In this brilliant, 8-minute video, psychologist Kelly McGonigal, PhD, teaches a simple and very effective strategy to resist temptation by surfing the urge.
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Body Language Analyst REACTS to WILL SMITH/CHRIS ROCK SLAP at 2022 Oscars. WAS IT STAGED?
Spidey, an award-winning behavior analyst, provides a brilliant analysis of the Will Smith / Chris Rock slap AND Will Smith’s acceptance speech to answer the question: was it staged?
Will Smith shocked the world when he slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards after the comedian made a joke about the Oscar-winning actor’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. But was the confrontation real or staged? Learn expert-level body language and behavior analysis and find out what to look for to know when people are lying to you!
. Jim Carey’s Reaction to the Slap:
. Full Video of the Slap:
. Full Acceptance Speech:
The Psychological Cruelty of Denying Natural Immunity
Every sick child, and probably every adult at some point, asks that existential question: why am I suffering?
No answer is satisfying. To be sick is to feel vulnerable, weak, not in control, not in the game. Life is chugging along outside of your room. You can hear laughter, cars going here and there, people out and about. But you are stuck, shivering under blankets, appetite disrupted and struggling to remember what it was like to feel healthy.
With fever, all of this is worse because the capacity for one’s brain to process information with full rationality is deprecated. High fever can induce a form of brief insanity, even involving hallucinations. You imagine things that are not true. You know that but can’t shake it off. The fever breaks and you find yourself in a pool of sweat, and your hope is that somewhere in this mess the bug has left you.
For children, it is a scary experience. For adults too, when it lasts long enough.
From the depths of the suffering, people naturally look for a source of hope. When is recovery? And what can I expect once that happens? Where is the meaning and the purpose behind the ordeal?
For a conventional respiratory virus, and for many other pathogens, generations have known that there is a silver lining to the suffering. Your immune system has undergone a training exercise. It is encoding new information. That is information your body can use to be healthier in the future. It is now prepared to fight off a similar pathogen in the future.
From the depths of suffering, this realization provides that much-needed source of hope. You can look forward to a better, healthier life on the other side. You will now confront the world with a shield. That dangerous dance with pathogens has been won for at least this particular virus. You can enjoy a stronger and healthier you in the future.
For generations, people understood this. Particularly in the 20th century, when knowledge of natural immunity became more sophisticated, along with the documentation of herd immunity, this became culturally entrenched.
Speaking from personal experience, my own parents were constantly explaining this to me when I was young. When I was sick, it became my essential source of hope. This was crucial for me, as I was an unusually sickly child. To know that I could become stronger and live more normally was a blessing.
Nothing made the point more prescient than my bout with chicken pox. To wake with itchy red spots all over me threw me into panic at the age of 6 or 7. But when I saw the smiles on my parents’ faces, I relaxed. They explained that this is a normal sickness that I absolutely needed to get as a young person. I could then get a lifetime of immunity.
It is far less dangerous to get it when you are young, they explained. Don’t scratch the sores. Just endure it and it will be over soon. I will have done my duty to myself.
That was a striking education for me. It was my introduction to the reality of natural immunity. I learned not only about this one sickness but all kinds of viruses. I learned that there is a plus side, a silver lining, to my suffering. It created the conditions that led to a better life.
Culturally, this was considered to be a modern way to think, a mental awareness that enabled generations not to give up hope but rather to look to the future with confidence.
From the beginning of the current pathogenic crisis, this piece has been missing. Covid has been treated as a pathogen to avoid at all costs – personal and social. No price was too high to pay to purchase avoidance. The worst possible fate would be to confront the virus. We must not live life normally, we were told. We must reorganize everything around slogans: slow the spread, flatten the curve, socially distance, mask up, regard everyone and everything as a carrier.
After two years, this is still the case in many parts of the country. Public health authorities have not recognized, must less explained natural immunity. Instead our source of hope has been the vaccine, which the authorities said would turn you into a dead end for the virus. That seemed like hope for many. Then it turned out not to be true. Hopes have been dashed and we were plunged right back where we were before.
Covid’s coverage of the country is so broad now that everyone knows one or many people who have had it. They share stories. Some are short bouts. Others last a week or longer. Nearly everyone shakes it off. Some people die from it, particularly the elderly and infirm. And this universal tactile experience has also given rise not so much to another round of panic – that is certainly there – but exhaustion and the great question: when will all this end?
It ends, as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration said, with the arrival of population immunity. In this sense, it is like every pandemic that has come before. They swept through the population and those who recover have lasting immunity to the pathogen and probably others in the same family. This happens with or without a vaccine. It is this upgrade of the immune system that provides the way out.
And yet even now, millions of people have not been made aware of the payoff to confronting the virus. They have been denied hope that it ever will end. They simply do not know. The authorities have not told them. Yes, you can find out if you are curious and read competent opinion on the topic. Maybe your doctor has shared that view.
But when you have the leading voices in public health seeming to go out of their way to pretend that natural immunity does not exist, you are going to throttle that knowledge in the general population. The immunity passports do not recognize it. The people who are fired despite having demonstrated robust immunities know this all-too-well.
Of all the scandals and outrages of the last two years – the incredible failings of public officials and the silence of so many people who should have known better – the strange silence on acquired immunity is among the worst. It has a medical cost but also a huge cultural and psychological one.
This is not just an arcane matter of science. It is a main means by which the population can see the other side of the pandemic. For all the fear, suffering, and death, there is still hope on the other side, and we can know this because of our awareness of how the immune system works.
Take that away and you take away the possibility of the human mind to imagine a bright future. You promote despair. You create a permanent state of fear. You rob people of optimism. You create dependency and promote sadness.
No one can live this way. And we do not have to. If we know for sure that all this suffering was not for naught, the universe and its functioning seem a bit less chaotic and appears to make a greater degree of sense. We cannot live in a pathogen-free world but we can confront this world with intelligence, courage, and conviction that we can get to the other side and live even better than we did before. We do not need to give up freedom.
The people who denied us this knowledge, this confidence, have engaged in a cruel game with human psychology. What makes it worse is that they knew better. Fauci, Walensky, Birx, and all the rest, have the training and the knowledge. They are not unaware. Perhaps Gates’s ignorance is understandable but the rest of these people have actual medical training. They have always known the truth.
Why have they done this to us? To sell vaccines? To elicit compliance? To reduce us all to fearful subjects who are easier to control? I’m not sure we know the answers. It’s possible that natural immunity came to be seen by these technocrats as too primitive, too rudimentary, insufficiently technocratic, to be allowed as part of the conversation.
Regardless, it is a scandal and a tragedy with an enormous human cost. It will be generations before we see a full recovery.
That recovery can begin at least with awareness. You can examine all the studies and see for yourself how this goes. We are now up to 141 studies that demonstrate robust immunities after recovery, a much better form of immunity than can be induced from these vaccines. We should be happy for the studies but they should not have been necessary. We should have known based on prevailing science for these sorts of pathogens.
We currently confront a tragic morass. Cases are at an all-time high. There is a growing realization that nothing has worked. The loss of trust is palpable. More people now know that everyone will get this thing. There is no more hiding, no more success in “being careful,” no option but to get out there and take a risk with this thing. But what bolsters one’s confidence that doing so is worth it? The realization that you will be stronger as a result.
Take away the knowledge of natural immunity, and thus the realization that there can be a better life on the other side of sickness, and you leave people with existential emptiness and a lasting sense of despair. No one can live that way. No one should have to.
About the Author
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. tucker@brownstone.org
Understanding the Psychology Behind the COVID Pandemic | Dr. Joseph Mercola
A psychological condition of society known as “mass formation psychosis” is a condition for totalitarianism. Under mass formation psychosis, a population enters a hypnotic-type trance that makes them willing to sacrifice anything, including their lives and their freedom. That’s what’s happening right now
There are four key conditions that must be in place for mass formation psychosis to occur: Lack of societal bonding, experiencing life as meaningless and senseless, widespread free-floating anxiety/free-floating discontent, and free-floating frustration/aggression
Once these four conditions are widespread, the mass formation can occur, which allows for totalitarianism to rise and thrive
A key strategy to break mass formation and prevent totalitarianism is to speak out against it. We also need to give those hypnotized a greater fear to replace the fear of the virus with, namely the fear of totalitarianism and the loss of their and their children’s lives, livelihoods, and freedoms that go along with it
Dissenters need to join together, thereby giving fence-sitters who are not yet fully hypnotized an alternative to going along with the totalitarians
In the video above, Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology,1 review a theory professor Mattias Desmet, a Belgian psychologist, and statistician, believes explains the absurd and irrational behavior we’re now seeing worldwide with regard to the COVID pandemic and its countermeasures.
He calls this phenomenon “mass formation psychosis,” a type of crowd hypnosis that results in literally converting a large segment of the population into psychosis. Mass formation psychosis is the explanation for how the Germans accepted the atrocities by the Nazi Party in the 1930s, and it’s the explanation for why so many around the world support medical apartheid and the destruction of the unvaccinated now.
It’s so irrational and inhumane, many have wondered how we got here. As it turns out, the psychology of totalitarianism has been studied for decades, and the whole thing is in fact explainable as a psychiatric phenomenon that arises when certain conditions exist in a society.
The Four Base Conditions for ‘Mass Formation’
The four central conditions that need to exist in order for mass formation psychosis to take root are:
1. Lack of social bonding — Social isolation was a widespread problem long before the pandemic. In one survey, 25% of respondents said they didn’t have a single close friend. The COVID lockdowns also contributed to and worsened already existing isolation. We were all told that any contact with others, including members of our own family, could be a death sentence.
2. Seeing life as meaningless, purposelessness and senseless, and/or being faced with persistent circumstances that don’t make rational sense — Desmet cites research showing that half of all adults feel their jobs are completely meaningless, providing no value to either themselves or others.
In another poll, done in 2012, 63% of respondents said they were “sleepwalking” through their workdays, putting no passion into their work whatsoever. So, condition No. 2 for mass formation hypnosis was also fulfilled, even before the pandemic hit.
Events that occurred in late 2019 and early 2020, such as the many questions surrounding the presidential election and the initial COVID lockdowns, added fuel to the widespread confusion and uncertainty, resulting in the next condition: free-floating anxiety.
3. Widespread free-floating anxiety and free-floating discontent — Free-floating anxiety refers to anxiety that has no apparent or distinct cause. Judging by the popularity of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, condition No. 3 was also fulfilled long before the pandemic, but additional fuel was piled on just before the pandemic.
Many felt, and still feel, that “things just aren’t right.” Through 2020, it became increasingly apparent to many that most if not all of the systems we depend on are broken, and likely broken beyond repair, including our medical system, our voting system, and our judicial system.
4. Widespread free-floating frustration and aggression — This tends to naturally follow the previous three. Here, again, the frustration and aggression have no discernible cause.
How Mass Formation Allows Totalitarianism to Rise
When these four conditions are fulfilled by a large enough portion of society, they are ripe for the picking to convert to a psychosis, being totally out of touch with reality, which in turn leads to the rise of totalitarianism. As explained by Malone, when the pandemic broke out, people around the world became obsessed with one thing: the virus.
People everywhere thought about, read about, and talked about the virus almost exclusively to everything else. This singular focus, this obsession, having the base conditions for mass formation already firmly in place, allowed for large portions of the population to enter into a hypnotic-like state.
In that hypnotic-like state (it’s very similar to conventional hypnotism but with minor differences), people lose their ability to have rational thought and judgment.
As noted by Malone, there is evidence that suggests at least parts of this psychological operation were done intentionally, by “some entity that has financial benefit or power to gain from doing this, which gets to the point of global totalitarianism.” Now, once a large portion of society is hyper-focused on and fused in their joint discontent and anxiety, all a leader or leaders need to do to convince many that totalitarian control and loss of their freedom is best for them is to:
a) Present a story in which the cause of the anxiety is identified, and then
b) Offer a strategy for neutralizing that cause
Social Bonding Is Key
By accepting and participating in whatever that strategy is, people with free-floating anxiety feel equipped with the means to control their anxiety and avoid panic. They also feel a strong bond with others, because they’ve all identified the same nemesis. As explained by Desmet in the Peak Prosperity interview below:
“Because many people participate in the same strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, a new kind of social bond emerges a new kind of solidarity. So, people feel connected again in a new way. And that’s actually the most crucial thing.
If you look at the corona crisis and listen to the mainstream narrative, you will hear that everything is about solidarity. You have to participate, you have to accept the vaccine. You have to respect social distancing, because if you don’t, you lack citizenship, you show no solidarity. That’s the most crucial thing, always, in mass formation.
That’s the real reason why people buy into the story, even if it is utterly absurd. It’s not because they believe in the narrative. It is because the narrative leads to a new social bond. That’s the real reason.
There’s [also another] advantage. All the frustration and aggression can be directed at an object. And that object is the people who, for one reason or another, do not want to participate in the mass formation …
So, you have this very strange situation where people start from a very negative and divisive mental state; [they have a] lack of social bond, lack of meaning-making, free floating anxiety and a lot of frustration and aggression.
They switch from this very highly aversive mental state to a symptomatic positive state where they feel connected. Their life makes sense again through this heroic struggle with the object of anxiety … That’s why people continue to believe in the narrative, even if it is utterly absurd.”
Mass Formation Psychosis Is a Self-Destructive Condition
The crazy thing is that the story can be an obvious lie, yet those under this hypnotic spell will believe it. The remedy can be utterly absurd, yet they’ll obey. This is how totalitarianism is allowed to rise.
Of course, there must always be a common enemy that must be obliterated — the “cause” for the peoples’ fear and anxiety — and under totalitarian rule, that enemy is anyone who is not spellbound. The dissenters are the enemy. In 2021, the unmasked and unvaccinated are the enemy.
If everyone would just get the experimental jab, COVID would vanish and everyone could go back to feeling safe again. That’s the narrative. It makes no sense, it’s irrational, inhumane, and unscientific, but those who are in mass formation psychosis believe it’s just that simple, and that’s why some are able to wish death on the unmasked and/or unvaccinated.
So, as noted by Malone, “If it seems to you that the rest of the world has gone mad, the truth is, they have.” A problem far greater than any virus now is mass formation itself.
It’s a very dangerous condition, both for those under its spell and those who aren’t, because the “mental intoxication” that results makes people willing to do things that are clearly wrong and utterly immoral, up to and including voluntarily killing their own families and themselves if told it’s for the greater good. In short, masses of people become profoundly gullible and self-destructive, which is a frightening combination.
As noted by Desmet, in a dictatorship, people comply because they fear the dictator. In a totalitarian regime, however, mass formation psychosis is at work, and this gives the regime extreme power over the individual, as the people, when in this hypnotic trance, voluntarily destroy their own families, their lives and themselves, along with the stated enemy.
Is Totalitarianism Unavoidable?
Malone says that in his conversations with Desmet, Desmet has said he believes the mass formation psychosis is so widespread at this point that global totalitarianism may be unavoidable. He believes it’ll take over, as we’re seeing in a number of countries already. So, what, if anything, can we do? A summary of suggestions are as follows:
• Continue providing true and accurate information to counter the false narrative. Some who aren’t yet fully hypnotized may still be routed back to sanity. Speaking out can also help to limit the atrocities the totalitarian regime is emboldened to implement because in totalitarianism, atrocities and crimes against humanity increase as dissent decreases.
• Substitute fear of the virus narratives with narratives that highlight an even greater fear — fear of totalitarianism. “Totalitarianism is a bigger boogeyman than the virus is,” Malone says. “Losing control to Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, BlackRock, and Vanguard is a bigger threat than SARS-CoV-2 is for you and your children, by far.”
Desmet has tested this theory and found you CAN break the hypnotic focus on COVID if you’re able to refocus their attention on something that’s of even greater concern to them.
• Join with other dissenters into larger groups. This gives the larger majority who aren’t fully hypnotized but too fearful to go against the grain an alternative to going along with the totalitarians.
• Build parallel structures within your local communities. Think globally, act locally. Start developing parallel structures to heal the four underlying conditions that allowed mass formation to occur in the first place.
A parallel structure is any kind of business, organization, technology, movement, or creative pursuit that fits within a totalitarian society while being morally outside of it. Once enough parallel structures are created, a parallel culture is born that functions as a sanctuary of sanity within the totalitarian world.
The Gravity of Our Situation
To hear from Desmet himself, listen to his hour-long interview with Dr. Chris Martenson. As noted by Desmet, since self-destructiveness is built into the totalitarian system from the ground up, totalitarian regimes cannot be sustained forever. They fall apart as they’re destroyed from within. That’s the good news.
The bad news is it can be hell while it lasts, as totalitarianism built on mass formation almost always leads to heinous atrocities being committed in the name of doing good. There are usually few survivors at the end.
That said, Desmet believes this new global totalitarianism is more unstable than regional dictator-led totalitarian systems, so it may self-destruct faster. He has just finished writing a book, “The Psychology of Totalitarianism,” which is expected to be published in January 2022.
THE STORY:Experiments as far back as 1951 have shown us that human nature has a tendency to conform and obey authority against its own instincts and moral code.
THE IMPLICATIONS:Do these 5 experiments and syndromes explain the many psychological aspects of Operation Coronavirus?
People are walking around in a COVID trance
or COVID hypnosis as I covered in a previous article How the Masses Were Hypnotized Into the COVID Cult. The orchestrators of the COVID scamdemic understand human psychology very well and have been able to cleverly hack or exploit psychological weaknesses in the masses to engender compliance and obedience. In that article, I discussed Desmet’s ideas of mass formation and how those who deeply buy into the official narrative are part of a cult – the COVID Cult. In this article, I will emphasize 5 experiments or syndromes which also shed light on how people come to conform, adapt to absurdity and obey authority, even if it goes against their personal moral code and principles. We must be aware of these tendencies within ourselves as we strive to remain sovereign and free individuals.
COVID Trance Like Behavior: The Asch Conformity Experiments
Peer pressure is not just something with which only kids or teenagers have to deal. The desire to belong is a deep-seated human drive. The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted in 1951, were a set of experiments used to determine the degree to which people would adjust their behavior based on the need to fit in and not stand out. Solomon Asch told the participants it was an experiment about visual perception. He first had them answer a simple question alone where they were comparing the length of 3 different lines on the right to the one on the left and answering which line on the right was closest in length to the one on the left. 99% of people answered correctly.
Then, he put the participant in a room with others, where some of the others were actually confederates with the experimenter. The confederates would at times deliberately give the wrong answer. This had the effect of swaying the participant to give the wrong answer, denying their own eyes or senses in order to conform with the group. Asch found people would go along with the group 37% of the time, but for different reasons: some because they thought they must be wrong (when so many others or “the group” has a different answer), and others because they wanted to avoid the discomfort of standing out. Asch also discovered that when he gave the participant a partner (i.e. another participant who was participating at the same time), then conformity dropped from 37% to 5%.
You can watch an excerpt of the experiment here. The following is a revealing excerpt:
Sometimes we go along with the group because what they say convinces us they are right. This is called informational conformity. Sometimes we conform because we are apprehensive that the group will disapprove if we are deviant. This is called normative conformity … The partnership variation shows that much of the power of the group came not merely from its numbers, but from the unanimity of its oppostion. When that unanimity is punctured, the group’s power is greatly reduced.”
COVID Trance Like Behavior: The Milgram Experiments
The Milgram Experiment, conducted in 1961 and repeated many times, shows that ordinary people can be tricked into following orders and committing horrible acts if they believe the commands are coming from a legitimate authority. The results show that generally, 50-65% of people would obey authority even if it conflicted with their morals and conscience. The experiment was set up by telling volunteers they would be helping with research to see how well people learned via punishment. They needed to read questions to someone in another room, and if that person answered incorrectly, they were to administer an electric shock, each time at an increasing voltage. As the experiment went on, they could hear the yells of pain after they inflicted the punishment, and they were led to believe they were causing it (although they were not; the person in the other room was a confederate of the experiment). Although some of the volunteers clearly felt uncomfortable and objected, the experimenter in charge, who wore a white coat and introduced himself as a scientist, would merely say things like “the experiment requires that you continue” – and many did continue all the way to the highest voltage of shock.
You can watch an excerpt of the experiment here. The following is narrated by Stanley Milgram himself:
“The results, as I observed them in the laboratory, are disturbing. They raise the possiblity that human nature cannot be counted on to insulate men from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authorities. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. If in this study, an anonymous experimenter could succesfully command adults to subdue a 50 year old man, and force on him painful electric shocks against his protests, one can only wonder what government, with its vastly greater authority and prestige, can command of its subjects.”
COVID Trance Like Behavior: Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 and has a website dedicated to it here. Student volunteers were told they would be adopting the roles of prison guard and prisoner, participating in an experiment to study the psychological effects of prison life. The experimenters set up a simulated prison and carefully noted its effects on the behavior of all those within its walls. Shockingly and very quickly, those playing the role of prison guard fell into sadism, and those playing the role of prisoner fell into depression. These were volunteer strangers who had no previous affiliation or connection with each other. The experiment was stopped after 6 days for ethical reasons and concern about the mental, emotional, and physical health of the participants:
“Blindfolded and in a state of mild shock over their surprise arrest by the city police, our prisoners were put into a car and driven to the “Stanford County Jail” for further processing. The prisoners were then brought into our jail one at a time and greeted by the warden, who conveyed the seriousness of their offense and their new status as prisoners. Each prisoner was systematically searched and stripped naked. He was then deloused with a spray … The guards were given no specific training on how to be guards. Instead they were free, within limits, to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners … On the fifth night, some visiting parents asked me to contact a lawyer in order to get their son out of prison. They said a Catholic priest had called to tell them they should get a lawyer or public defender if they wanted to bail their son out! I called the lawyer as requested, and he came the next day to interview the prisoners with a standard set of legal questions, even though he, too, knew it was just an experiment.
At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation – a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the “good” guards felt helpless to intervene … I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was “off.” Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.
Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality.”
COVID Trance Like Behavior: Stockholm Syndrome
These next 2 are syndromes, not experiments. The term Stockholm syndrome was first used by the media in 1973 when 4 hostages were taken during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. The hostages defended their captors after being released and would not agree to testify against them in court. They had developed a connection with and an affinity for their captors. Stockholm syndrome is thus defined as a condition in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity. Wikipedia quotes this research from the book Stockholm Syndrome by C. S. Sundaram, which lists 4 key components that characterize Stockholm syndrome:
A hostage’s development of positive feelings towards the captor
No previous relationship between hostage and captor
A refusal by hostages to cooperate with police forces and other government authorities
A hostage’s belief in the humanity of the captor, ceasing to perceive them as a threat when the victim holds the same values as the aggressor.
Even before the advent of the COVID scamdemic, I believe the world was suffering from societal Stockholm syndrome, i.e. a society-wide disorder of citizens liking and defending their political leaders who were actively exploiting them.
COVID Trance Like Behavior: Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
Munchausen syndrome was first described in 1951, relating to a group of patients who invented stories about their supposed illnesses, and convinced doctors to perform unnecessary surgical procedures on them. The theory is that these people were unconsciously doing this because they craved attention or care. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a variation but contains a key difference. It is a specific form of child abuse first described in 1977 which describes situations in which the parents or the caregivers, almost always the mother, invent illness stories about their children and attempt to substantiate the stories by fabricating physical symptoms and signs. Usually, families or caregivers bring the child to the hospital with symptoms that cannot be explained easily via physiologic ways, and these symptoms occur only when the child is with the parents.
The Underlying Patterns
Now that you know about these 5 experiments and syndromes, can you see how they fit into the COVID plandemic and at least partially explain all the COVID trance behavior? Think about all the conformity that has happened, as people in many places still continue obediently wearing their masks, getting their fake vaccine, and chastising those who don’t follow all the ridiculous, illegal and illogical COVID rules. Think about all those who were influenced into getting the clot shot to conform with the expectations of their spouse, partner, family, or friends. Think about all the blind obedience and lack of critical thinking that has happened, as white-coated misleaders like Dr. Anthony Fraud-ci instructed the masses to “follow the science” and that if you disbelieved him, you would be going against science itself. Think about all the heavy-handed and sadistic brutality dished out by sociopathic cops, especially in places like Australia, to those who dared to peacefully protest, walk around without a mask or simply walk outside their home for a few hours. Think about how those cops (who were so inclined) relished the chance to become prison guards while the rest of the citizenry was relegated to prisoner status. Think about all the support and praise leaders, whether political or scientific, have received over the last 20+ months, while they have been actively engaged in violating fundamental and inherent human rights, such as the right to work, to trade, to travel, and to breathe air in an unrestricted manner, not to mention the rights of medical freedom and bodily autonomy. Finally, think about the psychopathic nature of the state, which has invented a virus, a pandemic, and an emergency in order to turn the citizenry into patients that must be “cared” for, even when the majority never wanted that care and even when that “care” is actually grave harm.
Final Thoughts
In so many ways, Operation Coronavirus is a psychological operation. It is the grand psyop. It works by leveraging fear to induce conformity, docility, obedience, and a blind trust in authority. It works, as Huxley and Orwell both said in different ways, by attempting to make you love your servitude and love your captor-abuser. It works by attempting to make you doubt your own sanity and capacity to assess your own state of health. Although it is vital to expose the numerous medical and scientific fallacies of the official COVID narrative (and there are many), as I and others have been diligently doing since the start, it is, I would suggest, even more, critical to understanding the powerful psychological manipulation that has taken place. We must do this in order to break free of the COVID trance propaganda and reclaim our sovereignty.
A psychological condition of society known as “mass formation” is a condition for totalitarianism. Under mass formation, a population willingly sacrifices their freedom
The central condition for mass formation to occur is a lack of societal bonding. In other words, social isolation on a mass scale, which is precisely what the lockdowns were all about. But even before the pandemic, social isolation was at a historical high
The second condition is that a majority of people must experience life as meaningless and purposeless. The third condition is widespread free-floating anxiety and free-floating discontent. This refers to discontent and anxiety that have no apparent or distinct causes
The fourth condition is free-floating frustration and aggression, which tends to naturally follow the previous three. Here, again, the frustration and aggression have no discernible cause
Once these four conditions are widespread, the mass formation can occur, which allows for totalitarianism to rise and thrive. A key strategy to break mass formation and prevent totalitarianism is for dissenters to join together as one large group, thereby giving fence-sitters who are not yet fully hypnotized an alternative to going along with the totalitarians. Another is to loudly speak out against the totalitarian regime, as this is how atrocities are limited
In the video above, Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, reviews the societal conditions under which a population ends up willingly sacrificing their freedom.
Desmet, who also has a master’s degree in statistics, discovered peculiar anomalies in statistical analyses done during the COVID pandemic, which made him realize our global society is starting to enter a “mass formation” state, a type of “collective hypnosis” required for the rise of a totalitarian regime.
In this Aubrey Marcus podcast interview, Desmet reviews the step-by-step formula that results in this collective hypnosis, and how this formula has been deployed on the global population over the past two years.
Needless to say, he warns us about continuing down this path and provides solutions that we can take, both on an individual and collective basis, to prevent the loss of freedom that will surely follow if we do nothing.
Nonsensical Modeling
Around the end of February 2020, Desmet started looking at case fatality rates and other statistics, quickly realizing that there was something seriously wrong with the models presented to the public and used as justification for shutting down “nonessential” businesses and telling everyone to stay at home.
The models were greatly exaggerating the threat of SARS-CoV-2, and by the end of May 2020, this was “proven beyond doubt.” For example, the Imperial College in London predicted that if Sweden did not lockdown, 80,000 people would be dead by the end of May 2020. Well, Sweden opted not to lockdown, and by the end of May, only 6,000 people had died with a diagnosis of COVID-19.
Strangest of all, Desmet says, was that everyone kept saying the coronavirus countermeasures were based on mathematical models and science, yet “when it was proven beyond doubt that the initial models were completely wrong, the measures continued as if nothing was wrong and the models were right.”
Clearly, then, modeling and science were not foundational or even part of the equation at all. This, Desmet says, “was a strong sign that there was something going on at the psychological level that was really powerful.”
Another tipoff that something was really wrong was the fact that none of our political leaders were taking into account the collateral damage of their countermeasures. There was no cost-benefit/risk-reward analysis for any of the countermeasures.
The World Health Organization did warn that the measures might result in excess deaths from starvation. Yet at no time did we ever see a mathematical model that took into account both sides of the coin — the death toll from the virus, and the collateral damage of the countermeasures. And without such an analysis, we could not assess whether the countermeasures might be more harmful than the virus.
Anytime you consider a public health measure, a cost-benefit analysis is essential. You cannot make a sensible decision without it. Yet here, such basics were ignored as if the collateral damage was inconsequential.
The Four Base Conditions for ‘Mass Formation’
What psychological dynamics and processes might be responsible for this apparent blindness? After a couple of months, Desmet finally realized what was going on. Society was (and still is) under the spell of mass hypnosis, a psychological process known as “mass formation” that arises in society when specific conditions are met.
The central condition is a lack of societal bonding. In other words, social isolation on a mass scale, which is precisely what the lockdowns were all about. We were all told that any contact with others, including members of our own family, could be a death sentence.
I’ve heard of people who for over a year have not met with a single person, remaining locked in their homes the entire time, for fear of contagion. But social isolation was a widespread problem even before the pandemic. Marcus cites a survey, which found 25% of respondents didn’t have a single close friend. What’s more, the loneliest age group were young adults, not seniors, as typically suspected.
So, even before the pandemic, Western societies were suffering from a lack of community, which is a key condition for “mass formation” syndrome to emerge in the first place.
The second condition is that a majority of people must experience life as meaningless and purposeless. Desmet cites research showing that half of all adults feel their jobs are completely meaningless, providing no value to either themselves or others.
In another poll, done in 2012, 63% of respondents said they were “sleepwalking” through their workdays, putting no passion into their work whatsoever. So, condition No. 2 for mass formation hypnosis was also fulfilled, even before the pandemic hit.
The third condition is widespread free-floating anxiety and free-floating discontent. Free-floating anxiety refers to anxiety that has no apparent or distinct cause. If you’re in the jungle and find yourself chased by a lion, your fear and anxiety have a natural, easily-identified cause — the lion.
However, when you are socially disconnected and feel your life has no meaning, then free-floating anxiety can emerge that is not connected to a mental or physical representation of a specific threat. Judging by the popularity of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, condition No. 3 was also fulfilled long before the pandemic.
The fourth condition is free-floating frustration and aggression, which tends to naturally follow the previous three. Here, again, the frustration and aggression have no discernible cause.
When Conditions Are Met, Mass Formation Emerges
When these four conditions are fulfilled by a large enough portion of society, they are ripe for mass formation hypnosis. All that’s needed now is a story in which the source or cause of the anxiety is identified and spelled out, while simultaneously providing a strategy for addressing and neutralizing that cause.
By accepting and participating in whatever that strategy is, people with free-floating anxiety feel equipped, finally, with the means to control their anxiety and avoid panic. They feel like they’re in charge again.
Interestingly, when this happens, people also suddenly feel reconnected with others, because they’ve all identified the same nemesis. So, they’re joined together in a heroic struggle against the mental representation of their anxiety. This newfound solidarity also gives their lives new meaning and purpose.
Together, this connection, while based on a false premise, acts to strengthen the psychological disconnect from reality. It explains why so many have bought into a clearly illogical narrative, and why they are willing to participate in the prescribed strategy — “even if it’s utterly absurd,” Desmet says.
“The reason they buy into the narrative is that it leads to this new social bond,” he explains. Science, logic, and correctness have nothing to do with it.
“Through the process of mass formation, they switch from the very painful condition of social isolation to the opposite state of maximal connectedness that exists in a crowd or a mass.
That in and of itself leads up to a sort of mental intoxication, which is the real reason people stick to the narrative, why people are willing to go along with the narrative, even, as we said, it is utterly wrong, and even if they lose everything that is important to them, personally.”
These losses can include their mental and physical health, their homes, livelihoods, and material well-being. None of it matters when you’re under the hypnotic spell of mass formation. And this, Desmet says, is one of the most problematic aspects of this psychological phenomenon. Masses of people become self-destructive through their myopic focus.
19th Century Mass Formation
Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist renowned for his study of crowds once said:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
Le Bon’s book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,”1 takes a deep dive into the characteristics of human crowds and how, when gathered in groups, people tend to relinquish conscious deliberation in favor of unconscious crowd action.
He warned that if society didn’t take heed and ward of social isolation and the anti-religious idea that life has no purpose, we would end up in a state where mass formation would become the norm. These psychologically damaged people would take over, which is precisely what happened.
A key example is the Nazi regime. Desmet points out that while we typically think of dictatorships arising from the use of brute force and fear, the Nazi regime — and the leadership we’re faced with right now — came into power on the back of this deep psychological phenomenon known as a mass formation.
People WILLINGLY participated in the Nazi atrocities because of the psychological state society was in, the mass formation phenomenon, not because they feared their leader.
Key Difference Between Dictatorship and Totalitarianism
So, it’s important to realize that classical dictatorships and totalitarianism arise from different causes. As a general rule, in a classic dictatorship, the dictator becomes milder and less aggressive once dissident voices, his opposition, are silenced. Once he has seized complete power, he doesn’t need to be aggressive anymore and can resort to other means to maintain control.
In a totalitarian state, the exact opposite occurs. This is crucial for us to understand, because in a totalitarian society, once the opposition is silenced, that’s when the state commits its greatest and cruelest atrocities.
An example of this is Stalin’s purification scheme in the 1930s, which led to the death of about 80 million people in a single decade. The mid-30s is also when the Nazi regime began its insane cleansing, which resulted in the Holocaust. Both occurred after the vocal opposition had been quenched.
We’re now at another watershed moment in history, where the opposition to the pandemic madness is being silenced. If we want humanity to survive and not succumb to global totalitarianism, we must keep speaking against it, because when we stop, THAT’S when the real atrocities will begin. In other words, we ain’t seen nothing yet. The worst is still to come — if we fall silent.
Here’s another important point. Totalitarians don’t stop committing atrocities once the opposition is vanquished. It merely expands to new groups. Desmet recounts how Stalin switched from one scapegoat to the next, as he kept running out of groups to blame and had them killed off. Eventually, he ended up murdering half of his Communist Party members, even though most had done nothing wrong and were loyal to him.
That’s something to ponder in our present situation. Right now, “anti-vaxxers” are the opposition the totalitarian regime seeks to destroy. Once there are no more “anti-vaxxers,” who say, theoretically, that everyone in the world got the shot, the opposition to be done away with would become some other group.
So, if you’re “vaccinated” and upon all your boosters right now and are cheering on the crusade against those who don’t want the shot, know that it’s only a matter of time before it’s your turn to be victimized over something.
The Tragic End That Awaits All Mass Formation Societies
The fate of those who succumb to mass formation and embrace totalitarianism is particularly tragic, in a sense, because of another curious thing that occurs. People under its spell often end up agreeing that they deserve to die and willingly go to their death. This, Desmet says, is what happened with many of Stalin’s party members who were given death sentences for no apparent reason.
As noted by Marcus, this is basically menticide, the killing of the mind. The psychological process of menticide so degrades the mental faculties that rational thinking is no longer possible, making you profoundly gullible. In this state, you’ll buy into any narrative without critical thinking.
Mass formation also always ends up creating more of the conditions that allowed it to emerge in the first place. So, in the end, people who are under mass formation hypnosis will feel greater social isolation than ever before, less meaning and purpose in life, and more free-floating anxiety and free-floating aggression than before.
Mass formation also erases individuality. The group becomes all-important and the individual inconsequential. Hence being told you, your parents, or children deserve or need to die for the betterment of society is acceptable and agreeable.
“Everyone becomes equally stupid, essentially,” Desmet says. “It doesn’t matter how smart or intelligent they were before. They lose all capacity for critical thinking, they lose all individual characteristics.”
Applied to today, this is shockingly relevant. It helps explain how and why parents are willing to line up their children for an experimental injection that can disable or kill them. “Totalitarianism is a monster that ALWAYS devours its own children,” Desmet says.
Mass Formation in Action
Another important point is that, typically, only 30% of people in a totalitarian society are actually under the hypnotic spell of mass formation. It seems greater, but they’re actually in a minority.
However, there’s typically another 40% that simply go along with the program, even though they’re unconvinced. They don’t want to stick out by going against the prevailing current. The remaining 30% are not hypnotized and want to wake the others up.
The so-called Ash experiments clearly demonstrated that very few people, only 25%, are willing to go against the crowd, no matter how absurd and obviously wrong the crowd’s opinion is. Two-thirds of people are willing to go along with “idiocracy.”
Time and again, mass formation events and experiments show us there are three groups of people: those who become spellbound and actually believe that the wrong answer is the right one; those who know the answer is wrong but dare not tell the truth so they agree with what they know to be false; and those who know the answer is wrong and say so.
How to Break Mass Formation
All of this points to what the answer is. According to Desmet, what dissidents need to do is join together to form one large group. This gives the largest, 40% group — the fence-sitters who only go along with the program because they’re afraid of being ostracized — an alternative social bonding platform.
Most of them are likely to join the dissident anti-totalitarian group rather than follow the totalitarian mindset that they don’t fully agree with. At that point, the mass formation is done. The totalitarian state is finished because the neutral fence-sitters, which allowed for mass formation to take root and grow, are now no longer participating in that process. And without mass formation, a totalitarian takeover cannot succeed.
Secondly, we must continue to speak out — LOUDLY. Speaking out can help minimize the number of people who get hypnotized. It can also wake some up who already are under the mass formation spell. According to Desmet, speaking out has also been shown to limit the atrocities committed.
“In my opinion, it is not an option to stop speaking,” he says. “It’s the most important thing we can do.”
It’s not easy. As discussed by Marcus and Desmet, the totalitarian regime has the benefit of being able to control the narrative through centralized media. Not surprisingly, mass media is a key tool for the successful creation of mass formation.
A third action item is creating parallel structures. The power of this strategy was demonstrated by Vaclav Havel, a political dissident who eventually became the president of Czechoslovakia. A parallel structure is any kind of business, organization, technology, movement, or creative pursuit that fits within a totalitarian society while being morally outside of it.
Once enough parallel structures are created, a parallel culture is born that functions as a sanctuary of sanity within the totalitarian world. Havel explains this strategy in his book, “The Power of the Powerless.” As noted by Desmet, totalitarianism will always self-destruct in the end. The psychological underpinnings are so self-destructive that the system falls apart. That’s the good news.
The bad news is a totalitarian system can survive for long periods of time before petering out, and there tend to be few survivors at the end. That said, Desmet believes this new global totalitarianism is more unstable than regional dictator-led totalitarian systems, so it may self-destruct faster. So, the key is to survive outside the totalitarian system while we wait for it to self-destruct.
However, we must still dissent in word and deed, in order to limit the atrocities and mitigate the damage.
Ultimately, as in medicine, preventing totalitarianism is far easier than trying to break free later. To do that, we need to prevent the four root causes of mass formation in society: social isolation, purposelessness, free-floating discontent/anxiety, and free-floating frustration/aggression. This will be the task of those who remain once this global totalitarianism experiment fails and falls.
THE STORY:Does it sometimes feel to you that you are surrounded by people who’ve been hypnotized? Well, in a very real sense they have been.
THE IMPLICATIONS:Learn the psychology that explains why many have undergone mass hypnosis via an elaborate and cleverly disguised initiation ritual into a cult – the COVID Cult.
Operation Coronavirus has shown how mass hypnosis
can be inculcated into entire populations, around the world. We are now 20 months into “2 weeks to flatten the curve” and there are still many people hopelessly lost in the official narrative. The NWO (New World Order) controllers know that narrative is everything. To control the information and to control the way people interpret that information is the absolute power to control perception. Why do you think Bond villain and WEF head Klaus Schwab just held another WEF (World Economic Forum) event on introducing The Great Narrative? A really effective narrative has a hypnotizing effect. This article will take a deeper look at how the official COVID narrative has been able to induce people into a state of fear, disempowerment, compliance, obedience, and mass hypnosis – and how it continues to do so – in a manner identical to the brainwashing propaganda of a cult.
Still Buying the Official Narrative …
Look around you. Do you see many people, including family, friends, and colleagues, who are still buying into the official narrative – even at this stage in the game when there has been so much information to destroy it? Even when Big Pharma has admitted the vaccine was never designed to stop transmission? Even when recent statistics from VAERS (as of November 12th, 2021) show 875,653 adverse events following COVID vaccines and 18,461 COVID vaccine deaths? We need to recall that the 2010 Harvard Pilgrim Health Care study concluded that under 1% of vaccine adverse events or side effects are ever reported; going by that, that would mean 87 million COVID vaccine injuries and 1.8 million COVID vaccine deaths in the USA – a nation of 330 million (over 1/4 of the country injured). Mass murder is certainly no exaggeration.
Clinical Psychology Professor Explains Mass Formation
In this interview on The Pandemic Podcast, Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at the Belgian University of Ghent, explains the psychological reason why so many still buy into the narrative. He outlines 4 conditions that need to be present that allow people to fall for an absurd official narrative, become hypnotized, and fall into what he calls mass formation. Mass formation (also known as mass psychology, mob psychology, or crowd psychology) studies how human behavior is influenced by large groups of people. This brief description gives an overview of it. Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, Leon Festinger, and Philip Zimbardo have all contributed to the understanding of this concept. Essentially, when people become part of a crowd, they deindividuate. There is a tendency for people to give away their personal identity, self-responsibility, self-awareness, guilt, empathy, and other individual morality-related attitudes and behaviors. A mob mentality can take over.
Desmet cites the following 4 conditions as necessary precursors to mass hypnosis:
1. Lack of social bond/connectedness
2. Lack of meaning/sense-making
3. Free-floating anxiety and psychological discontent
4. Free-floating frustration and aggression
When you have a society where there is already a lot of general anxiety, and where people are uprooted psychologically and spiritually because they are disconnected from their essence and their purpose (and from other humans too), they are ripe for exploitation. The NWO controllers melded together this free-floating anxiety with the fear of the virus (fear of disease/death). I encourage all readers to familiarize themselves with the NWO blueprint which was revealed in 1969 by Dr. Richard Day. It talks about how the world would be socially engineered so that everything would be chaotic and in a constant state of flux, and people would be encouraged to move away from their hometowns and families so that people would be more disconnected from each other and feel less grounded.
Desmet describes how such people with these 4 conditions develop a very small field of attention, both mentally and emotionally, and seem unable to expand it even when faced with the facts. He gives examples from historical totalitarian regimes, saying that usually only around 30% of the population becomes hypnotized. Another 40% is not hypnotized but is cowardly, too afraid to speak up. This is why people must continue to speak out now during the COVID scamdemic. Historically, once the opposition is silenced or destroyed, the dictator becomes even more monstrous, metaphorically devouring his own children (killing his own people/supporters) as Hitler and Stalin both did.
Mass Hypnosis Leads to Mass Psychosis
Mass hypnosis isn’t even the final destination. It can go even further into mass psychosis, where an entire population becomes infected with madness and loses its ability to think clearly and rationally. Sound familiar? This After Skool/Academy of Ideas video does a great job of explaining mass psychosis – an epidemic of madness that occurs when a large portion of society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions. With anxiety already present in large amounts in the population, the foundations were already there to generate a pandemic of compliance – for that is what Operation Coronavirus really is, a pandemic of compliance. With decades or even centuries of relentless propaganda, the general population was a fertile ground for seeds of collectivism and authoritarianism to be sown and grown.
The Corona-Initiation Ritual and the COVID Cult
Beyond mass hypnosis and mass psychosis, we can even take this analysis one step further – into the subconscious realms and into the occult. The mass psychosis video touches briefly on how people can more effectively be brought under the heel of totalitarianism by isolation. This is something I highlighted in a July 2020 article entitled Exposing the Occult Corona-Initiation Ritual where I outlined how the lockdowns, quarantines, masks, social distancing, and other COVID restrictions mimicked the exact elements of a ritual. In a later article entitled The COVID Cult and the 10 Stages of Genocide, I suggested that we are actually dealing with the phenomenon of a cult – the COVID Cult.
Take a look at this list of cult characteristics below found at this website and ask yourself – how many of these apply to the COVID Cult? Think about all the unaccountable adoration that has been heaped on Gates, Fauci, and the vaccine. Think about all the excessive zealotry and commitment that has gone into establishing the (utterly false) dogma that SARS-CoV-2 and COVID are respectively the most dangerous virus and disease – ever. Think about all the censorship that has occurred in a vain attempt to obliterate dissent. Think about all the effort that has gone into fostering the division, separation, and us vs. them mentality. Think about the way the ends justify the means (COVID vaccine injuries and deaths don’t matter because we must stop the virus at any cost). Think about all the shame and guilt hurled at those standing for bodily autonomy (dirty, selfish anti-vaxxers who will kill Grandma).
The group displays an excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader, and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.
Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, or debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (e.g., members must get permission to date, change jobs, or marry—or leaders prescribe what to wear, where to live, whether to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).
The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (e.g., the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
The group has a polarized, us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
The leader is not accountable to any authorities (unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders, or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations).
The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group (e.g., lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).
The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and control members. Often this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.
The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
The group is preoccupied with making money.
Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.
Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave—or even consider leaving—the group.
Another site has 6 key cult characteristics. Again, consider just well these fit the current COVID Cult:
Authoritarian Leadership
Exclusivism
Isolationism
Opposition to Independent Thinking
Fear of Being “Disfellowshiped”
Threats of Satanic Attack
Then, after the acute phase of the crisis has passed, the hypnosis remains. People (who lacked meaning before the formation of the cult) find a new meaning by bonding together over the (false) details of the narrative, e.g. “we’re all in this together” so we can “build back better.”
Final Thoughts: Implications of the Mass Hypnosis/Psychosis for Those Outside the Cult
The entire COVID scamdemic has been a giant occult ritual. This is because the forces that run the world are steeped in black magic, seeking to shape the world after themselves. People participate in rituals to show they belong to the group. The more absurd the ritual is, the better it functions as a ritual – it becomes unique to that group. Anyone under the ritualistic spell may accurately be said to be a member of the COVID Cult. This explains the astonishing ease with which people forgot their self-respect, their common sense, their innate immune systems, and their unalienable, sovereign, inherent, god-given human rights … and threw them all in the gutter over a supposed “emergency.” What else could explain it?
So what are the implications of all this for those outside the cult who maintained their sanity? Well, we have to treat those in the COVID cult as under a spell of delusion, trauma, and mind control. We have to figure out the best ways to deprogram them. Meanwhile, we must remain grounded in our own sanity and inherent rights as the NWO controllers try to turn the pressure up on those around the world who are outside the cult.
But, while characterizing generations is a common practice, it’s often counterproductive, says Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London and author of a new book, The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think. Duffy argues that assigning cohorts of people particular traits misses the importance of outside factors affecting their attitudes and actions. Plus, it takes us down a fruitless path of pitting one generation against another, creating division.
“The generation we were born into is merely one important part of the story, alongside the extraordinary influence of individual life cycles and the impact of historical events,” writes Duffy. “Although it is possible to learn something invaluable about ourselves by studying generational dynamics, we will not learn these lessons from a mixture of manufactured conflicts and tiresome clichés.”
As a course corrective, Duffy provides longitudinal data on a multitude of issues—from obesity to views on pre-marital sex to car ownership and much more—showing how generations respond to different social, health, and economic trends. In this way, he separates out truly generational effects from changes that affect all ages at a particular historical moment or changes that affect everyone once they hit a certain age. This makes for fascinating reading, much of it is counterintuitive—and instructive.
How we get generational stereotypes wrong
Part of what drives generational stereotyping is the uncertainty of the future and worry that our children will not do as well as we did in life, says Duffy. We look for simplistic explanations rather than exploring complex reasons for a generation’s struggle to succeed, missing out on opportunities to work together to ameliorate present problems or prepare for future disasters.
A case in point is our concern over climate change. Many of us fall prey to the stereotype that younger generations are the most concerned about climate change and are leading the fight against global warming (think Greta Thunberg and her movement). But, when Duffy looks at public opinion, he finds that worry about climate change has been rising among all generations, with very little difference between them. And, while younger-generation activism is certainly important for creating visibility, Baby Boomers may be more likely than younger people to take a stand against global warming by changing their actual behavior.
In other words, our generational stereotypes of selfish Boomers and caring Gen Zers can be misleading. Plus, they can cause people to put too much faith in younger generations, thinking they will solve climate change rather than all of us stepping up to do something.
Another persistent myth—that Gen Xers and Millennials are lazier, more materialistic, and less willing to act responsibly than other generations—obscures more important changes that are happening in society. When you look through the data, it becomes clear these stereotypes are ignoring long-term trends in rising wealth inequality, income stagnation, the need for more (and more expensive) education to compete in today’s economy, and devastating market crashes. What some people call “delayed adulthood” has less to do with personality than external realities, like exorbitant housing costs or limited wealth accumulation. To solve the problem, Duffy argues, we need to get away from blaming the victims and prioritize affordable housing and rent control for vulnerable young people.
Sadly, those solutions are harder to enact than sticking to unflattering stereotypes. Older generations often ignore how much the world has changed since they were young adults, failing to recognize that opportunities they enjoyed no longer exist. It’s easier to rely on our cognitive biases and form shorthand stereotypes of the young, where we “overemphasize personality-based explanations for behavior that we observe in others, while underemphasizing situational explanations,” writes Duffy.
“These blunt characterizations reflect a tendency to pick on younger generations for traits that are created by context,” he adds.
Take the current media frenzy over social media’s impacts on Gen Z. This follows a well-worn pattern: Each successive generation has found some kind of new media or technology to blame for the woes of youth, including books, radio, comics, TV, and now social media. While it’s true that social media use is higher in younger generations than past generations—and that could be tied to problems in youth, including mental health declines—evidence for that is inconsistent.
“It’s vital that we resist the lure of these simple answers, as they are likely to distract us from taking necessary action,” writes Duffy.
Acknowledging real generational effects, not stereotypes
Though stereotyping is wrong, Duffy does find actual generational differences in attitudes and behavior that might be instructive. For example, older generations attend religious services more regularly than younger generations, with each generation attending less often than the previous one. With every successive generation, drinking alcohol has decreased, too—one of the most consistent cohort effects discussed in the book. And Gen Zers are reporting more mental health problems compared to prior generations—a trend that may only get worse during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Knowing these generational trends exist could help us understand how to tackle issues that affect generations differently, perhaps tailoring supports to their particular challenges. For example, if younger generations don’t find social support by attending religious services, perhaps communities need to provide other spaces for them to connect with others around a shared sense of purpose and meaning.
Still, it’s possible that even these clearer generational differences may lessen when you consider extenuating circumstances—like available alternatives to alcohol for younger generations (such as legalized marijuana) or their willingness to report mental health problems more readily. We need to look closely at the data, as Duffy does in his book, to pinpoint real differences rather than imagined ones. Granted, this may be less eye-catching and click-worthy than media hype, but it could help us identify where the real problems are.
Unfortunately, our work is cut out for us. Stereotypes abound when we don’t have direct contact with different groups of people. And, Duffy argues, the U.S. has become one of the most age-segregated societies in the world, with young and old barely interacting (outside of their families, that is). This is problematic, as an intergenerational connection is tied to well-being, and its opposite feeds misunderstanding.
“It’s not intergenerational warfare we should be most worried about, but a drifting apart of age groups,” says Duffy. “This powers the stereotypes that exaggerate the division between generations and leads us to miss out on a host of positive benefits from generational connections.”
All in all, if we want to make the world a better place and see thriving future generations, we need to get away from stereotyping and stop pitting generations against each other, which serves no one. Instead, we must find more ways to be together and connect, sharing the necessary work of making the world a better place for current and future generations.
Jill Suttie, Psy.D., is Greater Good’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good.
Shocking Social Experiments Demonstrate Why Conformity and Blind Obedience To Authority Have Gone Viral
Editor’s Note: Friends, please join me for a special live zoom event on November 17th where I demonstrate how our society has been hypnotized by mind control experts and social engineers, and show you how to evict these forces from your own mind so you don’t fall victim to self-sabotaging behavior. Register HERE now!
I’m a committed advocate of personal liberty and informed consent, and I can’t possibly fathom turning my sacred body over to the pharmaceutical industry to be a guinea pig in an experimental drug trial. Especially when the institutions pushing this on the world are so brazenly involved in creating the crisis, are censoring any contrarian information or opinions, and have openly stated their plans to use this situation to herd the world’s people into a medical technocracy governed by the creepiest pricks on the planet.
Furthermore, I’m floored by the fact that so many people are not only rushing to participate in all of the mandates, rules, edicts, and orders, but also demanding that we non-conformists do the same. Even going so far as to support coercion and segregation of people who dare wish to remain naturally healthy and uncolonized by the pharmaceutical industry.
The social pressure is outstanding, and if I hadn’t been involved in researching the work of the social engineers, mind control experts, and propagandists for the last ten years, I might not be able to see what’s really happening.
People keep calling me things like ‘science denier,’ ‘anti-vaxxer,’ or ‘anti-science,’ and while sticks and stones may break my bones, I just can’t get over the sad irony that science also has an explanation for the social conditions we see today.
Because science definitely has something to say about how mass obedience, mass conformity, and mass psychosis occur.
Science definitely has a logical explanation for the fact that so many people are willing to put drugs in their bodies without logically assessing the risk vs. reward, or even knowing what’s in the drugs.
Science can most definitely explain why people demand that others take this product when the product is supposed to offer you protection from those who don’t take the product.
And science can most definitely explain why so many people are uninterested in the declarations of globalist vampires like Klaus Schwab who openly say they want to eradicate the concept of private property, track human beings by the signature of their heartbeat, and read people’s minds to determine if they are a threat to the state.
In fact, science very clearly explains why people do things that go against their self-interests. Let me offer you a few examples.
1.) The Asch Conformity Experiments
In the 1950s Solomon Asch conducted a series of group psychology experiments that demonstrated how easily people will go against the evidence of their own eyes, just because of the influence of a group of anonymous peers.
Participants were asked to look at a picture of simple lines and declare which one appears to be closest in length to a control sample. The correct answer is always quite obvious, yet the majority of participants answered incorrectly, instead of following along with a group of others who deliberately gave the incorrect answer.
The essential question here is ‘would you rather stand alone and be right, or stand with the group and be wrong?’ This is a riveting example of the power of groupthink. It reminds us that we are wired to adhere to the norms of our tribe above and beyond all logical reason, if necessary.
Watch for yourself…
Here’s an updated version of this same experiment, showing that disturbing conclusion still rings true today.
2.) Dangerous Conformity – When Your Life is at Stake By Following the Herd
We’re hard-wired for social conformity, even when doing so may present an immediate danger to our safety. This phenomenon is well-known and is illustrated in a social experiment overseen by psychology professor Dominic Abrams in which researchers attempt to answer the following question.
“Behaving differently from your group can make you an outcast. But what would you do if you knew your group was entirely wrong? Would you, for example, sit in a burning room, just because everyone else does?” – Dangerous Conformity
Shockingly, most participants ignored the evidence of their own senses, and instead of immediately leaving a burning building, they waited for the group to lead the way, which is a real-life situation that would have cost them their lives.
3.) Deferring Responsibility to Perceived Authority Figures
Stanley Milgram’s famous 1961 social experiment on obedience to authority is hailed as a milestone in our understanding of how people’s ethics can drastically change when responsibility for their actions is deferred on to an authority figure, such as an ‘expert’ or leader. Intrigued by the role of Nazi military personnel in concentration camps during WWII, Milgram wanted to know how much coercion people needed in order to willingly inflict harm on another person.
“He asked volunteers to deliver an electric shock to a stranger. Unbeknownst to the volunteers, there was no shock—and the people they were shocking were actors pretending to be terribly hurt, even feigning heart attacks. Milgram found that most people would keep delivering the shocks when ordered by a person in a lab coat, even when they believed that person was gravely injured. Only a tiny percentage of people refused.” [Source]
The suggested conclusion is that people are inherently unable to think for themselves when given a subordinate role in some authoritarian hierarchy, such as the role of the people in a state-controlled world. Their natural and unconscious reaction is to defer responsibility for their actions to someone of authority, relieving themselves of the stress of guilt.
https://youtu.be/mOUEC5YXV8U
Final Thoughts
Do you believe that people are thinking for themselves when they parrot ideas from the mainstream media and acquiesce to questionable rules and mandates?
These are just three examples of how the human mind pursues conformity over rationality under circumstances where group pressure or pressure from authority is applied. We are hard-wired for social conformity, and it’s one of the most dangerous aspects of the human condition.
There is a clear science to this that has to do with how the subconscious mind assesses safety amongst a tribe in a complex world and mitigates the dangers of being ousted by a tribe by defying logic in favor of conformity.
On the one hand, this information is quite valuable in helping to see and understand the world more clearly. On the other, knowledge of the mind’s natural tendency to conform to group pressure, subtle and not-so-subtle, is exceptionally valuable in the quest for self-mastery.
If you don’t understand how this aspect of your mind works, then you’re leaving the door open to be unconsciously manipulated by the propagandists, media, and government, and you’re missing out on the single greatest opportunity to take back control of your life and step into your full power as a sovereign being.
On November 17th I’m hosting a powerful LIVE zoom event where I share my extraordinary personal story while demonstrating how scientists, hypnotists, mind controllers, and propagandists exploit your mind to get you to defy your own self-interests and conform to their demands. It’s going to be one of the rawest, genuine, real, and mind-blowing talks you’ve heard in a long time. Register for that HERE.
About the Author
Dylan Charles is a self-mastery coach, the editor of Waking Times, and host of the Battered Souls podcast. His personal journey is deeply inspired by shamanic plant medicines and the arts of Kung Fu, Qi Gong, and Yoga. After seven years of living in Costa Rica, he now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he practices Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and enjoys spending time with family. He has written hundreds of articles, reaching and inspiring millions of people around the world. Follow Dylan on telegram here, and sign up for his weekly newsletter here.
Dylan is available for interviews and podcasts. Contact him at WakingTimes@gmail.com.
This article (Shocking Social Experiments Demonstrate Why Conformity and Blind Obedience to Authority Have Gone Viral) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.
The Science Of Propaganda Is Still Being Developed And Advanced
We live in a far less free society than most of us think.
It looks like we’re free. We don’t get thrown in prison for criticizing our government officials. We can vote for whoever we want. We can log onto the internet and look up information on any subject we’re interested in. If we want to buy a product we have many brands we are free to choose from.
How free is that? How free is your speech if there are myriad institutional safeguards in place to prevent speech from ever affecting political change?
It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to call the oligarchic puppet put in office by the last fake election a dickhead. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to Google any information you want only to find whatever information Google wants you to find.
What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has a system in place which prevents dissent from having any meaningful impact?
There is none.
Canada’s military “relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war”, “shaping” & “exploiting” info “to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages” https://t.co/qr9nRlT0lH
We live in a profoundly unfree society that is disguised as a free society. Western liberal democracy is just totalitarianism dressed in drag.
And it’s only getting worse. Propaganda is a still-developing science.
Last month Ottawa Citizen reported that the Canadian military used the Covid outbreak as an excuse to test actual military psyop techniques on its own civilian population under the pretense of assuring compliance with pandemic restrictions.
Some excerpts:
“Canadian military leaders saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test out propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting public, a newly released Canadian Forces report concludes.”
“The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for ‘shaping’ and ‘exploiting’ information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
“A separate initiative, not linked to the CJOC plan, but overseen by Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from public social media accounts in Ontario. Data was also compiled on peaceful Black Lives Matter gatherings and BLM leaders.”
“’ This is really a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance to start getting information operations into our (CAF-DND) routine,’ the rear admiral stated.”
“Yet another review centered on the Canadian Forces public affairs branch and its activities. Last year, the branch launched a controversial plan that would have allowed military public affairs officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviors of Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public social media accounts.”
“The plan would have seen staff move from traditional government methods of communicating with the public to a more aggressive strategy of using information warfare and influence tactics on Canadians.”
So they’re not just employing mass-scale psychological operations on the public, they’re testing them and learning from them.
And we can probably assume that anything which may have been learned was also shared with the government agencies of other NATO members.
Western governments in the NATO military alliance are developing tactics of “cognitive warfare,” using the supposed threats of China & Russia to justify waging a “battle for your brain” in the “human domain,” to “make everyone a weapon”
“NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded as cognitive warfare. Described as the ‘weaponization of brain sciences,’ the new method involves ‘hacking the individual’ by exploiting ‘the vulnerabilities of the human brain’ in order to implement more sophisticated ‘social engineering.’
“While the NATO-backed study insisted that much of its research on cognitive warfare is designed for defensive purposes, it also conceded that the military alliance is developing offensive tactics, stating, ‘The human is very often the main vulnerability and it should be acknowledged in order to protect NATO’s human capital but also to be able to benefit from our adversaries’ vulnerabilities.’”
“In a chilling disclosure, the report stated explicitly that ‘the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military.’”
“The study described this phenomenon as ‘the militarization of brain science.’ But it appears clear that NATO’s development of cognitive warfare will lead to a militarization of all aspects of human society and psychology, from the most intimate of social relationships to the mind itself.”
“In other words, this document shows that figures in the NATO military cartel increasingly see their own domestic population as a threat, fearing civilians to be potential Chinese or Russian sleeper cells, dastardly ‘fifth columns’ that challenge the stability of ‘Western liberal democracies.’”
“Naturally, the NATO researcher claimed foreign ‘adversaries’ are the supposed aggressors employing cognitive warfare. But at the same time, he made it clear that the Western military alliance is developing its own tactics.”
In 1917, a young Edward Bernays was asked to help the American war effort by applying his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious to a new German technique called “propaganda”. Thus began the current war: https://t.co/BqeaYIAic2
In a 2017 essay titled “The War on Sensemaking“, writer Jordan Greenhall made an observation that I have thought about ever since: that the science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for more than a century now, and has necessarily advanced scientifically just as much as other fields in the military have.
“In 1917, a young Edward Bernays was asked to help the American war effort by applying his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious to a new German technique called ‘propaganda’,” Greenhall writes. “The technology of war moves quickly. In the span of one and a half centuries, the last war leaped from long rifles to repeating rifles to Gatling guns all the way to Little Boy. The warfighters of the current war haven’t dawdled. The wars of culture, meaning, and purpose have seen innovation on an ‘exponential technology curve.’ The artisanal efforts of Bernays and Goebbels have been left far in the past by modern methods.”
Think about how many technological advancements there have been in the military over the last century. Our rulers have been refining their methods of manipulating our sensemaking abilities to their advantage throughout that entire time, and only a small minority of us have even begun to realize that that manipulation is even happening. We’re just learning to play checkers while they’re mastering 3-D chess.
I don’t have any solutions to this problem other than to spread consciousness of the fact that it is happening. Propaganda only works if you don’t understand (A) that it is happening to you and (B) how it is occurring, and a basic awareness of the fact that there’s a globe-spanning campaign to manipulate human thought to the advantage of the powerful is the first step toward having that understanding. Having the humility to understand that you yourself can be manipulated and deceived is the second step.
My hope is that humanity will transcend its psychological susceptibility to manipulation and move into a healthy relationship with mental narrative as our adapt-or-die precipice draws nearer. But time will only tell.
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list for her website, which will get you an email notification for everything. Her articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast, throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
MASS PSYCHOSIS – How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL and Submits to Totalitarian Control
This video explores the most dangerous of all psychic epidemics: mass psychosis. Mass psychosis is an epidemic of madness and it occurs when a large portion of society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions. Such a phenomenon is not a thing of fiction. Two examples of mass psychoses are the American and European witch hunts 16th and 17th centuries and the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century.
This video aims to answer questions surrounding mass psychosis: What is it? How does it start? Has it happened before? Are we experiencing one right now? And if so, how can the stages of mass psychosis be reversed?
Dance and Movement Therapy Holds Promise For Treating Anxiety and Depression, as well as Deeper Psychological Wounds
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A few years ago, framed by the skyline of Detroit, a group of about 15 children resettled as refugees from the Middle East and Africa leapt and twirled around, waving blue, pink and white streamers through the air.
The captivating scene was powerfully symbolic. Each streamer held a negative thought, feeling or memory that the children had written down on the streamers. On cue and in unison, the children released their streamers into the air, then sat down nearby. Then they gathered up the fallen streamers, which carried their collective struggles and hardships, threw them in a trash can and waved goodbye.
The children were participating in a dance therapy activity as part of our team’s research program exploring body-based approaches to mental health treatment in people resettled as refugees.
In 2017, our lab – the Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic – began piloting movement therapies to help address trauma in refugee families. We are learning that movement may not only provide a way to express oneself, but also offer a path toward healing and lifelong strategies for managing stress.
Dance and movement therapy offers a self-empowering mind-body approach to mental health treatment. David Dalton, CC BY-ND
On average, every year about 60,000 children are resettled as refugees in Western nations. Now, the refugee crisis resulting from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is bringing renewed attention to their needs. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that 6 million Afghans have been displaced over the past 40 years, and a new wave of tens of thousands are now fleeing from Taliban rule.
I am a neuroscientist who specializes in understanding how trauma reshapes the nervous system of developing youth. I use this information to explore creative arts and movement-based therapies to treat stress and anxiety. The instinct to move the body in expressive ways is as old as humanity. But movement-based strategies such as dance therapy have only recently been given much attention in mental health treatment circles.
As a dancer myself, I always found the nonverbal emotional expression offered through movement to be incredibly therapeutic – especially when I was experiencing significant anxiety and depression in high school and college. Now, through my neuroscience research, I am joining a growing number of scholars working to bolster the evidence base supporting movement-based interventions.
One mind and body
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the incidence of anxiety and depression doubled in youth. As a result, many people are searching for new ways to cope with and handle emotional turmoil.
Interventions that offer physical activity and creativity components at a time when children and people of all ages are likely to be sedentary and with reduced environmental enrichment can be beneficial during the pandemic and beyond. Creative arts and movement-based interventions may be well-suited to address not just the emotional but also the physical aspects of mental illness, such as pain and fatigue. These factors often contribute to the significant distress and dysfunction that drive individuals to seek care.
With outstretched arms, neuroscientist Lana Ruvolo Grasser performs a tension-and-release exercise with her study participants. David Dalton, CC BY-ND
Dance and movement therapy sessions place an emphasis on fostering creativity and adaptability in order to help people develop greater cognitive flexibility, self-regulation and self-direction. This is especially important because research shows that early-life experiences and how children learn to cope with them can have a lasting impact on their health into adulthood.
According to the Child Mind Institute Children’s Mental Health Report, 80% of children with anxiety disorders are not receiving the treatment they require. This might be due to barriers such as clinician availability and cultural literacy, cost and accessibility, and stigma surrounding mental health conditions and treatment.
In this ice-breaker exercise, study participants created a dream catcher by tossing strings of yarn to one another, introducing themselves and then tossing the string to another child across the room. David Dalton, CC BY-ND
We are finding that dance and movement therapy and other group behavioral health programs can help fill important gaps. For instance, these strategies can be used in combination with services people are already receiving. And they can provide an accessible and affordable option in school and community settings. Dance and movement therapy can also instill coping skills and relaxation techniques that, once learned, can last a lifetime.
Much like yoga and meditation, dance and movement therapy has, at the root of its practice, a focus on deep breathing through the diaphragm. This intentional breathing movement physically pushes on and activates the vagus nerve, which is a large nerve that coordinates a number of biological processes in the body. When I work with kids, I call this form of breathing and nerve activation their “superpower.” Whenever they need to calm down, they can take a deep breath, and by engaging their vagus nerve, they can bring their bodies to a more restful and less reactive state.
An analysis of 23 clinical research studies indicated that dance and movement therapy may be an effective and appropriate method for child, adult, and elderly patients experiencing a wide array of symptoms – including psychiatric patients and those with developmental disorders. And for both healthy individuals and patients, the authors concluded that dance and movement therapy was most effective for reducing the severity of anxiety compared with other symptoms. Research from our team has also shown promise for the benefits of dance and movement therapy in reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety in youth who resettle as refugees.
We have scaled up these programs and brought them into the virtual classroom for six schools throughout the metro Detroit region during the pandemic.
Perhaps the most promising evidence for dance and movement therapy isn’t, as the saying goes, what the eyes cannot see. In this case, it is what the eyes can see: children releasing their streamers, their negative emotions and memories, waving goodbye to them and looking ahead to a new day.
Mass psychosis is defined as an epidemic of madness that occurs when a large portion of society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions
The witch hunts that occurred in the Americas and Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, when tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were burned at the stake is a classic example of mass psychosis. The rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century is another
When a society descends into madness, the results are always devastating. Individuals who make up the affected society become morally and spiritually inferior, unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable. Worst of all, a psychotic mob will engage in atrocities that any solitary individual within the group would normally never consider
The psychogenic steps that lead to madness include a panic phase, where the individual is frightened and confused by events they cannot explain, and a phase of psychotic insight, where the individual explains their abnormal experience of the world by inventing an illogical but magical way of seeing a reality that eases the panic and gives meaning to the experience
Menticide is a term that means “killing of the mind.” It’s a way of controlling the masses by systematically killing the human spirit and free thought. It’s a system through which the ruling elite imprints their own delusional worldview onto society. A society is primed for menticide by the intentional sowing of fear and social isolation
The 20-minute video above, “Mass Psychosis — How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill,” created by After Skool and Academy of Ideas,1 is a fascinating illustration of how mass psychosis can be induced.
Mass psychosis is defined as “an epidemic of madness” that occurs when a “large portion of society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions.”
One classic historical example of mass psychosis is the witch hunts that occurred in the Americas and Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, when tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were tortured, drowned, and burned alive at the stake. The rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century is a more recent example of mass psychosis.
Man’s Worst Enemy
As noted in the video:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
That’s a quote attributed to Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist renowned for his study of crowds. His book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,”2 takes a deep dive into the characteristics of human crowds and how, when gathered in groups, people tend to relinquish conscious deliberation in favor of unconscious crowd action. Similarly, psychologist Carl Jung once stated that:
“It is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
When a society descends into madness, the results are always devastating. Jung, who studied mass psychoses, wrote that the individuals who make up the affected society “become morally and spiritually inferior.” They become “unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic and unreliable.”
Worst of all, a psychotic mob will engage in atrocities that any solitary individual within the group would normally never consider. Yet through it all, those affected remain unaware of their condition and cannot recognize the error in their ways.
What Causes Mass Psychosis?
To understand how an entire society can be driven to madness, you must first understand what drives any given individual to insanity. Barring drug or alcohol abuse, or a brain injury, psychosis is typically triggered by psychogenic factors, i.e., influences that originate in the mind.
One of the most common psychogenic factors that can trigger psychosis is a flood of negative emotions such as fear or anxiety that drive the person into a state of panic. When in a panic, the natural inclination is to seek relief. A psychologically resilient individual may adapt by facing their fear and ultimately defeating it.
Another coping mechanism is a psychotic break. As explained in the video, a psychotic break is not the descent into chaos, but rather a reordering of one’s an experiential world in a way that blends fact and fiction, reality and illusions, in such a way that a sense of control is restored and panic ends. The psychogenic steps that lead to madness can be summarized as follows:
A phase of panic — Here, the individual begins to perceive the world around him or her in a different way and is frightened on account of it. There’s a perceived threat, whether it be real, fabricated, or imagined. Confusion grows as they can’t find a way to rationally explain the strange occurrences taking place around them.
A phase of psychotic insight — Here, the individual manages to explain his abnormal experience of the world by inventing an illogical but magical way of seeing reality. The term “insight” is used because magical thinking allows the individual to escape from the panic and find meaning again. However, the insight is psychotic, because it’s based on delusions.
Just as a psychologically weak and vulnerable individual can be driven to madness, so can large groups of weak and vulnerable people descend into madness and magical thinking.
Totalitarianism Is a Society Built on Delusions
In the 20th century, we’ve seen a rise in totalitarianism, defined by professor and religious studies scholar Arthur Versluis as:
“The modern phenomenn of total centralized state power coupled with the obliteration of individual human rights: In the totalized state, there are those in power and there are the objectified masses, the victims.”
In a totalitarian society, there are two classes: the rulers and the ruled, and both groups undergo a pathological transformation. Rulers are raised to a god-like status where they can do no wrong — a view that easily leads to corruption and unethical behavior — while the ruled are transformed into dependent subjects, which leads to psychological regression.
Joost Meerloo, author of “Rape of the Mind,” compares the reactions of citizens living in totalitarian states to that of schizophrenics. Both rulers and the ruled are ill. Both live in a delusional fog, as the entire society and its rules are sustained by delusional thinking.
As noted in the video, only deluded people regress to a child-like state of total submissiveness, and only a deluded ruling class will believe they possess the knowledge and wisdom to control society in a top-down manner. And, only a deluded person will believe that a power-hungry elite ruling a mentally regressed society will result in anything but mass suffering and financial ruin.
The mass psychosis that is totalitarianism begins within the ruling class, as the individuals within this class are easily enamored with delusions that augment their power. And no delusion is greater than the delusion that they can, and should — indeed are destined to — control and dominate all others.
Whether the totalitarian mindset takes the form of communism, fascism or technocracy, a ruling elite that has succumbed to their own delusions of grandeur then sets about to indoctrinate the masses into their own twisted worldview. All that’s needed to accomplish that reorganization of society is the manipulation of collective feelings.
The killing of the Mind
Menticide is a term that means “killing of the mind,” and it’s an ancient way of controlling the masses by systematically killing the human spirit and free thought. It’s a system through which the ruling elite imprints their own delusional worldview onto society.
A society is primed for menticide by the intentional sowing of fear. A particularly effective way to induce fear and panic that results in psychosis is the unleashing of waves of terror, and it doesn’t matter if the “terror” in question is real or fictitious. The waves of terror technique can be graphed out as an escalating wave pattern where each round of fear is followed by a round of calm.
After a short period of calm, the threat level is elevated again, with each round of fearmongering being more intense than the one before. Propaganda — fake and misleading news — is used to break down the minds of the masses, and over time, it becomes easier and easier to control everyone as confusion and anxiety give way to the magical thinking and psychotic insight presented as solutions through the media.
Contradictory reports, nonsensical recommendations, and blatant lies are deployed intentionally, as it heightens confusion. The more confused a population is, the greater the state of anxiety, which reduces society’s ability to cope with the crisis. As the ability to cope withers, the greater the chances a mass psychosis will develop.
As noted in the video, “Confusion heightens the susceptibility of a descent into the delusions of totalitarianism.” Or, as Meerloo noted in his book:
“Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot. It confuses those who think straight. The big lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more of an emotional appeal … than logic and reason. While the people are still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault them with another.”
The Rise of Technocracy
What sets modern-day totalitarianism apart from previous totalitarian states is technology. The means to incite fear and manipulate people’s thinking has never been more efficient or effective. TV, the internet, smartphones, and social media are all sources of information these days, and it’s easier than ever to control the flow of that information.
Algorithms automatically filter out the voices of reason and rational thinking, supplanting them with fear narratives instead. Modern technologies also have addictive qualities, so many voluntarily expose themselves to brainwashing. Commenting on man’s reliance on technology, Meerloo notes:
“No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation. The senses are continually overloaded with stimuli. Man doesn’t learn to question his world anymore. The screen offers him answers already made.”
Isolation — A Mass Psychosis-Inducing Tool
Aside from the onslaught of fearmongering and false propaganda, the ultimate tool to induce psychosis is in isolation. When you are deprived of regular social interactions and discussions, you become more susceptible to delusions for a number of reasons:
1. You lose contact with corrective forces of positive examples, role models of rational thinking, and behavior. Not everyone is tricked by the brainwashing attempts of the ruling elite, and these people can help free others from their delusions. When you’re in isolation, the power of these individuals greatly diminishes.
2. Like animals, human behavior is significantly easier to manipulate when the individual is kept in isolation. As animal research has discovered, conditioned reflexes are most easily developed in a quiet, secluded laboratory with a minimum of stimuli to detract from the indoctrination.
When you want to tame a wild animal, you must isolate the animal and patiently repeat a particular stimulus until the desired response is obtained. Humans can be conditioned in the same manner. Alone, confused, and battered by waves of terror, a society kept in isolation from each other descends into madness as rational thought is obliterated and replaced with magical thinking.
Once a society is firmly in the grip of mass psychosis, totalitarians are free to take the last, decisive step: They can offer a way out; a return to order. The price is your freedom. You must cede control of all aspects of your life to the rulers because unless they are granted total control, they won’t be able to create the order everyone craves.
This order, however, is a pathological one, devoid of all humanity. It eliminates the spontaneity that brings joy and creativity to one’s life by demanding strict conformity and blind obedience.
And despite the promise of safety, totalitarian society is inherently fearful. It was built on fear and is maintained by it too. So, giving up your freedom for safety and a sense of order will only lead to more of the same fear and anxiety that allowed the totalitarians to gain control in the first place.
How Can Mass Psychosis Be Reversed?
Can totalitarianism be prevented? And can the effects of mass psychosis be reversed? Yes, but just as the menticidal approach is multipronged, so must the solution be. To help return sanity to an insane world, first you need to center yourself and live in such a way as to provide inspiration for others to follow. As noted by Jung:
“It is not for nothing that our age cries out for the redeemer personality, for the one who can emancipate himself from the grip of the collective psychosis and save at least his own soul, who lights a beacon of hope for others, proclaiming that here is at least one man who has succeeded in extricating himself from the fatal identity with the group psyche.”
Next, you need to share and spread the truth — the counternarrative to the propaganda — as far and wide as possible. Because the truth is always more potent than lies, the success of propaganda relies on the censoring of truth. Another tactic is to use humor and ridicule to delegitimize the ruling elite.
A strategy proposed by Vaclav Havel, a political dissident who became the president of Czechoslovakia, is called “parallel structures.” A parallel structure is any kind of business, organization, technology, movement, or creative pursuit that fits within a totalitarian society while being morally outside of it.
Once enough parallel structures are created, a parallel culture is born that functions as a sanctuary of sanity within the totalitarian world. Havel explains this strategy in his book, “The Power of the Powerless.”
Last but not least, to prevent the descent into totalitarian madness, sane and rational action must be taken by as many people as possible. The totalitarian elite does not sit around twiddling their thumbs, hoping and wishing to increase their power and control. No. They are actively taking steps to augment their position. To defend against them, the would-be-ruled must be just as active and resolute in their counter-push toward freedom.
All of this can be extremely challenging as people around you succumb to collective psychosis. But as Thomas Paine once said:
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
Teens with Secure Family Relationships ‘Pay It Forward’ with Empathy for Friends
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The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
Teens with more secure family relationships get a head start on developing empathy, according to my colleagues’ and my new study tracking adolescents into adulthood.
In contrast to popular myths about self-obsessed teens, existing research shows that adolescence is a key stage of development for the growth of empathy: the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes, to understand and resonate with their emotions and to care about their well-being. Empathy is a skill that develops over time, and it has major consequences for teens’ social interactions, friendships and adult relationships.
So how do teens learn this critical skill?
Our team’s new findings, published on July 15, 2021, in the journal Child Development, suggest that teens who have secure, supportive family relationships provide more empathetic support to their friends.
Imagine yourself as a teenager with someone in your life who understands your struggles, offers help and makes you feel supported and connected – that’s what empathetic support is all about.
Our study, led by professor of psychology Joseph P. Allen, followed 184 adolescents from their early teens into adulthood. When teens were 14 years old, we interviewed them about their family experiences and their relationships with their parents.
The interviews were designed to measure attachment security – teens’ confidence that they can explore and build autonomy while trusting others to provide connection, safety and support when they need it. Past research shows that experiences of receiving sensitive care from adult caregivers, especially in times of stress, build secure attachment. In each interview, we rated teens as secure if they expressed that they valued their family relationships and described them in a balanced, clear way.
Then we videotaped the teens at ages 16, 17 and 18, while they helped their closest friend talk through problems they were facing. From these videos, we quantified how much support friends sought from the teens we interviewed – for example, by asking for their opinion on a situation. To measure how much empathetic support the teens provided, we looked for four types of behaviors: showing understanding, helping friends solve their problems, providing emotional validation and actively engaging in conversations.
We found that teens who were more secure in their family relationships at age 14 provided more empathetic support to their friends in early adolescence and showed consistently high empathy over time. Teens who were less secure showed lower levels of empathy at first but improved this skill over time and nearly caught up to more secure teens by age 18.
This finding suggests that teens naturally gain empathetic skills as they get older, but those with more secure family relationships may get there faster.
What is especially interesting is that teens’ friends were more likely to seek out support from secure teens, and friends who sought more help were more likely to receive it. Thus, friendships provide a key context for adolescents to practice giving and receiving empathetic support.
Why it matters
Teens who are more empathetic are less aggressive, exhibit less prejudice and are less likely to bully others.
Our research suggests that empathy starts with feeling safe and connected. Building secure relationships, characterized by trust, emotional safety and responsiveness, can give teens a firsthand experience of empathy. With this foundation in place, they can then share that empathy with others.
What’s next
There’s still plenty we don’t know about teens’ empathy. For instance, what equips teens to empathize with individuals from marginalized groups, with new peers or dating partners, or with their own future children?
Learning how to nurture empathy in adolescence is vital for building a more compassionate society.
Anxiety is one of the most common childhood mental disorders. About 7% of children suffer from it at any given time, with nearly 1 in 3 adolescents experiencing it sometime during their teen years.
For an anxious child, seemingly normal activities can be hard. Worried kids have trouble adjusting to school, making friends, and learning. They can feel inhibited, avoiding challenges by running away or retreating into themselves. While parents may feel desperate to help, their approaches can backfire. For example, trying to talk kids out of their feelings or keep them away from anxiety-producing situations may inadvertently make the anxiety worse.
To help anxious kids, clinicians have developed science-based treatments, like cognitive-behavioral therapy, to alleviate symptoms. But the treatments can be cumbersome and expensive, and they don’t always work. Anxiety in kids as young as preschool-aged can be a sign of future trouble—a precursor to later disorders, like social anxiety, phobias, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. But less is known about how to stop anxiety in its tracks at very young ages, when kids may not even have the cognitive capacity to benefit from the treatment.
What if very young kids could be inoculated against anxiety somehow, sparing them from a future of worry and inhibition? A new line of research conducted by Kate Fitzgerald, professor of Psychiatry and Obstetrics at the University of Michigan, suggests this may be possible.
Fitzgerald has been studying very young children with anxiety symptoms and making important discoveries about the brain markers for childhood anxiety. Building on this work, she and her team have created a training program for young children aimed at increasing their cognitive capacities, helping to lessen their anxiety—both immediately and, possibly, in the future.
“We hope our work will show that childhood anxiety is not inevitable, but might be prevented with the right intervention,” says Fitzgerald. “So far, it’s looking promising.”
The neuroscience of anxiety
When we face challenging or scary situations in life, our brains naturally go into action. The amygdala sends out neurochemicals (like adrenaline) to make our hearts pound and prepare our bodies to “fight-flight, or freeze” in case of danger. At the same time, the frontal lobes engage our cognition to assess the situation, draw from past experience, and problem-solve to come up with an appropriate response. In healthy people, these dual systems work in tandem—one putting on the gas and the other applying the brakes—depending on what’s needed.
In the context of this process, a little bit of anxiety can have a positive side—like when it motivates us to practice hard to master a piano piece or study for a test. But, in anxious people, that gas pedal goes to the metal every time, making them want to run or flee challenge. It can be debilitating and exhausting, too, as they often have to exert a lot of effortful control just to get through. Facing stressful situations while tamping down that fear response is key to overcoming anxiety—in adults as well as older kids.
But in young kids, Fitzgerald and her team are discovering, the brain may respond a little differently. For example, four to seven-year-olds have a higher-than-normal startle response in “neutral situations”—where nothing threatening is happening—but have a normal startle response in scary situations that any child might react to. That suggests that they have more to overcome when facing everyday challenges, like going to school or meeting new people.
Her team has also discovered that a part of the brain that responds when people make a mistake—the error-related negativity (or ERN)—is weaker in anxious five to seven-year-olds than in worried older children and adults. That’s likely because young kids don’t have well-developed cognitive capacities that could help them understand that errors happen, aren’t scary, and can often be fixed. Without more cognitive control, their startle response wins out, making them anxious, says Fitzgerald.
A young child with low cognitive control is also more likely to develop anxiety later on in childhood, while one with a higher capacity will be more resilient to stress. Raising cognitive control (which can be measured by the ERN) could both treat anxiety in young children and potentially prevent it from becoming worse over time.
“If we could just help kids gain some cognitive control when they are anxious, it could really make a difference in how they deal with stressful situations,” says Fitzgerald. “We just need to empower them.”
Preventing harmful anxiety
To test this idea, Fitzgerald and her colleagues conducted a pilot study (as yet unpublished) with anxious four to seven-year-olds. The children came to a “camp” the researchers designed called Kid Power for four half-day sessions over two weeks. At the camp, children played fun, ordinary childhood games, like “Simon Says” and “Red Light/Green Light,” that help strengthen cognitive control.
Counselors at the camp gradually increased the challenge within the games to help kids master the skills needed to do well—like being flexible, using their working memory, and inhibiting undesirable responses (like moving when they’re supposed to freeze). They also enjoyed the company of other kids, with whom they brainstormed ways to improve their performance. And parents participated at the end of each session, learning the games from their kids so they could practice playing together at home.
To see the effects this training had on the kids’ brains and behavior, Fitzgerald and her colleagues measured their startle response and ERN before they attended the Kid Power camp and four to six weeks after. To do that, they had kids play computer games that required cognitive control while wearing special monitors that could capture their startle and ERN responses when they made mistakes. Additionally, the researchers gathered information from the parents and the kids themselves about anxiety symptoms before and after the camp.
After analyzing the data, the team found that the children’s ERNs increased (signifying greater cognitive control), while their startle responses went down—a pattern associated with less anxiety at that age.
“The brain signal that related to detecting an error actually increased, but in a good way,” said Fitzgerald. “Kids were getting better at doing hard things, stopping instinctual responding, including the fear response.”
This mirrored the children’s (and their parents’) own assessments. They reported fewer anxiety symptoms, including fear and avoiding challenging situations, after the training—something Fitzgerald found particularly rewarding.
“It’s exciting to link the brain to behavior, but what’s even more rewarding is the individual children we’ve seen go through the program who are experiencing fewer anxiety symptoms,” she says.
For example, one parent reported that her daughter, who’d had symptoms of the obsessive-compulsive disorder prior to attending the Kid Power camp, had made a noticeable improvement, even while the camp was still going on.
“She didn’t want to leave while she was here, and she was in a better mood during the week in between—a little less rigid and able to experience more joy,” the parent wrote in an evaluation.
Fitzgerald recalls another five-year-old camper who’d been very afraid of making mistakes in his kindergarten class, which led to bouts of crying and other disruptive behaviors, requiring daily calls home. After attending the camp, though, and learning how to calm anxiety, everything changed.
“After a week of playing those games that were part of the intervention, those calls from home stopped,” says Fitzgerald. “His mom was impressed because earlier counseling with a trained therapist had not led to improvement. Only after Kid Power did he successfully adjust to kindergarten and begin to enjoy it.”
With encouraging results from this pilot study, Fitzgerald applied for and received a $3 million National Institutes of Health grant to expand the Kid Power program and conduct further research. She hopes future studies will help her nail down the key ingredient in the program that led to reduced anxiety and, potentially, find a way to tailor treatment to individual children—some of whom may need a stronger dose of the training or slightly different activities to improve, she says.
If her initial findings hold, her work could have broad implications, providing a template that others can follow for treating and preventing childhood anxiety disorders in the future.
“Interventions are within reach,” she says. “As we work to understand the science behind anxiety in young minds, we can use that science to develop treatments that are more effective.”
This article was originally published by AIM Youth Mental Health, a non-profit dedicated to finding and funding promising youth mental health research that can identify solutions to make a difference in young people’s lives today, which contributed to funding Kate Fitzgerald’s research. Read the original article.
Jill Suttie, Psy.D., is Greater Good’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good.
