Recently, I've been coming across the term 'mass formation psychosis' in reference to society losing its mind about the pandemic. A post by the Free Thought Project suggests that this term is being censored by Google and social media. YouTube even removed a video of an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience in which the podcast host was talking to Dr Robert Malone about this subject within hours of it being posted.
The now-viral conversation between Mr Rogan and Dr Malone saw the latter drawing parallels between current American society and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Nazis came into power, saying American society is developing a “mass formation psychosis”.
“It was from, basically, European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. And how did that happen? The answer is mass formation psychosis.
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other, and has free-floating anxiety, in a sense that things don’t make sense. We can’t understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” said [Dr] Malone.
Dr Malone draws on the work of Dr Mattias Desmet to suggest that 30% of society is fully hypnotized by the control regime while another 40% are susceptible to the hypnotized group's propaganda. There are apparently four conditions that must be met for such mass hypnosis to be possible:
- A lack of societal bonding.
- Most people consider their lives to be without meaning.
- Free floating anxiety.
- High levels of frustration or aggression.
Taken at face value, this makes intuitive sense. The idea of mass formation psychosis seems to track with my observations of culture over the last few years. But the claim that this phenomenon was responsible for the rise of the Nazis in Germany betrays an imperfect understanding of that important bit of human history. In fact, a psychologist named Wilhelm Reich was in Germany during that era and wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism based on what he saw.
Reich watched as unmet biological needs and sexual repression primed the population to embrace the mysticism of authoritarian power structures, which used primal symbols as points of fixation for mass hypnosis. Although the end result may appear superficially similar to the mass psychosis of our contemporary era, the psychological landscape of pre-WWII Germany was very different from our own psychological landscape. And it should go without saying that the mass psychosis supporting the Nazis was very different from the mass hypnosis upholding our modern control regime.
It's possible that 30% of the population is indeed hypnotized by covid, but it isn't clear to me where Dr Malone is getting this figure from. Nor am I yet convinced that mass formation psychosis as described by Dr Desmet is the right lens through which to view the societal madness that's become evident since the pandemic began. It is equally plausible, in my opinion, that biological repression ala Reich set the stage for society to embrace the scientific establishment in a mystical sense, priming us to accept insane policies like lockdowns and technologically-enforced segregation of the unvaccinated.
I find it disturbing that Dr Malone's words on mass formation psychosis are being censored. But it is equally disturbing to consider that this concept could be used to gaslight large swaths of the population, shutting down meaningful conversation by dismissing supporters of the new normal as psychotic. They may do crazy things and ignore true information that calls those crazy things into question, yet I suspect the reasons for this are more complex than a collective mental illness described by a internet personality doctor who may have a political agenda.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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