The conspiracy theorist looks for centralized conspiracies to explain societal level events. But for Covid it was abundantly clear that vast swathes of the public at all levels aggressively pushed for the draconian interventions (such as wearing masks in their cars alone), making it difficult for a conspiracy theorist.
Every example you give except the 2018 vaccine thing is EXACTLY what is expected from collective hysteria. And is ONLY possible via collective hysteria.
On beating a dead horse, this IS the most important issue. My research at FreeX IS this. You misunderstand this, and you misunderstand all genocides, democides, and mass movements generally.
You seem to like to beat this dead horse. Everyone would love to believe that this was just mass hysteria but it wasn't. Unfortunately, mass hysteria just doesn't align with the facts. The media was coordinated to have one voice. Look at their total repudiation of hydroxychloroquine even though there was a paper in 2005 that showed chloroquine to be a potent inhibitor of SARS-1. No outlet pointed to that paper nor did Dr. Fauci or the experts who should have been well aware. Hysteria was also instilled into the population by the fear campaign launched by the media.
Then there were all the incentives such as hospitals getting money to put people on ventilators. These policies didn't just arise from mass hysteria. Also note that if it were merely hysteria you would see messaging that might actually be of use such as government often trying to calm the population down. When anyone tried to do so such as the GBD, they and their ideas were smeared. Also the campaign of fear used half-truths and lies such as pretending everyone was equally at risk which isn't explained by hysteria. Also note the fear campaign tried to create a sense of solidarity such as messaging that we're all in this together which actually isn't from a source of hysteria. Also, vaccine passports were in the works since at least 2018 with even a timeline of rollout for the EU which again would not be explained by mass hysteria.
Sorry but mass hysteria only gets you so far. Think of Jonestown. Many were true believers but there were some that would never take their own lives for their cult and so a conspiracy was in place to have them killed.
I agree that groupthink sheep are the biggest and worst problem; they enable any opportunist tyrants who come along. Agreed that they don't care enough about civil liberties. ("If ... If ... we didn't love freedom enough . . ." Solzhenitsyn
On the other hand, it is hard not to acknowledge international coordination, what with every western leader from Castro Jr to Jacinda saying "Build back better" in unison, along with simultaneous adoption of badly misapplied PCR "tests," masks and lockdowns. Then simultaneous adoption of successive COVID vaccines. It is really hard not to conceive of a centrally planned mastermind, and I think his name is likely Schwab and/or Gates.
"Conspiracy theories" gain credibility among people who are students of history, students of psychology, students of propaganda when they know that mass formations can be provoked by a handful of people in powerful positions, knowing the laws of chance favor a series of events will unfold as professionals trained in manipulation and coercion of the masses have set up, have prepared the terrain. As surely as pushing a single domino against others arranged in a pattern will fall down in a mostly predictable pattern.
At which point the only way to prevent a predetermined outcome that handful of people desire is an intervention that breaks up the pattern the dominoes are lined up in, by removal of a piece before it knocks the next one down.
The handful of people in powerful positions have known the "science" of provoking mass formations for desired effect for nearly a century. It is the same "science" that Goebbels studied. He's even referenced in this piece written in 1935. We were supposed to learn from history lest we be doomed to repeat it. The handful of people in powerful positions learned from it - wanting to repeat it, but on a bigger scale, without interference from free people, individualists, free thinkers and free speakers capable of removing a domino before it knocks the next one down, as happened in WWII. They know this history, Mark. Yet they do it anyways.
Which makes them evil. An evil conspiracy does lie at its heart. Which takes advantage of known human psychology. Knowing weak men (and women) in positions of power beneath them will unwittingly or opportunistically fall into line, ensuring the prepared pattern remains unbroken. The laws of chance calculated in their favor. Only provoking conflict when the battle is to their advantage. They believed 2020 to be the moment in history they had the advantage.
"A strictly psychological distinction must be drawn, therefore, between the propagandist who consciously and deliberately seeks to disseminate material in his own behalf or in the interest of a client, and the propagandist who unwittingly spreads a particular doctrine. Psychologically, the former intends to accomplish what he does or does not accomplish, and the latter is generally motivated by factors that have no direct connection with what he is doing. Intentional and unintentional propagandists occupy positions in society which possess different degrees of prestige, but both of them employ very similar techniques."
"Modern vehicles of communication offer the propagandist very efficient avenues of approach to large numbers of individuals. The intentional propagandist consequently selects with great care the billboard, the magazine, the radio program, or the hall as his psychological megaphone, and the unintentional propagandist ex officio seems to have in his possession the principal organs of public opinion."
"Finally, the propagandist is acquainted with the laws of chance; he knows that if he repeats his stimuli sufficiently often, eventually more and more people will begin to notice his existence. Perceiving a situation may be quite different from reacting to it in a prescribed fashion; but perception remains the first step in the process."
"It is also possible to carry on an extensive campaign, only in the course of which are people given an opportunity to perceive the propaganda as propaganda. In this instance, first indirect and then direct suggestions are given. The latter, moreover, must be added at a crucial moment after the psychological atmosphere has been carefully prepared.
The success of a suggestion depends upon the arousal of attitudes or beliefs which people already possess. If these attitudes are momentarily active, then they may be exploited by the wide-awake propagandist. This is what is meant by swimming with the tide, or, in Propaganda Minister Goebbels' terminology, "seeing with the eyes of the masses." Those attitudes which play a significant role in the life of the personality can be tapped quite readily, and the new integration that emerges as a result of the suggestion may be very influential. To know which attitudes are active and which are central requires a combination of psychological intuition and an insight into the social structure of a culture in which many of these attitudes have their genesis. It is also important to vary the type of appeal, since the reasons which induce people to react in specified fashion never remain constant.
And yet there are many individuals who are not potential "victims" of certain kinds of propaganda, since their mental organization may be hostile to the very ideas which these particular changes involve. To capture them, the propagandist must resort to one of two methods of counter-propaganda. In the first place, he may ignore the hostility (and pray that it remain latent) and instead employ positive suggestion in an effort to build up favorable attitudes. Naturally these attitudes in turn are constructed on the basis of other attitudes that are still more distant from the propagandist's goal. A second method of counterpropaganda makes use of negative suggestion; the propagandist tries ruthlessly to break down attitudes that are unfriendly to him, so that they will no longer inhibit people from joining his cause. Positive suggestion must supplement negative suggestion, inasmuch as the destruction of one type of attitude implies the substitution of a different type.
DEVICES OF THE PROPAGANDIST
Perception and suggestion, however, by no means complete the picture of how propaganda operates. For the propagandist is dealing with a number of people whose ways of life are both varied and unique. He can never be absolutely certain that a given stimulus will bring about the same response in every single individual. There remains a sphere of unpredictability which he cannot completely control. As a realistic man of affairs, he must be content with percentages and not seek perfect scores. Any person living in society is stimulated constantly, and, since propaganda is often extended in time, the propagandist may see his efforts destroyed by a rival before his own ends have been attained. It is essential, therefore, for him to reduce the sphere of unpredictability as far as possible by means of a number of subtle devices."
"The propagandist wants conflict only when the battle will be to his advantage. More often than not he will be afraid to present, or his training in the mores will prevent him from transmitting, what might be considered true on the basis of some other criterion. Such truth would be damaging. To avoid this possibility, he may shrewdly or unconsciously limit his stimulus-situation by suppressing, distorting, or fabricating the possible sources of disturbance. Any one or all of these methods have shocked too many pious observers who still have the mistaken notion that everything about any situation can, should, and will be presented.
When the propagandist has changed people psychologically, he often wants to retain their patronage. To do this, he must strengthen the new attitudes which have emerged within these patrons. Again he repeats his stimulus situation, this time not to make more people perceive his message, but to have those who have perceived it remain static in at least one respect. Again he varies the situation, not to gain the support of the unconverted, but to furnish additional intellectual and emotional reasons for the beliefs that have now come to exist. And again he seeks to induce new attitudes from older ones, not to draw in the tardy or the stubborn, but to fortify the faithful. It is clear, then, that repetition, variation, and the construction of new attitudes have simultaneously both a perceptual and a reenforcing function.
Like Sir Basil Zaharoff, propagandists, especially the unintentional ones, are fond of children. For children are plastic, and the propaganda which is sprayed upon them at an early age is likely to last. Similarly any propagandist is eager to be the first force to reach people, since an initial attitude is relatively stable. The principle of primacy, consequently, is one of the surest ways of coping with the sphere of unpredictability.
It must not be thought, however, that the propagandist merely wants to change people's attitudes; on the contrary-and especially in the long run -he is anxious to have these attitudes lead to action. Moral support is not substantial enough; it must bring about overt behavior. The propagandist is seldom shy; without a blush he indicates the paths of action along which people who feel as he has made them feel can most satisfactorily release "their" feelings."
"Thus the psychologist has practical obligations in his study of propaganda. Though it is to the interest of better understanding that he should not at once declare all propaganda bad, and that he should not glibly identify its badness with the directness or the indirectness of its appeal, he is not thereby freed from all duty to give advice regarding the state of public opinion and the mechanisms that ought to be used in its control. The psychologist who observes fundamentally similar psychological mechanisms in the psychotic and the sane, still has a responsibility to fight mental disease.
The psychologist, of course, even though much of the obvious unintentional propaganda has escaped him, has done much more in the way of furnishing disinterested descriptions of the process of propaganda than he has in stating the circumstances under which a given type of propaganda should or should not be used. Possibly this timidity is due to his efforts to avoid those popular but superficial judgments about the basic viciousness of propaganda which have been pointed out."
Mass Hysteria doesn't dispense the idea of Conspiracy. Mass Hypnosis is a psychological tool not a replacement for the organized efforts of 2 or more entities to act covertly in order to do something that if done publicly would be considered illegal like top level experts in the government on medicine working with CEOs of large international pharmaceutical companies to produce an expiramental gene therapy marketed as a vaccine and provide government enforced immunity from any harm the drug causes.
Mass Hysteria accou ys for why so many went along, it however does not dismiss the idea that persons in high positions worked covertly to promote the thing.
EX: masking wasn't a conspiracy to take over the nation's governments but it was a conspiracy to psychologically reinforce the belief that covid was worse than it teuly was so as to get as much of the public as possible to go along with restrictions and mandates and it worked, at least partly. Covid simply wasn't as lethal as they needed
Every example you give except the 2018 vaccine thing is EXACTLY what is expected from collective hysteria. And is ONLY possible via collective hysteria.
On beating a dead horse, this IS the most important issue. My research at FreeX IS this. You misunderstand this, and you misunderstand all genocides, democides, and mass movements generally.
You seem to like to beat this dead horse. Everyone would love to believe that this was just mass hysteria but it wasn't. Unfortunately, mass hysteria just doesn't align with the facts. The media was coordinated to have one voice. Look at their total repudiation of hydroxychloroquine even though there was a paper in 2005 that showed chloroquine to be a potent inhibitor of SARS-1. No outlet pointed to that paper nor did Dr. Fauci or the experts who should have been well aware. Hysteria was also instilled into the population by the fear campaign launched by the media.
Then there were all the incentives such as hospitals getting money to put people on ventilators. These policies didn't just arise from mass hysteria. Also note that if it were merely hysteria you would see messaging that might actually be of use such as government often trying to calm the population down. When anyone tried to do so such as the GBD, they and their ideas were smeared. Also the campaign of fear used half-truths and lies such as pretending everyone was equally at risk which isn't explained by hysteria. Also note the fear campaign tried to create a sense of solidarity such as messaging that we're all in this together which actually isn't from a source of hysteria. Also, vaccine passports were in the works since at least 2018 with even a timeline of rollout for the EU which again would not be explained by mass hysteria.
Sorry but mass hysteria only gets you so far. Think of Jonestown. Many were true believers but there were some that would never take their own lives for their cult and so a conspiracy was in place to have them killed.
I agree that groupthink sheep are the biggest and worst problem; they enable any opportunist tyrants who come along. Agreed that they don't care enough about civil liberties. ("If ... If ... we didn't love freedom enough . . ." Solzhenitsyn
On the other hand, it is hard not to acknowledge international coordination, what with every western leader from Castro Jr to Jacinda saying "Build back better" in unison, along with simultaneous adoption of badly misapplied PCR "tests," masks and lockdowns. Then simultaneous adoption of successive COVID vaccines. It is really hard not to conceive of a centrally planned mastermind, and I think his name is likely Schwab and/or Gates.
"Conspiracy theories" gain credibility among people who are students of history, students of psychology, students of propaganda when they know that mass formations can be provoked by a handful of people in powerful positions, knowing the laws of chance favor a series of events will unfold as professionals trained in manipulation and coercion of the masses have set up, have prepared the terrain. As surely as pushing a single domino against others arranged in a pattern will fall down in a mostly predictable pattern.
At which point the only way to prevent a predetermined outcome that handful of people desire is an intervention that breaks up the pattern the dominoes are lined up in, by removal of a piece before it knocks the next one down.
The handful of people in powerful positions have known the "science" of provoking mass formations for desired effect for nearly a century. It is the same "science" that Goebbels studied. He's even referenced in this piece written in 1935. We were supposed to learn from history lest we be doomed to repeat it. The handful of people in powerful positions learned from it - wanting to repeat it, but on a bigger scale, without interference from free people, individualists, free thinkers and free speakers capable of removing a domino before it knocks the next one down, as happened in WWII. They know this history, Mark. Yet they do it anyways.
Which makes them evil. An evil conspiracy does lie at its heart. Which takes advantage of known human psychology. Knowing weak men (and women) in positions of power beneath them will unwittingly or opportunistically fall into line, ensuring the prepared pattern remains unbroken. The laws of chance calculated in their favor. Only provoking conflict when the battle is to their advantage. They believed 2020 to be the moment in history they had the advantage.
American Academy of Political and Social Science
Psychology and Propaganda, May, 1935
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1020283
"A strictly psychological distinction must be drawn, therefore, between the propagandist who consciously and deliberately seeks to disseminate material in his own behalf or in the interest of a client, and the propagandist who unwittingly spreads a particular doctrine. Psychologically, the former intends to accomplish what he does or does not accomplish, and the latter is generally motivated by factors that have no direct connection with what he is doing. Intentional and unintentional propagandists occupy positions in society which possess different degrees of prestige, but both of them employ very similar techniques."
"Modern vehicles of communication offer the propagandist very efficient avenues of approach to large numbers of individuals. The intentional propagandist consequently selects with great care the billboard, the magazine, the radio program, or the hall as his psychological megaphone, and the unintentional propagandist ex officio seems to have in his possession the principal organs of public opinion."
"Finally, the propagandist is acquainted with the laws of chance; he knows that if he repeats his stimuli sufficiently often, eventually more and more people will begin to notice his existence. Perceiving a situation may be quite different from reacting to it in a prescribed fashion; but perception remains the first step in the process."
"It is also possible to carry on an extensive campaign, only in the course of which are people given an opportunity to perceive the propaganda as propaganda. In this instance, first indirect and then direct suggestions are given. The latter, moreover, must be added at a crucial moment after the psychological atmosphere has been carefully prepared.
The success of a suggestion depends upon the arousal of attitudes or beliefs which people already possess. If these attitudes are momentarily active, then they may be exploited by the wide-awake propagandist. This is what is meant by swimming with the tide, or, in Propaganda Minister Goebbels' terminology, "seeing with the eyes of the masses." Those attitudes which play a significant role in the life of the personality can be tapped quite readily, and the new integration that emerges as a result of the suggestion may be very influential. To know which attitudes are active and which are central requires a combination of psychological intuition and an insight into the social structure of a culture in which many of these attitudes have their genesis. It is also important to vary the type of appeal, since the reasons which induce people to react in specified fashion never remain constant.
And yet there are many individuals who are not potential "victims" of certain kinds of propaganda, since their mental organization may be hostile to the very ideas which these particular changes involve. To capture them, the propagandist must resort to one of two methods of counter-propaganda. In the first place, he may ignore the hostility (and pray that it remain latent) and instead employ positive suggestion in an effort to build up favorable attitudes. Naturally these attitudes in turn are constructed on the basis of other attitudes that are still more distant from the propagandist's goal. A second method of counterpropaganda makes use of negative suggestion; the propagandist tries ruthlessly to break down attitudes that are unfriendly to him, so that they will no longer inhibit people from joining his cause. Positive suggestion must supplement negative suggestion, inasmuch as the destruction of one type of attitude implies the substitution of a different type.
DEVICES OF THE PROPAGANDIST
Perception and suggestion, however, by no means complete the picture of how propaganda operates. For the propagandist is dealing with a number of people whose ways of life are both varied and unique. He can never be absolutely certain that a given stimulus will bring about the same response in every single individual. There remains a sphere of unpredictability which he cannot completely control. As a realistic man of affairs, he must be content with percentages and not seek perfect scores. Any person living in society is stimulated constantly, and, since propaganda is often extended in time, the propagandist may see his efforts destroyed by a rival before his own ends have been attained. It is essential, therefore, for him to reduce the sphere of unpredictability as far as possible by means of a number of subtle devices."
"The propagandist wants conflict only when the battle will be to his advantage. More often than not he will be afraid to present, or his training in the mores will prevent him from transmitting, what might be considered true on the basis of some other criterion. Such truth would be damaging. To avoid this possibility, he may shrewdly or unconsciously limit his stimulus-situation by suppressing, distorting, or fabricating the possible sources of disturbance. Any one or all of these methods have shocked too many pious observers who still have the mistaken notion that everything about any situation can, should, and will be presented.
When the propagandist has changed people psychologically, he often wants to retain their patronage. To do this, he must strengthen the new attitudes which have emerged within these patrons. Again he repeats his stimulus situation, this time not to make more people perceive his message, but to have those who have perceived it remain static in at least one respect. Again he varies the situation, not to gain the support of the unconverted, but to furnish additional intellectual and emotional reasons for the beliefs that have now come to exist. And again he seeks to induce new attitudes from older ones, not to draw in the tardy or the stubborn, but to fortify the faithful. It is clear, then, that repetition, variation, and the construction of new attitudes have simultaneously both a perceptual and a reenforcing function.
Like Sir Basil Zaharoff, propagandists, especially the unintentional ones, are fond of children. For children are plastic, and the propaganda which is sprayed upon them at an early age is likely to last. Similarly any propagandist is eager to be the first force to reach people, since an initial attitude is relatively stable. The principle of primacy, consequently, is one of the surest ways of coping with the sphere of unpredictability.
It must not be thought, however, that the propagandist merely wants to change people's attitudes; on the contrary-and especially in the long run -he is anxious to have these attitudes lead to action. Moral support is not substantial enough; it must bring about overt behavior. The propagandist is seldom shy; without a blush he indicates the paths of action along which people who feel as he has made them feel can most satisfactorily release "their" feelings."
"Thus the psychologist has practical obligations in his study of propaganda. Though it is to the interest of better understanding that he should not at once declare all propaganda bad, and that he should not glibly identify its badness with the directness or the indirectness of its appeal, he is not thereby freed from all duty to give advice regarding the state of public opinion and the mechanisms that ought to be used in its control. The psychologist who observes fundamentally similar psychological mechanisms in the psychotic and the sane, still has a responsibility to fight mental disease.
The psychologist, of course, even though much of the obvious unintentional propaganda has escaped him, has done much more in the way of furnishing disinterested descriptions of the process of propaganda than he has in stating the circumstances under which a given type of propaganda should or should not be used. Possibly this timidity is due to his efforts to avoid those popular but superficial judgments about the basic viciousness of propaganda which have been pointed out."
(1/2)
Mass Hysteria doesn't dispense the idea of Conspiracy. Mass Hypnosis is a psychological tool not a replacement for the organized efforts of 2 or more entities to act covertly in order to do something that if done publicly would be considered illegal like top level experts in the government on medicine working with CEOs of large international pharmaceutical companies to produce an expiramental gene therapy marketed as a vaccine and provide government enforced immunity from any harm the drug causes.
Mass Hysteria accou ys for why so many went along, it however does not dismiss the idea that persons in high positions worked covertly to promote the thing.
EX: masking wasn't a conspiracy to take over the nation's governments but it was a conspiracy to psychologically reinforce the belief that covid was worse than it teuly was so as to get as much of the public as possible to go along with restrictions and mandates and it worked, at least partly. Covid simply wasn't as lethal as they needed