Are we in the grip of a mass psychosis?
A lot of people have said that things have gotten crazy in the last year or two – that we’ve gone through the looking glass, and that it feels surreal. People seem to have become somewhat unhinged by the COVID lockdowns, the isolation, the riots, the election, and the speed of the turn to the left.
The following video advances an interesting set of ideas about what’s been happening. The writers consider it a mass psychosis. But I don’t think the analogy to schizophrenia or any other kind of psychosis is correct, although I do agree with some of the assertions in the video, such as the enormous influence of fear and the drumming up of fear.
Take a look:
Another point made in the video is that although fear is the first step, the type of propaganda we’ve been subjected to includes contradictory reports, confusing information, and even lies. These things are features rather than bugs, because the inducement of confusion is intentional. Illogic cannot be met successfully with logic, and illogic is more effective anyway in preying on fear.
Isolation and the cutting off of normal social interaction is very important as well.
After the fear and confusion are stoked, the leaders offer a way out – but the way out involves the relinquishment of liberty and submission to the control of the leaders.
Towards the end of the video, some ways to combat the propaganda are offered. One is simply to spread the truth as much as possible, although as previously stated, logic has trouble countering emotion that is not logical. Humor and ridicule are other weapons (Eff-Biden, anyone?).
Another suggestion is to create parallel structures that exist morally outside the society. I’m not sure exactly what those would be, unless it means things like home schooling or even the relative autonomy of states within our federal system. The red states don’t exist outside the society, but they are parallel to the blue states. Of course, that’s why the feds want to control the red states ever more tightly, so that they can’t construct these parallel systems
Insanity has been normalized by the Left. Their mask mandates – in light of all the evidence – is one example.
I’ve appeared twice before the Omaha Public Power District and have told them to cancel their plans to go net carbon zero. OPPD is planning to close three coal-fired power plants and substitute that power with wind and solar. I told them that plan is failing in Europe. They ignored me. They are Green Zealots.
Yea – we are in the midst of a fever dream. A bat-bitten drooling fool, who hops about with his left foot ensconced between his dentures, spouts spittle-flecked fantasies of grandeur. His dear and glorious physician spouse prescribes pizza slices for troops who slumber on concrete floors. His noble son – our contemporary heir to Rembrandt – impregnates Arkansan exotic dancers, and smokes crack with Russian ladies of easy virtue.
Cornhead, their plan is to create energy shortages in order to ration it. They are evil.
I think I suggested mass psychosis a year ago, but not having any training whatsoever in psychology, I assumed I was just being paranoid 😉
Terrific video. I will send it out to a few people and hope it moves them. Physicsguy: Thanks for the chuckles.
physicsguy, you weren’t wrong, just early (as they say in the investment world) 🙂
Another piece on this topic with a similar analysis and conclusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLDpZ8daIVM
WHY DO SO MANY STILL BUY INTO THE NARRATIVE?
Despite the counter-evidence, the censorship/bullying/intimidation, the cognitive dissonance … the majority of our neighbors still hold onto Teh Narrative with both hands.
One anecdote I like (from memory so some details are likely wrong):
Imperial College said urgently that if Sweden did not shutdown 60,000 people would die!!!!
Sweden did not shutdown.
A total of 8,000 people died.
The models being used were not re-examined.
The parallels with global warming are clear.
The topic is too complicated for normal citizens to voice an opinion.
Models are used for prediction, the results don’t match reality but the models are not re-examined
We’re all gonna die so the stakes are very high.
The official line changes, is contradictory, etc, etc but no one questions (“we’ve ALWAYS been at war with EastAsia”)
Taught in the schools as established fact and reinforced by class activities (mask wearing, recycling projects)
Corporations jump on board, in fact become rich by buying into the narrative
The media is a cheerleader for Big Gov’t
Demonization not debate for anyone who steps out of line
Haven’t watched the video yet (and I will), but absolutely!
No question China, Russia and probably Iran and North Korea are independently actively propagating chaos and disruption in our nation (and we do it in theirs). Social media has made it much easier to get to we plebians as well as impersonate us.
Also, like Madison Avenue folks decades ago, computer algorithms have figured out the best way to get people engaged (and looking at peripheral ads) is enraging them. So we have automated systems coming up with more and more focused ways to specifically trigger our rage meters every waking minute.
JimNorCal
Newsome did the same thing in CA.
For the life of me, I can’t get over how people believe the CAGW models after the covid models were wildly wrong.
Neo wrote that “[i]solation and the cutting off of normal social interaction is very important as well.”
According to Stanford economist, Nicholas Bloom, people either working from home, or else not working at all, outnumber those working on the premises of a business. (https://tinyurl.com/4hm3bj3e) (But please note that his interview dates from June, 2020. I don’t have current data.)
I have mixed feelings about working from home, distance learning, online education, etc. But it’s unfortunately true that these trends increase isolation and vulnerability to digitally induced craziness. I am, of course, immune — or maybe vaccinated.
Didn’t Rush Limbaugh used to say liberalism is a mental illness?
At practically every Dem campaign event I went to in Iowa, I could always count on two things the candidates would say: 1. Mental health care; and 2. Pay teachers more.
I don’t have time to watch the video now, and I don’t think I’d go as far as calling it literally a psychosis. But I’ve been thinking for some time that our predominant cultural environment now is being determined by people who have in some sense lost contact with reality. Or, more accurately, severed contact. So just refusing to submit to altered realities, like the attempt to pretend that biological sex is unreal or insignificant, becomes an important part of resisting that tide. It’s easier than most of us might think to be swept away by it.
For my part I also refuse to submit to engineered distortions of language like “homophobe.” Nor do I accept that women can have wives or that men can have husbands.
Let’s go, Brandon.
Well stated, Milwaukee.
Screw Brandon. Fuck Biden.
The writers consider it a mass psychosis. But I don’t think the analogy to schizophrenia or any other kind of psychosis is correct…
–neo
Yes. I do wish people were more discerning when employing the term, psychosis. It shouldn’t be a snarl word for others who are mistaken or have different beliefs or reach different conclusions.
I once came home from college and my mother showed me a large cubical air purifier in her bedroom roaring away. She explained that her landlord was putting LSD in the air she was breathing. Furthermore, there was a fleet of young men in white panel trucks following her around the city during the day and at night she could tell the planes were signaling to her.
My mother had become psychotic. She spent a few months in a locked ward. She came out full of thorazine. She still believed most of her hallucinations, but had become shrewd enough not to mention the fact.
That’s psychosis. It’s not to be mistaken for voting Democrat or paying too much attention to social media.
I’m not sure if it is mass psychosis as much as it is a crisis of faith.
You can look at the issue of immigration where supposedly educated people preach open borders as if that’s always been U.S. policy, then just stop talking about it when thousands of illegal immigrants wind up living under a Texas bridge.
Or my favorite is the absolute conviction that Donald Trump is an incompetent boob. Sure, he’s a billionaire real estate developer who remade himself into a reality TV star and then overcame all the odds to win the White House, but there’s no way he could be as capable as somebody like Joe Biden.
Our political culture and public discourse is largely controlled by people who woke up on Election Day 2016 thinking everything was JUST FINE. On Election Night 2020, those same people thought everything would finally go back to being JUST FINE. They were wrong both times and it’s getting harder for them to pretend otherwise.
I don’t think it’s psychosis. I think it’s a national anxiety attack by people who like things the way they are being confronted with how unjust and unsustainable is the status quo.
Mike
It’s partially true. True of the liberal low-info Americans who are being played for fools by the Marxist ‘Progressive’ Left.
What’s also true is that the spreading of fear coupled with propaganda that has repeatedly included “contradictory reports, confusing information, and even lies” has led to 70- 80 million American adults rejecting the fear based propaganda.
An increasing percentage of those 80 million are concluding that America’s Federal Government is not only illegitimate but has become malevolent.
That realization is a preventitive against mass psychosis.
Here is a link (1 hour) https://www.americaoutloud.com/dr-peter-mccullough-presents-bold-challenge-to-those-who-crush-our-rights/ to Dr Peter McCullough’s keynote speech to the association of american physicians and surgeons in early October. The breadth of the malfeasance of the wider medical community and our government is disheartening.
And McCullogh cannot be ignored. He’s published nearly 700 papers and is a cardiologist and an epidemiologist.
In the video he exhorts the audience to do the right thing and use the outpatient protocols for covid that he has published. He then tells them that they need to use their power as physicians to move the government to follow the science.
Yes, they’re not following the science.
Cornhead, re: AGW
Big lies. Repeated often.
A media whose thumb is on the scale aiding the powerful not questioning them.
Just think of them as an updated, 10.01 version of Pavlov’s dogs. The beliefs promoted by the Left are their bell. The emotions invoked whether happiness, love, fear, or rage are the drool. They can’t be reasoned out of it because they weren’t reasoned into this state.
We’ve stumbled into a ‘Lost’ world. We are living a shared non-reality, a dream. None of this is real. It will only end when some of us awake and convince the others to do the same.
Not sure of “PSYCHOSIS” . I think it overlooks the need on the part of a lot of folks for a looming catastrophe.
Remember fallout? Strontium 90? Nuclear war? Population bomb (mass starvartion in the midst of increasing obesity). Coming ice age. Global warming. Now Covid.
The millenarian urge–rapture is coming, eat all your seed corn!
Ghost dance.
Malaria was almost extinct, but, fortunately, Silent Spring came along and saved it.
While a number of my acquaintances who are at least potentially competent in the field(s) of whatever is looming this week are SERIOUS, it seems the intensity is in inverse proportion to actual knowledge. It’s as if my metaphor of some time back was correct; they look at information as if they were brandishing a crucifix at a werewolf. Or zombie or whatever is supposed to be undone by a crucifix. Honest, sometimes the facial expression….
So why do you want to be overtaken by permanent fear of something of which you know little and try to know less?
If we were to subtract the catastrophiles, perhaps the rest of the committed herd could be dealt with….somehow.
Getting lots of credit from my wife. Had dinner with some friends. The wife said she voted for Biden because she couldn’t stand Trump. Never wanted to hear his voice. I said nothing. Good hosting, right there.
I enjoy thenewneo. Always interesting. Thanks.
Part of the mass psychosis or hysteria or whatever you call it has been driven by the over the top reporting of issues like hospitals.
Here is a very nice piece answering if hospitals have really been overloaded.
Answer, no not really for the most part.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/have-hospitals-really-been-overloaded
@ Richard Aubrey
I couldn’t stand Clinton or Obama. Never wanted to hear them speak either. I muted the TV when they came on. For Clinton’s years my TV remote had a button that would throw 3 characters on screen to show the channel. I programed “LIE” into all channels so I could put that up when he was on. That said I could articulate, at length, my reasons for disliking both of them and they went beyond the lying that was the reason I didn’t want to hear them speak.
A Twilight faith (i.e. conflation of logical domains), Pro-Choice religion (“ethical”), and liberal ideology (divergent) that serves the special and peculiar interests of a democratic/dictatorial regime. For example, selective-child a.k.a. planned parent/hood, is the revival of one-child (i.e. population control) through religious temperance (i.e. behavior modification) and delegation of Choice: human sacrifice for social progress, medical progress (e.g. Mengele effect, clinical cannibalism), and climate mitigation (e.g. carbon sequestration). A wicked solution to a purportedly hard problem (e.g. social liberalism).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7833340/
Antihistamines and azithromycin as a treatment for COVID-19 on primary health care – A retrospective observational study in elderly patients
Between March and April 2020, 84 elderly patients with suspected COVID-19 living in two nursing homes of Yepes, Toledo (Spain) were treated early with antihistamines (dexchlorpheniramine, cetirizine or loratadine), adding azithromycin in the 25 symptomatic cases. The outcomes are retrospectively reported. The primary endpoint is the fatality rate of COVID-19. The secondary endpoints are the hospital and ICU admission rates. Endpoints were compared with the official Spanish rates for the elderly. The mean age of our population was 85 and 48% were over 80 years old. No hospital admissions, deaths, nor adverse drug effects were reported in our patient population. By the end of June, 100% of the residents had positive serology for COVID-19.
Planned parent/hood was neither an exclusive nor a good Choice.
The mandates were unscientific, cargo cult science, that had em-pathetic appeal, and offered viable legal indemnity. A focused approach would have reduced excess deaths and collateral damage.
Meanwhile, vaccine(s) produce excess dysfunctional antibodies and a prematurely waning immune response, and masks are worn that are scientifically established to have a random effect to control transmission of heavy droplet particles, there is a silent spread and community blooms.
I do not subscribe to the ‘Mass Psychosis’ hypothesis. Things are functioning entirely too smoothly for it to be craziness on that scale.
Most I think it’s these 3 things:
1. It has become far too easy to live and even thrive in our society. Abundance of food, social support safety nets, ubiquitous health care, etc. It requires little effort to meet critical needs compared to 100, 50, even 20 years ago.
2. Partly as a consequence of this, people have become too amiable, to agreeable, too acquiescing. Every one in a while some crazy person will snap and tear up a Burger King, but that momentary rage is relatively rare.
3. Lastly, and most importantly: People are no longer held accountable for the consequences of their actions. There is no swift corrective actions, even for screw-ups on a massive scale. (See Afghanistan Bugout, or changes in prosecution philosophy in many major US cities, for instance).
Put all 3 things together, and someone with a Bad Mind can get away with almost anything.
Yes.
And history suggests that the only way out of these bouts of madness is by going forward through the fire(*)… of course only after the various varieties of totally blameless moral preeners have pranced about vaporing and pouring on their various road-to-hell-paving well-intentioned accelerants.
* The only question, as always, is who gets thrown *on* the fire as part of the Healing Rite. And whoever says This is Not Who We Are is the greatest fool of all. It’s bloody obvious by now who we are as a species. You might as well hurl curses at the ocean waves.
Zaphod,
Who we are as a species, cannot be fitted into a stereotype.
A glass half empty is also half full.
If the human race were solely as you imply, civilzations would not keep arising. It is the outliers, the demagogues and greats who lead us into the valley of death and up to the mountain top.
I have been convinced for years that schizophrenia is an organic disease. Sorry, while I agree that mass neurosis is likely, the psychoanalyst’s theories based on Freud have been pretty well discredited.
Richard Aubrey: Does the belief of some anti-Covid-vaxxers that we’re all going to die of myocarditis, ADE, and autoimmune diseases count as one of those looming catastrophes?
I’m vaxed and while I have some real concerns I’m also leery of some of the sensationalist claims about the dangers of the mRNA.
What happens when an unstoppable psychosis meets an immovable mass?
I think we have been seeing a clash of power seekers using the public as weapons against each other, and all of them are trying to keep their victims untethered from reality in different ways.
It’s the people caught in the middle that have to end the crisis — note that the Domestic Terrorist Parents are coming from both parties, all races, and multiple socioeconomic classes.
“Let’s go, Biden!”
“Let’s go, Fauci!”
(I’ve decided it’s unfair to The Real Brandon and all the others of that name to tarnish their moniker. Give discredit where discredit is due.)
The video quotes Joost Meerloo’s book “Rape of the Mind” frequently, and I did not know who he was.
Very interesting; his book should be Required Reading. Probably much more useful than Adorno’s “Authoritarian Personality” for countering the psychosis-inducers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost_Meerloo
Now the White House and Congressional Democrats are supporting an American Activities Committee, where the targets are not Communists but the still-sane citizens.
And with all due respect to the Doctor’s concerns in the abstract, the US government WAS riddled with communists at the time. (h/t Artfldgr – missin’ ya, dude! I always learned something from you)
*You can’t think through a problem unless you know the facts, so this is not an “either-or” choice in education. Too many of the “elites” and their press don’t know anything except concepts. However, the facts have to be accurate (tethered to reality) because as Reagan said, ““It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.””
So all the policies and agendas aren’t just because of following bad ideas. They follow the studies of telling people illogical things and before the subject makes sense of that someone then says something else illogical. Breakdown basic identity, offer a cure. Whoa, what an explanation of what is being done nowadays.
I don’t know if psychosis is the correct term, but otherwise I think the analysis in the video is spot on. I’ve thought of what’s happening as a mass cult, as a fanatical religion. The dynamics described are exactly what’s happening.
Parallel structures may be the best hope of effectively striking back—in education, certainly. While I applaud the bravery of those who speak out to school boards and try to reform their local K-12s, I don’t see any quick turnarounds likely to occur. Kids need to be removed from those toxic environments as soon as possible. Here and there some private schools are popping up specifically in response to the ideology-obsessed education establishment, but nowhere near enough of them—yet. I hope that movement can grow quickly.
We need parallel structures elsewhere, wherever they can affect culture, e.g., in entertainment. Ben Shapiro has taken some steps in that direction, also Fox News (FoxNation), albeit behind paywalls. There must be others, and I’d like to know about them.
Mass psychosis?
More like mass conspiracy to induce it….
Here’s a bracing, “get-a-grip” pep talk from a fearless octogenarian—no doubt a “Tale of Two Cities” AND “Fight Club” fan—who would appear to know what he’s talking about!
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/06/world-renowned-psychiatrist-global-predators-fauci-gates-and-schwab-behind-the-covid-reign-of-terror/
(Hope I can be this irate when I’m 85…)
File under: “The Last Angry Man”?
And the latest in cult news (it was only a matter of time)….
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2021/10/07/woke-govt-funded-london-tour-guide-targets-racist-plants-says-botanical-terms-like-native-invasive-are-offensive/
OTOH, maybe they DO have the right idea; and we can get rid of these irritating (not to mention ridiculous)—no doubt even dangerous!!—cults by erasing such words as “culture”, “cultivation”, “occult’, “difficult”, “cuttle fish”, etc.
}}} (Eff-Biden, anyone?)
L E T ‘ S
G O
B R A N D O N ! ! !
}}} It’s not to be mistaken for voting Democrat
I think it’s getting to be that voting for Democrats and their policies and not thinking you’re totally screwing up not just the country, but the world, is akin to thinking that your landlord is pumping LSD into the HVAC system… Both are so blatantly disconnected from reality and the real-world evidence that you have to have something wrong with your brain chemistry.
}}} A glass half empty is also half full.
Actually, it’s completely full. 50% air, 50% water.
😛
}}} 2. Partly as a consequence of this, people have become too amiable, to agreeable, too acquiescing.
Part of this, I’d assert, is much more due to social conditioning in schools.
“Don’t fight, run to the teacher” — don’t solve or work on your own problems, appeal instead to authority.
This is why bullies thrive these days, they have nothing to fear.
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
— Walt Whitman —
Guess what? 🙁
}}} (I’ve decided it’s unfair to The Real Brandon and all the others of that name to tarnish their moniker. Give discredit where discredit is due.)
Oh, no. It’s a credit to Brandon, that we’ve included him as a part of the whimsy. HE knows what it’s about, and is probably quite pleased that he has become a placeholder for “Fuck Biden”…
😀
Marisa. I never heard “all”. To make that case means somebody’s going all conspiracy theory on us. Why would you do that?
Anti-vaxxers say that the likelihood is sufficient that, compared to the possibility of something like seasonal flu, take the flu. It won’t kill you.
To the extent that the Chinese lung mung kills somebody, it’s almost invariably associated with other comorbidities. And if you don’t have any of those…you might already have had the crud and have the natural immunities Pfizer says are superior to the jab. Why would somebody want others who are already immune to take the shot?
Or, if you haven’t had the crud even asymptomatically, and you are young and healthy, you still don’t need it. And since you don’t need it, you really don’t need the possible side effects.
Problem is that this has been sold, even with short cuts, as some kind of miracle drug. Not only were there no side effects, when there were, the reports were minimized or censored. That’s a real confidence builder, by golly.
Even baby aspirin has warnings. But to suspect this….that’s a flat-Earther thing.
One virologist said her studies with one of the drugs left her subjects–fortunately animals-with no germ cells. IOW, cannot reproduce.
So a disease which tears fhrough nursing homes and misses, or is missed by, the young and healthy has to rule everybody’s life.
If the Establishment could keep its story straight for as long as a week, and wouldn’t keep getting busted lying, and the big shots weren’t scorning to mask as the rest of us must–except scroom we don’t–people might not be so suspicious.
Nobody in the developed world worries about getting measles because they got they shot about age one or whatever. But this…gonna have to keep coming back.
Flu and cold virii don’t go away. To turn the world upside down in the hopes there’s a lot of money in fooling folks that this virus can be disappeared is stupid.
Several years ago, I asked ‘Are We Living at the Intersection of These Two Stories?’, the stories being:
–Heinlein’s ‘Year of the Jackpot’, about the (imagined future) time when everything went crazy in America, and
–Ionseco’s ‘Rhinoceros’, about a time when people started turning into these destructive beasts
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/50743.html
I think it is time to republish this, with the title changed to: We Are Living at the Intersection of These Two Stories.
“Whoa…”
Indeed.
And it goes without saying that once the 24/7 hate is implanted—i.e., implemented successfully and chaneled reliably—then “the job” is for all intents and purposes complete.
Stating the obvious (not that it would pass anything as rigorous as a Left-wing “fact checker” of course…the claim being, obviously, that “If all dissent has been crushed, then why is “Biden” still desperately trying to crush it?)…
https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/07/daniel-to-biden-unity-means-crushing-all-dissent/
I see how people can become dominated by totalitarians.
What I don’t understand is what makes someone want to be a totalitarian.
“What I don’t understand is what makes someone want to be a totalitarian.”
I suspect ego and fear have a lot to do with it.
David Foster,
I have thought often of Ionesco’s, “Rhinoceros,” in the past 20 months, or so. Even went back and re-read it (it had been over 40 years).
RTF…there’s a great movie of ‘Rhinocero’, with Zero Mostel.
Pingback:Strange Daze: Opulence, I Has It