Kindness is Force

Catching the Yale Virus

Butchered cow argues on behalf of slaughterhouse, news at 11:00.

Nicholas Christakis is the Yale professor who tried to have an open discussion with students after his wife — a lecturer at the same university — sent an email message suggesting that Halloween costumes were maybe not the most important issue in the world, and something that adults could make decisions about without the help of academic administrators. Wading into a crowd of aggrieved adult children, Christakis famously said that a university is an “intellectual space” in which people risk hearing things they don’t like. In response, students lost their everloving shit, and one — Jerelyn Luther, a name I try to remember — shouted “BE QUIET!” in his face. Then she told him that his job was to make students feel safe. (“It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is NOT!”) If you’ve never watched the exchange, watch it, because I’m just gonna keep posting it until you give up and soak in the era-defining stench of this horrible thing:

Another student would soon write about Christakis, in an op-ed in the Yale newspaper, "I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain."

So of all the people on the planet who understand silencing — of all the people in the world who should be equipped to see what’s happening in coercive responses to honest questions, of force as an answer to debate — here he is: the man who Jocelyn Luther told to “BE QUIET,” who resigned his position as the head of Yale’s Silliman College (but not his position as a professor) because he was shouted down by the new breed of Louboutin Jacobins.

Remarkably, though, this is the very same Nicholas Christakis who has now published an essay, “Sometimes Altruism Needs to Be Enforced,” on the value of COVID-19 measures that reject informed consent and operate on the principle of force. Christakis argues for the value of “punishment and ostracism, both of which can, in the right circumstances, foster cooperation” — as in the case of “those who are unwilling to get vaccinated,” given their “steady resistance to helping their more vulnerable neighbors.” Joe Biden’s adoption of a coercive measure, a vaccine mandate, is an expected human behavior, learned through evolution and the human experience with challenges that had to be overcome. “We do not need to see these actions in a negative or even authoritarian light,” he argues. We just need to make people do what’s right, so we can be safe.

If you have an argument you’d like to make about the safety and efficacy of the available COVID vaccines, which don’t prevent infection from or transmission of the virus for which they are supposedly “vaccines,” Christakis is your Jerelyn Luther. The same goes if you’d like to suggest that highly vaccinated places seem to be seeing very high rates of infection, or if you’d like to discuss the growing evidence that vaccine protection wanes quickly after vaccination: BE QUIET. We’re not having a debate — we’re enforcing altruism. This boot is nurturing your face.

Say this for the concept of viral infection: It seems to have worked at Yale, where Nicholas Christakis has become fully infected with the virus that causes Jocelyn Luther Syndrome.

Unsurprisingly, Christakis found a home for his pro-coercion piece in The Atlantic, a magazine that increasingly finds itself ready to impose silence on others:

Imagine how much you’re missing out on by not subscribing to that. It’s quickly turning into one of the culture’s most important hubs for ideas about why you should shut up and do what you’re told. It’s very, what word am I looking for, altruistic.