Note: In this piece I use the term ‘vaccine’ in place of ‘untested chemical intervention intended to (a) line the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry and (b) rubber-stamp the control mechanisms introduced in the UK in 2020’.
THE shills for the pharmaceutical industry deny that sudden deaths in the fully vaccinated add up to any more than a collection of unconnected tragedies. That many of the fallen are young, fit, and healthy is insufficient in evidential force to bend their collective mind towards the possibility that there could be a causal connection between the death and the jab. To the extent that they are prepared to sieve the evidence, they are sceptical that the vaccination might be the common factor which explains the ‘unexplained’ fatal injuries.
The virus of cognitive dissonance has spread Omicron-like through the community of vaccine cultists.
As Kathy Gyngell pointed out on the Mark Steyn Show the other evening, a standard manoeuvre in this whirlwind of denial is the tiresome insistence that ‘correlation is not causation’. Kathy was quite right to call this out. The strategy is predicated on a category error.
The attempt to separate correlation and causation is logically unsustainable. Correlation is a necessary condition of causation and is therefore always evidence of it. And there is a respectable tradition of empiricist thought which argues that causation just is a systemised pattern of correlation.
The 18th century philosopher and man of letters David Hume is the most prominent representative of this tradition. Hume suggested that there is no more to causation than ‘contiguity and succession’. In other words, correlation between events which always seem to occur one after the other. That’s it. When it comes to causal relationships, he argued, what more is there to say?
Whether deaths, and indeed injury, following vaccination meet this evidential threshold is moot, I suppose. But to reduce a claim of causation to one of ‘mere’ correlation is to overlook a durable Enlightenment worldview, one shaped by minds even more penetrating than that of your average (and they are very average) member of Sage.
At the risk of arguing against myself (which is not always a bad thing) this is a worldview I do not share. I consider it to be mechanistic and reductive, and it’s worth pointing out that it is historically recent. There is an alternative, Aristotelian, conception of the universe which sees it not as a system of mechanistic interactions, but as being rinsed in purpose. Aristotle had a textured account of how change is possible and identified ‘causation’ not as a unitary phenomenon but as involving four distinct elements. Only one of these, the ‘final cause’, approximates to anything we might ordinarily recognise today.
Aristotle developed this conception in c400BC, but truth is not time-stamped and this teleological, non-mechanistic metaphysic has a modern iteration in the philosophy of science. Again, disseminated by philosophers more fleet-of-mind than your average Establishment scientist.
It’s also worth pointing out, by the way, that Aristotle was far more scientist than philosopher. And that while his teacher, Plato, would have written the ideal car maintenance manual, Aristotle would have been tinkering under the bonnet. The point is that both the Humean and Aristotelian analyses of causation – while incommensurable – each affirm an intimacy between (systematic) correlation and causation, and each deny any viable metaphysical separation.
Why am I risking (another) cameo in Pseuds Corner?
Since March 2020 the Sage Sanhedrin and their government puppets have dictated the terms of reference of the lockdown and vaccination debate and have ensured – deliberately or not – that the parameters of allowable discussion constitute a number-count assessment of the rhythms of human life. This approach was authored by soulless types who assumed that the world is a system of mechanisms. How those mechanisms interact is of extreme importance to them; whence they originate is a matter worthy only of indifference.
The Whittys and Vallances of this world can read the notes on the page but cannot hear the music in their heads, let alone their hearts. And, as I have suggested, their ploy when faced with overwhelming evidence of vaccine-related injury – to appeal to an unsustainable difference between correlation and causation – is philosophically and historically ignorant. There is no respectable school of thought which allows it. When the correlation becomes increasingly salient there comes a point at which a causal assertion is being made.
For the last two and a half years the Establishment pseudoscientists have been trying to drain life of its complexity and replace it with numbers on a graph. They have insisted we play draughts when life is really chess. It is essential, for the sake of the injured and dead, that we prove the real connection between vaccine and injury, that to a certain extent we play their game.
But let’s always bear in mind that the fallacious correlation/causation ‘distinction’ can never be the basis for their counterargument. That it is not a weapon which is available to them.
One final point: we need also to be clear that whatever the number of vaccine injured, the evil of coercive vaccination was also inflicted on those who came through unscathed, who were duped into surrendering their capacity for informed consent. The evil was intrinsic to the process.
