How so many people can believe demonstrably false things, and persist in their beliefs for years despite mountains of contrary evidence, is a great problem.
Reminds me of what I heard this morning in my car driving kids to school:
11 year old: “You know…seems like these scientists aren’t actually very smart. Because all of the vaccinated kids in my class are getting Covid, so what was the point of all that?”
8 year old: “I think they just wanted to make money.” 🤣
Several more years of formulaic schooling will destroy these kids' ability to recognize reality and state it bluntly. Best to pull them out of school before that happens. It's not hard for an intelligent, intellectually active parent to educate a child at home while developing, rather than destroying, the child's intellect and close relationship with reality.
It is hard. In my country at least. The govt makes it hard. You're not allowed to do it unless you leap through their hoops to begin and meet their criteria as you proceed.
And that's before you get to the need, for yourself, within their official framework, to devise a theory of how to educate along with a theory of what should be educated.
And that's before you get to the adjustment in your life to make room for full time educating of someone.
It's hard alright.
What's easier and perhaps more fruitful is to join the child in a sort of 'meta analysis' perhaps, an overview of the school experience, a 'setting in context', a continuing appraisal and monitoring of what's really happening as against what the school says is happening.
But of course it all comes with great risk. The risk that one might use the child merely as a captive butt for your own egotism, intellectual conceits, half baked theories, favourite hobby horses, transmitting willy-nilly blindnesses and biases.
And there's been paradigm shift. Now you are not a parent/friend with the implied measure of education and guidance but are now something else, a third thing, a parent/friend/teacher.
You've adopted a persona. Each persona requires an appropriate response from the child: the friend requires friendship, the parent requires love, familial bonding and acceptance of moral authority, the teacher requires formal admission of superior technical expertise and commitment to absorb formal lessons.
Hence home education often isn't so much a freeing of the child but some kind of moving into a subtle bondage of the child, a restriction of freedoms and an imposition of strictures, demands.
not in my case - I pulled my son out of school when he was 8. At 12 he started at the local community college - not some special class, but we got a waiver for him based on his tests to take community college classes. He had an AS at 15 and a masters in Biotechnology at 20. After reading a lot about homeschooling and unschooling (John Taylor Gatto's books, yes!) we pretty quickly realized the "school at home" with desks and chalkboards and all the trappings of public school was not going to cut it. Unschooling from then on. We had a great support system and a great homeschooling group.
I agree it is hard. But the government be damned. We took our two big kids out of school when it was still illegal. A friend of ours did a little jail time but inspired us nevertheless. We went through various stages of realizing the Folly of desks and subjects. We also helped organize a little Christian Day School when our younger two kids became school age. Another folly. But all the while staying clear of public school. Maybe 10 years of all that experimentalism. In the meantime our family flourished, committed and cohesive! Intelligent and brave! In later years, responding to the perennial call for "desperately needed" science teachers, I became a public school science teacher. Retired now for more than a decade, I look back on my brief Science teaching career as a strange acquiescence to the transmission of government propaganda packaged up as scientific fact. It is absolutely no wonder how so many people adhere to the government narrative of covid-19 and everything else. They have been hopelessly brainwashed by the public school training. A pox on public school!!!
That's very interesting. I'd like to know more about how you did it and what indications of 'success' you decided you had as time went by.
What the goals were - for instance in Aus you can't even sit for the govt exams, I think, if you haven't attended their approved schools. Hence you can't possibly get that qualification, used for entry to universities.
I well may be wrong there but something like that is going on. And in any case what I'm meaning is did you aim for the traditional 'school leaving' exam success results? And get them? Or you did without them and future success or at least pleasant future was attained without them?
Seems to me there's a whole 'establishment school' outside of school on the one hand and then a plethora of different individual methods: anecdotes, we did this and we did that and we found thing and we found that.
The 'establishment school' is, of course, the mainstream 'home schooling' process, approved by government, backed by hundreds of books etc. and which does proceed through the normal education qualification hoops.
So all in all there's almost a directionless maze. Which way to go?
What to aim for?
Different countries, of course, would have different situations possibly calling for different home schooling.
And then finally - rarely seems to get a mention, ironically - is the student. All people are different. They vary in ability, in interests, in sociability, desire to be amongst the group or not and so on...
Which would seem to indicate there should be different home schooling for nearly every student. Or if not so, for many, many different 'types' of student, at least.
So I see it as a very large subject. Not one to be happily dispensed with and authoritatively pronounced on by the govt, nor by the major 'alternatives' with their books and videos etc, nor by individual anecdotes...
Leaving me with the task of becoming familiar with all three as best I can and then forming an opinion of their worth and suitability.
Daunting. But how to avoid it? Just keep children at home and feed their natural curiosity, play it 'by ear' so to speak?
All the more information I can get the happier I'd be.
Not in my case as well… my family are in our 22nd year of homeschooling, 4 graduated, 2 to go… currently 2 in college doing very well. One of the things my college kids have noticed is that their peers were totally unprepared for college and have no concept of a work ethic. 🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️ They can’t memorize anything, focus to finish their projects, many cheat by having family members write their papers for them, etc. and so many just don’t even show up for class… 😬
We always tried to stress thinking and acting for yourself… yes, we had our textbooks but we always supplemented with extras to tie in with current events and lessons on God and other Godly/moral topics… I wish I had a dollar for every time I said, “Look it up…” or “What do you think about that?” or “How would that make you feel?” And here’s my favorite, “Does it pass the smell test?” 🤔🤨
During this plandemic, we have had so much to talk about… And NO, none of this so called “coof” (Covid) passes the smell test… 😱😱😱
In your country, the strict requirements and structure imposed by your government distort a parent's relationship with their child during homeschooling. You aren't free to make your own decisions, following your own moral compass and honoring your own conceptions of what life is about and your own evaluation and understanding of what your child needs to learn and how.
The sort of meta analysis you describe might be helpful in this situation. But I don't think meta analysis would work well for most children attending school, because the "silent lessons" of school (typically taught for hours per day, five days per week) are so powerful. I think by the time a child is cognitively equipped to meta analyze, which would be when well through puberty, many of the silent lessons are well incorporated.
The "great risk" you describe is something I have never seen played out in many years of being a homeschooling parent, knowing dozens of other homeschooling parents and their kids, giving free workshops for homeschooling parents, reading books by and for homeschooling parents...There may be a tiny percentage of homeschooling parents that bad but I haven't encountered any of them.
As for the paradigm shift of adding a third thing -- being a teacher -- and adopting a persona...This can happen if you homeschool under the direction of a school (or a school's "independent study" program), if you homeschool under a controlling/oppressive government, or if you have been a school teacher in the past. This is one reason I've always recommended independent (no school involved) homeschooling.
Children naturally expect to learn from their parents. Children also learn (whether they go to school or are homeschooled) that being a member of a family involves work to be done, expectations to meet, other people's needs and desires to consider. Family life isn't "total freedom" -- but kids don't expect total freedom; they want real life, with other people. At its best, homeschooling is a variety of intellectually stimulating activities embedded in real life, with the other people who mean the most to the child.
A 10 year old would make a better president in their clear, childish view, than an 80year old, rusted in his settings. The description of scientists also made me think of some famous artists, who were dispised in their lifetime, like Van Gogh, and died in poverty, only to be glorified and overprized after their deaths.
Yes - My 12 year old daughter asked why children had to mask up at school, yet could go to the store, go to a football game with tens of thousands of people in attendance-literally go anywhere in our town without having to wear one. She saw immediately how inconsistent and ridiculous the masking policy is for school children.
And to purposefully kill/maim some people. If it were just money the vials would have all been saline. Make sure those smart kids understand the true evil goes deeper than dollars.
These academics are part of an unaccountable and unelected elite who control everything, including people's minds. This class detests workers, individuals, populism, democracy and liberty. Herding people into their controlled information environments has become easy with tech monopolies they control. For 20 years they've been priming western populations for this moment. Google and Facebook their most effective tools. They will come for substack soon.
I fear you may be right about expanding censorship. But on the optimistic side, dissent will always have a forum. It may be outlawed, undercover and very inefficient, but it will exist. It may be hand-written or typed samizdat (or today, perhaps flash drives) shared about, or simple conversations in the backroom with the lights out.
I don't believe in this mass psychosis at all. It's an intellectual's fashion of the day.
It looks for a fancy explanation for why so many people acquiesce meekly with masking and lockdowns etc.
The simple explanation is that faced with a monolithic govt propaganda machine with scattered pockets and rumours of dissent they chose, en masse, in their wisdom, to decide that they simply don't know the truth.
Then they decided that not knowing the truth they might as well, they ought to, play it safe.
Then they contemplated the strictures and decided they were bearable especially as they applied to all.
The setting for all this being a group identification. A feeling of togetherness. Of being one of 'the mob' - a demotiki, one of the people.
This group sense leads naturally into group loyalty behaviour, too. They support each other in going along with what seems right at the time.
They are not psychotic.
There is no psychosis. They are acting as rational human beings in the situation.
That is: rational human being as part of a group. With group identification.
They do not see themselves as independent critical thinkers with a direct line to the truth, apart and separate from the common run as so many of us who frequent fora such as this do.
They are happy to be 'of the mob'. We would abhor the very idea.
They are gregarious, we tend to isolate and study alone.
They are not 'us', so often, in discussions in places like this.
Robert Malone and such who are sold the idea of mass psychosis clearly see the people as 'different', 'separate', something else and subject to pychosis which he, of course, goes without saying, isn't.
But he simply, they simply, see them as different without every contemplating the nature of the difference.
Which is as I've suggested. A group nature with different priorities, understandings, very essential nature.
He/they see the answer as a psychosis for in contemplation of themselves they can only imagine it would take a psychosis to make them behave that way.
But it doesn't take a psychosis to make the people behave this way at all. It is rational behaviour.
The irrationality is in the 'clever people' , the 'smart people', the 'rulers' and the 'protectors'.
We speak from amongst that subset and tell the people that subset is insane.
The people find that a little hard to believe.
And they circle the wagons. Watch each other's backs. Support each other by all doing the same thing. Not dissenting, not disturbing. Following what appears to be the safest route. Suffering in common cause.
All completely alien concepts to us 'intellectuals'.
There's a psychosis alright. But Dr Malone for all his excellent and brilliant and devout work and understanding has fallen prey to it. It's this belief that the people are psychotic.
Arthur brogard, this may be splitting hairs but I think you & Dr Malone are actually in agreement but with different terminology. Dr Malone first repeated 'mass formation psychosis' on the Joe Rogan podcast but later admitted that the term 'psychosis' should never have been used. Mattias Desmet, the person from whom Dr Malone borrowed the term, has said many times that it is not a 'psychosis ' as much as the group mentality that you describe. So, to me at least, you both appear to be saying much the same thing with the use of different words. And I'd agree with both assessments: there are those who want to be part of the 'in crowd' & those who don't. I've never been part of the 'in crowd' & don't find it attractive in the slightest. So here I am........
A big part of the mass formation theory is that people really enjoy the connectedness and sense of common cause that the perceived crisis creates and so they are unconsciously motivated to perpetuate it.
Has anyone else noticed Dr. Malone is a little sus? For myself, I don't get a good read on him and can't tell if he is just talking out both sides of his mouth, or just very big brained. I sometimes wonder if he is just smartly riding this wave of antivax media $ucce$$
I sometimes wonder that about everyone I meet in this discussion. It's part of the process. Has to be if you're not totally naive these days.
I lament his retreat behind paywalls. And it makes me wonder.
I lament his devotion to the mass formation thing and it make me wonder.
However on balance or at core I think he's an honest and forthright man.
Until the recent paywalls nearly everything he did was for free, you know?
And he's got a lot at stake. As we know, these days a man can lose everything at the whim of the vicious. Look at what Trudeau is doing. It's quite ferocious.
I think Malone is brave and I think he's honest.
I guess the point is not Malone: that's an ad hominem - it's what he says and his core messages are the danger of covid vaccines in themselves and then the danger of govts mandating.
Both messages I'm completely in favour of so I'm with Dr Malone as long as it takes.
True, the message stands. Why try to personally attack the messenger? Still, I am surprised he readily uses such examples as "insurance companies have found a 40% increase in overall deaths" as an example that vaccines are dangerous. While it's very possible the vaccine and this metric are be related, it seems like this would be more of a talking point embraced by the 'anti-vaxer' cohort than by a really science based person who I would think would be more demanding of specific evidence to make his point.
Sorry but as I talk to various people and interact on-line, I conclude that many are in great fear that this virus could kill them. In the very beginning you could see this happening as people were confusing the news covid scoreboards counting cases and deaths by conflating a case with death. They were certain that if you became a case you would die. Evidence arriving showing that many cases resulted in a new number, those recovered. And every day those numbers were reported breathlessly. But the conflation remained in many people.
Those who were terrified began to do all sorts of things to avoid the virus. We did see empty streets from the lockdowns which confirmed how dangerous life had become.
Malone doesn't think people became psychotic just consumed with hysteria. which I greatly prefer rather than psychosis. As a layman perhaps I just am not accepting that psychosis equals hysteria. Maybe to him they are the same.
As our writer says we perceive in our constructed world.
If everybody in authority and all mass media are bombarding you with the message that you are in deadly danger and it's just like a war, while at the same time closing the borders, locking you down and telling you not to talk to your neighbours and wear a mask it's hardly surprising that most people were absolutely terrified! Maybe hiding under the bed is a perfectly sensible and normal reaction. Most people are NOT intellectuals, scientists or experts and aren't going to go digging around for information and anyway most people in the expert group were telling us that it was a huge pandemic and to do exactly as they say.
I didn't really buy into it because I don't pay attention to most of the noise but that doesn't make me smarter or more insightful. Maybe most people here are holding their own false beliefs. I'm not sure what a false believe is though. You can believe anything, right?
I have read this post about three times and I like it and get it but... I'm not in an expert group so I don't approach things in a 'scientific' manner. Being human is so much more than that and there's a huge mystery about life that is unexplainable. One of the reasons why I love being a Catholic is the recognition of mystery, the unnameable, unknowable - It's there and it's amazing.
Very much agree and also Catholic:) I did have the advantage of being married to a smart doctor / researcher who said "this is nuts" from the start. I also had a great class in statistics in medical research back in college. Despite that, there was something born of my faith, I think, which said all this focus on safety without regard to other factors was wrong. There would never have been a Church if the early martyrs had chosen safety first. This pandemic happened in the midst of another pandemic - the meaning crisis. Never have I heard so many try to find meaning while throwing religion out the window as old fashion and superstitious. At the same time, one of my biggest disappointments in the past 2 years has been the leadership of my faith (and most others too) cave to the way of "safety" and lose courage in the face of possible death. When the Vatican supported vaccinating children I almost switched to the Orthodox. This lack of courage has been the most heartbreaking for me personally.
Yep. Well that's very interesting. I don't know what the truth is. Whether 'consumed with fear' or simply confessing to not knowing and taking the safer (and mandated anyway) course.
I don't know.
I do know I don't see any signs of all consuming fear where I live. :)
The interesting part about mass formation is the focusing of the public's attention on one point, and this becomes a hypnosis, not a psychosis. By focusing on this one point and obeying, humans are trying to overcome their anxiety about the disease. My point being, 'psychosis' is the wrong interpretation of this theory. It's a great topic to mull over.
While all of what you say seems to hit the mark, you are missing the fact that many people are not simply choosing the path of least resistance. Many people are absolutely terrified and expanding vast amounts of energy reacting to their terror. These are the people driving the bus.
Yes of course this entire reaction is based upon a well established scientific fact that the prefrontal cortex shuts down in the presence of panic and fear. The media and the government is to blame, mostly, for that. However, I was also a panic stricken dweeb early on that was disinfecting his groceries, so I'll refrain from being too judgemental.
If you genuinely believe there is an invisible doomsday villain deliberately targeting those who fail to wear their 1/8" thick superhero costume, you are, in fact, psychotic.
Yep. He doesn't want to think. He's not conceited enough to think he can think and arrive at 'better' or 'truer' conclusions than anyone else.
Than the prevailing narrative.
So he goes with the flow and crosses his fingers and hopes for the best and trusts in his 'betters'.
Which, of course, I think you'll agree, includes all those reading and contributing to these columns.
And reading and contributing to the vilification and mockery of this man.
But all around he sees rips in the fabric of his reality and he grows desperate for some reassurance, some certainty, some truth...
But of course as time goes on there's been no clear resolutions to anything, covid hasn't been defeated in the first couple of weeks of restraint, nor in two years of vaccines and measures and voices of dissent... etc.
So like a wounded animal - I note the typecasting of him as a brute animal elsewhere in this thread - he cries in pain and fear and anger and looks for something to focus his torment on.
Picks on the unvaccinated. For that's the mantra endlessly directed at him.
By a monolith omnipresent media/govt machine. Countered by what? Is there even a programme of pasting up bills showing graphs and charts and expressing truth? No.
Is there a 'fight back' centre compiling all the truths that can be pointed to as free for all source where irrefutable truths and facts can be found to set against the propaganda? No.
Is there any help at all?
Does his government and prevailing narrative love him? No. He's directed to obey, to obey and to obey... and never receives any benefit.
Does the 'counter narrative' love him? No. They attack him, mock him, barrage him with abstruse 'arguments', try to manipulate him into doing apparently anti-social and even illegal things. To them he's a dumb animal.
Yep. And you're happy with that.
What he needs is - if you don't mind a dose of strong 'sugar' for a minute - your love. Your understanding. Your fellowship. Your identification with him.
Haha you say All that the govt is saying and doing is wrong. Wrong for what, wrong for whom? You? You alone? Or for all?
It's wrong for all. Isn't it? Wrong for all. Including him. Including that man. He's not a fool, a clown, a villain, a brute animal. He's the very stuff that you're presumably fighting on behalf of.
Stock, standard, bemused, misled and mistreated humanity.
You claim to be showing the way, illuminating the path. For whom? For him. You're working for him. He is the one you're all about. He is the one you care for.
Mock and vilify him and you've cut the ground from beneath your own feet.
You have to agree with him. All the time. That's called 'being agreeable'. This transcends dumb academic logic. Humans are agreeable with each other despite all kinds of logical fallacies and absurdities on the way to finding the truth and common ground.
I'm saying it is not necessary to be strictly logical and scientifically accurate in agreeing with such people. Not at all. Real human dialogue is not strict debating society exercise in pure logic.
So you can, we can, take his part entirely and be purely agreeable with his expressed fears and attitudes at the same time as being of completely different mind and set upon altering his mind 180°.
Don't understand me? Not hard. I'm not being clever. Just think of a soothing adult with a distressed child demanding something absurd they can't have.
The adult approaches with as much love as possible and much positive assurance: 'Yes, yes, dear, it's all alright, yes, of course, of course, we'll fix everything..'
That kind of thing is all I'm talking about. Not so rare is it?
In adult terms its perhaps called compassion, is it? Whatever. That's what's needed. That's the way out of this mess. Not division and smart alecks.
I agree, love is important. I don't discard these people. I pity them. But I'm not going to obey just to make him feel better, because that will make the problem worse, for everyone, in the long run. You love someone the most when you speak truth to them, or at the very least, force them to attack their own false pretensions.
The best strategy imo is to scoff. You need to trigger the same part of their brain 'they' trigger. That gooey selfish little prideful center. Instead of trying to reason with them rationally, calmly and stoically say "you still believe that!?" and then turn away or ignore them. That's the only way to get them to look inward instead of at outer threats.
I understand. I don't say much - haven't been openly challenged and my state has few restrictions. I'm torn between letting such people be and hoping time will help them or saying something. Some, like Robert Kennedy, say to speak out / challenge because it is important to get them to question the narrative they are living in so they don't become part of forces that continue to try to obstruct liberty.
I don't know about perfectly but certainly it's pretty much the same I think.
But the point is that it is not mob rule
It is rule by the rulers.
The mob are saying 'we don't know where the truth is'
They are saying 'it is wiser to do as we're told in earthly pragmatic terms'.
They are saying 'it is wiser 'philosophically' to believe - better safe than sorry. (today that's better safe than risk 'terrible covid' and re witches it was better safe than risk eternal damnation.)
They are saying: let us act together in the interests of safety in numbers, we are 'we'.
Now as then. Then as now.
What is seen as an evil on the part of deluded people is clearly, at this remove, seen as an institutional evil and the part of the people fairly obviously dictated by necessity in all sober reasonableness.
Very handy to blame the people on both occasions.
Oh you poor deluded fools.
I'm saying they're not necessarily so deluded. But neither are they sure of their ground hence they simply do as they're told until the truth does become apparent.
All is orchestrated, then as now, by their 'betters'.
And then as now their 'betters' is a wide and general kind of term.
Almost anyone can be one of their 'betters'.
All the establishment by law, by structure of their civilization.
But all the self styled 'observers' and 'intellectuals' and so on.
So that where you and I see three parties: ourselves, the masses and the govt, big pharma etc. they see only two.
Themselves and the rest. The officious and the pretentious 'rest'.
All those who pretend to 'know' and never cease pronouncing on it with ever more abstruse arguments.
Hence why they are not convinced by our arguments. They don't see them as counter to the prevailing establishment position, they simply see them as minor dissents amongst the 'ruling' or better perhaps 'pontificating' class.
I think the term (i.e., mass formation psychosis) is an attempt to put a measure (in this case, a string of words that come sufficiently close to putting a definition to an action) to a pattern of behaviour amongst many; and a pattern that seems to run counter to logic.
I think it can also be described in the following way: 'Getting caught up and taken along with the tide that is the gravity of social comformity, at the expense of individual scrutiny to the position of the self' (or something along those lines)
From casual observation, those who consume the most television and newspapers seem to be more susceptible to manipulation. It's likely not as simple as that, but my family, who believe the narrative and are all jabbed are also avid consumers of the almighty TV.
I think that's part of it. However, I didn't get overcome with this fear but I do have on going anxiety and depression so can be fearful in my own way of lots of normal everyday things (like going to a new place or meeting new people, flying) but often NOT of things that are presented to me say via mass media. What can I say: people are weird.
I can understand how people were originally afraid. I was afraid myself, through most of 2020. What I don't understand is how they didn't learn that the danger was exaggerated, and certainly didn't warrant taking grossly undertested "vaccines".
In deep blue urban areas of the US - these people who cling to fear are ideologically driven. They had TDS long before Covid and the two combined have created an impenetrable wall against common sense. They simply can't and won't admit they were wrong. At least this is one part of it - from direct observation.
Yep Well my stance is pretty simple. I seek to employ Occam's razor and not multiply entities without reason is all. The behaviour of the compliant masses is adequately explained by the mechanisms I've mentioned.
The behaviour of those who propagate propaganda could be a different thing - when you get to levels somewhere near Fauci. But for the most part on the lower levels, which is the most part, the same mechanisms generally can be seen to operate I think.
And those folks are suffering two or three kinds of coercion.
The have the same coercive forces as everyone, the general public.
But they also have a special coercive force as part of their job.
They have perhaps a third coercive force: the need to justify themselves to their fellows who, knowing where they work, what they do, will perhaps query them regarding the whole matter.
It's interesting, the definition of psychosis.
" an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real "
for we can see that the condition of mind of the masses remains, in my narrative, as it ever was: essentially compliant, protective, group identified, long suffering, believing in salvation via their 'betters' or those charged with the job.
But the condition of mind of our activists is not as ever was. Indignation, disbelief, wonder, astonishment, chagrin, wrath, head spin - feelings of losing contact with reality are all symptoms felt by those at any level who're considering the whole covid madness and trying to make sense of it.
It is universal amongst such people to declare they never, ever could have believed such as this would ever have come to pass.
In short: the abnormal conditions of mind belong to the activists and a feature of that abnormal condition is an obsessive desire to determine what is real and what is not... the sole focus of their efforts for many of them... 'real' as pertains to covid and all things covid related.
So I find it not at all difficult to imagine that the pressures of the day cause them to grasp at straws and the straw they grasp at is 'mass formation psychosis'.
They have an easy antidote and a ready alternative diagnosis: respect for the masses and the ability to see life through their eyes.
But mostly I think they simply choose not to do that.
In the USA especially the penchant for 'not doing', 'not seeing through their eyes' seems very deeply ingrained indeed.
And it perhaps spills over into this.
p.s. A small correction: I wasn't referring to people who 'truly believe the propaganda' per se. I think I mentioned I hypothesized many of them didn't know what to believe and admitted it but took the road of compliance as the safer, more polite, more in accord with their fellows, etc.... Was in fact the biggest part of my point. That they don't claim to know.
That they are essentially humble. And well motivated.
1) of the big five personality traits, the “masses” in this case likely score highly in conscientiousness and agreeability. These two traits together create a significant thrust toward harmony in smaller populations (think Dunbar number) yet can be hijacked through propaganda by authoritarian interests if the conditions are right (adding in negative emotion, via pandemic fear, is an example). So, the very type of person that is needed in numbers to have small communities run smoothly can be the reason mass formation over an inappropriately large swath of the globe can be created. Conscientiousness and Agreeability are the very fuel of this formation.
Interesting point about personality traits. I did Jordan Peterson's online assessment back before Christmas & was quite dismayed at my results (although, based on your comment, it may turn out to be my saving grace, so to speak). I scored 80 in agreeableness, 17 in conscientiousness & 94 in neuroticism. I didn't feel it painted a very accurate portrait of myself but perhaps, in hindsight, it has kept me searching for answers.
This has brought me great ruminations. I've re-read all of the above about a dozen times, trying to absorb your point, Arthur brogard. If I'm understanding your point correctly, if I may grossly simplify, you are saying that the people who are being pointed at as suffering from 'mass formation' are simply displaying normal herd behaviour? And those who are doing the pointing are those who live outside the herd, who are not driven by the same motivations as those 'in the herd'?
It certainly makes as much sense as anything else. Unfortunately it means that I'm just going to have to learn to suck it up........
I think you've got me exactly right. I wish I'd had the sense to put it so succinctly myself.
I'm not only saying normal 'herd' behaviour I'm saying normal 'sensible' behaviour.
For they see only a total wall of propaganda with tiny areas of objection all vilified by many and nearly all abstruse and apparently beside the point.... as so on. Right?
So they say 'there's a solid wall of opinion with a few dissenters. we cannot find a solid core of dissent, any centre, any 'repository' of truth as a touchstone, we instead find all about quarreling 'experts'.
What's the sensible thing to do? Overturn everything or stick with strength for the while and see what transpires?
If the evils are as egregious as the dissenters claim surely there'll be an enormous furore directly?
Would go the normal, reasonable sensible thinking is what I claim.
And there never was any great furore was there?
Prominent persons were claimed to have literally killed hundreds even thousands by forcing them, old and sick with covid, to return to crowded relatively unprepared ill equipped hospices and such.
What a claim! A claim of major malfeasance. Of gross incompetence in office. A claim even of literal mass murder.
What happened? Nothing.
Do you see where I'm going?
Like supremely sensible and unpretentious persons they don't claim or pretend to know the truth in all this hysterical shouting match. So they watch, listen, try to learn and meanwhile practice the same kind of life preserving skills/measures people do in wartime.
They do as they're told whether it seems right or not. They care for their families etc. They generally care for the whole body, the whole social body.
And so on.
I'm simply saying you and I would act that way, anyone would, it is the sensible and human/humane way to act.
So why don't you and I act like that? Well because we are somewhat marginalised, by choice. We are very much in a minority. We are a tiny minority of 'outsiders' perhaps to use Colin Wilson (was it? ) 's term.
And we are a little egocentric and a little conceited and believe ourselves to be capable of discovering the truths alone in our rooms, without the company of our fellows, without the benefit of 'groupthink'.
It just happens to be something about which we have much material freely available courtesy of the miracle world wide web and which we can get our heads around if we try hard enough.
If it had been an issue concerning abstruse maths, esoteric quantum physical particles or somesuch we wouldn't be quite so ready to engage and form opinions.
Probably haven't made myself clear. Probably didn't need to say any of it. Sorry.
Just want to add that I see no cause for 'unfortunate' 'sucking up'. To me the realisation that my fellows are sane and sensible after all - and human, humane - moreso than I apparently, is a relief and a boon.
It means that when the truth does begin to permeate through the mass like ink spreading through a blotter it will be permeating a good mass, a sensible, living true and good mass.
A mass that will allow itself to be educated in reason and truth. Far better prospect than the thought of the truth struggling to get through a dumb mass of psychotics.
"Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism."
“ The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer—and they don't want explanations that fail to give them that.” -Thomas Sowell
Thank you for examining this vital key to understanding how and why so many otherwise intelligent people could succumb to menticide and mass formation.
This has been a topic I have been exploring since my first essay, “A Primer for the Propagandized: Fear Is the Mind-Killer” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/a-primer-for-the-propagandized), and I believe understanding our susceptibility to cognitive biases can help us comprehend how this occurs while also building our own defenses against such neurological vulnerabilities.
“An unwitting Goldstein, Trump played right into BigPharma’s strategy to discredit hydroxychloroquine by praising it—giving Trump Derangement Syndrome (a psychological disorder manufactured by and spread to tremendous monetary benefit and turnkey mass control by the media) sufferers the best and only reason they needed to dismiss it. They have been trained to plug their ears, cover their eyes, scream at the top of their lungs, and stamp their feet the instant any one of the Deplorables opens his mouth. One of the most effective instruments in the plutocracy’s toolkit, TDS has been brandished to misdirect the public for years, and it continues to work its magic despite Trump’s declining relevance, the embers of which the media will continue to fan as long as it pays dividends—just as Goldstein’s detested image is deployed in culturally unifying activities such as Two Minutes Hate.”
P.S. Love the optical illusion example you use at the outset. Also makes me think of the Japanese film “Rashomon,” where you see the story from multiple perspectives, every version of which causes you to perceive the same scenario differently.
I enjoy your articles immensely - Having lived in Portland and having been involved in political groups through the Trump years I can attest to this overwhelmingly. We probably have friends in common as I knew many from Yamhill County. I learned early on - with no literature or resources to help me understand what was going on - that facts literally don't matter. These people are incapable of accepting information, whether it's new data or simply from a non-approved source (meaning anything outside the MSM). I have never known so many highly educated people to be so woefully misinformed. I moved my family away about year ago, for all the reasons one can imagine knowing Portland. To this day, every time I think of Portland - I get a bad bad feeling. Progressive urban cities have become a cancer to the health and well being of our society.
Thank you, Jhigh68, and so true about facts not mattering! That reminds me of this prescient quote from Gustave Le Bon’s should-be-required-for-all “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
Regarding my “Letter to the Yamhill County Board of Commissioners” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-yamhill-county-board), I actually don’t live there but only learned about it from a reader who’s a fellow Oregonian. Amazingly, one of the commissioners actually wrote me back with an enthusiastic thank-you, so that was rather encouraging given it’s the first time I’ve ever gotten a response from the intended recipients of one of my letters!
I agree with everything you said about Portland and urban centers—everyone who wants to survive should stay far-far away from those atomic bombs waiting to go off.
I have come to accept that belief based on evidence isn't a thing for most people. Instead, most people simply espouse the views of the group/groups with which they most strongly identify and then espouse different views as the group views change. Gay marriage was an abomination rejected by all good people, right up until the day the tide changed, and everyone was in favor as they claimed they had always been. And those who did not agree were the abomination.
My guess is that humans work this way because there are valuable evolutionary advantages conveyed on people who hold no beliefs. When the village thinks cannibalism is an abomination, you hunt monkeys. But when the village decides to eat their enemies, you collect firewood. The person who holds on to the belief that cannibalism is wrong starves as do his children.
Let me suggest that we can never know what others believe. We can't even easily know if we are dealing with someone who is capable of belief based on evidence. All we can do is listen to what they say, read what they write and observe what they do. I offer this outlook as a means of stress relief. If most people don't hold beliefs, then you shouldn't stress when you can't change their beliefs.
I logged in just to like this comment. We should be cautious when we agree with our peers on everything because that's a sign that we're not thinking. Holds for our side, too.
Reposting from another stack to hear views: How does one counter the ‘but variants’ narrative? I’ve heard from so many believers that everything - masks, lockdowns, vaccines would have worked but for variants.
When I point out that vaccine evading variants can only exist if there’s a vaccine - I get blank looks
there are always variants. all kinds of viruses infect humans and each of them has variant strains. a strategy premised on SARS-2 not having variant strains is stupid and doomed to fail.
I would add that there are an infinite number of variants. By that I mean that when someone “catches” a cold (covid) from someone else and then spreads it, what they spread is not a designated variant (e.g. Omicron) but an individually altered virus that is unique to the spreader. In turn the recipient then spreads another unique variant. In that way it can be said that there is no such thing as an official single variant that can be designated by an authorised test.
I can back that up by stating that I personally have “caught” (by her shedding) something from my vaccinated significant other that has caused me several unusual minor symptoms that are annoying and continuing but not life threatening, such symptoms being unique to me.
And I further suggest that any lab testing purporting to identify a designated variant is an artefact of the protocols used in the testing process.
The rebuttal I usually see is that vaccinated people carry less of the virus therefore reducing the probability of a bad variant spontaneously emerging. They view this as a mitigating factor stronger than the evolutionary pressure the vaccine puts on variants. I am not enough of an expert to have any idea which of those pressures would be stronger.
It's unfortunate that we don't have an honest and fact seeking media that could have spent just a modicum of time to enlighten the average non-scientific reader on the ever so basic facts about viruses and how they virus. I heard someone recently talk about the almost infinitesimal differences between the genomes of the recent coronavirus variants, and how even the SarsCov1 virus of 20 years ago was 80% the same as SarsCov2, and furthermore, that natural immunity for the original Cov1 still appeared to work for Cov2 with that 80% similarity.
Unfortunate indeed about the MSM. Being in the early winter of my life I have lived through the demise of the MSM. Fewer and fewer readers want to pay for what they offer so MSM now relies on benefactors such as Bezos for their income. Shouldn't malign him too much as such has always owned newspapers, cf Beaverbrook mid 20th UK. Nevertheless the reporting in current day MSM is juvenile compared to past and to blogs such as found on Substack.
MSM are getting a final windfall from govt sponsorship about covid so they'll keep it going as long as possible.
At issue with media was their new found 'enlightened' viewpoints about society with little understanding of ordinary people. Trump's antics were repulsive to that group which is oblivious to policy. When Pelosi decided that the pandemic could be used politically to destroy Trump, she did so and the media was more than happy to assign fault. Trump's policies that might have reduced the damage being caused by mitigation had to be shouted down by media. Trump never used his awesome powers to force his policies but caved to the pressure campaign. Then we were trapped by the politics. Those politics have kept us mired in the various ineffective mitigation efforts. Trump could not have known the vaccines were a bill of defective goods and may still find he can't admit being hoodwinked but the vaccines were adopted as the singular tool against the virus by the same public health officials complicit in creating the virus. But, sadly, those public heath officials seem captured by pHarma who are motivated by greed.
Biologists estimate that 380 trillion viruses are living on and inside your body right now—10 times the number of bacteria. Some can cause illness, but many simply coexist with you. In late 2019, for example, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania discovered 19 different strains of redondovirus in the respiratory tract; a handful were associated with periodontal disease or lung disease, but others could possibly fight respiratory illnesses. Scientists' rapidly expanding knowledge makes it clear that we are not made up primarily of “human” cells that are occasionally invaded by microbes; our body is really a superorganism of cohabitating cells, bacteria, fungi and most numerous of all: viruses. The latest counts indicate that as much as half of all the biological matter in your body is not human.
Remind them that viruses, like everything, evolve constantly, and that every cold they've ever caught was caused by a variant of a previous cold virus.
Oh Bob! A man after my own heart! As a veterinary nurse, when I learned that all dogs had Demodex mites & that it was a compromised immune system that allowed 'symptoms' to appear, that was a link in a chain that continues to grow. Terrain theory vs germ theory......... 🤔.
Oh, yes: they sure are. When the immune system fails to contain the population of demodex mites, the dog develops demodectic mange: hairloss, itching & inflammation of the skin along with 2ndary bacterial infections of the skin because of the mites, damage to the skin from the dog scratching & the depressed immune system. Injections of Dectomax (an ivermectin-family of parasite control for cattle) is the standard treatment here in Australia. It's off-label, of course, because Dectomax is registered for use in cattle. But it's interesting, isn't it?
I hadn't heard of terrain theory until a few weeks ago so I haven't completely got my head around it. But it makes sense: pathogens are everywhere all of the time & it's only our healthy, functioning immune system that keeps them at bay. I'm sure that it's way more complicated than that but it explains why not everyone gets infected when they are exposed 🤔.
ETA: re use Dectomax for demodectic mange, terrain theory makes me wonder if the anti-parasitic Dectomax kills the parasite (the demodex mite) or if it does something which aids/improves the immune response, enabling the immune system to re-establish the correct population........ I'm not a scientist, so I don't understand the mode of action. But one has to wonder.........
Check out helminthic therapy. Our immune system and microbiome evolved with any number of other symbiotic organisms, and may not be able to work very well in a vacuum.
Please don't! We would all be ordered to wear bio-hazard suits for ever and be confined to our rooms exploring the metaverse (all for our own safety, of course)
As a historian of science, I wrote an article over a year ago using Kuhn's insights (and others) to explain why we should be skeptical about scientific claims. I argued that science is an interested enterprise, full of economical, personal, social and political agendas. Science is not what is left when we leave all those interests behind, science is a bundle of all that, just like any other human activity. To prove my point, the article was praised but I couldn't get it published because of political issues.
"Betrayers of Truth" is a good analysis of this. You can publish most anything you want at a new publisher called substack.com. Many of us would like to see your article.
This is a beautiful breakdown of the struggles I've had over the last two years (and even before with all the Trump stuff) interacting with generically "blue pilled" friends. It's not that they aren't smart, or that I'm smarter, but that we live in two completely different universes. Trying to bridge that gap is like talking to a square about cubes
Right, I live in a different world from almost everyone else I know. My path diverged from everyone else's the minute the official word was "There's no treatment for COVID-19. All we can offer is supportive care in a hospital once your lips start to turn blue." I knew that high-dose Vitamin C given by IV had saved at least one person from a deadly virus, so I got on the web and started researching the treatments alternative docs were proposing or using for COVID-19. By the time I got COVID, in mid-March 2020, I had a file folder full of information on effective treatment and the early, effective treatment I did worked beautifully. I was through the illness in 8 days and was never even sick enough to sit down; my oxygen saturation at worst went from 99% to 97%. But well-propagandized people can hardly even hear what I say about my experience because it just doesn't fit the narrative MSM has installed in their brains.
Before I entered the field of law, I was a professor with a Ph.d and post doctoral training in a hard science. Being in the field of law greatly increased my critical thinking skills with the law's insistence on thinking like a lawyer and understanding completely both sides of any issue. As I survey the garbage people like Fauci are feeding the population in the name of "science" I've been struck by how wrong, how lost and how much hubris these wrong people inflict on us all. I've gotten to the point of asking people in debates about science whether they accept that science is carried out by humans who are subject to all human frailties, therefore, they could be wrong even if they think the "science" is airtight.
Another problem is that scientists assume that "peer review" is a process for ensuring that a scientific article is correct.
In fact, peer review is simply a process for ensuring that all scientists say the same thing. Often, they say the same thing because their funding comes from the same source.
To give just one example: all studies funded by the sugar industry say that sugar is good for you, whereas just about all independently-funded studies (not that there are many of those) say that it's bad for you.
I have great respect for Allan Savory and his work. I also respect the fact that he publicly tells the story of his ordering 40,000 elephants killed, and then having to deal with the fact that this measure backfired. Something we should learn from this is that actions and their effects should be thoroughly tested on a small scale before being implemented on a large scale.
Exactly, you got that right! Other related expressions for that are the "sunk cost fallacy" or "escalation of commitment". I think it is a basic flaw in humans and their systems, which during evolution probably have served us good, but in a rapidly changing environment gives us the results we see now.
Elegant, and beautifully written. The missing point is that most of our troubles are the result of inexorable human nature, over which we have no control in others, only ourselves. The path to success is recognizing that nature in others, and ourselves, and adapting it to our needs.
To wit, it doesn't benefit us to explain to others the masks don't work or vax is unnecessarily risky, but our decisions should be better informed than theirs. The better model wins.
My point is that millions who have used the better model have suffered horribly from the lockdowns, loss of livelihoods, passports and pariah policies employed by adherents to the loser model. True, they haven’t succumbed to the experimental jab. But millions have been collateral damage just the same.
Yes, we often share the misfortunes of our neighbors, to some extent. But less so, if we're more careful. I know people who have lived in terror for two years, which I have avoided entirely. I've missed some conveniences by avoiding some of the restrictions, but have enjoyed some occasional acts of defiance, so there are entries on both sides of the ledger. Net loss overall, but that's always the price of civilization. And I've lost less than many others, so it's a relative win. We all try to make the best of our circumstances. Some do it better than others.
Great piece, thank you. It goes along with how my review of RFK Jr book on Fauci might read. ' This book is not for those that cling to these core beliefs- Our government agencies are run by good scientists who could never be corrupted. Science and scientists always corrects themselves as soon as new info is discovered. Tony is a good person and couldn't possible get to his position if he was corrupt. And finally any jab named a 'vaccine' is always safe and effective and fully vetted by science.
So many people with these core beliefs is why we are where we are.
What if a person fought against their natural fear of uncertainty by perpetual acknowledgement of their lowliness before the incomprehensible glory of God? Perhaps objective reality (ie God) could make contact with the human mind in those circumstances.
God is objective? We all know about god from people who claimed to have spoken or seen god, and managed to get published.
I'm not an atheist but I think everyone's idea of god is just like this virology sham .. a belief that is based on past stories. None of it is objective
I fear young people today don't study Plato's dialogues. In them, Socrates keeps saying how much he does not know and showing up people who claim to know stuff.but
Whenever something in science or medicine is controversial, and especially if someone is being "discredited" for their work or views, I'm attracted, not repelled. I find it's essential to go straight to the controversial person's own words (speech, writings, interviews) because virtually always, what they have to say is interesting and valuable -- and it's being distorted all to heck by the person's opponents.
Reminds me of what I heard this morning in my car driving kids to school:
11 year old: “You know…seems like these scientists aren’t actually very smart. Because all of the vaccinated kids in my class are getting Covid, so what was the point of all that?”
8 year old: “I think they just wanted to make money.” 🤣
From the mouth of babes, always
Several more years of formulaic schooling will destroy these kids' ability to recognize reality and state it bluntly. Best to pull them out of school before that happens. It's not hard for an intelligent, intellectually active parent to educate a child at home while developing, rather than destroying, the child's intellect and close relationship with reality.
It is hard. In my country at least. The govt makes it hard. You're not allowed to do it unless you leap through their hoops to begin and meet their criteria as you proceed.
And that's before you get to the need, for yourself, within their official framework, to devise a theory of how to educate along with a theory of what should be educated.
And that's before you get to the adjustment in your life to make room for full time educating of someone.
It's hard alright.
What's easier and perhaps more fruitful is to join the child in a sort of 'meta analysis' perhaps, an overview of the school experience, a 'setting in context', a continuing appraisal and monitoring of what's really happening as against what the school says is happening.
But of course it all comes with great risk. The risk that one might use the child merely as a captive butt for your own egotism, intellectual conceits, half baked theories, favourite hobby horses, transmitting willy-nilly blindnesses and biases.
And there's been paradigm shift. Now you are not a parent/friend with the implied measure of education and guidance but are now something else, a third thing, a parent/friend/teacher.
You've adopted a persona. Each persona requires an appropriate response from the child: the friend requires friendship, the parent requires love, familial bonding and acceptance of moral authority, the teacher requires formal admission of superior technical expertise and commitment to absorb formal lessons.
Hence home education often isn't so much a freeing of the child but some kind of moving into a subtle bondage of the child, a restriction of freedoms and an imposition of strictures, demands.
not in my case - I pulled my son out of school when he was 8. At 12 he started at the local community college - not some special class, but we got a waiver for him based on his tests to take community college classes. He had an AS at 15 and a masters in Biotechnology at 20. After reading a lot about homeschooling and unschooling (John Taylor Gatto's books, yes!) we pretty quickly realized the "school at home" with desks and chalkboards and all the trappings of public school was not going to cut it. Unschooling from then on. We had a great support system and a great homeschooling group.
I had John Taylor Gatto as a teacher in intermediate school - he was one of my favorites - I absolutely adored him!
Have you ever read John Taylor Gatto's books? The alternative education strategies he describes sound very different from what you're saying here.
I'm not a parent though and I can't pretend to understand what it's like.
Excellent recommendation from A Superfluous Man ~
No I have not. I'll make a start on them. I have three of them here. If there is one you think I should see first please point it out.
I agree it is hard. But the government be damned. We took our two big kids out of school when it was still illegal. A friend of ours did a little jail time but inspired us nevertheless. We went through various stages of realizing the Folly of desks and subjects. We also helped organize a little Christian Day School when our younger two kids became school age. Another folly. But all the while staying clear of public school. Maybe 10 years of all that experimentalism. In the meantime our family flourished, committed and cohesive! Intelligent and brave! In later years, responding to the perennial call for "desperately needed" science teachers, I became a public school science teacher. Retired now for more than a decade, I look back on my brief Science teaching career as a strange acquiescence to the transmission of government propaganda packaged up as scientific fact. It is absolutely no wonder how so many people adhere to the government narrative of covid-19 and everything else. They have been hopelessly brainwashed by the public school training. A pox on public school!!!
That's very interesting. I'd like to know more about how you did it and what indications of 'success' you decided you had as time went by.
What the goals were - for instance in Aus you can't even sit for the govt exams, I think, if you haven't attended their approved schools. Hence you can't possibly get that qualification, used for entry to universities.
I well may be wrong there but something like that is going on. And in any case what I'm meaning is did you aim for the traditional 'school leaving' exam success results? And get them? Or you did without them and future success or at least pleasant future was attained without them?
Seems to me there's a whole 'establishment school' outside of school on the one hand and then a plethora of different individual methods: anecdotes, we did this and we did that and we found thing and we found that.
The 'establishment school' is, of course, the mainstream 'home schooling' process, approved by government, backed by hundreds of books etc. and which does proceed through the normal education qualification hoops.
So all in all there's almost a directionless maze. Which way to go?
What to aim for?
Different countries, of course, would have different situations possibly calling for different home schooling.
And then finally - rarely seems to get a mention, ironically - is the student. All people are different. They vary in ability, in interests, in sociability, desire to be amongst the group or not and so on...
Which would seem to indicate there should be different home schooling for nearly every student. Or if not so, for many, many different 'types' of student, at least.
So I see it as a very large subject. Not one to be happily dispensed with and authoritatively pronounced on by the govt, nor by the major 'alternatives' with their books and videos etc, nor by individual anecdotes...
Leaving me with the task of becoming familiar with all three as best I can and then forming an opinion of their worth and suitability.
Daunting. But how to avoid it? Just keep children at home and feed their natural curiosity, play it 'by ear' so to speak?
All the more information I can get the happier I'd be.
Not in my case as well… my family are in our 22nd year of homeschooling, 4 graduated, 2 to go… currently 2 in college doing very well. One of the things my college kids have noticed is that their peers were totally unprepared for college and have no concept of a work ethic. 🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️ They can’t memorize anything, focus to finish their projects, many cheat by having family members write their papers for them, etc. and so many just don’t even show up for class… 😬
We always tried to stress thinking and acting for yourself… yes, we had our textbooks but we always supplemented with extras to tie in with current events and lessons on God and other Godly/moral topics… I wish I had a dollar for every time I said, “Look it up…” or “What do you think about that?” or “How would that make you feel?” And here’s my favorite, “Does it pass the smell test?” 🤔🤨
During this plandemic, we have had so much to talk about… And NO, none of this so called “coof” (Covid) passes the smell test… 😱😱😱
In your country, the strict requirements and structure imposed by your government distort a parent's relationship with their child during homeschooling. You aren't free to make your own decisions, following your own moral compass and honoring your own conceptions of what life is about and your own evaluation and understanding of what your child needs to learn and how.
The sort of meta analysis you describe might be helpful in this situation. But I don't think meta analysis would work well for most children attending school, because the "silent lessons" of school (typically taught for hours per day, five days per week) are so powerful. I think by the time a child is cognitively equipped to meta analyze, which would be when well through puberty, many of the silent lessons are well incorporated.
The "great risk" you describe is something I have never seen played out in many years of being a homeschooling parent, knowing dozens of other homeschooling parents and their kids, giving free workshops for homeschooling parents, reading books by and for homeschooling parents...There may be a tiny percentage of homeschooling parents that bad but I haven't encountered any of them.
As for the paradigm shift of adding a third thing -- being a teacher -- and adopting a persona...This can happen if you homeschool under the direction of a school (or a school's "independent study" program), if you homeschool under a controlling/oppressive government, or if you have been a school teacher in the past. This is one reason I've always recommended independent (no school involved) homeschooling.
Children naturally expect to learn from their parents. Children also learn (whether they go to school or are homeschooled) that being a member of a family involves work to be done, expectations to meet, other people's needs and desires to consider. Family life isn't "total freedom" -- but kids don't expect total freedom; they want real life, with other people. At its best, homeschooling is a variety of intellectually stimulating activities embedded in real life, with the other people who mean the most to the child.
Amen… 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Brilliantly said… I wish I was as eloquent… 🙏🙏🙏☺️
"close relationship with reality," perfect phrase ~
Often children have a clarity of thought and observation that has been drummed out of adults.
A 10 year old would make a better president in their clear, childish view, than an 80year old, rusted in his settings. The description of scientists also made me think of some famous artists, who were dispised in their lifetime, like Van Gogh, and died in poverty, only to be glorified and overprized after their deaths.
Yes - My 12 year old daughter asked why children had to mask up at school, yet could go to the store, go to a football game with tens of thousands of people in attendance-literally go anywhere in our town without having to wear one. She saw immediately how inconsistent and ridiculous the masking policy is for school children.
And to purposefully kill/maim some people. If it were just money the vials would have all been saline. Make sure those smart kids understand the true evil goes deeper than dollars.
They get it.
Brilliant! I know many seniors who are still unable or simply cannot connect the dots.
Very smart children.
I like how your kids see the world the way it actually is, without all the filters and blinders that many people get with age.
These academics are part of an unaccountable and unelected elite who control everything, including people's minds. This class detests workers, individuals, populism, democracy and liberty. Herding people into their controlled information environments has become easy with tech monopolies they control. For 20 years they've been priming western populations for this moment. Google and Facebook their most effective tools. They will come for substack soon.
https://thegoodcitizen.substack.com/p/here-lies-google-search?utm_source=url
I fear you may be right about expanding censorship. But on the optimistic side, dissent will always have a forum. It may be outlawed, undercover and very inefficient, but it will exist. It may be hand-written or typed samizdat (or today, perhaps flash drives) shared about, or simple conversations in the backroom with the lights out.
I don't believe in this mass psychosis at all. It's an intellectual's fashion of the day.
It looks for a fancy explanation for why so many people acquiesce meekly with masking and lockdowns etc.
The simple explanation is that faced with a monolithic govt propaganda machine with scattered pockets and rumours of dissent they chose, en masse, in their wisdom, to decide that they simply don't know the truth.
Then they decided that not knowing the truth they might as well, they ought to, play it safe.
Then they contemplated the strictures and decided they were bearable especially as they applied to all.
The setting for all this being a group identification. A feeling of togetherness. Of being one of 'the mob' - a demotiki, one of the people.
This group sense leads naturally into group loyalty behaviour, too. They support each other in going along with what seems right at the time.
They are not psychotic.
There is no psychosis. They are acting as rational human beings in the situation.
That is: rational human being as part of a group. With group identification.
They do not see themselves as independent critical thinkers with a direct line to the truth, apart and separate from the common run as so many of us who frequent fora such as this do.
They are happy to be 'of the mob'. We would abhor the very idea.
They are gregarious, we tend to isolate and study alone.
They are not 'us', so often, in discussions in places like this.
Robert Malone and such who are sold the idea of mass psychosis clearly see the people as 'different', 'separate', something else and subject to pychosis which he, of course, goes without saying, isn't.
But he simply, they simply, see them as different without every contemplating the nature of the difference.
Which is as I've suggested. A group nature with different priorities, understandings, very essential nature.
He/they see the answer as a psychosis for in contemplation of themselves they can only imagine it would take a psychosis to make them behave that way.
But it doesn't take a psychosis to make the people behave this way at all. It is rational behaviour.
The irrationality is in the 'clever people' , the 'smart people', the 'rulers' and the 'protectors'.
We speak from amongst that subset and tell the people that subset is insane.
The people find that a little hard to believe.
And they circle the wagons. Watch each other's backs. Support each other by all doing the same thing. Not dissenting, not disturbing. Following what appears to be the safest route. Suffering in common cause.
All completely alien concepts to us 'intellectuals'.
There's a psychosis alright. But Dr Malone for all his excellent and brilliant and devout work and understanding has fallen prey to it. It's this belief that the people are psychotic.
Nope. They are not.
Arthur brogard, this may be splitting hairs but I think you & Dr Malone are actually in agreement but with different terminology. Dr Malone first repeated 'mass formation psychosis' on the Joe Rogan podcast but later admitted that the term 'psychosis' should never have been used. Mattias Desmet, the person from whom Dr Malone borrowed the term, has said many times that it is not a 'psychosis ' as much as the group mentality that you describe. So, to me at least, you both appear to be saying much the same thing with the use of different words. And I'd agree with both assessments: there are those who want to be part of the 'in crowd' & those who don't. I've never been part of the 'in crowd' & don't find it attractive in the slightest. So here I am........
A big part of the mass formation theory is that people really enjoy the connectedness and sense of common cause that the perceived crisis creates and so they are unconsciously motivated to perpetuate it.
Has anyone else noticed Dr. Malone is a little sus? For myself, I don't get a good read on him and can't tell if he is just talking out both sides of his mouth, or just very big brained. I sometimes wonder if he is just smartly riding this wave of antivax media $ucce$$
I sometimes wonder that about everyone I meet in this discussion. It's part of the process. Has to be if you're not totally naive these days.
I lament his retreat behind paywalls. And it makes me wonder.
I lament his devotion to the mass formation thing and it make me wonder.
However on balance or at core I think he's an honest and forthright man.
Until the recent paywalls nearly everything he did was for free, you know?
And he's got a lot at stake. As we know, these days a man can lose everything at the whim of the vicious. Look at what Trudeau is doing. It's quite ferocious.
I think Malone is brave and I think he's honest.
I guess the point is not Malone: that's an ad hominem - it's what he says and his core messages are the danger of covid vaccines in themselves and then the danger of govts mandating.
Both messages I'm completely in favour of so I'm with Dr Malone as long as it takes.
True, the message stands. Why try to personally attack the messenger? Still, I am surprised he readily uses such examples as "insurance companies have found a 40% increase in overall deaths" as an example that vaccines are dangerous. While it's very possible the vaccine and this metric are be related, it seems like this would be more of a talking point embraced by the 'anti-vaxer' cohort than by a really science based person who I would think would be more demanding of specific evidence to make his point.
Yes, thank you for that. That'd be good if that's the case. :)
Sorry but as I talk to various people and interact on-line, I conclude that many are in great fear that this virus could kill them. In the very beginning you could see this happening as people were confusing the news covid scoreboards counting cases and deaths by conflating a case with death. They were certain that if you became a case you would die. Evidence arriving showing that many cases resulted in a new number, those recovered. And every day those numbers were reported breathlessly. But the conflation remained in many people.
Those who were terrified began to do all sorts of things to avoid the virus. We did see empty streets from the lockdowns which confirmed how dangerous life had become.
Malone doesn't think people became psychotic just consumed with hysteria. which I greatly prefer rather than psychosis. As a layman perhaps I just am not accepting that psychosis equals hysteria. Maybe to him they are the same.
As our writer says we perceive in our constructed world.
If everybody in authority and all mass media are bombarding you with the message that you are in deadly danger and it's just like a war, while at the same time closing the borders, locking you down and telling you not to talk to your neighbours and wear a mask it's hardly surprising that most people were absolutely terrified! Maybe hiding under the bed is a perfectly sensible and normal reaction. Most people are NOT intellectuals, scientists or experts and aren't going to go digging around for information and anyway most people in the expert group were telling us that it was a huge pandemic and to do exactly as they say.
I didn't really buy into it because I don't pay attention to most of the noise but that doesn't make me smarter or more insightful. Maybe most people here are holding their own false beliefs. I'm not sure what a false believe is though. You can believe anything, right?
I have read this post about three times and I like it and get it but... I'm not in an expert group so I don't approach things in a 'scientific' manner. Being human is so much more than that and there's a huge mystery about life that is unexplainable. One of the reasons why I love being a Catholic is the recognition of mystery, the unnameable, unknowable - It's there and it's amazing.
Very much agree and also Catholic:) I did have the advantage of being married to a smart doctor / researcher who said "this is nuts" from the start. I also had a great class in statistics in medical research back in college. Despite that, there was something born of my faith, I think, which said all this focus on safety without regard to other factors was wrong. There would never have been a Church if the early martyrs had chosen safety first. This pandemic happened in the midst of another pandemic - the meaning crisis. Never have I heard so many try to find meaning while throwing religion out the window as old fashion and superstitious. At the same time, one of my biggest disappointments in the past 2 years has been the leadership of my faith (and most others too) cave to the way of "safety" and lose courage in the face of possible death. When the Vatican supported vaccinating children I almost switched to the Orthodox. This lack of courage has been the most heartbreaking for me personally.
Yep. Well that's very interesting. I don't know what the truth is. Whether 'consumed with fear' or simply confessing to not knowing and taking the safer (and mandated anyway) course.
I don't know.
I do know I don't see any signs of all consuming fear where I live. :)
The interesting part about mass formation is the focusing of the public's attention on one point, and this becomes a hypnosis, not a psychosis. By focusing on this one point and obeying, humans are trying to overcome their anxiety about the disease. My point being, 'psychosis' is the wrong interpretation of this theory. It's a great topic to mull over.
While all of what you say seems to hit the mark, you are missing the fact that many people are not simply choosing the path of least resistance. Many people are absolutely terrified and expanding vast amounts of energy reacting to their terror. These are the people driving the bus.
I don't think the people in charge are terrified but they have made sure most people are.
Yes of course this entire reaction is based upon a well established scientific fact that the prefrontal cortex shuts down in the presence of panic and fear. The media and the government is to blame, mostly, for that. However, I was also a panic stricken dweeb early on that was disinfecting his groceries, so I'll refrain from being too judgemental.
If you genuinely believe there is an invisible doomsday villain deliberately targeting those who fail to wear their 1/8" thick superhero costume, you are, in fact, psychotic.
Be very careful too... a lot of these tortured stupid animals bite.
Yep. He doesn't want to think. He's not conceited enough to think he can think and arrive at 'better' or 'truer' conclusions than anyone else.
Than the prevailing narrative.
So he goes with the flow and crosses his fingers and hopes for the best and trusts in his 'betters'.
Which, of course, I think you'll agree, includes all those reading and contributing to these columns.
And reading and contributing to the vilification and mockery of this man.
But all around he sees rips in the fabric of his reality and he grows desperate for some reassurance, some certainty, some truth...
But of course as time goes on there's been no clear resolutions to anything, covid hasn't been defeated in the first couple of weeks of restraint, nor in two years of vaccines and measures and voices of dissent... etc.
So like a wounded animal - I note the typecasting of him as a brute animal elsewhere in this thread - he cries in pain and fear and anger and looks for something to focus his torment on.
Picks on the unvaccinated. For that's the mantra endlessly directed at him.
By a monolith omnipresent media/govt machine. Countered by what? Is there even a programme of pasting up bills showing graphs and charts and expressing truth? No.
Is there a 'fight back' centre compiling all the truths that can be pointed to as free for all source where irrefutable truths and facts can be found to set against the propaganda? No.
Is there any help at all?
Does his government and prevailing narrative love him? No. He's directed to obey, to obey and to obey... and never receives any benefit.
Does the 'counter narrative' love him? No. They attack him, mock him, barrage him with abstruse 'arguments', try to manipulate him into doing apparently anti-social and even illegal things. To them he's a dumb animal.
Yep. And you're happy with that.
What he needs is - if you don't mind a dose of strong 'sugar' for a minute - your love. Your understanding. Your fellowship. Your identification with him.
Haha you say All that the govt is saying and doing is wrong. Wrong for what, wrong for whom? You? You alone? Or for all?
It's wrong for all. Isn't it? Wrong for all. Including him. Including that man. He's not a fool, a clown, a villain, a brute animal. He's the very stuff that you're presumably fighting on behalf of.
Stock, standard, bemused, misled and mistreated humanity.
You claim to be showing the way, illuminating the path. For whom? For him. You're working for him. He is the one you're all about. He is the one you care for.
Mock and vilify him and you've cut the ground from beneath your own feet.
You have to agree with him. All the time. That's called 'being agreeable'. This transcends dumb academic logic. Humans are agreeable with each other despite all kinds of logical fallacies and absurdities on the way to finding the truth and common ground.
I'm saying it is not necessary to be strictly logical and scientifically accurate in agreeing with such people. Not at all. Real human dialogue is not strict debating society exercise in pure logic.
So you can, we can, take his part entirely and be purely agreeable with his expressed fears and attitudes at the same time as being of completely different mind and set upon altering his mind 180°.
Don't understand me? Not hard. I'm not being clever. Just think of a soothing adult with a distressed child demanding something absurd they can't have.
The adult approaches with as much love as possible and much positive assurance: 'Yes, yes, dear, it's all alright, yes, of course, of course, we'll fix everything..'
That kind of thing is all I'm talking about. Not so rare is it?
In adult terms its perhaps called compassion, is it? Whatever. That's what's needed. That's the way out of this mess. Not division and smart alecks.
I agree, love is important. I don't discard these people. I pity them. But I'm not going to obey just to make him feel better, because that will make the problem worse, for everyone, in the long run. You love someone the most when you speak truth to them, or at the very least, force them to attack their own false pretensions.
The best strategy imo is to scoff. You need to trigger the same part of their brain 'they' trigger. That gooey selfish little prideful center. Instead of trying to reason with them rationally, calmly and stoically say "you still believe that!?" and then turn away or ignore them. That's the only way to get them to look inward instead of at outer threats.
I understand. I don't say much - haven't been openly challenged and my state has few restrictions. I'm torn between letting such people be and hoping time will help them or saying something. Some, like Robert Kennedy, say to speak out / challenge because it is important to get them to question the narrative they are living in so they don't become part of forces that continue to try to obstruct liberty.
I'll try that....
Call it what you will, but you’re describing the process of mob rule and witch hunts perfectly.
I don't know about perfectly but certainly it's pretty much the same I think.
But the point is that it is not mob rule
It is rule by the rulers.
The mob are saying 'we don't know where the truth is'
They are saying 'it is wiser to do as we're told in earthly pragmatic terms'.
They are saying 'it is wiser 'philosophically' to believe - better safe than sorry. (today that's better safe than risk 'terrible covid' and re witches it was better safe than risk eternal damnation.)
They are saying: let us act together in the interests of safety in numbers, we are 'we'.
Now as then. Then as now.
What is seen as an evil on the part of deluded people is clearly, at this remove, seen as an institutional evil and the part of the people fairly obviously dictated by necessity in all sober reasonableness.
Very handy to blame the people on both occasions.
Oh you poor deluded fools.
I'm saying they're not necessarily so deluded. But neither are they sure of their ground hence they simply do as they're told until the truth does become apparent.
All is orchestrated, then as now, by their 'betters'.
And then as now their 'betters' is a wide and general kind of term.
Almost anyone can be one of their 'betters'.
All the establishment by law, by structure of their civilization.
But all the self styled 'observers' and 'intellectuals' and so on.
So that where you and I see three parties: ourselves, the masses and the govt, big pharma etc. they see only two.
Themselves and the rest. The officious and the pretentious 'rest'.
All those who pretend to 'know' and never cease pronouncing on it with ever more abstruse arguments.
Hence why they are not convinced by our arguments. They don't see them as counter to the prevailing establishment position, they simply see them as minor dissents amongst the 'ruling' or better perhaps 'pontificating' class.
I think the term (i.e., mass formation psychosis) is an attempt to put a measure (in this case, a string of words that come sufficiently close to putting a definition to an action) to a pattern of behaviour amongst many; and a pattern that seems to run counter to logic.
I think it can also be described in the following way: 'Getting caught up and taken along with the tide that is the gravity of social comformity, at the expense of individual scrutiny to the position of the self' (or something along those lines)
Mass psychosis / formation / hypnosis, is surely the only explanation for the German populations complicity in the persecution and murder of Jews.
From casual observation, those who consume the most television and newspapers seem to be more susceptible to manipulation. It's likely not as simple as that, but my family, who believe the narrative and are all jabbed are also avid consumers of the almighty TV.
I think that's part of it. However, I didn't get overcome with this fear but I do have on going anxiety and depression so can be fearful in my own way of lots of normal everyday things (like going to a new place or meeting new people, flying) but often NOT of things that are presented to me say via mass media. What can I say: people are weird.
I can understand how people were originally afraid. I was afraid myself, through most of 2020. What I don't understand is how they didn't learn that the danger was exaggerated, and certainly didn't warrant taking grossly undertested "vaccines".
In deep blue urban areas of the US - these people who cling to fear are ideologically driven. They had TDS long before Covid and the two combined have created an impenetrable wall against common sense. They simply can't and won't admit they were wrong. At least this is one part of it - from direct observation.
Yep Well my stance is pretty simple. I seek to employ Occam's razor and not multiply entities without reason is all. The behaviour of the compliant masses is adequately explained by the mechanisms I've mentioned.
The behaviour of those who propagate propaganda could be a different thing - when you get to levels somewhere near Fauci. But for the most part on the lower levels, which is the most part, the same mechanisms generally can be seen to operate I think.
And those folks are suffering two or three kinds of coercion.
The have the same coercive forces as everyone, the general public.
But they also have a special coercive force as part of their job.
They have perhaps a third coercive force: the need to justify themselves to their fellows who, knowing where they work, what they do, will perhaps query them regarding the whole matter.
It's interesting, the definition of psychosis.
" an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real "
for we can see that the condition of mind of the masses remains, in my narrative, as it ever was: essentially compliant, protective, group identified, long suffering, believing in salvation via their 'betters' or those charged with the job.
But the condition of mind of our activists is not as ever was. Indignation, disbelief, wonder, astonishment, chagrin, wrath, head spin - feelings of losing contact with reality are all symptoms felt by those at any level who're considering the whole covid madness and trying to make sense of it.
It is universal amongst such people to declare they never, ever could have believed such as this would ever have come to pass.
In short: the abnormal conditions of mind belong to the activists and a feature of that abnormal condition is an obsessive desire to determine what is real and what is not... the sole focus of their efforts for many of them... 'real' as pertains to covid and all things covid related.
So I find it not at all difficult to imagine that the pressures of the day cause them to grasp at straws and the straw they grasp at is 'mass formation psychosis'.
They have an easy antidote and a ready alternative diagnosis: respect for the masses and the ability to see life through their eyes.
But mostly I think they simply choose not to do that.
In the USA especially the penchant for 'not doing', 'not seeing through their eyes' seems very deeply ingrained indeed.
And it perhaps spills over into this.
p.s. A small correction: I wasn't referring to people who 'truly believe the propaganda' per se. I think I mentioned I hypothesized many of them didn't know what to believe and admitted it but took the road of compliance as the safer, more polite, more in accord with their fellows, etc.... Was in fact the biggest part of my point. That they don't claim to know.
That they are essentially humble. And well motivated.
Two things:
1) of the big five personality traits, the “masses” in this case likely score highly in conscientiousness and agreeability. These two traits together create a significant thrust toward harmony in smaller populations (think Dunbar number) yet can be hijacked through propaganda by authoritarian interests if the conditions are right (adding in negative emotion, via pandemic fear, is an example). So, the very type of person that is needed in numbers to have small communities run smoothly can be the reason mass formation over an inappropriately large swath of the globe can be created. Conscientiousness and Agreeability are the very fuel of this formation.
2) I’ve posted this before https://www.rintrah.nl/vaccine-effectiveness-is-an-unfalsifiable-belief-system/ Girard discusses the mimetic crisis, and the need for scapegoats. Interesting read.
Interesting point about personality traits. I did Jordan Peterson's online assessment back before Christmas & was quite dismayed at my results (although, based on your comment, it may turn out to be my saving grace, so to speak). I scored 80 in agreeableness, 17 in conscientiousness & 94 in neuroticism. I didn't feel it painted a very accurate portrait of myself but perhaps, in hindsight, it has kept me searching for answers.
It's interesting alright. A bit garbled, though, I think.
His graph doesn't prove or even illustrate anything to me. Bemuses me.
What's his point? That there'll be a scapegoat that will eventually be deified? I would doubt that.
It's probably all a bit over my head. I'm not real smart you know.
Probably should read Girard I suppose.
:)
This has brought me great ruminations. I've re-read all of the above about a dozen times, trying to absorb your point, Arthur brogard. If I'm understanding your point correctly, if I may grossly simplify, you are saying that the people who are being pointed at as suffering from 'mass formation' are simply displaying normal herd behaviour? And those who are doing the pointing are those who live outside the herd, who are not driven by the same motivations as those 'in the herd'?
It certainly makes as much sense as anything else. Unfortunately it means that I'm just going to have to learn to suck it up........
I think you've got me exactly right. I wish I'd had the sense to put it so succinctly myself.
I'm not only saying normal 'herd' behaviour I'm saying normal 'sensible' behaviour.
For they see only a total wall of propaganda with tiny areas of objection all vilified by many and nearly all abstruse and apparently beside the point.... as so on. Right?
So they say 'there's a solid wall of opinion with a few dissenters. we cannot find a solid core of dissent, any centre, any 'repository' of truth as a touchstone, we instead find all about quarreling 'experts'.
What's the sensible thing to do? Overturn everything or stick with strength for the while and see what transpires?
If the evils are as egregious as the dissenters claim surely there'll be an enormous furore directly?
Would go the normal, reasonable sensible thinking is what I claim.
And there never was any great furore was there?
Prominent persons were claimed to have literally killed hundreds even thousands by forcing them, old and sick with covid, to return to crowded relatively unprepared ill equipped hospices and such.
What a claim! A claim of major malfeasance. Of gross incompetence in office. A claim even of literal mass murder.
What happened? Nothing.
Do you see where I'm going?
Like supremely sensible and unpretentious persons they don't claim or pretend to know the truth in all this hysterical shouting match. So they watch, listen, try to learn and meanwhile practice the same kind of life preserving skills/measures people do in wartime.
They do as they're told whether it seems right or not. They care for their families etc. They generally care for the whole body, the whole social body.
And so on.
I'm simply saying you and I would act that way, anyone would, it is the sensible and human/humane way to act.
So why don't you and I act like that? Well because we are somewhat marginalised, by choice. We are very much in a minority. We are a tiny minority of 'outsiders' perhaps to use Colin Wilson (was it? ) 's term.
And we are a little egocentric and a little conceited and believe ourselves to be capable of discovering the truths alone in our rooms, without the company of our fellows, without the benefit of 'groupthink'.
It just happens to be something about which we have much material freely available courtesy of the miracle world wide web and which we can get our heads around if we try hard enough.
If it had been an issue concerning abstruse maths, esoteric quantum physical particles or somesuch we wouldn't be quite so ready to engage and form opinions.
Probably haven't made myself clear. Probably didn't need to say any of it. Sorry.
Just want to add that I see no cause for 'unfortunate' 'sucking up'. To me the realisation that my fellows are sane and sensible after all - and human, humane - moreso than I apparently, is a relief and a boon.
It means that when the truth does begin to permeate through the mass like ink spreading through a blotter it will be permeating a good mass, a sensible, living true and good mass.
A mass that will allow itself to be educated in reason and truth. Far better prospect than the thought of the truth struggling to get through a dumb mass of psychotics.
Wasn't Event 201 (Bill Gates) about how to control the masses in a pandemic?
"Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism."
- Thomas Sowell
And this
“ The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer—and they don't want explanations that fail to give them that.” -Thomas Sowell
Sowell is one of the wisest and most astute observers I know of.
Yep. But he's not God. He makes mistakes.
Hence religion.
Thank you for examining this vital key to understanding how and why so many otherwise intelligent people could succumb to menticide and mass formation.
This has been a topic I have been exploring since my first essay, “A Primer for the Propagandized: Fear Is the Mind-Killer” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/a-primer-for-the-propagandized), and I believe understanding our susceptibility to cognitive biases can help us comprehend how this occurs while also building our own defenses against such neurological vulnerabilities.
This is also why Trump Derangement Syndrome has been such an effective tool for manipulating the masses. As I write in “Letter to a Scientifically-Minded Friend” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-scientifically-minded):
“An unwitting Goldstein, Trump played right into BigPharma’s strategy to discredit hydroxychloroquine by praising it—giving Trump Derangement Syndrome (a psychological disorder manufactured by and spread to tremendous monetary benefit and turnkey mass control by the media) sufferers the best and only reason they needed to dismiss it. They have been trained to plug their ears, cover their eyes, scream at the top of their lungs, and stamp their feet the instant any one of the Deplorables opens his mouth. One of the most effective instruments in the plutocracy’s toolkit, TDS has been brandished to misdirect the public for years, and it continues to work its magic despite Trump’s declining relevance, the embers of which the media will continue to fan as long as it pays dividends—just as Goldstein’s detested image is deployed in culturally unifying activities such as Two Minutes Hate.”
P.S. Love the optical illusion example you use at the outset. Also makes me think of the Japanese film “Rashomon,” where you see the story from multiple perspectives, every version of which causes you to perceive the same scenario differently.
I enjoy your articles immensely - Having lived in Portland and having been involved in political groups through the Trump years I can attest to this overwhelmingly. We probably have friends in common as I knew many from Yamhill County. I learned early on - with no literature or resources to help me understand what was going on - that facts literally don't matter. These people are incapable of accepting information, whether it's new data or simply from a non-approved source (meaning anything outside the MSM). I have never known so many highly educated people to be so woefully misinformed. I moved my family away about year ago, for all the reasons one can imagine knowing Portland. To this day, every time I think of Portland - I get a bad bad feeling. Progressive urban cities have become a cancer to the health and well being of our society.
Thank you, Jhigh68, and so true about facts not mattering! That reminds me of this prescient quote from Gustave Le Bon’s should-be-required-for-all “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
Regarding my “Letter to the Yamhill County Board of Commissioners” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-yamhill-county-board), I actually don’t live there but only learned about it from a reader who’s a fellow Oregonian. Amazingly, one of the commissioners actually wrote me back with an enthusiastic thank-you, so that was rather encouraging given it’s the first time I’ve ever gotten a response from the intended recipients of one of my letters!
I agree with everything you said about Portland and urban centers—everyone who wants to survive should stay far-far away from those atomic bombs waiting to go off.
I have come to accept that belief based on evidence isn't a thing for most people. Instead, most people simply espouse the views of the group/groups with which they most strongly identify and then espouse different views as the group views change. Gay marriage was an abomination rejected by all good people, right up until the day the tide changed, and everyone was in favor as they claimed they had always been. And those who did not agree were the abomination.
My guess is that humans work this way because there are valuable evolutionary advantages conveyed on people who hold no beliefs. When the village thinks cannibalism is an abomination, you hunt monkeys. But when the village decides to eat their enemies, you collect firewood. The person who holds on to the belief that cannibalism is wrong starves as do his children.
Let me suggest that we can never know what others believe. We can't even easily know if we are dealing with someone who is capable of belief based on evidence. All we can do is listen to what they say, read what they write and observe what they do. I offer this outlook as a means of stress relief. If most people don't hold beliefs, then you shouldn't stress when you can't change their beliefs.
I logged in just to like this comment. We should be cautious when we agree with our peers on everything because that's a sign that we're not thinking. Holds for our side, too.
Good teachers encourage students who disagree with them.
Social conditioning on a smaller scale.
Reposting from another stack to hear views: How does one counter the ‘but variants’ narrative? I’ve heard from so many believers that everything - masks, lockdowns, vaccines would have worked but for variants.
When I point out that vaccine evading variants can only exist if there’s a vaccine - I get blank looks
there are always variants. all kinds of viruses infect humans and each of them has variant strains. a strategy premised on SARS-2 not having variant strains is stupid and doomed to fail.
I would add that there are an infinite number of variants. By that I mean that when someone “catches” a cold (covid) from someone else and then spreads it, what they spread is not a designated variant (e.g. Omicron) but an individually altered virus that is unique to the spreader. In turn the recipient then spreads another unique variant. In that way it can be said that there is no such thing as an official single variant that can be designated by an authorised test.
I can back that up by stating that I personally have “caught” (by her shedding) something from my vaccinated significant other that has caused me several unusual minor symptoms that are annoying and continuing but not life threatening, such symptoms being unique to me.
And I further suggest that any lab testing purporting to identify a designated variant is an artefact of the protocols used in the testing process.
Yes. I/we caught something from a woman who supposedly did not have covid but had recently had a vax.
I think it is not supposed to be possible.
But it happened. Could only be that she in fact did have the virus I suppose.
Unless the vaxxed can shed spike proteins and they then would cause symptoms, of course.
I believe that's said to be next door to impossible, though, isn't it? On the grounds that proteins degrade far too quickly?
that's more or less what I say.
That’s a superb answer. Other viruses have variants too!
The rebuttal I usually see is that vaccinated people carry less of the virus therefore reducing the probability of a bad variant spontaneously emerging. They view this as a mitigating factor stronger than the evolutionary pressure the vaccine puts on variants. I am not enough of an expert to have any idea which of those pressures would be stronger.
I’m not sure that was even proven about “less virus” being carried. I thing it was just conjecture.
Nope, similar viral load. The biggest difference in viral load is within the obese (much more, and for far longer)
It's unfortunate that we don't have an honest and fact seeking media that could have spent just a modicum of time to enlighten the average non-scientific reader on the ever so basic facts about viruses and how they virus. I heard someone recently talk about the almost infinitesimal differences between the genomes of the recent coronavirus variants, and how even the SarsCov1 virus of 20 years ago was 80% the same as SarsCov2, and furthermore, that natural immunity for the original Cov1 still appeared to work for Cov2 with that 80% similarity.
Unfortunate indeed about the MSM. Being in the early winter of my life I have lived through the demise of the MSM. Fewer and fewer readers want to pay for what they offer so MSM now relies on benefactors such as Bezos for their income. Shouldn't malign him too much as such has always owned newspapers, cf Beaverbrook mid 20th UK. Nevertheless the reporting in current day MSM is juvenile compared to past and to blogs such as found on Substack.
MSM are getting a final windfall from govt sponsorship about covid so they'll keep it going as long as possible.
At issue with media was their new found 'enlightened' viewpoints about society with little understanding of ordinary people. Trump's antics were repulsive to that group which is oblivious to policy. When Pelosi decided that the pandemic could be used politically to destroy Trump, she did so and the media was more than happy to assign fault. Trump's policies that might have reduced the damage being caused by mitigation had to be shouted down by media. Trump never used his awesome powers to force his policies but caved to the pressure campaign. Then we were trapped by the politics. Those politics have kept us mired in the various ineffective mitigation efforts. Trump could not have known the vaccines were a bill of defective goods and may still find he can't admit being hoodwinked but the vaccines were adopted as the singular tool against the virus by the same public health officials complicit in creating the virus. But, sadly, those public heath officials seem captured by pHarma who are motivated by greed.
Biologists estimate that 380 trillion viruses are living on and inside your body right now—10 times the number of bacteria. Some can cause illness, but many simply coexist with you. In late 2019, for example, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania discovered 19 different strains of redondovirus in the respiratory tract; a handful were associated with periodontal disease or lung disease, but others could possibly fight respiratory illnesses. Scientists' rapidly expanding knowledge makes it clear that we are not made up primarily of “human” cells that are occasionally invaded by microbes; our body is really a superorganism of cohabitating cells, bacteria, fungi and most numerous of all: viruses. The latest counts indicate that as much as half of all the biological matter in your body is not human.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/viruses-can-help-us-as-well-as-harm-us/
The study of exosomes will eventually blow-up what we think we know about exogenous viruses.
Remind them that viruses, like everything, evolve constantly, and that every cold they've ever caught was caused by a variant of a previous cold virus.
Remind them that they are exposed to germs everyday and don't notice it. Tell them about Demodex mites.
Oh Bob! A man after my own heart! As a veterinary nurse, when I learned that all dogs had Demodex mites & that it was a compromised immune system that allowed 'symptoms' to appear, that was a link in a chain that continues to grow. Terrain theory vs germ theory......... 🤔.
All humans have cancer cells. It's weakened immune systems that allow them to grow into cancers.
Hi Nikki. What are your thoughts on terrain versus germ theory?
As I understand it, these mites are a part of our biome when it is functioning normally. I didn't know they are also found on dogs!
Oh, yes: they sure are. When the immune system fails to contain the population of demodex mites, the dog develops demodectic mange: hairloss, itching & inflammation of the skin along with 2ndary bacterial infections of the skin because of the mites, damage to the skin from the dog scratching & the depressed immune system. Injections of Dectomax (an ivermectin-family of parasite control for cattle) is the standard treatment here in Australia. It's off-label, of course, because Dectomax is registered for use in cattle. But it's interesting, isn't it?
I hadn't heard of terrain theory until a few weeks ago so I haven't completely got my head around it. But it makes sense: pathogens are everywhere all of the time & it's only our healthy, functioning immune system that keeps them at bay. I'm sure that it's way more complicated than that but it explains why not everyone gets infected when they are exposed 🤔.
ETA: re use Dectomax for demodectic mange, terrain theory makes me wonder if the anti-parasitic Dectomax kills the parasite (the demodex mite) or if it does something which aids/improves the immune response, enabling the immune system to re-establish the correct population........ I'm not a scientist, so I don't understand the mode of action. But one has to wonder.........
Check out helminthic therapy. Our immune system and microbiome evolved with any number of other symbiotic organisms, and may not be able to work very well in a vacuum.
Please don't! We would all be ordered to wear bio-hazard suits for ever and be confined to our rooms exploring the metaverse (all for our own safety, of course)
Immunity-dodging variants were inevitable as soon as it was known it was a coronavirus. Policy should've accounted for that.
Policy is determined by the goal meant to be achieved ~ if you misunderstand the goal, the policy won't make sense.
Umm, right, that is the awkward part, isn’t it😉
Refer to Geert Vanden Bossche recent substack article:
'Could Omicron metamorphose into a wolf in sheep’s clothing?'
He issues a warning that we may be heading for major trouble.
It’s the unthinkable thought, that their choosing the vaxx actually hurt the common good. No more virtue.
An invisible umbrella would work except when it rains.
They didn’t need to work.
And this is why science has never been able to create a vaccine for the common cold!
As a historian of science, I wrote an article over a year ago using Kuhn's insights (and others) to explain why we should be skeptical about scientific claims. I argued that science is an interested enterprise, full of economical, personal, social and political agendas. Science is not what is left when we leave all those interests behind, science is a bundle of all that, just like any other human activity. To prove my point, the article was praised but I couldn't get it published because of political issues.
"Betrayers of Truth" is a good analysis of this. You can publish most anything you want at a new publisher called substack.com. Many of us would like to see your article.
OMG I remember that Forbes article. What a classic.
This is a beautiful breakdown of the struggles I've had over the last two years (and even before with all the Trump stuff) interacting with generically "blue pilled" friends. It's not that they aren't smart, or that I'm smarter, but that we live in two completely different universes. Trying to bridge that gap is like talking to a square about cubes
Right, I live in a different world from almost everyone else I know. My path diverged from everyone else's the minute the official word was "There's no treatment for COVID-19. All we can offer is supportive care in a hospital once your lips start to turn blue." I knew that high-dose Vitamin C given by IV had saved at least one person from a deadly virus, so I got on the web and started researching the treatments alternative docs were proposing or using for COVID-19. By the time I got COVID, in mid-March 2020, I had a file folder full of information on effective treatment and the early, effective treatment I did worked beautifully. I was through the illness in 8 days and was never even sick enough to sit down; my oxygen saturation at worst went from 99% to 97%. But well-propagandized people can hardly even hear what I say about my experience because it just doesn't fit the narrative MSM has installed in their brains.
Same here. I think one thing is that I like to question and wonder and most people just want the “answer.”
So, I suppose bringing up the tesseract is out of the question? 🤡
Not at all. Go right ahead. The thought has me grinning ear to ear.
Before I entered the field of law, I was a professor with a Ph.d and post doctoral training in a hard science. Being in the field of law greatly increased my critical thinking skills with the law's insistence on thinking like a lawyer and understanding completely both sides of any issue. As I survey the garbage people like Fauci are feeding the population in the name of "science" I've been struck by how wrong, how lost and how much hubris these wrong people inflict on us all. I've gotten to the point of asking people in debates about science whether they accept that science is carried out by humans who are subject to all human frailties, therefore, they could be wrong even if they think the "science" is airtight.
Two comments:
1) The world's leading candle makers would never have peer reviewed a light bulb.
2) The most important exclamation in science is not the "Eureka" of Archimedes, but "WTF?"
Another problem is that scientists assume that "peer review" is a process for ensuring that a scientific article is correct.
In fact, peer review is simply a process for ensuring that all scientists say the same thing. Often, they say the same thing because their funding comes from the same source.
To give just one example: all studies funded by the sugar industry say that sugar is good for you, whereas just about all independently-funded studies (not that there are many of those) say that it's bad for you.
Funny, that.
Peer review = dogma enforcement
https://twitter.com/DarlingPlease2/status/1486862509420154883?s=20&t=vmUwhqYJZCOaGPgwiCZTbA
Ah, Allan Savory - there's someone for whom things that work come first, and theory comes second.
How the mainstream scientists try to knock him down!
I have great respect for Allan Savory and his work. I also respect the fact that he publicly tells the story of his ordering 40,000 elephants killed, and then having to deal with the fact that this measure backfired. Something we should learn from this is that actions and their effects should be thoroughly tested on a small scale before being implemented on a large scale.
or, another thought...Original Antigenic Sin is not exclusive to the immune system... Similar phenomena also affect reasoning.
Exactly, you got that right! Other related expressions for that are the "sunk cost fallacy" or "escalation of commitment". I think it is a basic flaw in humans and their systems, which during evolution probably have served us good, but in a rapidly changing environment gives us the results we see now.
I agree. I call it "Original Information Sin."
I like to think that, when I admit error, I'm at least showing I'm smarter than people who cannot admit error.
Elegant, and beautifully written. The missing point is that most of our troubles are the result of inexorable human nature, over which we have no control in others, only ourselves. The path to success is recognizing that nature in others, and ourselves, and adapting it to our needs.
To wit, it doesn't benefit us to explain to others the masks don't work or vax is unnecessarily risky, but our decisions should be better informed than theirs. The better model wins.
The better model has gotten its azz beaten for two years
Not mine. The better model always wins, but too few used it. The losers all followed loser models.
My point is that millions who have used the better model have suffered horribly from the lockdowns, loss of livelihoods, passports and pariah policies employed by adherents to the loser model. True, they haven’t succumbed to the experimental jab. But millions have been collateral damage just the same.
Sometimes the best outcome available is not called "winner" but "least worst."
Yes, we often share the misfortunes of our neighbors, to some extent. But less so, if we're more careful. I know people who have lived in terror for two years, which I have avoided entirely. I've missed some conveniences by avoiding some of the restrictions, but have enjoyed some occasional acts of defiance, so there are entries on both sides of the ledger. Net loss overall, but that's always the price of civilization. And I've lost less than many others, so it's a relative win. We all try to make the best of our circumstances. Some do it better than others.
Great piece, thank you. It goes along with how my review of RFK Jr book on Fauci might read. ' This book is not for those that cling to these core beliefs- Our government agencies are run by good scientists who could never be corrupted. Science and scientists always corrects themselves as soon as new info is discovered. Tony is a good person and couldn't possible get to his position if he was corrupt. And finally any jab named a 'vaccine' is always safe and effective and fully vetted by science.
So many people with these core beliefs is why we are where we are.
It's really distressing and disorienting to have your cocoon of comfortable core beliefs blasted to bits. A lot of people aren't up for it.
I find having core beliefs exploded exciting. It means there's a lot more thinking that has to be done.
What if a person fought against their natural fear of uncertainty by perpetual acknowledgement of their lowliness before the incomprehensible glory of God? Perhaps objective reality (ie God) could make contact with the human mind in those circumstances.
As an atheist, I'm still OK with people believing in God as long as they don't mandate it.
God is objective? We all know about god from people who claimed to have spoken or seen god, and managed to get published.
I'm not an atheist but I think everyone's idea of god is just like this virology sham .. a belief that is based on past stories. None of it is objective
that's why it's called faith...
I fear young people today don't study Plato's dialogues. In them, Socrates keeps saying how much he does not know and showing up people who claim to know stuff.but
this is why anything in science that is viciously attacked i generally want to find out more
i love science and i hate it!
I love science. I hate The Science.
Science is like America. It's an idea that a handful of people don't have exclusive copyright to, no matter what they tell you.
I can be American at the bottom of the fucking ocean. I can do science without permission.
guttermouth.substack.com
"I can do science without permission." Beautiful statement! (Dang, I've been doing science without permission for about 45 years now. )
Whenever something in science or medicine is controversial, and especially if someone is being "discredited" for their work or views, I'm attracted, not repelled. I find it's essential to go straight to the controversial person's own words (speech, writings, interviews) because virtually always, what they have to say is interesting and valuable -- and it's being distorted all to heck by the person's opponents.
This. Dissent excites a curious mind and enrages an incurious one.