You are currently viewing The Truth About The Vaccination Schism – Part 1

The Truth About The Vaccination Schism – Part 1

Recently I found myself in a protracted and robust conversation with one of my highly intelligent coachees who has chosen to opt out of our international modules due to his strong objections against vaccinating.

My intention, as always, was to enable him to weigh up his decision based on systematic thinking rather than conjecture.

Now to be sure, the pivotal question for me is not whether to vax or not, but rather around your epistemological framework for your decision-making. In other words, it is more important to be clear about how you have come to know what you know that informs your decision-making.

So the first task was to consider the sources of the data sets that he had used to inform his decision. He seemed quite stunned by this task and initially stated the source of his decision was not what others have said but was rather his intuitive conviction, which he claimed was from God.

Now let me pause here and say I hear this kind of thinking a lot in religious circles. I’ve seen the most sincere people falling into the trap of morphing their convictions without testing them against the tenets of the Scriptures they claim to believe in.

Let me put it this way: the fruit of our convictions should be to align to the spirit of the Scriptures we claim to believe. For example, if the Scriptures teach me to pray for and bless my enemies, any pattern within me that is contradictory to this teaching needs to be flagged and changed, not justified.

So I had a lengthy conversation with my coachee on the dangers of morphing our convictions with God while they have not been tested against the spirit of the teachings of the Scriptures.

I asked him how he had tested his convictions against the Scriptures. He conceded that he had not done this.

So we went back to the sources of data that informed his convictions. His reflection was that the evidence of ill-intent with these emerging obligatory vaccination mandates is all over the place to those that are willing to listen.

So I asked if he had considered the epistemological framework that has informed his convictions. In other words, did he consider how they came to know what they claimed? He thought this was a ridiculous expectation of anyone.

“Who has time for that?” he argued.

“How can you not have time for evaluating what has defined your world view?” I retorted.

Let me pause here. I find it heart-breaking when intelligent and highly educated people are prepared to surrender their cognition to the altar of narratives they have never tested. To me, this is antithetical to the purpose of this most precious gift of being human. How can anyone yield to and embrace narratives if they don’t know where and how they were developed? This why I am persuaded that any self-respecting human being should be a devout student of history. Anyway, let me not digress too much.

So I put it to my coachee that what he was saying was that he had convictions from sources about which he had no information regarding their epistemological framework, and that he had never sought to test the fruit of his convictions against the Scripture he subscribes to.

I gently relayed to him that what he was doing to himself was allowing his cognitive world to be shaped by what he never tests. It’s a sad state of being human.

Being the beautiful person that he is, he looked at me, smiled and thanked me. He committed to go and do his homework.

So here is the thing: this vaccination schism we have landed ourselves in is due to our poor cognitive fitness. We have allowed ourselves to be shaped by narratives the origin of which we have no clue. The vaccination schism is our strange fruit from a strange tree. Until we critically evaluate our epistemological frameworks, this strange fruit is here to stay.

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