rigorousintuition.ca

this is how you enroll willing, even gleeful ranks of vicious brownshirts not only ready but desperate to oppress others. that’s why half of them joined up in the first place. if it were not this cause, it would be some other. the form the pretext takes is immaterial. it is the chance to do wrong and call it righteous that attracts.

it’s easy to provide.

you simply invert this base human desire to dominate and attack (often in plentiful supply in the upper reaches of the beta groups) into “civic virtue” by othering and segregating out-groups.

you make it no only OK but actually laudable to engage in the nasty, brutal actions that would otherwise be taboo.

you need not run around conscripting assistance to totalitarian regimes. the mawkish middle will fall all over itself in its rush to sign up as long as they get to wear a hall monitor sash and push people around.

this, of course, has a flip side as well which is that all in these groups must endlessly and ostentatiously profess group membership and loyalty at all times for fear of becoming the next target of this focused aggression, because, of course, there must always be such a target. it is this unification to assail the “other” that generates group purpose and cohesion. it is the essential ethos and pathology of such assemblages.

this is why it’s such an effective and time honored tool of demagogues. it draws the right sort of amoral shock troops to you and holds them in thrall for once they have transgressed, there is no getting down off the tiger.

it does not take some orchestrated conspiracy to get them all singing from the exact same hymnal and keep them marching in lockstep. it’s just emergent behavior from the same base fear of being shunned and attacked if they falter.

once they cross the line into calling oppression honorable, they are yours...

Could an open discussion of Mass Formation Psychosis pave the way to becoming more aware of our personal and collective ‘shadow’?

Might it provide a graceful climb down for fervent adherents of the cult of covid, and expedite the way out of this mess of untruths founded on untruths founded on myths founded on lies? Will it allow us to place judgement to one side, and forge a new path based on self-knowledge, transparency, devotion to truth, facts and actual science?

Or perhaps, as the covid narrative noticeably struggles, we should be cautious of fast-trending alt. narratives coming to the fore?

While Prof. Desmet’s theories are indeed interesting and provide much potential insight into many aspects of the covid phenomenon (and ourselves), a fast-trending hashtag is a likely target for spin.

What could that spin be?

As the pandemic narrative self destructs, could mass psychosis provide a moral hall of mirrors? Could it let some very culpable and unsavoury characters off the hook with an easy plea of temporary group insanity?

If too much blame is laid at the feet of a sociological phenomenon, might we become drunk on new-found forgiveness and dewey-eyed reconciliation with our fellow man, and lose our vigilance? Might we turn around to discover the history books have been quietly rewritten, that evil truths have been airbrushed away and COVID erected in their place, and that a globalist agenda has been stealthily working behind the scenes?

If we can avoid the traps, there is potentially a lot to be gained by a greater understanding of ‘mass formation’, integrated into a wider pursuit of truth and justice.

Complex human institutions, which have eschewed rigid hierarchy and command discipline for a looser, consensus-based administration, are characteristic of western societies and their liberal democratic governments. Such institutions have a lot of idiosyncrasies, and among them is the inability to pursue any kind of complex strategy. Strategies are birthed in the minds of individuals or small groups; they require clear lines of command and a lot of people willing to follow orders unquestioningly. Institutions that have succumbed to committee government have tendencies instead of strategies. Western Corona policies reflect the diffuse, profoundly demobilised attitude of the institutions that sustain them. We might say that these are tendential rather than strategic regimes. Their policies are not machines, carefully assembled to produce a desired outcome, but instead a random assemblage of everything that a few thousand different committees managed to dream up or copy from other committees in other countries doing the same thing, all because they seem to serve the same basic end. Tendential policies will always be less than the sum of their parts.

The aims of consensus-based administrative governments are not hidden. They cannot be, because the high degree of self-coordination these institutions demand. Thus their aims are always both painfully overt and shamelessly simple, to the point of seeming stupid. The aim of containment and mass vaccination policies, quite clearly, is the eradication or the long-term suppression of SARS-CoV-2. This is not to say that every last person participating in this circus genuinely sincerely in their deepest self cares about whether SARS-2 goes away. It is only to say that no other purpose unites or explains the system, as a whole. Cynical profiteers and grifters and opportunists all find themselves very much at home in western institutions, which do not plan or plot, but merely tend.

Recognising this is clarifying and important. Without an understanding of what it is our governments are trying to do, we will never be able to assess how they are progressing, and – most importantly – the kinds of mistakes they make along the way. A lot of overtly conspiratorial analyses tend to reconstruct mistakes as in fact clever elements in highly complicated evil plots. This is demoralising, because it serves the myth of an omnipotent, omniscient adversary, but it is also confusing. The truth is that our adversaries make mistakes all the time, and many of these mistakes have typical characteristics from which we can learn.

...

Spontaneous Order in Complex Systems

eugyppius
1 hr ago

As expected, my last piece generated a wealth of critical comments.

I don’t deny that there are many bad actors scattered across our governments, and that these bad actors coordinate, plan and conspire. The question, is not whether there are conspiracies, or whether these policies benefit our oligarchic elites, or whether I’ve looked into Event 201. The question, is what is the dominant force driving containment and universal vaccination right now.

The one thing I want to convey here, more than anything else, is the complexity and extent of modern western governments. These are unbelievably elaborate systems, and they are not easily controlled or understood by individuals or confined groups. A lot of their regulations and policies are totally baffling and inexplicable, and this has been the case for decades, long before anybody cared about SARS-related coronaviruses. These systems exhibit properties of spontaneous order; they act towards their own ends, in ways nobody intends, even as people within them perceive the folly of what their institutions are doing. They are suprahuman organisms.

As for plans and conspiracies, there two of them which played a huge part in making what should have been a middle-of-the-road pandemic influenza-type event into a worldwide catastrophe:

1) There is, firstly, the decades-long retooling of biodefence planning and preparedness into pandemic planning and preparedness. This happened after 2003, in the wake of the SARS-1 outbreak. Our benevolent public health authorities and their allies in academia suddenly became deeply interested in pandemics. They acquired a bunch of shiny new policy toys they wanted to try out. The false Swine flu panic of 2009 was an early sign that this entire network of think tanks, schemers and philanthropic organisations had begun to represent a truly dangerous threat to our economies and societies.

2) Then, secondly, there is the specific role of shadowy actors, mostly from mainland China, in promoting mass containment after January 2020. I really recommend you betake yourself to the Event 201 website and watch all of the videos. You will find there a perfect statement of everything western pandemic planners had spent years fantasising about. What’s missing from the event, is lockdowns, border closures, mass testing, contact tracing, and everything else that belongs to mass containment. All of this, which has made the Corona pandemic massively worse, was implemented by very deliberate conspiracies in the earliest months of 2020.

Together, 1) and 2) have proven to be a toxic mix. Governments are now using the repressive containment policies they got from China to drive their populations into the arms of the vaccinators. In their eagerness for a pandemic, they once again jumped the gun and overreacted to a virus that was only somewhat bad. They were not welcomed as saviours and not everybody wanted their vaccines. A lot of people weren’t sure these new products were safe. Then the vaccines turned out not to work so well, and that was to many of these people a double slight. Their escalating fanaticism, vindictiveness, and newfound preference for punitive approaches, are all psychological reactions to the failure and repudiation they have experienced.

So yes, the inception of this involved a lot of planning. Now, however, the initiators are no longer in the driver’s seat. They shouted fire in a theatre and caused a stampede to the exits; the crowd will continue to rush out whatever anybody does.

A whole ideological revolution has taken place, thanks to two years of intense media propaganda and social isolation. Millions and millions of people believe in containment, in the same way they believe racism is bad. The collective force of these deeply held beliefs is very great, and vastly stronger than any repressive policies an autocratic public health establishment could issue from on high. These beliefs are especially rife in the middle and upper-middle classes – the urban professionals, the well-off doctors and lawyers, the university professors, and so on. It is precisely these social spheres that are most heavily represented in our government, corporate and academic institutions. The collective force of these public and private bureaucracies is now driving containment; this is just undeniable.

It has been clear, since the summer, that the political leadership and the upper bureaucratic ranks want to end lockdowns, and are in fact desperate to do so. The vaccines drained a lot of the organic demand for these policies, which have also proven to be wildly ineffective and dangerous. This repudiation, however, has happened for the most part in silence. Policy makers decided it was best simply not to talk about lockdowns anymore, and to ensure that their odious, forever-wrong modellers appear less often in the press.

Only now, many months into this quiet pivot, do we begin to hear the first clear statements in the left-liberal media that lockdowns were a mistake.

There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.

And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”

And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir.

“We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt,” he argues. “All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy.

“We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.”

The tone is still tentative here and there, because the primary force driving lockdowns is the vast, distributed consensus of the middle bureaucratic managerial ranks. This is a dangerous force even for politicians and wealthy oligarchs to confront, and they’ve approached it carefully.

Since the pandemic started, the go-to Bond villains at the glorified conference circuit known as the World Economic Forum have been trying to move on from Corona and get back to their own pet issues, which are an evil if beige blend of equity, sustainability, and technocratic fantasies. In a 10 July 2020 invitation to the Dutch Minister of Finance, Klaus Schwab wrote that the WEF

aims to provide a clear signal, at the beginning of next year, that the world has moved out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussions will focus on shaping policies for the post-COVID-19 era under the theme of the Great Reset.

Despite Schwab’s hopes, the world did not leave the pandemic behind in early 2021. Corona persists, because in early 2020, a lot of people with outsized social, economic and political influence were converted into to a parareligious belief system about how best to manage a respiratory virus. This system has been reinforced by months of hysterical press coverage; by bad propaganda disease statistics; and by an imprudent, heavily policed scientific consensus. These all started life as a coordinated information campaign to promote and enforce Chinese-style authoritarian lockdowns in the West. Since then, the propaganda has become an autonomous, self-sustaining media and bureaucratic organism, driven by the personal fears and convictions of untold thousands of people, and nobody can shut it off.

The Davos crowd, for their part, have spent years trying to develop widespread interest in their stakeholder-capitalist aspirations. They’ve had very mixed results, compared to the religious fervour that containment has achieved. I’ve written before about why that is: As an issue, climate change doesn’t have the same universal appeal as Corona. It doesn’t give everyone a role to play, its threats aren’t as immediate, and the time-scale is too grand. It’s unsurprising that the Schwabs of our world are doing everything they can to hijack Corona as an issue and make it about their own policy priorities. So far, they’ve had roughly zero success.

I’m always a little surprised that analysis like this proves controversial.

We all know multiple, real-life, flesh-and-blood Corona hystericists in our own lives. Notice how these people tend to come from precisely those segments of society whose views are over-represented in government and the press. This really, really matters. It makes radical government policies possible in the first place, it ensures close enforcement of even the most ridiculous rules. However it began, it has become an autonomous, self-perpetuating force, not all that different from other political ideologies that have inspired similar fervour among their adherents.

In the beginning, there were plans and conspiracies, and there are plans and conspiracies still. The difference between then and now, is simply that those early plans unleashed a preference cascade which took our whole society and culture by storm. Further planning by confined groups of people is now overwhelmed by the semi-stable international ideological consensus driving containment. This consensus has moved our world in a very extreme, radical direction, that is no longer in anyone’s interest. Profits are no good if you destroy the economy or destabilise the currency.

I don’t type all of these things to irritate my readers. I type them because they are true, and because they indicate certain strategies. To begin with, I think it’s very important to avoid anything that deepens fear or panic, even in the face of bad news. I’ve not always gotten this right, but I do my best to maintain a calm, level-headed tone. In the second place, I think it’s essential to develop a counter-narrative that is politically neutral and accessible to ordinary people, many of whom are just going along with this. In the third place, it’s worth remembering that if we’re thinking about this, other people with vastly more resources and, uh, conspiratorial and planning capacity, are thinking about this too. Some of you have suspected this is might explain the origins of Omicron, which is not implausible, but they’re unlikely to stop there.

covid policy and the topology of terror
why the propensity to panic at just the wrong time makes humans into superstitious rubes that will do the wrong thing and think that it worked

el gato malo
17 min ago

humans are panicky animals.

we think you aren’t, but we are.

but what makes us unique is the weird manner in which we do it. the simple fact is this:



and that is the problem...

It’s an important question at a time when the converging technologies of AI and social media are affecting individual and group psychology is not yet understood ways. British illusionist Derren Brown recently conducted a similar experiment, this time in a feature documentary for Netflix entitled, The Push.

“This show is about how readily we hand over authorship of our lives, every day, and the dangers of losing that control,” says Brown, who organized the reality TV-like experiment in which ordinary people were duped into doing things most of us would never even consider.

At the heart of the experiment lies the powerful effects of social pressure and social compliance, along with the individual’s inherent need to belong and fit into society. It also questions the nature of individuality, while demonstrating that many of us simply don’t have the courage to assert our own moral courage when faced with even a slight amount of authoritarian pressure.

The Push begins with a phony police officer calling a cafe worker on the phone and in a quick minute, without even a face-to-face interaction, convinces this person to steal a woman’s baby. Interestingly, the worker carries out the abduction even while expressing significant hesitance.

The main experiment picks up from there, involving unwitting subjects who are gradually convinced of the need to push another person off of a high-rise building. It’s an elaborate setup, which builds upon one small act of compliance after another until the subject is put into a situation where they are encouraged to kill a man they just met.

It’s a rather theatrical and unscientific presentation, but the results are noteworthy as three out of four participants actually shove an actor off of a building, believing they are committing murder, after being pressured into it by a small group of others. It’s a shocking act of compliance and subservience to the pressures of a peer group and a persistent authority figure.

What we don’t know about society today, though, is just how many people are this extremely socially compliant, capable of doing anything to appease the directives of others. As Brown notes, “the more socially compliant a person is, the more likely they are to look to others for signs on how to behave. And the more people, the greater the pressure to join in.”

This says a great deal about humans. Are we somehow wired to abandon our own morals and sense of self-integrity for the false belief that fitting into a group is necessary for survival?

A trailer for this show is seen below.

alloneword » Sat Jan 08, 2022 2:43 pm wrote:

covid policy and the topology of terror
why the propensity to panic at just the wrong time makes humans into superstitious rubes that will do the wrong thing and think that it worked

el gato malo

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/covi ... opology-of

Dr Mike Yeadon Jan 8

I appreciate that one way to read what you’ve said is to give those who think this is all innocent blunder a way out, an explanation for why their leaders are behaving abominably.

But in my opinion, that’s an implausible explanation for what has happened & continues to happen.

I return to my theme that all nations had pandemic preparedness plans which had just two requirements:

-if you’re symptomatic, sick, unwell, ill, stay at home until you’re better. That’s because it’s only symptomatic people who are potent sources of infection (I’m limiting my remarks to respiratory viruses).

-wash your hands more often than usually you do, because until we do, we just don’t know what the routes of transmission are dominant vs contributors.

These plans then used several pages to explain why it wasn’t appropriate to do a whole bunch of things. Masks, mass testing of the well, locking down the healthy. School, Business & border closures etc etc

But in a period around March 2020, scores of governments set aside those time-honoured plans & without scientific justification, installed numerous implausible lies.

That’s unquestionably what happened.

Why is a good question. I just don’t buy for a moment that all the public health officials panicked & did these things. Why not?

1. It’s blindingly obvious that several of the installed measures & accompanying lies are simply not true, have never been true, fly in the face of what we know about respiratory virus infections & transmission.

2. Even if some role holders did convince themselves that different measures were required than the tried & tested ones, and chose some of these dumb ones, other smart & independent countries would choose differently. It’s not possible they’d all decide the same oddball lies / measures are just the ones to choose.

That this switch occurred, from old standards to new lies is, for me, strong evidence of a supranational plan of some kind.

I’ve no idea when the agreement to install the 6-8 lies was made. A week earlier? A year? The day before?

Anyone got alternative takes on all this?

Is there a benign / innocent explanation?

Here’s what we did

Over the last few months, we have been developing, refining, and testing vaccine messages. We used an iterative process that involved scanning the existing behavioral science literature on vaccine uptake, running 5 randomized controlled trials, and hosting 15 focus groups in English and Spanish.

In our final trial, we tested four final messages in English and Spanish with 20,000 people, using our online research platform, Predictiv. The messages were:

1. Helping Loved Ones tapped into people’s desire to protect and support their friends and family. It made clear that vaccinating yourself can help your loved ones while being careful not to overstate the vaccine’s power to reduce or eliminate transmission.



2. Approved by Healthcare Workers used the credibility and authority of healthcare workers as trusted messengers. The message emphasized how most people have demonstrated confidence in the vaccine by taking it themselves.



3. Getting Lives Back drew on the powerful motivation to return to the activities and people they are missing, without promising that life will ever fully go back to “normal.”



4. Tested by Thousands built trust in the vaccine development process, without getting bogged down in overly technical details or medical jargon. The message incorporated aspects of ‘social proof’ by indicating that millions of people have already taken the vaccine safely.



We used two measures to evaluate these messages: our primary measure was vaccine confidence, a composite of measures on safety, efficacy, and importance of the COVID-19 vaccine. Our secondary measure was stated willingness to vaccinate.

The results

All four messages increased vaccine confidence and willingness to vaccinate by 3-4 percentage points, a relative increase of approximately 6%. If those increases translated to action, it would mean over 10 million more residents getting vaccinated in the US. Even more encouraging was the fact that the messages were effective for groups most affected by COVID-19.



While all of our messages were effective at boosting confidence and willingness to get vaccinated, one message was particularly effective. The Helping Loved Ones message increased willingness to vaccinate across all hesitant groups. While we recommend rotating through multiple high-performing messages, the strength of the “Helping Loved Ones” message makes it a good candidate to lead campaigns.

Moving forward, we are working to get these results out to policymakers and other stakeholders who can translate our recommendations into real-world outreach. However, our results go beyond specific messages – they show that good communication can be a powerful tool to increase health equity. We encourage policy makers, elected officials, and others to use these insights to increase confidence in COVID-19 vaccines.