Social Science Mass (crowd) Formation Psychosis

[BlueE]

Summary: Professor of Clinical Psychology with added degree in statistics, Professor Mattias Desmet from Gent University in Belgium

A mass formation, or crowd formation psychological response, in reaction to a mass campaign of fear of the COVID narrative.

How fear, isolation socialisation lead to mass formation and totalitarian thinking.

Main stream narrative from beginning statistics did not dramatically overestimated the dangerousness of the virus. Eg Stanford but dissident voices did no have much effect.

Initial mathematical models overestimated mortality, especially Imperial Collage models. By end of May 2020 in Sweden, 80,000 were supposed to die unless lockdowns occurred, when 6000 were reported dying with COVID-19 with no lockdowns and no protection of vulnerable older people.

Corona measures present themselves as based on science but even when models were shown to be dramatically overestimated the responses were never changed.

Mass Formation emerges in society when;

• A lot of people experiencing lack of social bond (social connectedness).
• A lot of people experiencing lack of meaning in their lives.
• A lot of people experiencing free floating anxiety. This means not connected to a concrete threat, like being threatened by a lion. End up in extremely aversive negative emotional state dealing with anxiety that you can not control
• Free floating frustration and aggression that you feel but can’t aim at a direct cause.

Free floating anxiety is a very painful experience and people are looking for an explanation for their pain. If the media provide an object for this anxiety and give a strategy to deal with the anxiety all their anxiety connects to this object and people are willing to go along with the strategy to deal with this no matter what the cost is.

Secondly, people start a collective and heroic battle with this object of anxiety and in that way a new kind of social bond and sense making emerges. Suddenly life is directed at battling the object of anxiety and establishing new connections with other people. The sudden switch of a negative lack of social connection to the opposite, leads to a mental intoxication making mass or crowd formation like hypnosis.

It doesn’t matter any more if the narrative is incorrect or wrong, they continue to go along with the narrative which makes it difficult to destroy.

We all try to show the narrative is wrong for people in this state they don’t want to go back to the state of free-floating anxiety. Have to acknowledge the state of and look for other ways of finding solutions or replace the anxiety.

This is a narrow psychological state that people only see the victims of the corona virus and no empathy of any victims of lockdowns, delayed treatments or dying from others causes. Mass formation focuses attention so much on one point they don’t worry about their own physical and psychological wellbeing.

People become radically intolerant of dissenting voices because this threatens to wake people up and instead of being confronted with their original anxiety they become very angry with different information.

If people many in the population are happy to participate in a strategy to “control” the narrative. Eg there is a very dangerous virus that need to go into lockdown to control.

This gives a new kind of social bond and meaning to life is given meaning and connectedness that many did not have and is the real reason that people still buy into the narrative. Mental intoxication of connectedness which is the real reason people still buy into the narrative.

It has the function of a ritual, behaviours that people participate in to show you belong to a group, to show solidarity, to create a collective. The more absurd the rituals are from a practical perceptive the more protective people are.

Very narrow field of attention. People are only aware of a narrow field or reality or attention. For example, people are only able to fee empathy for victims of the Corona virus and victims of any other illness, treatments delayed, suicides, people losing jobs or other collateral damage are ignored or not valued.

Almost impossible to provide arguments in conflict with the narrative. Any arguments that do not fall into the small field of attention of people in the mass formation, just like hypnosis, are ignored and people are completely insensitive to.

Attention remains focused on solidarity and shared narrative, and they won’t notice anything else.

Also seen in the population 30s with Stalin’s and Hitler people were insensitive to personal losses. People are willing to sacrifice all individual freedoms and rights for the collective goals.

A precursor to totalitarianism. Lose education, jobs, homes, health diagnosis to protect one another, protect health system which gives then a collective purpose.

Many including politicians don’t want to go back to the old models, If we want to wake people up have to show there are others ways, than going back to the old model with bs jobs etc.

Mass formation makes people intolerant of dissenting voices and need to cancel or censor them, for threatening to wake people up.

Easier to direct free floating aggressions to close and be cruel to dissenting voices to protect the collective.

Intolerance to anyone not going along with the mass.

The leaders don’t want people to wake up as the masses would hold them responsible. Sacrifices with personal and collective losses would seem to be needless.

Only aware of one small part of reality and told this is the only reality that counts so all decisions and measures are disproportionate meaning an unbalanced way to deal with reality.

The difference between Totalitarian states and Dictatorships are important. As soon as you understand that you understand the power of the mass.

In a classical Dictatorship the popn. obeys the Dictator because they are scared. In a Totalitarian state the popn. obeys because they are "hypnotized".

The Totalitarian state behaves in a totally different way to a Dictatorship. For example, in a Dictatorship when the opposition is silenced the Dictator becomes milder or friendly because he has to get a positive image to remain leader.

When the opposition is silenced in a Totalitarian system it commits it’s worst atrocities. For example, Stalin in 30s and 1935 Nazi Germany. It becomes a monster that radically "devours it’s children", or destroys people that support it or not.

People in a totalitarian state who commit crimes, stick to the rules that they make, allowing the narratives. They are deeply convinced of the ideology bringing them to some kind of artificial paradise. So they think almost everything can be sacrificed to achieve this ideology.

If confronted what is actually happening with what they believe they will lie and this makes them guilty of a crime.

Create a very strict society with more control and stricter rules that supersede laws, even if they change every 5 minutes. Many intelligent people with high academic qualification seem to be susceptible to this type of manipulation. They want to follow the rules and believe not only they’re correct they need to reach the conspiracy theorists to change them.

Other people with no academic backgrounds may be more open to different opinions and can think for yourself.

Very important to keep speaking out because the hypnosis becomes worse than it is with the processes or mass formation, so atrocities are committed.

Three groups.

• Around 30% is fully indoctrinated or committed to the mass.
• Around 40% not really committed but follow the crown
• 30% do not flow the mass and speak out against it

The third group is diverse and if it finds a way to unify, it is a danger to the mass or crowd.

The mass formation of the population is reinforced by voices repeating messages every day and leaders know this.

Without support of the media the mass psychosis would not continue.

People in the masses are convinced everything they do is to help other people. Hitler said “I expect every German to sacrifice his life for the German people” Stalin similar. People want to understand what they believe, and you need transparency. When many have been cheated and lied to they need transparency and to be able to trust.

The opposite is true with voices continuing to speak out is the most important way to disrupt the message and is why they are desperate to silence differing voices. Being able to use humour and irony is important rather than direct confrontation to wake people out of their mass.

Continue to share data and present rational argument as sharing rational counter arguments make the hypnosis less severe but never really able to wake people up because there is a connection at an emotional level of free floating anxiety with the virus. Like two pieces of metal heated and merged means it needs more than facts and logic.

 

[BlueE]

A brief overview of Mass Formation, which was developed by Dr. Mattias Desmet. He is a psychologist and a statistician. He is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. He calls this phenomena:

MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS

So, when he says “mass” formation, you can think of this as equivalent to “crowd” formation. One can think of this as:

CROWD PSYCHOSIS

The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sense making as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible "object of anxiety" and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective single-mindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.

As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view. Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong.

Left unabated, a society under the spell of mass formation will support a totalitarian governance structure capable of otherwise unthinkable atrocities in order to maintain compliance. A note: mass formation is different from group think. There are easy ways to fix group think by just bringing in dissenting voices and making sure you give them platforms. It isn’t so easy with mass formation. Even when the narrative falls apart, cracks in the strategy clearly aren’t solving the issue, the hypnotized crowd can’t break free of the narrative. This is what appears to be happening now with COVID-19. The solution for those in control of the narrative is to produce bigger and bigger lies to prop up the solution. Those being controlled by mass formation no longer are able to use reason to break free of the group narrative.

Of course, the obvious example of mass formation is Germany in the 1930s and 40s. How could the German people who were highly educated, very liberal in the classic sense; western thinking people… how could they go so crazy and do what they did to the Jews? How could this happen?
To a civilized people? A leader of a mass formation movement will use the platform to continue to pump the group with new information to focus on. In the case of COVID-19, I like to use the term “fear pr0n.” Leaders, through main stream media and government channels continuously feed the “beast” with more messaging that focus and further hypnotize their adherents.

Studies suggest that mass formation follows a general distribution:

30% are brainwashed, hypnotized, indoctrinated by the group narrative
40% in the middle are persuadable and may follow if no worthy alternative is perceived
30% fight against the narrative.

Those that rebel and fight against the narrative, become the enemy of the brainwashed and a primary target of aggression.

One of the the best ways to counter mass formation is for those against the narrative to continue to speak out against it, which serves to help break the hypnosis of some in the brainwashed group as well as persuade the persuadable middle to choose reason over mindlessness.

Dr. Desmet suggests that for something as big as COVID-19, the only way to break the mass formation psychosis is to give the crowd something bigger to focus on. He believes that totalitarianism may be that bigger issue. Of course, after COVID-19, global totalitarianism may be the biggest issue of our time.

 

[CD Xbow]

A brief overview of Mass Formation, which was developed by Dr. Mattias Desmet. He is a psychologist and a statistician. He is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. He calls this phenomena:

MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS

So, when he says “mass” formation, you can think of this as equivalent to “crowd” formation. One can think of this as:

CROWD PSYCHOSIS

The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sense making as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible "object of anxiety" and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective single-mindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.

As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view. Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong.

Left unabated, a society under the spell of mass formation will support a totalitarian governance structure capable of otherwise unthinkable atrocities in order to maintain compliance. A note: mass formation is different from group think. There are easy ways to fix group think by just bringing in dissenting voices and making sure you give them platforms. It isn’t so easy with mass formation. Even when the narrative falls apart, cracks in the strategy clearly aren’t solving the issue, the hypnotized crowd can’t break free of the narrative. This is what appears to be happening now with COVID-19. The solution for those in control of the narrative is to produce bigger and bigger lies to prop up the solution. Those being controlled by mass formation no longer are able to use reason to break free of the group narrative.

Of course, the obvious example of mass formation is Germany in the 1930s and 40s. How could the German people who were highly educated, very liberal in the classic sense; western thinking people… how could they go so crazy and do what they did to the Jews? How could this happen?
To a civilized people? A leader of a mass formation movement will use the platform to continue to pump the group with new information to focus on. In the case of COVID-19, I like to use the term “fear pr0n.” Leaders, through main stream media and government channels continuously feed the “beast” with more messaging that focus and further hypnotize their adherents.

Studies suggest that mass formation follows a general distribution:

30% are brainwashed, hypnotized, indoctrinated by the group narrative
40% in the middle are persuadable and may follow if no worthy alternative is perceived
30% fight against the narrative.

Those that rebel and fight against the narrative, become the enemy of the brainwashed and a primary target of aggression.

One of the the best ways to counter mass formation is for those against the narrative to continue to speak out against it, which serves to help break the hypnosis of some in the brainwashed group as well as persuade the persuadable middle to choose reason over mindlessness.

Dr. Desmet suggests that for something as big as COVID-19, the only way to break the mass formation psychosis is to give the crowd something bigger to focus on. He believes that totalitarianism may be that bigger issue. Of course, after COVID-19, global totalitarianism may be the biggest issue of our time.

What a load of fact free hogwash. Watching stuff like this will rot your brain. We have lived through the worst fuc*ing pandemic in 100 years, not a disinformation exercise. There is no end to stupidity. No wonder his wife has anxiety, living with a nutter like him.

 

[Rusty Brookes]

What a load of fact free hogwash. Watching stuff like this will rot your brain. We have lived through the worst fuc*ing pandemic in 100 years, not a disinformation exercise. There is no end to stupidity. No wonder his wife has anxiety, living with a nutter like him.

Always good to look who wrote the article - Desmet is an old school, Freudian psycho-analyst. A form of psychology I understood to have been dismissed years ago. And how that would translate into the mass hypnosis thing he's claiming, is beyond me.

There's no paper to discuss, there's no data to analyse and claims made without any backup. Rather than posting youtube vidoes, it would be great to show an actual research paper.

 

[BlueE]

What a load of fact free hogwash. Watching stuff like this will rot your brain. We have lived through the worst fuc*ing pandemic in 100 years, not a disinformation exercise. There is no end to stupidity. No wonder his wife has anxiety, living with a nutter like him.

So you're relying on the co-ordinated propaganda and censorship response of corporate "factcheckers" to suppress a growing awareness by the general public of having been actively manipulated using crowd psychology tools to generate fear and anxiety?

Dr. Mattias Desmet lecturer in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at Gent University, Belgium, known for his research on "mass formation," published 126 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr Desmet explained how all four factors mentioned have been met through the weaponisation of COVID-19 by governments, media and the pharmaceutical industry.

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

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

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

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

prof. dr. Mattias Desmet

biblio.ugent.be

 

[BlueE]

Always good to look who wrote the article - Desmet is an old school, Freudian psycho-analyst. A form of psychology I understood to have been dismissed years ago. And how that would translate into the mass hypnosis thing he's claiming, is beyond me.

There's no paper to discuss, there's no data to analyse and claims made without any backup. Rather than posting youtube vidoes, it would be great to show an actual research paper.

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

• Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)
  • The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895
    .pdf (pp. 157), Public Domain complete audiobook, Worldcat
  • Overview of The Crowd
    
    
    
  • William McDougall (1871-1938)
    • The Group Mind; A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology, with Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character, 1920 1st Ed. 1920 (pp. 419),ebook format; 2nd Ed. (pp. 304), Worldcat
      
      
    
    Elias Canetti (1905-1994) Crowds and Power, 1960
    .pdf (pp. 495), Worldcat. Overview of Crowds and Power
    
    
    Classification and Symbols of Masses in the Conception of Elias Canetti (2019)
    
    John Ioannidis(1965-)
    Why Most Published Research Findings are False, 2005
    
    Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
    Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil1963 .pdf (pp. 401), Worldcat
    The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951 2nd Ed. 1958 (pp. 521), Worldcat
    
    Solomon Asch (1907-1996)
    Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgements, 1951
    Opinions and Social Pressure, 1955 .pdf
    Studies of Independence and Conformity: 1. A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority, 1956
    
    Use of fear to control behaviour in COVID crisis was "totalitarian", admit scientists
    
    
    

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

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

    www.telegraph.co.uk
    
    Gordon Rayner 14 May 2021
    
    
    
    A State of Fear by Laura Dodsworth
    
    
    
    
    
    A State of Fear: how the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic
    
    This is a book about fear. Fear of a virus. Fear of death. Fear of losing our jobs, our democracy, our human connections, our health and our minds. It’s also about how the government weaponised our fear against us – supposedly in our best interests – until we were the most frightened country in Europe.
    
    Fear is the most powerful emotion. Hardwired into humans, fear is part of our evolutionary success. But that also makes it one of the most powerful tools in the behavioural psychology toolbox and it has been used to manipulate and control people during the pandemic.
    
    In one of the most extraordinary documents ever revealed to the British public, the behavioural scientists advising the government said that a substantial number of people did not feel threatened enough by Covid-19 to follow the rules. They advised the government to increase our sense of ‘personal threat’, to scare us into submission.
    
    But why did the government deliberately frighten us, and how has this affected us as individuals and as a country? Who is involved in the decision-making that affects our lives? How are behavioural science and nudge theory being used to subliminally manipulate us? How does the media leverage fear? What are the real risks to our wellbeing?
    
    Ahead of any official inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Laura Dodsworth explores all these questions and more, in a nuanced and thought-provoking discussion of an extraordinary year in British life and politics. With stories from members of the general public who were impacted by fear, anxiety and isolation, and revealing interviews with psychologists, politicians, scientists, lawyers, Whitehall advisers and journalists, A State of Fear calls for a more hopeful, transparent and effective democracy
    
    The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Mentacide and Brainwashing by Joost A. M. Meerloo. 1961
    
    In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective "truth" on their victims' minds. In "The Rape of the Mind" he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people's minds.
    He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized "rape of the mind." He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The "Rape of the Mind" is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists.
    
    "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay is one of the first book on this subject.
    …originally published in 1841. This includes the preface, which is often omitted from abridged versions.
    In this book, Charles Mackay discusses the irrational behaviors of crowds in the economy, war and magic. He gives several different examples of market bubbles, such as the Mississippi Scheme and the infamous Tulip Mania in the Netherlands.
    Ever since it was written, investors have used it as a guide to help identify boom and bust cycles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds has had an important influence on economists in understanding of crowd psychology and feedback loops.
    

 

[Rusty Brookes]

So nothing in a peer reviewed journal and a stab at science saying most research findings are false. Not a great platform on which to build.

By the way, it's not a theory at this point. A theory is once the science is accepted by the vast majority of scientists in the field. Mass Formation Psychosis is not accepted by the vast majority of psychologists. And this is a pretty good rebuttal.

Does "Mass Formation Psychosis" Really Exist?

Claims of "mass delusion" and "mass formation psychosis" are being used inappropriately as pejoratives to denigrate our ideological opponents and advance political agendas.

www.psychologytoday.com

As is this

What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? Robert Malone Makes Unfounded Covid-19 Vaccine Claims On Joe Rogan Show

Malone asserted how conditions before 2019 may have led to “mass formation psychosis” in the U.S. and that certain leaders have taken advantage of this situation.

www.forbes.com

 

[BlueE]

So nothing in a peer reviewed journal and a stab at science saying most research findings are false. Not a great platform on which to build.

By the way, it's not a theory at this point. A theory is once the science is accepted by the vast majority of scientists in the field. Mass Formation Psychosis is not accepted by the vast majority of psychologists. And this is a pretty good rebuttal.

Does "Mass Formation Psychosis" Really Exist?

Claims of "mass delusion" and "mass formation psychosis" are being used inappropriately as pejoratives to denigrate our ideological opponents and advance political agendas.

www.psychologytoday.com

As is this

What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? Robert Malone Makes Unfounded Covid-19 Vaccine Claims On Joe Rogan Show

Malone asserted how conditions before 2019 may have led to “mass formation psychosis” in the U.S. and that certain leaders have taken advantage of this situation.

www.forbes.com

I posted the link to Desmet where he has over 100 publications on Web Science. Also many references to books and chapters for research above. Eg.

https://ratical.org/PandemicParallaxView/SolomonAsch-1952.pdf

https://panarchy.org/asch/social.pressure.1955.html

http://psyc604.stasson.org/Asch1956.pdf

There is massive amount of real time data validating the Mass Formation intellectual synthesis developed by Professor Desmet over the last two years.

Funny that one of AP's "fact checkers" Van Bavel, a junior academic and director of NYU's "Social Identity and Morality Lab," which "examine(s) how collective concerns—group identities, moral values, and political beliefs—shape the mind, brain, and behaviour."

In a Nature article in 2020 Van Blavel addresses using fear as a means to control people, in the right doses:

"A meta-analysis found that targeting fears can be useful in some situations, but not others: appealing to fear leads people to change their behaviour if they feel capable of dealing with the threat, but leads to defensive reactions when they feel helpless to act. The results suggest that strong fear appeals produce the greatest behaviour change only when people feel a sense of efficacy, whereas strong fear appeals with low-efficacy messages produce the greatest levels of defensive responses."

The AP's fact check listed Malone's claims, and then cited "psychology experts" who say "there is no support for the 'psychosis' theory described by Malone."

But that includes Van Bavel, who advocated for a group think mentality and the dissemination of propaganda in order to get Americans to behave in the way that he thought was best during the early days of the pandemic.

"He has made claims that the only way to fight COVID-19 is for everyone to change their behavior until such time as a vaccine came along. And how to get everyone to change? "We have to think through the lens of behavioral science," Van Bavel wrote. "What can we do to nudge and encourage and cajole and motivate people to do the right thing?"

REVEALED: AP source who ‘fact checked’ Mass Formation Psychosis theory encouraged ‘behavioral nudging’ people into Covid compliance, quoted Goebbels

“We have to think through the lens of behavioral science,” Van Bavel wrote. “What can we do to nudge and encourage and cajole and motivate people to do the right thing?”

thepostmillennial.com

Downing Street’s controversial ‘Nudge Unit’ accused of exploiting scare tactics during Covid crisis

‘Level of fear willingly conveyed on the public’ to get people to change their behaviour was a ‘far-reaching mistake’, says co-founder

www.telegraph.co.uk

Forbes "fact checker" is a journalist and systems modeler in trying to attack Malone with easily proved disinformation (just starting below), is not working the way they intended.

"He also used the word “experimental” when describing the vaccine rather than making it clear that these Covid-19 vaccines did first receive emergency use authorization (EUA) then approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)."

But that isn't true.

Moderna, Pfizer and J&J are all under emergency use authorisation in the US. AZ is not approved. All COVID-19 vaccines in Australia are only provisionally approved for 2 years.

Comirnaty has approval for 16 years and over, but it is not available in the US, only Pfizer is. When approving Comirnaty for 16 and over on August 23 2021, the FDA asked Pfizer to initiate and complete at least 13 research studies because "the pharmacovigilance system that FDA is required to maintain under section 505(k)(3) of the FDCA is not sufficient to assess these serious risks. Therefore, based on appropriate scientific data, we have determined that you are required to conduct the following studies:"

https://www.fda.gov/media/151710/download

"Because current data presented to the FDA "will not be sufficient to assess known serious risks of myocarditis and pericarditis and identify an unexpected serious risk of subclinical myocarditis." the studies ranged from myo-pericarditis in infants under 6 months to 30 year olds and the first human pregnancy double blind study, becasue there was not enough data available to assess known serious safety risks. These studies will be completed between 2023 and 2027.

 

[Werewolf]

I think (as alluded to in the very first post) the best example of MFP is 1930's Germany. An advanced and educated nation following a lunatic into a mass grave. There were a combination of exceptional circumstances leading up to this - losing WW1 and the Versailles treaty, internal strife, massive inflation, unemployment, etc. Nevertheless a mixture of media control, censorship and "following orders" can be a dangerous combination.

The Milgram experiments proved that humans (not just soldiers) generally follow orders, no matter what. Humans are prone to being emotional and irrational. So the best antidote is a genuinely free, impartial press, less censorship and open debates. You don't need censorship to defeat bad ideas.

 

[CD Xbow]

So you're relying on the co-ordinated propaganda and censorship response of corporate "factcheckers" to suppress a growing awareness by the general public of having been actively manipulated using crowd psychology tools to generate fear and anxiety?

Dr. Mattias Desmet lecturer in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at Gent University, Belgium, known for his research on "mass formation," published 126 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr Desmet explained how all four factors mentioned have been met through the weaponisation of COVID-19 by governments, media and the pharmaceutical industry.






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

prof. dr. Mattias Desmet

biblio.ugent.be

I don't care what his credentials are, he is presenting nothing other than pseudo-scientific nonsense without a scrap of evidence. No different to antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists. It would do you well to remember psychology is not a science.

 

[M Malice]

Maybe related? Short 4 minute clip, there is a link to full discussion in the description.

Professor Gigi Foster is detecting an increasingly angry public sentiment in Australia and believes we have now passed 'peak crowd' when it comes to crowd dynamics. Gigi believes that politicians have missed the opportunity to reframe the narrative and will struggle to do anything other than double and triple down despite any evidence to the contrary.

 

[Run n Spread]

Maybe related? Short 4 minute clip, there is a link to full discussion in the description.

Professor Gigi Foster is detecting an increasingly angry public sentiment in Australia and believes we have now passed 'peak crowd' when it comes to crowd dynamics. Gigi believes that politicians have missed the opportunity to reframe the narrative and will struggle to do anything other than double and triple down despite any evidence to the contrary.

Spot on. Especially the part about the true believers only believing in one thing. Ties in with the point in the OP about rituals must be protected. The more ridiculous the more they are defended.
Exactly like a Cult.
-True belief= COVID is all that matters, the science etc
-Anyone who speaks out about the crazy non sensical inconsistent rules is a heretic = (granny killer/anti science/ anti vax, rwnj, Trump something blah blah blah).

Its part of what makes it so dangerous. We live in a world with a lot happening, a lot of competing priorities and different perspectives and people.
By narrowing perspective so narrowly essentially what the crowd does is shut out all opposition which leads to a one world view been imposed= totalitarianism.

What causes this I think relates to the free thinking anxiety posted above. Keep safe, stay safe have become new catchphrases. Safe from what thou?
Maybe she is right in that people deep down know this is wrong but also people are confused and bewildered by all the scientific and medical terms so it is easy just to "trust the experts" and not have to contemplate things which leads to anxiety.

A point I would add to the above is it is far more comforting to follow the rules and governments in the belief they are keeping you safe. As the alternative is anxiety provoking as they may not have your best interests at heart. (Plenty of examples from history attest to that).

Also don't underestimate ego here. By identifying with the Covid Cult and willingly wearing masks 24/7 and restricting ones own freedoms these people can believe they are more empathetic and better than other people. They are more caring than the philistines who want to go outside and breath fresh air. By making other people the heretics/"selfish ones" you feel special like you are a chosen one who will be rewarded. Like a religion.

 

[Mofra]

Also don't underestimate ego here.

Ego is a big one here. The advent of social media seems to be leading a decline in humility.
People now believe their googling is a substitute for a lifetime of career experience in a particular chosen field. Epidemiology and climate science being two notable examples.

 

[BlueE]

The Psychology of Mimetic Contagion ⋆ Brownstone Institute

Mimetic contagion and mass formation theory go a long way in explaining the more puzzling behaviors we saw emerge during the pandemic.

brownstone.org