hankyoreh

Slavoj Žižek

In October 2021, Greek media reported that a scam involving over 100,000 anti-vaxxers and 200-300 doctors and nurses was discovered. Anti-vaxxers were paying doctors 400 euros for fake vaccinations.

It went like this: they would ask the doctor to inject them with a dose of plain tap water instead of the vaccine. However, the (now simultaneously both corrupt and ethical) doctor would pocket the bribe and inject them with the real vaccine, unbeknownst to the anti-vaxxer.

The secretly vaccinated anti-vaxxer would naturally suffer the vaccine’s side effects without being able to explain how or why they would occur, since the anti-vaxxer would still believe that he or she had tricked the system.

Although I condemn the doctors participating in this scam, I cannot judge them too harshly. When they issued the document confirming vaccination status to the anti-vaxxer, they did not cheat, as they did indeed vaccinate their patients. The only ones effectively cheated were the ones who wanted to cheat — those who wanted to enjoy the benefits of vaccination without getting vaccinated.

Is, then, the problem that the doctor not only lied to his patient but also pocketed the bribe? Even here, one can say that, if the doctor were not to take the bribe, his patient would not trust the doctor. The true ethical concern resides in the fact that the patient was vaccinated against his explicit will. I consider this a rather minor misdemeanor since the patient’s intention was to cheat — that is, he wanted a public document confirming his vaccination — making him a threat not just to himself, but also to others.

Many of those who oppose vaccination argue that obligatory vaccination is not only an attack on our personal freedom of choice but also a violent intrusion into our bodies comparable to sexual assault. But is our body ever really just ours? Recently in Slovenia, there was a case of a very old woman who was slowly dying in a hospital, unable to feed herself, kept alive by multiple simultaneous infusions. When asked if she would like to get vaccinated, she rejected it, saying that she doesn’t know what is in the vaccine and doesn’t want any foreign stuff in her body. Is this not the situation we all face? Vaccinated or not, we are already controlled and manipulated in ways we are unaware of.

However, the true interest of the Greek anecdote is that it renders in a pure form the way we are controlled and manipulated. While we think we cheat the public authority, our cheating is already included in the cycle of the self-reproduction of public authority. We, thus, act even worse than a lamb to the slaughter — we act like a lamb which eagerly pays for its own slaughter. Again, as Lacan put it, “les non-dupes errent” — those who are not duped err most, like the white lower-class members who were not duped by the liberal establishment and ended up voting for Trump.

One often hears that the anti-vaccination protests are not just a display of anti-scientific irrationality, but that they condense a series of other dissatisfactions (with exploding control over our lives, with the power of medical and other corporations, and so on), so we should enter in a dialogue with them, not just dismiss them with contempt. The problem I see here is that exactly the same can be said about anti-Semitism (it expresses a protest against financial exploitation), or even about violence against women (men who abuse women often do this in order to vent out their frustration at being humiliated in their social life).

What, in all these cases, undermines such a “benevolent” and “understanding” view is the surplus-enjoyment generated by the movement in question: brutalizing women obviously brings a perverted enjoyment, the same goes for anti-Semitic pogroms, and the anti-vaccination conspiracy theories also generate an enjoyment of their own. We should here supplement Lacan’s formula of psychoanalytic ethics “the only thing of which one can be guilty of is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” with: you are always guilty/responsible for your enjoyment, even when what brings you to enjoy is externally imposed on you.

Therein resides the material power of ideology. It not only trains us to tolerate power, or even to actively participate in our own submission, but it cheats us by the very act of warning us against being cheated. It does not count on our trust (in the public order and its values) but on our very distrust. Its underlying message is: “Don’t trust those in power, you are manipulated — and here is the way you can avoid being duped!”

Sometimes, naivety is our best weapon against deception.

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