OPINION. In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how vaccine passports create new inequalities in an already fractured society and raise moral dilemmas due to the inconvenient truth of vaccine injury.
By Nate Doromal, originally published on May 6, 2021 on Organicconsumers.org
Still, an important question remains: why is there a pervasive lack of questioning of the dilemmas posed by vaccine passports and the COVID response?
Given the magnitude of changes associated with the COVID response and the potential for harm by those changes, one would think there would be greater questioning by the more educated classes and the progressive elements in society.
But largely, we have seen the opposite. Members of the working class and the middle class have voiced their dissent, while the professional class acts with complicity and obedience in carrying out the dictums of public health. The latter has been largely silent on the complaints of the former.
Doctors and scientists promote the virtues of the vaccines while minimizing (or outrightly denying) their negatives. Silicon Valley engineers and executives openly participate in and work in conjunction with public health to censor talk of vaccine injuries. Lawyer groups, like the New York Bar, are pushing for mandatory vaccination. Now, the business community is looked to as the primary enforcer of vaccine passports.
The media isn’t acknowledging the large power inequality between the professional and working classes, an inequality that has become all the more apparent due to COVID-19 and reaching its apex in the vaccine passport.
Delusions of the Professional Class
It is an inequality problem when the professional class can force its belief, values, or behaviors on the majority in ways that undermine their self-sovereignty. The problem doubles when the professional class, under COVID-19, becomes the implicit enforcers of government policy, seemingly without questioning and deeper moral inquiry.
- There is no denying the power inequality between the professional class and the majority. The Silicon Valley technologists believe they are the ones to save humanity using technology while blind to the social and economic costs born by the common people.
- There’s no denying that inequality is rampant in Silicon Valley. The technologists work full-speed ahead on artificial intelligence while being blind to the effects of work automation on the working class. Now, they work full-speed ahead on technology like the vaccine passport meant to save us from the existential threat of infectious disease. Similarly, the scientists, doctors, academics, and lawyers all implicitly support this effort.
In his book Listen Liberals, political thinker Thomas Frank expounded upon the risks to society by increased dominance of the professional class: “As a political ideology, professionalism carries enormous potential for mischief. For starters, it is obviously and inherently undemocratic, prioritizing the views of experts over those of the public… But what happens when an entire category of experts stops thinking of itself as ‘social trustees’? What happens when they abuse their monopoly power?”
The term technocracy has been used to describe the rise of the professional class, their increased reliance by politicians on experts, and their outsized ability to dictate the functioning of society. Gradually, more and more of the professional class occupy positions of power. There is a shift from democratic representation to rule by a small number of experts who get to dictate the policies for the majority on the expertise.
“Rule by expert” was the new normal we have seen during the COVID pandemic, and the problem here is when the experts themselves, in the pursuit of their metrics, have become divorced from the needs of the common people.
Unfortunately, it will be the common people who will bear the costs of their messianic technology,as exemplified by the vaccine passport.
The COVID-19 and the Problem of Technocracy
The COVID-19 response has been largely driven by technocracy, and its tentacles can be seen throughout the pandemic response.
Operation Warp Speed was an 18 billion dollar effort between the government and pharmaceuticals to develop COVID vaccines in an unprecedented short development. Silicon Valley has been throwing vast sums of money to develop technological solutions while the government provides the funding. The prominent Big Tech firms (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter) have taken liberties regarding censorship and have self-appointed themselves as arbiters of truth regarding vaccines and COVID information.
The “rule by expert” mentality of the technocracy was exemplified by the fact that the pandemic response has been shaped by a small group of elite experts, including people like long-time National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci and billionaire and long-time global vaccination proponent Bill Gates who, despite their publicly unelected status.
These technocratic efforts reach their zenith in the vaccine passport, an engineered solution developed jointly by the technology, biotech, and public health sectors. It embodies their self-granted mandate to create a “more perfect union,” one that is free from the existential threat of disease but embodies the technocrat’s need to control.
Inevitability, the views of the technocrats diverge from that of the common people. As George Friedman explained:
“Over time, the technocrats, who are the experts, developed ambitions and ideology. The ambition was to be free of the meddling hand of politicians and the ignorant whims of the people, and to be free, in the words of the United States Constitution, to build ‘a more perfect union’ without being constrained by the inexpert help of the citizens or government.”
But public health and technocrats might protest: “500,000 Americans have died from COVID-19! If not for us, more Americans would have died! We are saving the people!”
There is data that shows that the COVID-19 measurement metrics used by the technocrats were themselves biased. A position paper by GreenMedInfo argues that the PCR test methodology and the way the CDC handled death certificates has created rampant false positives. In their drive to push their solutions, the technocrats are too busy to revise their necessity calculations.
The problem with professionals in the technocracy is that its assessment is self-serving – it gets to define the observational metrics however way it wants to justify necessity. Then it gets to grade itself on how well it did by selectively choosing the goal metrics.
What about the litany of complaints regarding the COVID-19 response? What about all the research studies that showed COVID-19 lockdowns had little effect on disease progression? What about the increases in suicides and domestic abuse as a result of the lockdowns? What about the concerns of vaccine safety and vaccine injury? What about the loss of privacy and loss of freedoms resulting from the two-class system introduced by vaccine passports?
What of other types of professionals who may not necessarily be related to the COVID-19 response? Do they ever question the judgments of the public health professional or scientist? Essentially no. Due to their extreme specialization, professionals generally assume that other professionals are making the right decisions.
There is a kind of professional class blindness. This is especially the case when there are huge sums of money to be won from government contracts. Because of this, the professional class is mainly unable to police self-serving behavior on the part of its members. Even worse, the professional class is blind to the inequality that itself is driving.
The greater considerations do not exist in the reductionistic world of the technocrat. George Friedman explained:
“Technocrats are struggling with how to perfect the world. Citizens are struggling with how not to lose control over their lives. It is not just that they live different lives. It is that they live in different moral universes.”
Does the “Party of the People” Fight for the Common Person?
There is a push for its adoption in Democrat-led blue states, while GOP-led red states seek to ban them. The question everyone wants to know is “When will we get back to normal?” but a more profound question that needs to be asked is “How well did the normal serve the common person?”
In an NPR interview, Atlantic scientific writer Ed Yong observed:
“radical introspection begins with understanding that ‘normal’ wasn’t so great for everyone. You know, that normal included a swath of inequalities, of long-standing problems that we had come to tolerate… And I think we need to recognize all the ways in which ‘normal’ failed: in the carceral state, the health care system, the legacy of racism and colonialism. If we can’t even look all of those problems in the face, we’re just going to be weak again the next time round.”
Both parties are to blame for the current state of affairs. The GOP has long passed favorable tax benefits to the ultra-rich and has been a proponent of deregulation that favors Big Business. Intellectual Noam Chomsky commented, “The Democrats abandoned the working class decades ago. Republicans may take a populist line, but they are much more opposed to working people than even the Democrats in policies.”
Still, even as the Biden administration and Democrat leadership pursue race and gender equality, they are blind to the inequality they push on the working and middle classes to eradicate SaRs-Cov-2 using technology developed via partnerships with Big Tech and Big Pharma.
Do we want a normal that is based on vaccination status? Do we want a normal in which the common person cannot question government action because they do not have the required expertise? Do we want a normal in which the unelected professional class in society can make the decisions for the majority?
Journalist Thomas Frank explained:
“Professionalism is a ‘post-industrial ideology,’ and today the Democrats are the party of the professional class. The party has other constituencies to be sure – minorities, women, and the young – but professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers, and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true.”
Perhaps this close alignment with professionalism and technocracy has prevented Democrat leadership from seeing how it has lost touch with the ordinary people that decades ago formed the backbone of support for the Democrat party.
The Vaccine Passport – Pro-Technocracy, Anti-People
The vaccine passport symbolizes the worst of the COVID-19 response and heralds a new normal that is antithetical to the desires of the common person.
The vaccine passport is a tool developed from the belly of the technocratic beast, a trilateral effort composed of government, public health, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, that represents heavy-handed control and surveillance in pursuit of government goals. It is a solution developed without the input of the common people and marketed as a panacea, with the threat of government coercion in the background.
Vaccine passports don’t address the fundamental problem that people distrust the government; instead, it gives people more of what they do not want. The vaccine passports embody the surveillance state and the “rule-by-expert” control mentality, thereby exacerbating feelings of disenfranchisement felt by the common people and heightens existing rifts in America.
The concerns of the common people have become lost in the “war on the virus.” The working and middle classes have been slowly losing economic ground for decades, and, under the thumb of the COVID-19 pandemic response, they face loss of power to a technocratic state. The media is silent on this fact. There’s already blowback happening, and it is time for the government and the media to acknowledge it.
How do we heal America? We can begin by not making it worse.
We need bridge-building between the professional class and the working people. First, the professional class needs to acknowledge its role in the power inequalities it participates in. Second, it needs to give them up and enter into genuine dialogue with the common people.
Finally, we need reform of our government and scientific institutions. The economic benefits to corporations pushing the vaccine passport are substantial. There are billions of dollars to be made in promoting the COVID-19 vaccines. With these conflicts of interest, it becomes easy for the government to become a tool of industry. We need to divorce profit-making from government science so that it serves the people.
Politician Atifete Jahjaga once said:
“Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation, and indignation.”
Ultimately, the answer was always this: we need to balance the power of the technocracy and its professionals with the common people and put them on level ground.
We need more democracy – less technology. We need the common people to have a greater voice, and we need the liberal faction of society, traditionally associated with the Democrat party, to once again support the voice of the common people.
By Nate Doromal | Part 1
Nate Doromal is an activist and writer within the Vaccine Awareness and Vaccine Safety movement. He is a veteran software engineer, formerly with Google, who now works in finance. He holds an MS and an MBA in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. He holds an Executive MBA from the Smartly Institute. He was originally trained on vaccines and vaccine activism by Dr. Sherri Tenpenny in her Mastering Vaccine Info Bootcamp. He has also studied immunological science extensively with Dr. Tetyana Obukhanych through her Building Bridges Course.
