What "Never Again" Really Means

how functionally illiterate cult members predicted Sam Harris

After “The End of Faith in Sam Harris: Requiem for a Former Hero”, an essay I wrote last year, I thought I was done writing about Sam Harris. Then he went on a podcast and said something so horrifying that it triggered me (in the PTSD sense, not the “made mildly uncomfortable” colloquial sense); it gave me a nightmare about something from my childhood in a quasi-cult.

A Lesson in Malpractice

Before I get back to that, let me tell you a story about a surgery I had on my ears. Growing up in a Christian “school,” an informal gathering of church members’ kids that was more like a homeschool co-op than anything else, I never got the normal vision and hearing checks that schoolchildren typically get, so I don’t know how long my hearing has been poor. I know I got punished many times for “disobedience” as a kid, which always amounted to not obeying instructions I hadn’t heard. That started happening before my earliest memories; that’s all I know for sure.

In my teens, as my hearing got worse, doctors started trying to figure out why I was rapidly going deaf. (Most severe hearing loss is idiopathic; this is not an unusual mystery.) I had simple surgery twice, once on each ear, to create a much larger opening. Ear/nose/throat specialist surgeons re-shaped the opening of each ear to enable them to reach parts of my middle ear more easily, an infrastructure modification to make it easier to try some of the various treatments and explorations they were working on to diagnose and treat me.

In the hospital for the first one, the anesthesiologist and nurses asked me repeatedly which ear was to be worked on, and their caution extended to drawing an arrow on my face pointing to the correct ear.

When I asked the surgeon, “Why is this such a big deal? Why can’t you just do them both today? Why do I have to come back in two weeks and go through this again for the other ear? It’s the same surgery and I’m more nervous about the general anesthesia than the surgery itself.”

He pulled up a chair and sat down, then gave me a lengthy and detailed explanation of medical malpractice. A fair summary would be: “Bodies are complex and complicated, and even something as simple as a procedure like this has real risks. Doing both your ears on the same day would be egregious malpractice. It’s my responsibility as a doctor to look out for your best interest and to weigh the risks and benefits very carefully. It is for all my patients, but even more so for you, because you’re a minor. We don’t know what’s wrong with your ears. If it turns out that something about this procedure makes your ear worse, then by not doing them both on one day, we’ve prevented doing harm to you. The first responsibility of every physician is not to do any harm, and a big part of that responsibility is to always remember how much we don’t know, and to make decisions based on the idea that we don’t know everything. We cannot possibly know everything, even about conditions for which we’ve got long-term data, and we certainly don’t know everything about conditions like yours that we can’t even easily diagnose.”

Once he explained it to me, I felt silly for even asking the question.

The obvious wisdom in this kind of caution with something new and unusual, something for which risks and long-term information by definition cannot exist, should have been obvious to everyone during COVID.

Remember this bit of wisdom; it’ll be relevant again in a few paragraphs.

Why Sam Triggered my PTSD

As mentioned, my childhood “school” was really a loose confederation of people who were terrified their kids would learn about evolution and cease to believe in God. We read old books by Rush Limbaugh for civics and Genesis for science. Our history curriculum came from Bob Jones University, including hagiography for figures who promoted slavery. (This is how I know the uproar over the Florida standards is bullshit; actual hagiography for slavery is a thing, and that ain’t it.)

I was very fortunate in one respect—an experienced English teacher became a Christian after thirty years of teaching and moved from the public school system to our “school”, so I got a solid foundation in grammar and writing. And they took the Bible class angle seriously. I can exegete scripture better than most seminary graduates and speak the language of Christian eschatology with fluency. Other than that, it was all paranoia and a great deal of actual brainwashing.

The necessity of very hard work in re-doing of this kind of childhood “coding”, combined with the traumas of “discipline” by paddling and regular sermons about the end times, sermons filled with graphic depictions of the pit of snakes into which people who refuse to take the Mark of the Beast would be tossed—and how we’d remember the many opportunities we had to get saved, right here in this very school, and so bitterly regret that we weren’t ready for the Rapture as the snakes slithered over our bodies, biting us over and over—well, my therapist earns his money. And then some.

And god fucking damn him, Sam Harris just had to come along and prove a core principle of their worldview correct.

What They Got Right

Over and over and over and over and over again, we kids were told that the liberals and Democrats were only pretending to believe in freedom. They didn’t really think that we were endowed with inalienable rights—not by our Creator, not even by the Constitution. They believed the State was God; the State owned us all. Our freedoms were only on loan from the government for as long as the government was pleased to allow us to have them. When it suited them, they would revoke those freedoms, up to and including sending police door-to-door to demand you denounce Jesus or be taken away.

Sam Harris appeared on the “Impact Theory” podcast recently, wherein he asserted that if a virus was causing corpses of kids to be stacked up in parks (as opposed to in basements, about which he’s on record as stating that the corpses of children wouldn’t even warrant changing his vote) it would be justifiable to vaccinate everyone by force.

There is a six-minute clip here in the middle of a good Twitter thread if you want to see his remarks in context.

To listen to him is to learn that the cult members who raised me were accurate in their description of the beliefs of the Other as they saw it. Sam Harris effectively demonstrated this. He and others like him do not believe that our rights come from the Constitution, from God, or from anything other than the sufferance of the people who, like Sam, have sufficient money and cultural power to decide what data, under whose interpretation, constitutes a good enough reason to suspend them. If experts reach a “consensus” that something is dangerous enough, that’s sufficient to declare “Fuck informed consent, get the cops and the 4-point restraints for holding people down to vaccinate them by force” and send them door-to-door.

The Nuremberg Code declared voluntary and informed consent to be an inviolable principle.

Sam Harris believes that Nuremberg is, like bodily autonomy and freedom of speech, a privilege, not a principle—our freedoms are all just privileges, granted by people like him to the rest of us.

All it would take to move from his position on vaccine mandates—justifiable if the data can be shown to be “severe” enough to warrant it—to a new version of the Holocaust would be to conclude that some beliefs are dangerous enough to warrant building camps to isolate people for holding them.

Which—oh, look! Is weaker than a belief he’s already put into writing. From pages 52-53 of The End of Faith:

Beyond the sheer, unmitigated evil of this position—on vaccine mandates and anything else—let’s go back to the wisdom of the surgeon who worked on my ears.

Bodies are complex and we don’t know everything.

Forcing everyone to be vaccinated against a novel pathogen is an unimaginably stupid position to take.

If the long-term consequences of the vaccine turn out to be disastrous, they have now been inflicted on everyone.

The hypothetical starts from a position that drips contempt for everyone he regards as his inferior (read: everyone who disagrees with him in the present).

He pretends to believe that in the situation of a deadly pathogen and a vaccine that was actually safe and effective—coercion would still be necessary.

It wouldn’t be, on three levels. One, if the vaccine was safe and effective, once he vaccinates himself and his children, his decisions are made and his sphere of ethical autonomy to make decisions, ends. Two, if his hypothetical came to reality, he should be delighted to see as many of his inferiors as possible pass it by. That leaves more magic juice for the good people who are smart enough to do what Sam tells them to do. Three, if a pathogen were truly dangerous, particularly to children, and the safe vaccine was widely available, only the tiny percentage of people who are far outside the range of normal psychology would refuse it.

The inability to recognize these things is only possible for someone with blinding levels of narcissism.

Hypocritical Narcissism on a Grand Scale

In this interview with Bill Maher, start watching at 26:40. In it, Sam admits that he’s not getting boosted because the CDC has become politicized and their recommendations untrustworthy.

Besides the childishness of attacking people who came to that conclusion faster than he did (my friends Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying come to mind), this decision on his part is in direct and clashing conflict with his advocacy of authoritarian policies for a future pandemic wherein “authorities” are able to present “data” sufficient to make it seem “necessary” in his eyes.

What happens when the political corruption that makes data and recommendations untrustworthy only comes to light after the cops have gone door to door holding people down and jabbing them in violation of the Nuremberg Code, Sam?

What happens then?

Maybe, just maybe, we should be listening to people who figured out the recommendations were politically motivated before the booster stage.

Ya think?

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About Me: I’m a data scientist (two years experience and presently job-hunting if you’re hiring). My specialties are presentations that get stakeholders on board by giving them a solid understanding of the math behind recommendations, building custom reporting tools to suit individual client needs, and building/expanding/improving analytic codebases in Python.

About My Substack: My great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.

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