The New Religion and its Origins

Guest Post by Eric Peters

As with the enforced wearing of the Holy Rag – as with punishing people for “speeding” and so many other things – the presumption is that everyone must obey because of what some Authority asserts might happen if someone doesn’t.

You’re not sick, but you must wear a Holy Rag because it is asserted you might be sick and could get others sick. The not-wearing of the Holy Rag is such a threat to others it warrants public agonizing.

You aren’t harming anyone by driving 65 rather than 55 – but Authority says “speed kills” – and you are punished regardless.

Someone might turn cough syrup into meth and so you are presumed a meth head when you attempt to buy cough syrup.

Und so weiter – everywhere.

It doesn’t matter how abstract and remote  the “might happen” actually is. Nor what actually happens.

One can have an objective record of not having caused any harm behind the wheel of a car for decades – all of which counts for nothing on the day you get caught driving 65 in a 55, because of a subjective assertion that driving faster than the posted 55 MPH speed limit might cause an accident.

The fact that it didn’t – and hasn’t – carries no weight with the courts or the insurance mafia, which you’re forced to do business with because you might damage someone else’s car, notwithstanding that you haven’t.

This is why healthy Americans are being required to pretend they’re sick even though they’re not – and why the same upended morality will be used to compel them to submit to a medical procedure they don’t need and which actually has a higher chance of causing them harm than the abstract might-cause-harm asserted by Authority of not pretending they’re sick and avoiding the procedure.

The overall risk of significant complications arising from the taking of any vaccine is much greater than the average healthy person’s chances of dying from the WuFlu, which are on the order of 0.0-something percent.

These are facts.

But the average healthy person is being pressured to assume the higher risk of an experimental vaccine for the sake of other people feelings about the extremely remote risk of not taking it.

We did not get here overnight.

It took decades of changing the American mindset from one that inclined toward the idea of having to establish that someone did something before the state could legitimately do something to them to the current mindset that the state can legitimately do anything to everyone by asserting the possibility that someone might do something.

Like spread a sickness they haven’t actually got.

The change began when the state got into the business of “keeping us safe,” a thing which was unheard of even during the monstrous assaults on liberty that took place under Lincoln (the evisceration of the idea that justified the American Revolution; i.e., that government must be consensual and when it is not, the people have the right to separate and form a government they do consent to) and Wilson (the legalized theft of people’s income and the gutting of their privacy, by having to detail their business dealings to the state) and Roosevelt (who actually made it a criminal offense to possess real money; i.e., gold coins rather than federal paper) and Johnson (who assaulted the right to freely associate under the sheen of “civil rights”).

None of these uber authoritarians had the gall to talk of “safety” – personal safety – as being any of the state’s business. Probably because of the cloying effeminancy of the idea and America was not yet an effeminate country. A place where fear of risk – however attenuated – was obsessed over by hysteric bed-wetter types.

That began to change, though, around the time the 1960s faded and the ’70s came into being. It changed for a number of reasons, including the rise of the “consumer advocate,” who presumed to advocate for consumers, notwithstanding they never asked him to – and the rise of the consumer advocate’s best friend, the ambulance-chasing shyster lawyer.

These two creatures were largely unknown before the ’60s – or known to be disreputable. The law was once an honorable profession that didn’t solicit slip and fall business and “consumers” were previously customers who bought things using their own judgment and if they ended up gypped they stopped buying stuff from the place that gypped them, which usually went out of business for that reason.

What people bought was their business. They didn’t expect the state to “keep them safe.” It was a mewling, run-to-momma sort of thing – and embarrassing for that reason.

But the consumer advocate and the ambulance chaser worked on their minds. Danger – risk! – lurked everywhere and nothing was too much in cost or imposition if it reduced the risk, even if only hypothetically.

It is not coincidental that the state began to express great interest in “keeping us safe” around the same time, especially as regards cars – and the driving of them.

The Safety Cult was born – sounding the death knell for life, beyond the cringing perpetuation of mere biological existence.

It matured into a religion by the 1990s – by which time the state was decreeing that everyone must “buckle up” and kids must be strapped down – never to know the freedom of just jumping into the back seats, to slide from left to right to excitedly watch the world going by. Their world would be one of confinement – and fear. The car – and driving it – made into something fundamentally dangerous.

Cars – and driving – became less and less fun, more and more another hassle.

The religion fulminated like a baking soda and vinegar volcano. It expressed itself everywhere. People were hounded for smoking – a thing perhaps mildly unpleasant to be in the vicinity of but hardly a cause for a crusade. Yet a crusade was launched – and smoking anathematized. This setting the stage for further anathematizing.

Even to the extent of drinking soda.

Even to the extent of what people say – if what they say hurts someone’s feelings.

Americans once taught their kids that sticks and stones might break their bones but words could never hurt them. Words are now considered dangerous – if they question the Cult – and one risks sticks and stones if one says them.

And so, here we are – in the pews of the Church of Perpetual Sickness, amen. It is a natural elaboration of the decades-long conversion of the American mind from a largely secular point of view that regarded personal risk as personal business to a Holy Jihad opposed to all personal risk, including the personal risk (if any) that other persons chose to assume; they cannot be allowed to weigh and measure their risks and decide for themselves.

Authority will decide – and thereby “keep us safe.”

Isn’t it nice to know how much we’re cared for?

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