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By Kim Shinkoskey

Why did RFK Jr., the nation’s leading health official, tell a congressional committee that people should not be taking medical advice from him, like whether to take the measles vaccine? Is it because he is not a doctor? No, it runs a bit deeper than that.

RFK Jr. believes everyone is an island unto themselves and should be making all their own decisions in their own interests. In other words, he is a radical libertarian. He believes they have the total right to reject anything the community says they must do to save the community, like take a vaccine to help stop an epidemic.

He has followed this path his whole life. It is what led him to take up a life as a heroin addict. People can be their own scientists and figure out their own science. They can decide whether a vaccine is safe or not. They don’t need specially trained people to decide that for them.

This is a kind of variant on the anarchist theory of government. Every person is his own country. Every person has his or her own constitutional law. There are not really any deficiencies among people like lack of education, lack of experience or lack of good parental upbringing. Everybody is capable. For this reason, people like parents, schoolteachers, city councils, courtrooms and the Department of Health and Human Services in the national government do not need to tell them what to do.

From a dictator’s point of view, this kind of lawlessness is the perfect setup for his operations. When everybody is out there doing their own thing, things are so chaotic that there is a need for a strong-armed person to come in and restore some order. Trump needs an RFK Jr. to teach people how to be unruly so he can come in and do his thing.

A dictator lets people think they have total control over their own lives, but really he is giving them control only over those things which can harm them, not help them in their quest to become empowered people. Harm comes from uneducated personal decisions like not to get vaccinated. Help comes from a scientific community of experts who decide things like we must have “herd immunity” to keep the entire community from being wiped out. This means getting 95% of people vaccinated, so a disease is stopped in its tracks. A very small number of people might have some side effects, but that is a necessary risk to stop a much bigger catastrophe, ending the very existence of the tribe (the community).

The dictator steps in, weans them away from health, education and social welfare, taking away these real freedoms and leaving them with the only freedom that means anything to them any longer… the freedom to consume pizza and beer whenever they want. That is why the ancient Roman dictator said, “Let them eat cake.” He knew they would work long and hard as his slaves as long as they had their favorite food when they wanted it.

In this kind of system, people can do and say what they please as long as they don’t disparage the great leader and fail to keep his commands.

To get this kind of system started, people must be convinced that they don’t need any restraints on their behavior. They are gods in their own homes and neighborhoods. After a while, the whole system morphs into something very different, but is still based on faulty religion. It says there is a very special leader who really is God’s best friend. A king is a leader who is chosen by God to lead the entire nation and is given immunity from prosecution for any and all of his misdeeds, because he is so rich and powerful and God has such great confidence in him. This is the medieval theory of monarchy, and it is the backward place we are headed to today.

In fact, all the rich have the privilege of doing whatever they want and have this same relationship with heaven. RFK Jr. grew up in an environment of unbounded privilege to do whatever, whenever, to whomever. That is the only system of government he knows, and that is what he wants for America today. He wants the rich aristocracy and their king to lord it over everybody else forevermore.

(Robert Kimball Shinkoskey, who lives in Utah, has written books on theology, democracy and the American presidency.)