The Tyranny of the ‘Greater Good’

In the tumultuous years of the COVID-19 pandemic, a seismic shift occurred in our public discourse. The language of health, once focused on personal well-being and medical guidance, morphed into a vocabulary of moral obligation, social utility, and, ultimately, coercion. A stark line was drawn in the sand, not between the sick and the healthy, but between the compliant and the defiant.

This chasm was given a chilling voice by figures like Rabbi Avraham Steinberg, an influential medical ethicist, who, in the pages of Arutz Sheva, declared it permissible to force vaccine refusers “to be vaccinated against their will or to punish them for their refusal.” He went further, comparing the intentionally unvaccinated to “rodfim” (pursuers) who should be judged in a “criminal” light.

This was not merely a strong opinion on a public health measure. It was the expression of a political theology, one that demanded total adherence to a single, prescribed vision of the social good. It is a mindset that, decades earlier, Israeli historian J.L. Talmon dissected in his seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Talmon traced the intellectual roots of modern totalitarianism to a messianic impulse born out of the Enlightenment, an unwavering belief in a “sole and exclusive truth in politics.”

Examining Rabbi Steinberg’s pronouncements through Talmon’s lens reveals how the fanatic pursuit of public health can, alarmingly, adopt the very logic of the systems it purports to oppose. It demonstrates how a society, in its quest to exorcise the specter of disease, can become possessed by the spirit of totalitarianism.

The Single Plane of Existence: Social Utility

Talmon argued that a key feature of this political messianism was the creation of a “homogeneous society, in which men live upon one exclusive plane of existence.” On this plane, all complex and varied aspects of human life—class, citizenship, private belief, transcendental faith—are collapsed. They are replaced by a single, overriding standard of judgment: “social utility, as expressed in the idea of the general good.”

The COVID-19 pandemic brought this abstract concept into sharp, painful focus. The “general good” was defined singularly as the eradication of a virus through universal vaccination. Suddenly, this one act became the ultimate measure of a person’s worth and virtue.

As Rabbi Steinberg argued in a February 2021 opinion piece for Arutz Sheva, “there is a halakhic obligation to be vaccinated with approved vaccines, both for the sake of the person to keep healthy, and for the sake of others to prevent their infection.” He framed the issue in absolute terms, stating that the “only way to stop the pandemic is vaccination.”

In this framework, there is no room for other planes of existence. The private sphere of bodily autonomy, the sanctity of individual conscience, the right to personal risk assessment, and even deeply-held religious objections were not seen as legitimate considerations to be weighed but as obstacles to social utility. They were selfish deviations from the collective good.

This pressure was not just rhetorical. As reporting from the time shows, a pervasive atmosphere of compliance was fostered, where community leaders, clinics, and religious figures were co-opted by government entities to enforce the mandate, creating a unified front that marginalized dissent. The state, as Talmon wrote, could “recognize no such limitations.” The only framework for activity was the nation, united in its singular crusade against the virus.

Refusing to be Healthy and Free: Equating Virtue with Conformity

This new social order required a new definition of virtue. For the 18th-century thinkers Talmon analyzed, virtue was simple: “conformity to the hoped-for pattern of social harmony.” They cherished the “inevitable equation of liberty with virtue and reason.” Conflict between personal liberty and prescribed virtue was not seen as a possibility. To be free was to choose the rational, virtuous path laid out by the enlightened.

Rabbi Steinberg’s arguments perfectly embody this equation. In his view, the science was settled and the path was clear. Vaccination was the only rational, and therefore virtuous, choice. To refuse was not an exercise of liberty but a descent into irrationality and vice. It was, to paraphrase Talmon’s chilling phrase, “a refusal to be healthy and virtuous.” This is the intellectual move that justifies coercion. If there is no legitimate freedom to choose wrongly, then force is not a violation of liberty but a tool to guide the errant back to the path of righteousness.

This is precisely the logic Steinberg employs when he considers how to handle vaccine refusers. He writes, “The approach to those who refuse to be vaccinated can be at a criminal level – enforce them and/or punish them; or at the torts level – enact sanctions and/or deny benefits and employment.”

The language is stark. It is the language of a state dealing with criminals, not of a society engaging with conscientious objectors. When virtue is defined as nothing more than conformity to a state-prescribed health solution, non-conformity is, by definition, a crime against the social body. The schism Talmon described is complete: liberal democracy, which “flinched from the spectre of force,” gives way to a totalitarian messianism “who justified themselves in the use of coercion.”

Exorcising Disease: The Politics of Perfection

At the heart of this ideology is a utopian promise. Talmon identified its core totalitarian potential in a simple, devastating idea: “The very idea of a self-contained system from which all evil and unhappiness have been exorcised is totalitarian.” He continued, “The assumption that such a scheme of things is feasible and indeed inevitable is an invitation to a régime to proclaim that it embodies this perfection, to exact from its citizens recognition and submission and to brand opposition as vice or perversion.”

Let us apply Talmon’s words directly to the context of public health, as the logic is identical: The very idea of a self-contained system from which all disease has been exorcised is totalitarian. The assumption that such a scheme of things is feasible and indeed inevitable is an invitation to a régime to proclaim that it embodies this perfection.

This is the ultimate promise of the mandate advocates. The goal was not merely to manage a health crisis but to achieve a perfect state of safety, a world free from a specific pathogen. This secular messianic vision, the belief that a complex and ever-mutating respiratory virus could be completely defeated through a single technological solution, is what licensed the extreme rhetoric and coercive policies. It allowed Rabbi Steinberg to proclaim that the unvaccinated are not just taking a different approach to health but are actively preventing the arrival of this promised perfection. They are agents of chaos standing in the way of a disease-free utopia.

This mindset leaves no room for humility, error, or the possibility that the “perfect” solution may have unintended consequences or may not be perfect after all. The regime, whether a state or the intellectual vanguard championing its cause, has proclaimed its solution as the embodiment of perfection. Therefore, opposition cannot be legitimate. It cannot be based on reason or sincere belief. It can only be “vice or perversion,” the product of misinformation, selfishness, or malice. It must be branded, sanctioned, and if necessary, crushed.

The Enduring Virus

The most acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic may be behind us, but the ideological virus it unleashed remains. The arguments championed by Rabbi Steinberg and others like him were not simply about a vaccine; they were a trial run for a particular type of governance, one that sees the citizen not as a sovereign individual but as a component of a collective, a body to be managed for the sake of social utility. It is a vision rooted in the totalizing belief in a single, rational truth, a belief that inevitably sees dissent as pathology and coercion as a form of therapy.

J.L. Talmon’s warnings, born from the ashes of the Second World War, have never been more relevant. He taught us that the road to tyranny is often paved with the language of virtue, liberty, and reason. It is a road walked by those who believe they can engineer a perfect society, free from all evil, all unhappiness, and all disease.

In our modern age, the pursuit of public health risks becoming the new “exclusive doctrine,” the new secular religion that justifies any means to achieve its utopian ends.

Resisting this requires more than just debating the efficacy of a given medical intervention. It requires a fierce defense of the private sphere, a recognition of the limits of the state, and a renewed commitment to the messy, imperfect, and ultimately sacred principle that individual conscience, not state decree, must be the final authority in a free society.