Dr Robert Malone caused a storm when he appeared on the Joe Rogen Experience, and proclaimed that the world is in the grip of mass formation psychosis with Covid, namely that it is a form of mass insanity. Reason is discarded in favour of social conformity, the same rigid discipline seen in cults, like the suicidal cult of Jim Jones. I think Dr Malone has put his finger on a major problem here which has troubled defenders of democracy since the time of Plato’s critique in The Republic; namely that people are sheeple, and the evil elites are able to manipulate them with ease. Hence, democracy become dumocracy.

What can be done, if anything to prevent this? It is a difficult problem that the best minds have not cracked, and I am not going to be able to do it in a quickie essay, even if I knew the answer. Certainly, the answer is not “blowing in the wind.”

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/mass-formation-deployed-on-you-after

“Mass Formation: Deployed on You After Over 200 Years of Study

Junior academics cited by "Forbes", AP, Reuters and "The Independent" have not done their homework

Today in “factchecking the factcheckers”, junior academics cited by Forbes, Associated Press, Reuters and The Independent have just not done their homework concerning the work of Professor Dr. Mattias Desmet of the University of Ghent in Belgium. All I can say about this is that I hope that their naive, ignorant, grandstanding statements to the press are brought up during their future Academic Tenure and Advancement reviews.

But there has been an amazingly coordinated effort to shoot the messenger and actively character assassinate (or “defenstrate”) me as a surrogate while avoiding any reference to the highly credentialed academic Professor Dr. Mattias Desmet who actually developed the theory and has documented the extensive evidence in an upcoming academic book. So, what can we learn from this in the short term?

Clearly, Google was not the only corporation triggered by Joe Rogan podcast # 1757 which previously reached #1 podcast ranking worldwide, has been referred to as “the most important interview of our time” and has been seen by over 50 million viewers. But what absolutely has been generated by all of the coopted reactionary press and Big Tech titans metaphorically tripping over their shoelaces is a massive trove of real time data validating the brilliant Mass Formation intellectual synthesis developed by Professor Desmet over the last two years.

In this coordinated propaganda and censorship response, we can clearly see the hands of the BBC-led Trusted News Initiative, the Scientific Technological Elite, the transnational investment funds and their World Economic Forum allies which control Pfizer and most of Big Pharma, Legacy Media and Big Tech (and many national governments) acting in real time to suppress a growing awareness by the general public of having been actively manipulated using crowd psychology tools to generate clinically significant fear and anxiety of COVID-19 (otherwise known as “Coronaphobia”) to advance their agendas on a global scale. Multiple governments have now admitted to actively using fear and 'Mass Formation'-related theories as a tool for totalitarian population control during this outbreak. This is occurring at the same time that Omicron is destroying the legitimacy of government and WHO propaganda concerning the “Safe and Effective” mRNA vaccines and associated mandates.

But what confuses me is why the western press is all following the same narrative as Forbes, which is now owned by a Chinese media holding company. Is this all really just about China wanting to advance a New World Order agenda, and working in a coordinated fashion together with captured western legacy media and their transnational fund overlords?

Break out the popcorn, because we have an “approved narrative” dumpster fire in progress.

“I don’t see how people could claim that ‘mass-formation’ doesn’t exist or has never been scientifically studied. The term just refers – it goes without saying – to the process of the formation of a mass or a crowd. Mass formation has been studied for over 200 years, beginning with such scholars as Gustave Le Bon, Freud, McDougal, Canetti, Hannah Arendt, etc. In the twentieth century, psychologists such as Ash and Sheriff have studied mass formation experimentally.

Some of these scholars did explicitly use the term mass-formation, others didn’t. But what they studied was basically the same: the way in which individual’s mental states is influenced by their tendency to conform to group thinking. I myself have over 100 publications on Web of Science, a large part of them focusing on how individuals’ personality structures is influenced by their relationships with other people. Once you understand the basic mechanisms through which individual’s personality is in the grip of the opinion of other people, you understand the elementary mechanisms at work in this enormous psychological process that is happening when a mass emerges in a society.

In my upcoming book: The psychology of totalitarianism, I analyze and describe the way in which the psychological process of mass formation got stronger and stronger throughout the last two centuries and eventually leads to totalitarian thinking and in the end also to the emergence of totalitarian states.”

Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium

Please follow this link for Professor Dr. Desmet’s Prior Academic Works

Abridged from M. Desmet: “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”

‘Mass Formation – brief summary 

• Totalitarianism is characterized by processes of large scale mass formation. 
• Four conditions are needed for large scale mass formation:

1. A large amount of people must feel alone and isolated. 
2. Their lives must feel pointless and meaningless. 
3. There must be high levels of free floating anxiety, and 
4. There must be high levels of free-floating frustration and aggression.

*If under these conditions a narrative is distributed through the mass media which indicates an object of anxiety and provides a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety, then all the free floating anxiety might be associated to this object and a huge willingness might be observed to participate in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety.

• At the same time, the field of attention gets narrower until it only contains the part of reality that is indicated by the narrative and people lose their capacity to take into account the other aspects of reality (what makes them often utterly irrational).

Development of mathematical models to describe this process are currently in progress in a collaboration between Professor Desmet, Dr. rer. nat. habil. Norbert Schwarzer and Dr. Troy Vom Braucke. This work is building upon prior academic modeling work including the following volumes:’

 

Earlier seminal academic works regarding mass formation upon which Professor Desmet has based his theory include the following

• Gustave Le Bon(1841-1931)
  • The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895
    PDF(pp. 157), HTML, Public Domain complete audiobook, Worldcat
  • Overview of The Crowd

 

• William McDougall(1871-1938)
  • The Group Mind; A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology, with Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character, 1920
    First Edition 1920(pp. 419), HTML/ebook format; Second Edition 1927 (pp. 304), Worldcat
  • Crowds and Power, 1960
    PDF(pp. 495), Worldcat
  • Overview of Crowds and Power

 

• Classification and Symbols of Masses in the Conception of Elias Canetti(2019)

• John Ioannidis(1965-)
  • Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, 2005
• Hannah Arendt(1906-1975)
  • Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963
    PDF(pp. 401), Worldcat
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
    HTML, Second Edition 1958(pp. 521), Worldcat
• Solomon Asch(1907-1996)
  • Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments, 1951
  • Opinions and Social Pressure, 1955
    PDF
  • Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority, 1956

 

Use of fear to control behavior in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists

Members of Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour express regret about ‘unethical’ methods.

The Telegraph. By Gordon Rayner, 14 May 2021

 

A State of Fear by Laura Dodsworth

 

A State of Fear: how the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic

This is a book about fear. Fear of a virus. Fear of death. Fear of losing our jobs, our democracy, our human connections, our health and our minds. It’s also about how the government weaponised our fear against us – supposedly in our best interests – until we were the most frightened country in Europe.

Fear is the most powerful emotion. Hardwired into humans, fear is part of our evolutionary success. But that also makes it one of the most powerful tools in the behavioural psychology toolbox and it has been used to manipulate and control people during the pandemic.

In one of the most extraordinary documents ever revealed to the British public, the behavioural scientists advising the government said that a substantial number of people did not feel threatened enough by Covid-19 to follow the rules. They advised the government to increase our sense of ‘personal threat’, to scare us into submission.

But why did the government deliberately frighten us, and how has this affected us as individuals and as a country? Who is involved in the decision-making that affects our lives? How are behavioural science and nudge theory being used to subliminally manipulate us? How does the media leverage fear? What are the real risks to our wellbeing?

Ahead of any official inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Laura Dodsworth explores all these questions and more, in a nuanced and thought-provoking discussion of an extraordinary year in British life and politics. With stories from members of the general public who were impacted by fear, anxiety and isolation, and revealing interviews with psychologists, politicians, scientists, lawyers, Whitehall advisers and journalists, A State of Fear calls for a more hopeful, transparent and effective democracy.

 

More references:

The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost A.M. Meerloo. 1961

In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective "truth" on their victims' minds. In "The Rape of the Mind" he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people's minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized "rape of the mind." He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The "Rape of the Mind" is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists.

To end, the book written in 1841 entitled: “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds” is one of the first works on this subject.

by Charles MacKay (Author)

…originally published in 1841. This includes the preface, which is often omitted from abridged versions.In this book, Charles Mackay discusses the irrational behaviors of crowds in the economy, war and magic. He gives several different examples of market bubbles, such as the Mississippi Scheme and the infamous Tulip Mania in the Netherlands. Ever since it was written, investors have used it as a guide to help identify boom and bust cycles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds has had an important influence on economists in understanding of crowd psychology and feedback loops.”