It became acceptable, even de rigueur, to be tolerant of others points of view, regardless of how out of touch or even damaging they may have been, all in the name of this newer, perceived to be more tolerant way of looking at the world, and at people’s choices and experiences.

To be sure, this approach had its silver lining. It removed a certain dictatorial and rigid ways of thinking and being. It indeed does cultivate more understanding between people. In stable times, such an approach, while at times concerning, can also dissolve barriers between people and lead to much good.

The problem is that we live in a very real and flawed world where, unfortunately, evil and falsehood exist. It is not possible to see every experience through a relative prism, to validate every narrative. An offshoot of this kind of thinking is to privilege an individual’s experience to the point of compromising the integrity or welfare of the greater community.

We are seeing a fallout from this approach.

I would take the COVID vaccine if I could and I plan on taking it when I can.

Take this example: the vaccines.

Burning debates are transpiring about its efficacy. Suspicion, hostility and resentment are bleeding into day to day conversations about people’s choices regarding the vaccine.

Reasonable people who prior to COVID would not by a long shot ever have seen themselves in the marginalized anti-science, anti-vaxxer camp, people who are currently questioning if it is the best practice for them to be vaccinated, are being vilified.

Again, I believe in taking the vaccine and am deeply grateful to be living in a time when we have it available. I just find it ironic that suddenly now, when COVID vaccine-skeptic voices are growing, they are denigrated as primitives. These are people who respect modern science, yet due to the shortcut of the vaccine trials would like to wait just a bit longer to see if there are any adverse effects that might impact them.

Now that we are living in unstable times, in a state of global emergency, when the “my truth” approach is centered around questioning science, no longer is this approach deemed valid! Rather, robotic-like consent and compliance are expected. Any expression of doubt in taking the vaccine is silenced as primitive, selfish or worse.

Which is another irony. Because science’s whole premise is based on skepticism and questioning, on hypotheses that are probed and need to be proven completely.

By shutting down people’s concerns about the vaccine, in a sense science is being elevated into its own kind of dogma.

The truth is, when the vaccine came out, I remember thinking to myself, wow-anti vaxxers are finally and tangibly really going to see and understand how crazy their position has been. How wrong I’ve been. Many have only doubled down.

It seems the approach that was so revered — “my truth,” “doing what works for me” — is all well and good until it impinges on a non-religious dogma, until there is a global crisis, at which point being able to work with a duality, with thinking in terms of what is best for me personally, as well the greater good of community and humanity, is blunted.

The prejudice in the “my truth” approach is exposed. As long as it is a narrative that gels with people’s open Western sensibilities, it’s all well and good.

But once it’s along the lines of resisting a vaccine, suddenly many heretofore open-minded people feel that there is, after all, some objective truth, some definitions of good and evil, of right and wrong in the world — one example bring that the vaccine is objectively right and good.

While I would take the vaccine, I think it’s worth noting the double standard in the arc of this train of thought.

Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Tehilla Goldberg

IJN columnist | View from Central Park


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