"Mass Formation Psychosis". Really?

[Laodicean]

[Laodicean]

[MacCruiskeen]

crazy mad, hoodwinked by hustlers:

Jeff Wells @JeffWellsRigInt
The hoodwinked rage at friends and family who didn't fall for it, egged on by the hustlers who signed them up for a scam lifetime service contract.

They got in on the ground floor of the herd immunity boondoggle when they were told 40% needed to sign up and are now told their warranty's invalid because it actually needs to be 100%. No wonder they're crazy mad.
1:53 pm · 17. Jan. 2022

https://twitter.com/JeffWellsRigInt/sta ... 1782020096

[alloneword]

@Mac: Thanks for the response. I see no disagreement between us, but I'll expand on a couple of points...

..people who are trained and skilled in ever-more-specialised areas, but who have lost all ability to contextualise or synthesise or even read, who have lost all sense of the whole...

..It's the best-paid, best-schooled, most thoroughly domesticated & housetrained "mass" in history. Nor are these the poor isolated atomised individuals he invokes in his hypothesis. On the contrary, these people -- Guardian & BBC journalists, hospital doctors, academics, politicians, admen, managers, soi-disant "creatives" and "influencers" of all kinds. -- are mostly well-connected, well-adjusted and well-traveled, usually personable and even nice, not short of dinner-party invitations, and perfectly used to "dealing with people" all day long.

Absolutely, and again, Desmet recognises this - even suggesting that it may be that the more 'educated', 'higher strata' are more susceptible to the hypnosis and that level of education or any measure of 'intelligence' certainly offers no protection against falling under the spell.

Based on my own observations, I have formed my own (thoroughly speculative cod-psychological) theories on who is likely to be susceptible, mainly relating to an individual's attitude to 'authority'.

Basically, I've noticed that people who at some stage of their life (generally early) had it demonstrated to them that those in authority were actually fallible, in that they got it wrong or behaved like dickheads etc, tend to instinctively question 'authority' and are resistant. It could be that their parents fought (likely in low income families), teachers were unjust, cops were thugs or boss was a twat... any number of things that might cause one to develop the attitude that those claiming authority would actually need to earn it, rather than simply command it.

Whereas many of those who had a stable, 'wholesome' upbringing with adequate income, academic 'high achievers', all of that, never had a reason to question authority then, so it would never occur to them to do it now.

They honestly believe that those in authority have their best interests at heart.

Many (most?) people make the transition from childhood to adulthood as a teenager by challenging parental/guardian authority - it's about the only 'rite of passage' left - but some don't.

I've manage to find one of the articles that sparked this thought:

These poor deluded souls essentially believe that where personal experience and prior knowledge cannot fill in the gaps in their worldview – in short, where there is a barred door – mummy and daddy are behind it, working out how best to ensure that their little precious will be comfortable, happy and safe forever.

This is the core, comforting illusion at the root of the conspiracy denier’s mindset, the decrepit foundation upon which they build a towering castle of justification from which to pompously jeer at and mock those who see otherwise.

This explains why it is that the conspiracy denier will attack any suggestion that the caregiving archetype is no longer present – that sociopaths are behind the barred door, who hold us all in utter contempt or disregard us completely. The conspiracy denier will attack any such suggestion as viciously as if their survival depended on it – which, in a way, within the makeup of their unconscious and precarious psyche, it does.

Their sense of well-being, of security, of comfort, even of a future at all, is completely (and completely unconsciously) invested in this fantasy. The infant has never matured, and, because they are not conscious of this, other than as a deep attachment to their personal security, they will fiercely attack any threat to this unconscious and central aspect of their worldview.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/03/12/on- ... cy-denier/

..and there's plenty more that's quotable in that.

You mentioned 'an army of people who are trained and skilled in ever-more-specialised areas, but who have lost all ability to contextualise or synthesise or even read, who have lost all sense of the whole'... This put me in mind of Joseph Tainter's work on how and why complex civilisations ultimately collapse, and of that 'sense of the whole' of the sort that takes maybe 84 pages to outline.

What we're witnessing now is the lancing of a very big old boil, and it ain't a pretty sight. It's long overdue, though, and it's a prerequisite for any healthy or even survivable future.

True, that.

To return to Desmet for a moment (groan), as I mentioned before, one thing he said that caught my ear was that the covidians don't want to return to the 'old normal'. So, is one potential way out of this to somehow offer them a better one? The only other one would be to present them with an even bigger existential threat to go nuts about.

Those potential solutions that were looked at and over, over the years, as responses to the other doomsday clusterfucks of resource constraints, environmental catastrophe, etc never went away. In a word: Localisation. With what's coming down now in terms of supply chain collapse, food scarcity, monetary collapse and energy scarcity, maybe it's likely to become an easier sell. Or maybe the trap has already sprung.

[JackRiddler]

I find that rusty old terms like ideology, culture, religion, structure, power, conditioning, socialization, conformity, indoctrination, education, propaganda, etc., already describe the us-and-them schismogenic dynamics that have been a dominant feature of all known human history (as well as objects of the study of humans as it has developed in the last couple of centuries), and already allow us to treat the questions of how these dynamics can become (or be made to become) more extreme, total, and violent in given situations. Inventing a new term for this complex of questions has the (perhaps unintended) effect of setting up some fictive Old Normal that conservatives can yearn for as a better, more stable, more just world that didn't have all these artificial divisions and manipulable strife, etc., which seems to be MacC's original point in this thread; and also, once put into Youtube-ready form, of claiming for those who set up the new scheme for unlocking everything a status as the ones who are really, really, in the know, no sheeple they, as opposed to all those other dunces in the academies and elsewhere who have been talking about political philosophy, sociology, social psychology and the human condition in literature now dating back millennia.

[liminalOyster]

I find that rusty old terms like ideology, culture, religion, structure, power, conditioning, socialization, conformity, indoctrination, education, propaganda, etc., already describe the us-and-them schismogenic dynamics that have been a dominant feature of all known human history (as well as objects of the study of humans as it has developed in the last couple of centuries), and already allow us to treat the questions of how these dynamics can become (or be made to become) more extreme, total, and violent in given situations. Inventing a new term for this complex of questions has the (perhaps unintended) effect of setting up some fictive Old Normal that conservatives can yearn for as a better, more stable, more just world that didn't have all these artificial divisions and manipulable strife, etc., which seems to be MacC's original point in this thread; and also, once put into Youtube-ready form, of claiming for those who set up the new scheme for unlocking everything a status as the ones who are really, really, in the know, no sheeple they, as opposed to all those other dunces in the academies and elsewhere who have been talking about political philosophy, sociology, social psychology and the human condition in literature now dating back millennia.

This is one of the weird cascade effects of new media - the ability to consolidate and reframe epic histories and complex phenomena through a singular lens as the setup, too often, for attribution to a chosen enemy or villian. It was prototyped well in the early days of David Icke's blather but now finds full deployment everywhere. Gives you the eery sense that tech has laid the groundwork for fascism as a new kind of neural pathway. #Evolution

[Harvey]

Entirely about the subject of the thread and very enjoyable too.

Mark Crispin Miller on How to Identify, Understand and Dissect Propaganda

https://thewallwillfall.org/2022/01/16/ ... ropaganda/

[kelley]

"Gives you the eerie sense that tech has laid the groundwork for fascism as a new kind of neural pathway."


this was raised in one of the fascism threads

re: Roger Griffin

will have to search for the pertinent info

[alloneword]

I find that rusty old terms like ideology, culture, religion, structure, power, conditioning, socialization, conformity, indoctrination, education, propaganda, etc., already describe the us-and-them schismogenic dynamics that have been a dominant feature of all known human history (as well as objects of the study of humans as it has developed in the last couple of centuries), and already allow us to treat the questions of how these dynamics can become (or be made to become) more extreme, total, and violent in given situations.

What Desmet describes that is new (to me, at least) is the process by which individuals and groups can become so narrowly focused upon a single source of perceived risk as to willingly cause themselves (and others) harm in the pursuit of minimising it.

Lockdowns, masks, 'vaccines'. I've seen people jumping into the path of traffic to avoid passing within 2 metres of someone else on the pavement. Their awareness of relative risk is completely distorted by their perception of a single one. It's not simply that they are misinformed or propagandised. It doesn't matter how many graphs showing negative vaccine efficacy, statistics of road traffic accidents or the chances of getting struck by lightning you show them, they remain under the hypnotic spell.

The question of how and why such a narrow focus is achieved and maintained is (I think) one worthy of our attention, and one which Desmet has at least attempted to answer.

I've worked through a fair chunk of the material on crowd psychology, but haven't found much that comes close to adequately explaining what we're seeing now. I've taken the time to look at the theories proffered by some of Desmet's detractors - like 'factchecker/SPI-B member' Reicher, but meh. So if these ideas are nothing new, why can't I find them?

Looking to other examples of this phenomena, again I find Desmet's ideas applicable.

The two examples that I'm most familiar with are: The persecution of 'Witches' in England around the 1640s - where 'The World Turned Upside Down', as political and religious divisions divided the populace down to the family level, war raged throughout the land and the threat of plague lurked. Likely a fair amount of anxiety around there, 'free-floating' or otherwise. And, of course, 1930's Germany... we're probably all pretty much up-to-speed on that one.

@LO: Something else strikes me about all three examples, now that you mention it: Each was preceded by a revolution in the technology for propagating information.

17th Century England had the mass-produced woodcut pamphlets, the Nazis used radio and film to great effect, whilst we have... well, all this.

[Harvey]

Something else strikes me about all three examples, now that you mention it: Each was preceded by a revolution in the technology for propagating information.

17th Century England had the mass-produced woodcut pamphlets, the Nazis used radio and film to great effect, whilst we have... well, all this.

Interesting observation.

On the topic, to me, growing older has seemed like a process of continual emergence from one 'mass psychosis' after another...

[Belligerent Savant]

.

This here is definitely a psychosis. Dreadful to watch.

[Note: the 'Clifton Duncan' handle is a black man]

@cliftonaduncan
·
"Black lives matter", one of the women says, as she hysterically accosts a Black man and tries to kick him off the elevator

Btw Mass Psychosis isn't a thing, folks

@libsoftiktok
·
More mask madness, this time in an elevator. The mask police are really nuts

https://twitter.com/cliftonaduncan/stat ... 95559?s=20

Video clip at link.