Anatomy of Coercion
Anatomy of Coercion
How totalizing power is exerted with no locus of responsibility.
Someone remarked that a bureaucracy is an institution that exercises enormous power over you but with no locus of responsibility. This leads to the familiar frustration, often encountered on a small scale at the local DMV, that you can go round in bureaucratic circles trying to troubleshoot problems or rectify unfair practices. No actual person seems to be able to help you get to the bottom of things—even if a well-meaning person sincerely wants to assist you.
Here’s how this dynamic now plays out with coercive vaccine mandates. The CDC makes vaccine recommendations. But the ethically crucial distinction between a recommendation and mandate immediately collapses when institutions (e.g., a government agency, a business, employer, university, or school) requires you to be vaccinated based on the CDC recommendation.
Try to contest the rationality of these mandates, e.g., in federal court, and the mandating institution just points back to CDC recommendation as the rational basis for the mandate. The court will typically agree, deferring to the CDC’s authority on public health. The school, business, etc., thus disclaims responsibility for the decision to mandate the vaccine: “We’re just following CDC recommendations, after all. What can we do?”
So you try to go up the food chain, but CDC likewise disclaims responsibility: “We don’t make policy; we just make recommendations, after all.”
Meanwhile, the vaccine manufacturer is immune and indemnified from all liability or harm under federal law. It’s no use going to them if their product—a product that you did not freely decide to take—harms you.
You are now dizzy from going round in circles trying to identify the actual decision-maker: it’s impossible to pinpoint the relevant authority. You know that enormous power is being exercised over your body and your health, but with no locus of responsibility for the decision and no liability for the outcomes.
You are thus left to contend with the consequences of a decision that nobody claims to have made. The only certainty is that you did not make the decision and you were not given the choice.
I hope I'm not misidentifying the source here, but if memory serves, G.K. Chesterton rather famously remarked that you should be able to meet with your leaders under the tree (with the further implication that, if they did evil, they could be hung from that same tree). What we live under today is exactly the opposite. It is impossible to ever reach or question the people who are really making the decisions that affect you. The immediate actor may be your employer or a local school board, but try to question them and... no no, we're just following the guidance of some bureaucrats a thousand miles away. And them you can never reach.
In our present situation, I do not think we can overestimate the danger of bureaucratic rule, rule by decree rather than procedures established in the context of democratic oversight, in a political order in which consent is the legitimating principle.
I happened to come across an essay Fauci's bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, wrote. In it she argues that informed consent is not required for a biomedical experiment to be ethical. She mocks the "American obsession with autonomy," and cites the bureaucratic code according to which the the biomedical experimenters can obtain a waiver for the informed consent requirement. If it is an emergency, DARPA, or Pfizer, or the NIH, can make a request and never need to actually tell us what they are doing to us....At least that is how I read it.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/cphs/docs/jama-article.pdf
And as I suppose you surely know much better than I, the military gets such waivers to experiment on the troops on the regular.
I cannot help but wonder if there is a document somewhere with a president, secretary, or IRB chair's signature on it. I imagine all it would have to say is that it is an emergency and this is in our interest, perhaps that telling us would be counterproductive to national security.
Perhaps this is obvious. It does seem to make some sense of the bureaucratic craziness.