By Daniel Polikoff at Brownstone dot org.

The following is an excerpt from Daniel Polikoff's book, Apocalypse of the Modern Mind: Covid and the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The body qualifies as the original and paradigmatic piece of private property. Ownership rights to the body belong exclusively to the relevant individual soul, the identity of which the body is both physical vessel and visible insignia. This proprietary authority covers, as well, actions performed by the body. Actions express the will of the soul. Freedom—and therefore spiritual agency—is abridged when action is unduly coerced or restricted, as in the confinement and forced labor characteristic of slavery.

Still more primal, however, than coercion or restriction of physical activity is the instance in which some action is performed upon the body that the individual does not freely choose. Such represents, physically, psycho-spiritually, and politically, the most direct possible assault on the sovereignty of the individual because it most flagrantly robs the individual soul of its proprietary command over the physical vessel which belongs to that soul alone. As such, it represents a direct attack upon that freedom of will expressive of the spiritual identity of an individual; a direct attack, that is, upon the essence of one's humanity.

Vaccination, when compulsory or in any way coerced, falls into this category. Any vaccination program involving any degree of coercion (and the greater the coercion, the greater the offense) consequently amounts to an assault upon the human spirit. Inasmuch as the sovereignty of the individual human being inheres in the unalienable (or natural) right to bodily autonomy, coerced vaccination imperils the liberty integral to the spiritual marrow of humanity itself.

In this respect, coercive vaccination is—practically and psycho-spiritually—not unlike the institution of slavery, which today is recognized as an intrinsically dehumanizing practice. Because, however, compulsory vaccination involves an act performed directly upon the body (rather than confinement of that body, or compelling its labor), its violation of autonomy is of a distinct kind.

The more forceful, invasive, violent, and dangerous the deed performed upon the body, the more powerful the assault upon the sovereignty of the individual person. Corporal punishment of any kind violates the inherent dignity of human beings. Torture aims to break the human spirit by abusing the human body, crippling its form and impairing its function so it no longer so readily stands, upright, as vessel of immortal spirit. By contrast, forced injection entails— no blows landed upon the surface of the body—but penetration of the physical interior of the person. Coerced vaccination forces entry into the figurative as well as literal bloodstream of the unwilling subject.

Physically or physiologically, such penetration with the injection of an unnatural substance poses real danger, carrying the possibility of death, or irreversible life-altering injury. Denial of the very possibility of such outcomes is counterfactual, and represents (not science, but) the blend of willful delusion and superstition characteristic of a religiously charged ideological formation. Moreover, adverse effects may manifest immediately or long after the injection itself, multiplying the psychological trauma inflicted by coerced vaccination. While short-term reaction or lack thereof does provide a preliminary indication of whether or not the subject will be negatively affected, she can never be entirely confident that she has escaped unscathed. This naturally holds, too, of a parent deciding whether or not to vaccinate their child.

On a psycho-spiritual level, too, penetration into the interior of a person who does not wish to be vaccinated constitutes a peculiarly devastating form of violation. Insofar as unwanted injection effects alien entrance into the interior space phenomenologically experienced as the abode ...