None Worse for the Wear

Todd Hayen

I just got off zooming today with a lawyer friend of mine. He seems to be a nice guy but rather “play it by the book” (as these types are wont to be). Through the course of conversation I had to reveal that I am unvaccinated (he had just come from an overseas trip and asked where I had been in the world since our last conversation 12 months hence).

Body language gave away his position on the vaccination issue, and then verbally confirmed it with the comment, “I believe everyone should be vaccinated for obvious reasons.”

Obvious reasons?

I did let that go, and noted that a year ago I would have responded with a bit of arrogance and attitude. One thing I have noticed since all this started—in the beginning I was much more apt to give people like this guy some of my “two cents,” now it is very rare for me to become evangelical about it.

He went on to share with me that due to something that happened to his daughter he was a bit more empathic toward folks of my persuasion.

He proceeded to tell me that after her last shot (the third jab, the booster) she developed what the doctors diagnosed as an “immune deficiency” skin condition—which they proclaimed to be permanent and would need treatment for life.

“Not a really big deal,” my friend was quick to qualify. “But boy did it piss her off.”

No kidding.

The doctors also said it was likely caused by the vaccine. Now this caught my attention. “Really?” I thought to myself. “The doctors actually admitted this?” My lawyer friend didn’t say much else, and didn’t seem to think it was too much to be concerned about, simply the price some might have to pay for trying to save the world with mass vaccination—a Purple Heart sort of event.

All this again made me realize how difficult it will be for any of “these sorts” (not necessarily lawyer types, but anyone following the mainstream) to come to their senses and realize the true reality to this whole fiasco.

Yes, there are people, a lot of them actually, in Russia who still believe that Stalin was Russia’s saviour, as well as many, as we all know, that still venerate Hitler and his evil ideology.

Facts seldom persuade people who have been brainwashed into believing anything that contradicts their illusions.

I pondered on all the people I knew that were like this lawyer. People who actually had first hand experience with something that many of us on this side of the fence only know through the experiences of others. Once again, the question is how do these people hold onto the lies, subterfuge, and manipulation, that they call their “rock of reason?”

I just wrote a review of Mattias Desmet’s new book The Psychology of Totalitarianism which very clearly explains the making of sheep—the psychological underpinning for a mass formation of people who will go to their deaths believing the absolute opposite of truth. But are they all really under the influence of mass hypnosis?

Desmet claims only about a third are, and another third are just confused, or maybe not even confused, but simply uninformed. The final third are the shrews—those of us who seem to require absolutely no convincing that the sky is falling. In fact, we were so certain of this when all this started that we can’t even comprehend why the entire world’s population is still blindly following the pied piper.

I believe my lawyer friend is in this middle group. I am not sure why I believe this, but it seems obvious to me. Could he swing the shrew way? Well, he did develop some empathy for anti-vaxxers when his daughter developed a condition even her doctors claimed was caused by the vaccines. But don’t all vaccines have side effects? And you were just unlucky if you got struck by one?

Well, you would think everyone would be conscious of that, although the powers that be, and the Czar of Science himself, have continually claimed the vaccines are “safe and effective”—the first vaccine with such accolades in the history of medicine.

So I do wonder if my friend would be so quick to stay in the safety zone of sheep-ville if his daughter had died of blood clots or myocarditis, and her friendly doctors had claimed, “Sometimes we see this as a side effect of the Covid vaccines.”

As it stands now his daughter only has to deal with a life time skin irritation, again, a small price to pay for being wounded in the great battle to save grandma and, of course, to flatten the curve.

What would it take to make him instead see the horror behind the mass vaccination of the entire world with an untested, experimental, drug?

As the title of this article implies, whatever it takes that will wake such people up will not, more than likely, make much of an impression. Life will probably go on with the realization, or the assumption, that no one said it would be easy, and due to the war in Europe (blamed on the devil incarnate KGB boss V. Putin), global warming, the Republicans reversing Roe vs Wade, the Republicans in general, the irreparable damage of Trump’s presidential term, the Republicans not yet even born, we just have to accept the fact that life isn’t always peachy and live on making the best of it—none worse for the wear so to speak. We’ll all survive.

So how do us shrews live in that sort of bizarro world? A world we see actively falling apart with a third of the population actually advocating the bulldozer in their backyard uprooting all the trees, and the other third seemingly oblivious to it all? I found myself today almost laughing at my lawyer sheep-friend whereas a year ago I would have been steaming. I guess I have a humorous nature because I am morbidly beginning to find all of this rather funny.

I chuckle inside now when I hear my wife ask why there seems to be so many ambulances careening down the street in our neighbourhood, or why so many athletes are dropping dead in the fields, or why it seems so many people are just waking up dead (I like that phrase, “waking up dead,” even though it makes no sense, everything is funny now). I used to try to answer her, but now I don’t, I just say, “Yeah, I’ve noticed that too, honey. No idea why.”

I have made a commitment that I will stand by the people whom I love who seemingly have lost the ability to think. I will help them through this horror even if they never know, or accept, what is causing it.

As the world crumbles around us, I am sad to say I now have a morbid curiosity to see how long, or what event, it takes for these people in my life to break—to notice anything as being shockingly out of the ordinary and to wake up with a, “Oh my God, you were right all along, I’m sorry I thought you were an idiot.”

After today I really doubt if it will go that way, and if it doesn’t, it will be that much funnier. Laughable actually, a guffaw from me with a verbal exaltation, “Are you kidding? You still don’t see this?” But I actually think it will take a lot more for me to break.

Instead I see myself holding the hands of my loved ones, stroking their forehead as the world slips into oblivion, and saying, “Yes, sweetheart, you are right, we should have recycled more than we did.”

Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here