“Academic Skepticism appealed to Cicero for a number of reasons: its Platonic pedigree (the New Academics saw themselves as upholding Plato’s true method as seen in the early, Socratic dialogues); its affinity to and employment of rhetoric, especially in debates in utramque partem; and, more than anything, the intellectual independence that came with the Skeptic refusal of any unexamined dogma, coupled with the freedom to choose any position found plausible, without regard to school affiliation. Throughout his life, we see Cicero probing, doubting, arguing with himself and others, and changing his mind on more than one occasion. In his letters, his speeches, and his treatises, we find him withholding judgment on some issues, and on others espousing positions that range from the idiosyncratically Ciceronian to the bona fide Stoic, Platonic, or Antiochean. All of this is exactly what we would expect from a “soft”—that is, probabilist—Academic Skeptic. Skepticism does not prevent Cicero from holding a view, or from selecting positive aspects of a variety of philosophies; it does, however, prevent him from accepting any doctrine sight unseen or merely because it comes as part and parcel of a particular philosophical system.”
(Katharina Volk, The Roman Republic of Letters: Scholarship, Philosophy, and Politics in the Age of Cicero and Caesar: 77-78)
I take my role as an academic seriously. What I mean by “academic” is the hermeneutic tradition that flowed from Plato’s Academy. Over time the Academy trained students (like Cicero) to adopt a pervasive skepticism as to a human being’s ability to access the Truth itself. An Academic weighs all possible options of an issue and then inclines towards the one that is most likely approaching truth. A skeptic too, after weighing all options, may encounter more information that might result in changing one’s mind.
Katharina Volk expresses these ideas well:
“The Skeptic will consider all approaches to a philosophical question, typically by marshaling the arguments for all in the procedure known as disputare in utramque partem (“arguing in each direction”), but will suspend judgment as to the veracity of any position, believing truth to be unattainable; nevertheless, he may still espouse any position as his own on the ground that it is “probable” (Gk. pithanon, Lat. probabile) or “similar to the truth” (Lat. uerisimile). Cicero himself discusses the Skeptic approach in his Academica (unfortunately surviving only in parts) and employs variations of it in many of his philosophical dialogues, where different characters argue different positions and critique those of their interlocutors.” (The Roman Republic of Letters: 77)
Universities and Colleges used to embrace—to varying degrees—this kind of “academic skepticism.” Now it is common for professors to encounter whinnying banalities and platitudes from their academic institutions like “safety and health are primordial” or “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity are foundational,” as though it is a university’s role in society to promote the biomedical regime (it isn’t) or to advocate for the social Lysenkoism of the institutional programming of DIE. When academics use the terms Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, what they really mean is Ideological Purity, Institutional Capture, and Marxism, respectively. Whatever one might mean by the “Academy” in the current era one thing it doesn’t mean is skepticism of the sort that was developed in Plato’s Academy 2300 years ago.
Enter the Covid Moment.
One of the great tragedies of the COVID moment was the failure of professors and institutions of higher learning to behave like academics. As the CDC, WHO, EU-CDC, Canadian Public Health, etc promoted this or that biomedical protocol to stop the transmission of an aerosolized virus, “academics” refused to employ rational skepticism in order to adjudicate or evaluate the efficacy or potential negative outcomes of protocols such as social-distancing, lockdowns, masks, and an unending series of vaxxines and boosters.
In fact, the opposite occurred.
Provosts, Deans, and Department Chairs sent out contrived e-mails about “health and safety” (as though these protocols kept people healthy and safe, whatever that means). They purchased masks and handed them out to professors and students (in spite of an abundance of evidence on their lack of efficacy, which had been scientific consensus as late as April 2020). Provosts lauded the vaxxines as they praised themselves for getting one shot, then two, then three, then four, then five….and then thanking the vaxxines when they inevitably contracted COVID while wearing their masks. And in spite of following all the “health” directives of the omniscient and infallible public health authorities COVID breakouts happened everywhere. And now many notable Academic Institutions are requiring “vaxxine mandates” and even boosters to attend.
This is nothing short of an ideological purity test.
When it comes to COVID and Vaxxination there is no room for Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. Universities like Toronto, Brown, NYU, Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell have failed as academic institutions. But this assumes that they are academic institutions.
They aren’t.
These are centres for the construction of regime consensus. Even worse, they simply parrot the agenda of the “nudgers.” One type of pernicious nudging is what is known as the status quo. People are more likely to adopt a behaviour if they *think* that behaviour is a continuation of prior behaviours. This is the reason why the definition of vaccine was changed in June of 2021, to include the novel medical interventions of the mRNA shots. In expanding the semantic range of “vaccine” to include a new kind of inoculation, this resulted in people conflating the mRNA jabs with attenuated virus vaccines, which they have readily accepted for their entire lives. Even “Vaxxine Passports” are a product of nudging, not of “science.” The phrase “follow the science” is itself a form of insipid sloganeering that comes from the even more insipid brains of the “nudgers.”
How did Academic Institutions—whose very nature of existence is to employ skepticism and to interrogate reality—become megaphones and amplifiers of a biomedical regime, parroting slogans developed by behavioural “scientists”?
How did the credentialed class uncritically accept a series of COVID policy mandates that had little scientific basis and rationale, and that resulted in medical apartheid, discrimination, the violation of informed consent, and a disturbing centralization of governmental power and authority?
There are many possible answers to the questions above. Here are a few:
1) The nudging, propaganda, and marketing campaign of big Pharma and government over the last two years has been so effective that perfectly reasonable intellectuals have been brainwashed into oblivion. Even though the narrative around COVID is nonsensical at best—as lie after lie after lie continues to accumulate— academics are unaware that they have become clients and test subjects of big pharma.
2) One’s faith in public health and government is so unwavering and uncritical that one cannot cast even a glance of skepticism onto the various aspects of the policy. The idea that public health and government have become this profoundly compromised and corrupt is too devastating of a realization. It would be akin to a born again Christian realizing Jesus was not the son of God. *As an aside, many of these same academics had no problem coming to this very conclusion prior to the advent of the second war in Iraq when a similar merging of government interest, the military industrial complex, big oil, and media resulted in a real war based on a false reality. How were they able to see through THAT, but not through THIS?
3) Academic Institutions are ideologically captured, and the current intellectual framework to account for COVID policy mirrors the ideological capture of the institutions. Public Health employed the language of “equity” to promote vaxxination, which maps onto the moral and ethical framework of the academy.
4) I and people like me are wrong. The only way to end COVID is to continue mass vaxxination, until 100 percent of humanity is vaxxinated along with yearly boosters, and we should also wear masks forever (because they have worked so far) and continue to lockdown each and every fall and winter so we don’t overwhelm hospitals. What did Einstein say about insanity again?
5) Most academics see the moral and ethical hazard of the COVID moment but they are too afraid to speak out, and too cowardly to lose their cushy tenured position. It is better to support the regime. The regime pays your bills.
I am sure you can come up with a few possibilities.
Equity is the core value of every academic institution. It is also the key feature of the public health policy around COVID, and it explains the logic and rationale of almost every feature of the policy. At its core equity is a feature of a collectivist ideology. It is for this reason why a total and complete onslaught against informed consent has occurred. An individual does not have the right to say no, when the collective ideology of equity demands conformity to the policy.
Equity is everything.
Most academics—who are generally Liberal or Leftist—already accept the idea of collectivism and equity. It is a feature of their value system, and has been for a generation. It is the air they breath. When the public health authorities implement a health policy based on equity the administrators and faculty at these institutions experience ideological mirroring. The policy matches their moral and ethical template. Equity is axiomatic. And like all collectivist ideologies any belief system which falls outside of the collective ideology must be erased, ghettoized, marginalized, demonized, and annihilated. I am looking at you anti-vaxxers!
But there is a devastating irony in the fusion between the Academy and Equity.
One cannot be a collectivist/an adherent to Equity and continue to be an Academic. An academic would employ a skeptical deconstruction of the idea of equity (let alone public health equity) and so problematize the concept that it could in no reasonable way continue to be a governing principle of any institution.
While an academic cannot adopt the ethics of equity, an activist can.
The key difference between an academic and an activist is the following: an academic understands how difficult a process it is to arrive at anything that can be called true; an activist knows what the “truth” is, and demands everyone adopt their view of the “truth.” Equity based academia is simply institutional activism.
I no longer see my home institution, or institutions like Brown and Columbia in academic terms. They are indoctrination centers of collectivist ideology. From the perspective of education they are failed institutions. From the perspective of the Regime and manufacturing consent they are designed perfectly to legitimize ideological capture and purity.
But I might be wrong. Maybe Equity is the proper public health policy with regard to COVID. Maybe 100 percent vaxxination for every baby, infant, man, woman, and elderly person—shot after shot after shot—is correct. Maybe 100 percent mask compliance everywhere forever is right. Maybe lockdowns forever are correct. Maybe treating every single human being exactly the same way with respect to COVID is proper, and for anyone who rejects the collectivist mandates of equity, maybe it is right and proper to excise them from society.
On the other hand, maybe I am not wrong (and I will not claim that I am right).
Here are number of reasons why we ought to reject public health equity.
1) We often hear our public health authorities say the following: “We are all at risk from COVID, even children, and therefore everyone ought to be vaxxinated in order to lower the risk of severe COVID, hospitalization, and death.” It is true—technically speaking—that we are all at “risk” from COVID. It is also true—technically speaking—that we are all at risk from being struck by lightning. Even though we are all at risk, we don’t walk around in rubber suits. We are all not equally at risk from COVID. For the vast vast majority of people their risk from COVID is nearly zero, and closer in risk to being struck by lightning than dying from COVID. Nearly every single person alive today will NOT die of COVID, vaxxinated or not. Because risk is not equitable the COVID policy ought not to use equity to formulate it. The policy ought to take into account those who are truly at risk (the old and comorbid) and create a policy that protects these people (like the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for “focused attention”). Instead the semantic expansion of risk-equity resulted in a policy that denies the facts of reality and individuated health.
2) The vaxxines too are not equitable. The vaxxines do not provide immunity or stop transmission. Some vaccinated people will become sick and have more of a viral load than an infected unvaccinated person. Some vaccinated people will become severly ill and die. In fact, the current figures in Canada suggest that the more vaccinated one is the more likely one will become ill and die. Likewise, some people will take shot after shot after shot and have zero if any side effects. Another person will take one shot and have a severe reaction. Sometimes a person will take a shot and die. The outcomes of inoculation itself fly in the face of collectivism and equity. An individual is taking a medical intervention in their body, and this medical intervention does not provide immunity, does not stop transmission, and can cause harm. At the very moment the vaxxine does not provide immunity and can cause harm equity must be jettisoned as the overarching ethic to rationalize the policy. Instead we are dealing with an individual risk assessment.
3) But there is a more bizarre and disturbing form of equity that has now permeated our culture. People think they have a right not to become sick, and therefore it is society’s role writ large to protect one from all illness. This is idiotic. Our immune systems have evolved over time, predicated on the reality and fact of nature that human beings (and animals) infect one another with disease. And through infection our immune systems become more resilient and secure. This is precisely why attenuated virus vaccines are so important, because they employ the body’s natural ability to create immunity from a virus. COVID vaxxines do not do this (and anyone paying attention knew this from the beginning). It has been one of the great marketing victories in the modern era that Big Pharma successfully persuaded billions of people that their immune systems were incapable of responding to COVID. It is also profoundly immoral. And second to this, it is remarkable that perfectly reasonable and intelligent people now think that they are no longer responsible for their own health, that they have a right not to contract illnesses, and this right now requires an equity based public health policy to respond to a disease that does not operate according to the collectivist ideology of equity.
Yet, how can we have a public health policy against COVID based on equity when pharmaceutical companies are profiting from the mandated, equitable deployment of vaccines? How can there be equity when individuals and individual companies are becoming astronomically wealthy during a pandemic, while other indivdiuals and businesses have been driven into poverty or homelessness, or driven to drugs and alcohol, or suicide? How can we think in terms of equity when lockdowns have emphatically harmed nearly everyone in different ways, and those who are more vulnerable have been harmed more? The employment of public health equity actually has resulted in massive and pervasive inequities and inequalities throughout our society.
And this too explains why academics have embraced the ideology of equity. It benefits them.
Professors never missed a pay check. They were able to work from home. A middle and upper middle class student body were able to afford to attend university. They benefited from the policy. They benefited from parroting the regime. We now have petty professors pushing unethical and unscientific public health policies. We see them everywhere now. I am looking at you Don Vinh (who, as he promotes every vaxxine he possibly can, has not come to the realization that he should lose 50-70 pounds…a simple, individual health decision that is a million times more effective than any of the inoculations he promotes).
I chose not to take the vaxxine for a number of reasons, a decision that looks better and better each and every day. None of my colleagues have the option of changing their minds. They already underwent the medical intervention. That can never be undone. In addition, they have committed themselves to a reasoning and rationale for shot after shot after shot (as well as lockdown after lockdown after lockdown, not to mention the wearing of masks…keep in mind that if a single COVID molecule were the size of a tennis ball any gap in a mask would be three miles wide…). In my opinion, my colleagues showed an audacious rejection of prudence, let alone an evisceraton of the tenets and ethics of informed consent.
This is your professoriate, and it goes a long way in illuminating why the state of academia is in rapid decline (like so many of our other institutions).
And when I return from Sabbatical I will need to make eye contact with colleagues and students who are complicit in public health pronouncements based on discrimination, medical apartheid, and unscientific ideological capture.
And when the Canadian and Quebec governments (perhaps) reintroduce all the failed policies of the last two years (proving again the failure of their policies, while centralizing more and more power and control) what is my role as an Academic?
Do I spend a class going over the studies on the lack of efficacy of masks and why they do not stop the spread of COVID?
Do I go through the over 450 studies on the failure of lockdowns?
Do I teach the students about informed consent and the dark history of Vaccine Passports (what the Nazis called Gesundheitpass)—in addition to the moral and ethical hazard they catalyze?
Do I denounce the rise of a biomedical authoritarian regime in Canada and Quebec?
Do I teach students who are complicit in the banality of evil?
Can captured institutions become “un- or de-captured”?
I guess I am going to find out.
You're going to find and we're going to look forward to you telling us what you find out.
Don Vinh. Ooof. Ditto for Oughton, Juni, Fisman, Furness, Boguch and the rest of the Skinner Nudge Gang and TV Dinner Experts.