Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

I don't think this is the fundamental profile. I think the fundamental profile--and it underscores all three types, and even the fourth type, "just stupid as a sack of hammers" is "People enamored of death." The real message of the anti-vax movement is Thanatos.

https://twitter.com/frasermatthew/status/1367051204845588482

The real message of the anti-vax movement is that Freud was right: There is a death drive. It is as powerful, in human affairs, as Eros, the life drive. We underestimate its potency to shape human events at our peril.

Freud wrote this watching the rise of the Nazis.

But we can see the same drive at work today. We really can. There's no adult, in the modern world, who's *genuinely* confused about the efficacy of masks and vaccines. Truly there isn't. It's all a pose. If you were that stupid, you'd be unable to tie your own shoes.

But people are deeply infatuated with death--and have a real will, a longing, to kill and to die. Rejecting masks and vaccines--and pretending you have a serious political or medical reason for doing so--is just a socially acceptable way to flirt with murder and suicide.

This is clearly, for many people, *deeply* gratifying. So much so that they'll incur vast opprobrium--and, indeed, die--for the satisfaction of it. I had never realize how right, how insightful, Freud really was about this.

But we can't take the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers at face value. These are death movements--death cults--and death cults have always been with us. They flourish particularly at times of social change and stress. We've got one now.

We cannot take as serious what these people say about their own motivations. When you see people courting death--theirs and others--in such a methodical, dogged, insistent and stubborn way, assume they know what they're doing and they are doing it on purpose.

"The justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death." Fascinating fascism. Some form of it will always be with us, alas. And we all, probably, possess enough of it that we need always be looking for it in ourselves, too.