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.
Incorrect. Mass hysteria does not lead many countries to adopt the same policy of putting the elderly patients into nursing homes or to have various news outlets around the world basically parrot the same untruths. It doesn't lead to suddenly counting deaths with an illness as from the illness around the world. There was definitely coordination on a global scale to have similar policies put in place such as lockdowns, testing etc. That does not arise from mass hysteria.
I think your argument about whether the mass hysteria was purposely created is a non-starter. I don't think anyone is even arguing whether the people who set out a global coordination effort to drum up enough fear in the population did so in order to form mass hysteria. The goal seemed solely to drum up enough fear that people would comply. However, it doesn't seem to be the first time that propaganda was used to instill mass formation. From the article below which is worth reading as I expect many people expect mass formation occurred in much the same way that Matthias Desmet describes:
I describe that mass-formation can emerge in a more or less spontaneous way (as happened in the first stages of Nazism in Germany) or that it can be artificially provoked through indoctrination and propaganda (as in the former Soviet Union).
Another point I should add is that you seem to focus on mass hysteria as the cause of the covid crisis. I expect mass hysteria was induced by the measures taken (whether that was the intention or not is in my view beside the point).
However, mass hysteria was not the driver of the measures. For instance, here's a video describing where the idea of the Chinese lockdowns came from. There was a panel which included members from CEPI and others including the CEO of Moderna, Bancel. The recommendation offered were based on a 2006 US Homeland Security playbook created for the 2006 H5N1 avian flu which likely arose from even earlier roots, which was based on a 1998 Pentagon strategy paper.
While mass hysteria plays a role in perpetuating the covid insanity, the roots of the insanity are actually based on architects in the background guiding the response the world took.
Had there not been collective hysteria, the many subsequent evils that occurred would not have been possible.
And, had it just been collective hysteria and there not have been many groups and powers without any respect for civil liberties, it might not have led to an onslaught of authoritarianism.
My goal is not to study the particular evils that subsequently happened in this case, but to understand the almost overnight avalanche across minds that opens up thousands of vacuums, and empowers authoritarianism of many kinds. The “subsequent” stuff isn’t the ingredients that will help us with the general case.
You're assuming that the evils were subsequent to the mass hysteria but check the above video and article from The Conservative Woman the links the lockdowns China adopted to the advice of Westerners such as ones working for CEPI which is partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The point is that before there even was mass hysteria, lockdowns were pushed as the solution that everyone should adopt (much as vaccines had been touted from the very start). The actual hysteria was drummed up by the media which served as a propaganda vehicle to promote these interventions. I don't think mass hysteria is anywhere near as difficult to drum up with the influence of the media. One example you might look into is the fear that there were satanic rituals taking place in daycare centers in the 80's. This idea was even promoted by shows such as Oprah? (could be mistaken but it was a popular show). Think about people believing that sacrifices etc would be happening at the local daycare between the hours of 9-12. It's absurd and no one would have even considered it possible if not for the media perpetuating the idea. which didn't originate from them but likely from some particular story. The one talking point repeated ad nauseum was that children never lie and this "fact" was trotted out again and again. The hysteria fell apart when the idea became too absurd to buy such as children claiming that giraffes and elephants were being sacrificed. In other words, if you're looking for how this happened, I'd say you need not look further than the media. Too many put blind faith in the news.
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.
So-called "conspiracy theorists" were far more correct regarding their predictions back in spring of 2020 than any of the "experts".
As many of them will tell you, it's because the plans were out there for years from vaccine passports to lockdowns to requiring mass media to adopt similar messaging and likely promoting simple slogans during a pandemic. Somehow though we're supposed to believe that something that arose organically such as mass hysteria coalesced by change to bring their long-term ideas/investments to fruition. That seems a far bigger stretch than the same group who came up with these ideas in the first place helping to launch a campaign of fear triggering mass hysteria intentionally or not.
There were so many dodgy problems such as the extremely high cycle thresholds. In fact, if you were to try to do the worst possible response, you'd come up with something similar to the covid response. Hysteria would not explain that every misstep always seemed to go in the same direction such as locking people indoors away from vitamin D, not allowing elderly to see their families which likely sapped their will to live, denying patients in hospitals anyone in the room to advocate for them, having a hit piece put out about HCQ etc. I really could go on. Hysterical responses would be chaotic not so unidirectional.
I disagree as fear of a pandemic was not initially triggered otherwise we wouldn't have seen massive crowds shopping for supplies to get through lockdowns. People were worried about toilet paper not the virus.
I personally know some who had no fear at the start of lockdowns even expecting to be able to reschedule a trip that was supposed to take place at the end of the month - remember it was 15 days or three weeks to flatten the curve not the long months it turned out to be - but then by end of May these same people were completely unhinged and would not have considered travel.
Collective hysterias seem to be triggered by media all the time.
Remember when Hawai'i had that missile scare in 2019 or so and people panicked for 15 hours? Collective hysteria doesn't seem frankly all that uncommon. I'd think it would be readily induced when you create a new situation people have never been in before (cordoned off playgrounds, 5 mile restrictions, all non-essential businesses shuttered, arrows pointing people which way to shop, required hand sanitizer etc. like in some dystopian novel) and then you have media propagandize 24/7 fear porn which people tune into just to find out when some restrictions might ease. Perfect situation for massive hysteria to form but this was not before lockdowns but during the lockdown period.
There were shady people in top positions who knew that panic kills but kept mashing the panic gas pedal while publicly claiming it was for the greater good. That is the conspiracy. Yes, many people also acted as un- or partially-witting enablers. But mass panic was whipped for ulterior reasons.
Agreed. Not even sure that mass panic was intentional or not and I may be convinced either way but certainly the mass panic of the virus was created by the media during lockdowns. Before lockdowns, people were willing to navigate crowds of shoppers just to hoard up on toilet paper.
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.
No question there was LOADS of centrally organized and coordinated activity. I have been fighting it since early March 2020. My point is whether the INITIATION of the mass hysteria was via a centrally organized plan. Totally different issue. The answer is no. And THIS is crucial for grasping how to stop these events in the future.
"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."
The AAPSS piece excerpted above is one of many insightful research resources found in the same Annals volume. Much suggested reading in its table of contents.
Pro Tip: I use these portals to get behind walls academic institutions place around taxpayer-funded research. If one doesn't work I try another. Just copy and paste a URL, DOI, PMID or search string into the lookup field:
I've not read it yet, but have read much of his writings, find them very insightful. But his insights are not new. I recently read several chapters in another book written long ago (1951), "The Origins of Totalitarianism."
About how Naziism and Stalinism came about. I've read Chapters 10 & 11 so far, out of 554-pages. Chapter 9 is next up for me.
I excerpted large parts of Origins on my latest Freedom Fox Substack that highlight many parallels to what's happening in the world around us today that allowed for a Mass Formation in the first place, precursor were in place.
And the same exploitation of human psychology through coordinated propaganda and censorship campaigns practiced in the 1930's on Germans and Russians. Goebbels himself was well-versed and studied in the same materials I link to above in the 1935 Annals of the AAPSS; he is often cited in them. When history informs us, when academia and leaders possess this same information that's been known to us, published and accessible for nearly a century, to proceed down the path we are on just out of misfortune and happenstance requires a willing suspension of disbelief. There assuredly is a small group of people atop this ongoing human catastrophe, a "conspiracy" that is fully aware of what the consequences will likely be for each domino they push over in society. They know this information I present. And do it anyways. They are breaking eggs - to make an omelet.
You give way too much credit to those who supposedly know what they’re doing. Our understanding of these sorts of things is still in its infancy. Nearly all psychology is.
I counter that the 1930's these sorts of things were still in their infancy. A century later they've grown into their teens. Which is why we are going to prevail...after a great deal of loss, hardship and destruction to overcome - great danger is afoot, these are reckless teenagers who haven't learned their limits and are full of themselves without regard for others. Playing with very dangerous weapons without the requisite discipline.
We shall overcome. But we must know that these same reckless teenagers are trying to reset the rules of engagement for deploying weaponized psychology. They've thrown out all of the rules and ethics of propaganda, manipulation, coercive behavioral psychology that was established and taught to practitioners after the horrors and abuses it led to under Naziism and Stalinism. Boundaries tossed aside, obliterated by reckless teens who thought they knew better, imagined themselves capable of using it, undisciplined, unchastened by life experience and true empathy for their fellow man. Rather, they are full of contempt for their fellow man. In their arrogance these same reckless teenagers who blew right through the ethical practices of psychological manipulation and behaviorism that propaganda elicits have established a new, global behavioral science professional association to (re)define the ethics of the field. The Global Association of Applied Behavioral Scientists was established in September, 2020, as the field's pandemic activities began to come under scrutiny. How better to legitimize abusive behaviorism than to become the policing agency of the field? Designate themselves the foxes guarding the henhouse.
The names you find below you'll find in key roles advising governments, health agencies, corporations, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, etc on behavioral science-based nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI) for the pandemic. You'll find them advising the same types of entities on agriculture, food shortages, energy shortages, gender, race and equity issues, climate, you name it. These teenagers haven't been humbled, remain arrogantly committed to changing the world into the utopia they believe we all want and share aspirations to create. No matter what the cost. As long as it isn't borne by them. It's a field with practitioners that need a great deal of discipline. Those who are trained in the ethics of it are in the best positions to be the strongest disciplinarians for the present and the future. Hint: It's not these people.
Bravo! Your post offers much insight into how a mass formation may be engineered though I do not know if mass formation was the intent of the architects behind the covid-19 response. Given media censorship of dissenting voices, the repetition of certain phrases, along with other propaganda techniques you highlight, it's obvious that mass hysteria was a side effect at best of the measures rather than the instigator.
There is, however, another force that may have been important in preventing the psychologist from taking sides. Especially during the later eighteenth and the nineteenth century, much was made of the notion that all expression should be free. John Stuart Mill found it difficult to imagine an opinion which was too absurd to be permitted circulation. It was assumed that the truth would always survive the rivalry of falsehood, and that, since we can never be sure of truth or falsehood when we first meet them, it is better that society should tolerate every possible idea. If falsehood is certain ultimately to perish, a check upon freedom of expression merely runs the risk of stifling truth."
"The laissez faire theory of economics seems to be true as long as industry and business are divided into small enough units. At least the harm resulting from the freedom of any single small economic unit is not offensive to many people. Similarly, small voices, as long as they are independent, can speak as they will, with little risk of causing large public evils. But when great corporations arise, which are capable of modifying the rules of the contest to suit themselves, and of building up surpluses to support their own inefficiency, the public begins to be skeptical of the liberal doctrine of noninterference. When it is seen that a few large newspaper chains can turn a peaceful people into rabid warriors, or when a business man with enough money is able to advance questionable medical advice in a manner which others are not financially able to oppose, again the doctrine of freedom comes into question. Nowadays, psychological, like economic, competition is typically one-sided. This is a relatively new situation to psychologists as well as to other men.
In the face of economic, political, social, and spiritual cartels, the literal doctrine of noninterference with speech has plainly broken down. In most countries it has been replaced by the equally one-sided theory that the attitudes and opinions of a people should be under the complete control of governmental officials-that psychological freedom inevitably leads to social disintegration. In Great Britain, Scandinavia, and the United States, the ideal of free expression has not been entirely given up, though the nineteenth-century ideal of complete psychological laissez faire has undergone drastic modification. In the psychological as well as in the economic realm it is seen that freedom is tolerable only within limits."
"Whether one looks upon the psychological problem of modern social life as that of securing complete control over the sources of psychological influence, or whether one accepts the conception that only limiting controls should be exercised to define areas of free expression, there is no longer any possibility of escaping the problem on the ground that when truth and falsehood are turned loose against each other, truth will necessarily triumph. Too much of such "truth" is the dogma of those who have the power to issue decrees. In such a period of restraint, somebody must continually puncture the views that are forced to appear true, and to propose relative and more acceptable alternatives. Caught as we are in this attempt to find new values, we may expect psychologists, as well as other men, increasingly to look beyond the mere techniques of commercial advertising and political publicity, and to carry their analyses forward into the social-psychological consequences of alterations in public beliefs and attitudes."
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.
Incorrect. Mass hysteria does not lead many countries to adopt the same policy of putting the elderly patients into nursing homes or to have various news outlets around the world basically parrot the same untruths. It doesn't lead to suddenly counting deaths with an illness as from the illness around the world. There was definitely coordination on a global scale to have similar policies put in place such as lockdowns, testing etc. That does not arise from mass hysteria.
I think your argument about whether the mass hysteria was purposely created is a non-starter. I don't think anyone is even arguing whether the people who set out a global coordination effort to drum up enough fear in the population did so in order to form mass hysteria. The goal seemed solely to drum up enough fear that people would comply. However, it doesn't seem to be the first time that propaganda was used to instill mass formation. From the article below which is worth reading as I expect many people expect mass formation occurred in much the same way that Matthias Desmet describes:
I describe that mass-formation can emerge in a more or less spontaneous way (as happened in the first stages of Nazism in Germany) or that it can be artificially provoked through indoctrination and propaganda (as in the former Soviet Union).
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/is-mattias-desmet-an-expert-in-mass
Another point I should add is that you seem to focus on mass hysteria as the cause of the covid crisis. I expect mass hysteria was induced by the measures taken (whether that was the intention or not is in my view beside the point).
However, mass hysteria was not the driver of the measures. For instance, here's a video describing where the idea of the Chinese lockdowns came from. There was a panel which included members from CEPI and others including the CEO of Moderna, Bancel. The recommendation offered were based on a 2006 US Homeland Security playbook created for the 2006 H5N1 avian flu which likely arose from even earlier roots, which was based on a 1998 Pentagon strategy paper.
While mass hysteria plays a role in perpetuating the covid insanity, the roots of the insanity are actually based on architects in the background guiding the response the world took.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FPQJD-fQQI
I'll link to the articles the video references in case the video gets removed:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/forget-china-it-was-americas-bio-spooks-who-locked-down-the-west/
https://brownstone.org/articles/how-fanatics-took-over-the-world/
Had there not been collective hysteria, the many subsequent evils that occurred would not have been possible.
And, had it just been collective hysteria and there not have been many groups and powers without any respect for civil liberties, it might not have led to an onslaught of authoritarianism.
My goal is not to study the particular evils that subsequently happened in this case, but to understand the almost overnight avalanche across minds that opens up thousands of vacuums, and empowers authoritarianism of many kinds. The “subsequent” stuff isn’t the ingredients that will help us with the general case.
You're assuming that the evils were subsequent to the mass hysteria but check the above video and article from The Conservative Woman the links the lockdowns China adopted to the advice of Westerners such as ones working for CEPI which is partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The point is that before there even was mass hysteria, lockdowns were pushed as the solution that everyone should adopt (much as vaccines had been touted from the very start). The actual hysteria was drummed up by the media which served as a propaganda vehicle to promote these interventions. I don't think mass hysteria is anywhere near as difficult to drum up with the influence of the media. One example you might look into is the fear that there were satanic rituals taking place in daycare centers in the 80's. This idea was even promoted by shows such as Oprah? (could be mistaken but it was a popular show). Think about people believing that sacrifices etc would be happening at the local daycare between the hours of 9-12. It's absurd and no one would have even considered it possible if not for the media perpetuating the idea. which didn't originate from them but likely from some particular story. The one talking point repeated ad nauseum was that children never lie and this "fact" was trotted out again and again. The hysteria fell apart when the idea became too absurd to buy such as children claiming that giraffes and elephants were being sacrificed. In other words, if you're looking for how this happened, I'd say you need not look further than the media. Too many put blind faith in the news.
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.
Agreed. Is the Mafia not a conspiracy?
Conspiracy theories are not theories about conspiracies. https://youtu.be/izI1H1iidrk
So-called "conspiracy theorists" were far more correct regarding their predictions back in spring of 2020 than any of the "experts".
As many of them will tell you, it's because the plans were out there for years from vaccine passports to lockdowns to requiring mass media to adopt similar messaging and likely promoting simple slogans during a pandemic. Somehow though we're supposed to believe that something that arose organically such as mass hysteria coalesced by change to bring their long-term ideas/investments to fruition. That seems a far bigger stretch than the same group who came up with these ideas in the first place helping to launch a campaign of fear triggering mass hysteria intentionally or not.
When fear of a pandemic triggered a collective hysteria, loads of powerful forces conspired (often openly) to leverage the situation.
That in no way is evidence that these many conspiring forces themselves triggered the collective hysteria.
Where did the crazy PCR threshold of 40 come from? https://nyti.ms/31DJixp
Maybe you remember that the FDA was slow to approve the test at all. Probably, some stodgy scientists knew it was nonsense and were overruled.
There were so many dodgy problems such as the extremely high cycle thresholds. In fact, if you were to try to do the worst possible response, you'd come up with something similar to the covid response. Hysteria would not explain that every misstep always seemed to go in the same direction such as locking people indoors away from vitamin D, not allowing elderly to see their families which likely sapped their will to live, denying patients in hospitals anyone in the room to advocate for them, having a hit piece put out about HCQ etc. I really could go on. Hysterical responses would be chaotic not so unidirectional.
I disagree as fear of a pandemic was not initially triggered otherwise we wouldn't have seen massive crowds shopping for supplies to get through lockdowns. People were worried about toilet paper not the virus.
I personally know some who had no fear at the start of lockdowns even expecting to be able to reschedule a trip that was supposed to take place at the end of the month - remember it was 15 days or three weeks to flatten the curve not the long months it turned out to be - but then by end of May these same people were completely unhinged and would not have considered travel.
Collective hysterias seem to be triggered by media all the time.
Remember when Hawai'i had that missile scare in 2019 or so and people panicked for 15 hours? Collective hysteria doesn't seem frankly all that uncommon. I'd think it would be readily induced when you create a new situation people have never been in before (cordoned off playgrounds, 5 mile restrictions, all non-essential businesses shuttered, arrows pointing people which way to shop, required hand sanitizer etc. like in some dystopian novel) and then you have media propagandize 24/7 fear porn which people tune into just to find out when some restrictions might ease. Perfect situation for massive hysteria to form but this was not before lockdowns but during the lockdown period.
There were shady people in top positions who knew that panic kills but kept mashing the panic gas pedal while publicly claiming it was for the greater good. That is the conspiracy. Yes, many people also acted as un- or partially-witting enablers. But mass panic was whipped for ulterior reasons.
Agreed. Not even sure that mass panic was intentional or not and I may be convinced either way but certainly the mass panic of the virus was created by the media during lockdowns. Before lockdowns, people were willing to navigate crowds of shoppers just to hoard up on toilet paper.
such as mass hysteria coalesced by chance*
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2022/6/rubio-presses-harvard-on-potential-115-million-quid-pro-quo-to-cover-up-china-s-covid-origins
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.
No question there was LOADS of centrally organized and coordinated activity. I have been fighting it since early March 2020. My point is whether the INITIATION of the mass hysteria was via a centrally organized plan. Totally different issue. The answer is no. And THIS is crucial for grasping how to stop these events in the future.
"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."
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The AAPSS piece excerpted above is one of many insightful research resources found in the same Annals volume. Much suggested reading in its table of contents.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/i242784
Pro Tip: I use these portals to get behind walls academic institutions place around taxpayer-funded research. If one doesn't work I try another. Just copy and paste a URL, DOI, PMID or search string into the lookup field:
https://sci-hub.se/
https://sci-hub.st/
https://sci-hub.ru/
Other research sources to gain understanding:
https://www.academia.edu/es/42700978/Introduction_to_Propaganda_War_Crimes_Trials_and_International_Law_From_Speakers_Corner_to_War_Crimes
Mattias Desmet popularized the Mass Formation Theory of the pandemic. Has now published "The Psychology of Totalitarianism."
https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Totalitarianism-Mattias-Desmet/dp/1645021726/
I've not read it yet, but have read much of his writings, find them very insightful. But his insights are not new. I recently read several chapters in another book written long ago (1951), "The Origins of Totalitarianism."
https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/mode/2up
About how Naziism and Stalinism came about. I've read Chapters 10 & 11 so far, out of 554-pages. Chapter 9 is next up for me.
I excerpted large parts of Origins on my latest Freedom Fox Substack that highlight many parallels to what's happening in the world around us today that allowed for a Mass Formation in the first place, precursor were in place.
https://freedomfox.substack.com/p/after-a-totalitarian-speech-like
And the same exploitation of human psychology through coordinated propaganda and censorship campaigns practiced in the 1930's on Germans and Russians. Goebbels himself was well-versed and studied in the same materials I link to above in the 1935 Annals of the AAPSS; he is often cited in them. When history informs us, when academia and leaders possess this same information that's been known to us, published and accessible for nearly a century, to proceed down the path we are on just out of misfortune and happenstance requires a willing suspension of disbelief. There assuredly is a small group of people atop this ongoing human catastrophe, a "conspiracy" that is fully aware of what the consequences will likely be for each domino they push over in society. They know this information I present. And do it anyways. They are breaking eggs - to make an omelet.
https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/
You give way too much credit to those who supposedly know what they’re doing. Our understanding of these sorts of things is still in its infancy. Nearly all psychology is.
I counter that the 1930's these sorts of things were still in their infancy. A century later they've grown into their teens. Which is why we are going to prevail...after a great deal of loss, hardship and destruction to overcome - great danger is afoot, these are reckless teenagers who haven't learned their limits and are full of themselves without regard for others. Playing with very dangerous weapons without the requisite discipline.
We shall overcome. But we must know that these same reckless teenagers are trying to reset the rules of engagement for deploying weaponized psychology. They've thrown out all of the rules and ethics of propaganda, manipulation, coercive behavioral psychology that was established and taught to practitioners after the horrors and abuses it led to under Naziism and Stalinism. Boundaries tossed aside, obliterated by reckless teens who thought they knew better, imagined themselves capable of using it, undisciplined, unchastened by life experience and true empathy for their fellow man. Rather, they are full of contempt for their fellow man. In their arrogance these same reckless teenagers who blew right through the ethical practices of psychological manipulation and behaviorism that propaganda elicits have established a new, global behavioral science professional association to (re)define the ethics of the field. The Global Association of Applied Behavioral Scientists was established in September, 2020, as the field's pandemic activities began to come under scrutiny. How better to legitimize abusive behaviorism than to become the policing agency of the field? Designate themselves the foxes guarding the henhouse.
https://gaabs.org/
The names you find below you'll find in key roles advising governments, health agencies, corporations, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, etc on behavioral science-based nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI) for the pandemic. You'll find them advising the same types of entities on agriculture, food shortages, energy shortages, gender, race and equity issues, climate, you name it. These teenagers haven't been humbled, remain arrogantly committed to changing the world into the utopia they believe we all want and share aspirations to create. No matter what the cost. As long as it isn't borne by them. It's a field with practitioners that need a great deal of discipline. Those who are trained in the ethics of it are in the best positions to be the strongest disciplinarians for the present and the future. Hint: It's not these people.
https://gaabs.org/team/
Bravo! Your post offers much insight into how a mass formation may be engineered though I do not know if mass formation was the intent of the architects behind the covid-19 response. Given media censorship of dissenting voices, the repetition of certain phrases, along with other propaganda techniques you highlight, it's obvious that mass hysteria was a side effect at best of the measures rather than the instigator.
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"FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
There is, however, another force that may have been important in preventing the psychologist from taking sides. Especially during the later eighteenth and the nineteenth century, much was made of the notion that all expression should be free. John Stuart Mill found it difficult to imagine an opinion which was too absurd to be permitted circulation. It was assumed that the truth would always survive the rivalry of falsehood, and that, since we can never be sure of truth or falsehood when we first meet them, it is better that society should tolerate every possible idea. If falsehood is certain ultimately to perish, a check upon freedom of expression merely runs the risk of stifling truth."
"The laissez faire theory of economics seems to be true as long as industry and business are divided into small enough units. At least the harm resulting from the freedom of any single small economic unit is not offensive to many people. Similarly, small voices, as long as they are independent, can speak as they will, with little risk of causing large public evils. But when great corporations arise, which are capable of modifying the rules of the contest to suit themselves, and of building up surpluses to support their own inefficiency, the public begins to be skeptical of the liberal doctrine of noninterference. When it is seen that a few large newspaper chains can turn a peaceful people into rabid warriors, or when a business man with enough money is able to advance questionable medical advice in a manner which others are not financially able to oppose, again the doctrine of freedom comes into question. Nowadays, psychological, like economic, competition is typically one-sided. This is a relatively new situation to psychologists as well as to other men.
In the face of economic, political, social, and spiritual cartels, the literal doctrine of noninterference with speech has plainly broken down. In most countries it has been replaced by the equally one-sided theory that the attitudes and opinions of a people should be under the complete control of governmental officials-that psychological freedom inevitably leads to social disintegration. In Great Britain, Scandinavia, and the United States, the ideal of free expression has not been entirely given up, though the nineteenth-century ideal of complete psychological laissez faire has undergone drastic modification. In the psychological as well as in the economic realm it is seen that freedom is tolerable only within limits."
"Whether one looks upon the psychological problem of modern social life as that of securing complete control over the sources of psychological influence, or whether one accepts the conception that only limiting controls should be exercised to define areas of free expression, there is no longer any possibility of escaping the problem on the ground that when truth and falsehood are turned loose against each other, truth will necessarily triumph. Too much of such "truth" is the dogma of those who have the power to issue decrees. In such a period of restraint, somebody must continually puncture the views that are forced to appear true, and to propose relative and more acceptable alternatives. Caught as we are in this attempt to find new values, we may expect psychologists, as well as other men, increasingly to look beyond the mere techniques of commercial advertising and political publicity, and to carry their analyses forward into the social-psychological consequences of alterations in public beliefs and attitudes."
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