This week’s leave-’em-laughing story was National Review’s “In Germany, You Must Be Fully Vaxxed before Your Death by Assisted Suicide.” That headline immediately struck me as a minor masterpiece of absurdist gallows humor. (And yes, it’s an actual National Reviewnews story, not a Babylon Bee parody.)

So why did the German authorities decide to make COVID mRNA shots mandatory prerequisites for assisted suicide? They cannot have been worrying about suicidal patients infecting their Nazi doctors, I mean compassionate caregivers, with COVID-19, since everyone agrees that the COVID vaccines were never meant to stop transmission. Likewise the authorities cannot have been worried about the suicides experiencing severe COVID, possibly even hospitalization or death, in the afterlife, since they don’t believe in an afterlife—and even if they did, COVID wouldn’t be part of it. (Hell is too hot for the COVID virus to replicate efficiently, and heaven is far too nice a place to host bioweaponized plagues.)

So what in the world were these people thinking? Did they invent the only-vaxxed-people-can-be-suicided rule for the warped amusement of National Review readers and False Flag Weekly News viewers?

I have, on rare occasions, entertained the solipsistic notion that the universe in general, and certain hilariously insane actions of my fellow humans in particular, must exist purely for the entertainment value of those of us with a really weird sense of humor. But that theory doesn’t past the theological, philosophical, or empirical smell tests. So there has to be some real, serious reason for the German Reich’s suicide vaccination requirement.

After pondering the matter, it suddenly came to me: They’re control freaks! You have to be fully vaccinated to legally commit suicide in Germany not for any practical reason, but because both COVID-19 vaccination and assisted suicide are symbolic expressions of pretending to be in control when in reality you obviously aren’t.

The COVID pandemic and accompanying propaganda terrorized much of the population by intensifying an omnipresent baseline human emotion, fear-of-death.* The thought that one might more-or-less randomly contact an invisible virus and then sicken and die is disturbing, especially to people who believe they are entitled to retire comfortably at age 65 and spend a decade or two pillaging their IRA accounts and enjoying themselves before fading into oblivion. So in an effort to pretend they could do something to stop the pandemic, many people embraced the talismans proffered by their high priests, including social isolation, face coverings, and finally mRNA shots.

It soon became clear that, just as the scientists had always admitted, COVID vaccines (like masks) don’t stop transmission. And it is gradually becoming equally clear that the vaccines’ cost-benefit profiles, in terms of their overall effects on health and mortality, are likewise dubious.

In a sane world, people would stop vaccinating—or at least save the vaccines for the population groups that arguably might benefit. But the world, as FFWN viewers know, is far from sane. So what began as an allegedly rational medical intervention has become an article of faith. The requirement to vaxx-up before your suicide is a purely religious requirement, not a scientific or medical one.

And assisted suicide itself, like the vaccine, is a sacred rite of the control-freak religion. Most traditional cultures have frowned on suicide, seeing it as an arrogant imposition of human will signifying lack of faith in Divine providence. But today’s control freak religion, a.k.a. secular materialist scientistic progressivist humanism, is nothing if not an apotheosis of human arrogance whose central tenet is “God isn’t in control, we are.” Even death, that ultimate experience of not-being-in-control, has to be brought under control. So you fill out the paperwork, make sure you have been vaccinated, and let the Nazi doctors, I mean, the compassionate caregivers, administer your last rites.

Even COVID heretics, who tend to be much saner than the true believers, are prey to the illusions of their control-freak culture. For just as the true believers fear they might keel over suddenly if they don’t get the jab, the heretics suspect that the only people who have ever “died suddenly” are those who do get the jab.

Now I am not saying the “died suddenly” folks are entirely wrong. Given the 30%+ increase in overall working-age mortality since the COVID vaccine rollout, and the seeming increase in athletes dropping dead on the playing field, it is entirely possible that the notion of “sudden death overtime” will take on an entirely new meaning.