Whether the mass hysteria was planned misses the point
As you know, I have vehemently maintained that the collective hysteria was not itself planed in advance. It’s just not possible to reliably engineer that kind of thing.
Separately, though, that debate misses the point: The ones to blame are in plain sight. Our hysterical elected officials, academics, journalists and so on. Whether the mass hysteria was planned or due to a positive feedback spiral of fear-of-infection, their responsibility is to be robust to such mind avalanches.
Aide: Sir, they’re rioting in the street.
Mayor: How quickly can we get there and join in?
It’s just so hard to stomach that corporate “geniuses” and senior Senators are so weak minded, cowardly, and malinformed. Otherwise how did they get that job, that wealth, that prestige in the first place? Maybe they shouldn’t have that job anymore, and sadly the only way to unseat them is for the system itself to suffer a collapse, businesses to fail, institutions that once provided a valuable societal service to implode, with potentially catastrophic results for everyone. This can feed the cycle when the institutions are deemed “too big to fail” and therefore can’t self correct without causing famine and war.
Mass Psychosis is exactly how you engineer mass hysteria. You need only the right conditions and support. Hitler and the Nazi's used the plight of the German people at the time to engineer his rise to power by giving the German people someone to blame for their pains, the Jews. For covid, those in power used the unvaccinated and those unwilling to participate in the hysteria as the source, the ones to blame.
You can create mass hysteria without engineering it the same way you'd engineer a virus. If you have the reach and resources to do so it's not that hard to drum up mass hysteria with the right set of conditions.