"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."
"Thomas Edison said in all seriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking" - if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think - and ignore all the others! We want only the facts that justify our acts - the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices. As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage." Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems? Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, if we went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot of people in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that two plus two equals five- or maybe five hundred!"
"The human life is made up of choices. Yes or no. In or out. Up or down. And then there are the choices that matter. Love or hate. To be a hero or to be a coward. To fight or to give in. To live. Or die. Live or die. That's the important choice. And it's not always in our hands."
- Dr. Meredith Grey, "Grey's Anatomy"
“This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist. If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?"
Poitou, France - “I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.” ~ Joe Biden
On New Year’s Eve, the assault began. “I don’t feel well,” said Elizabeth. First, one member of the family went down. Then another. By the end of the weekend, almost everyone was a casualty. Yes, the Covid-19 – or some variety as yet unidentified – went through the house like a cold breeze through the rattling windows.
What to do? We closed the gates and drew up the drawbridge; we cut off contact with the outside world to wait it out. It struck unevenly. Haphazardly. One was hors du combat. Another barely felt anything at all. Almost all were tested. Those who had already had the disease tested negative. The others, mostly, tested positive.
Most severely affected was Elizabeth. Her husband – your penpal – has so far felt nothing at all. “Honey,” said Elizabeth, coughing, “maybe you should sleep in another room.” “Whither thou goest, I will go,” we replied. “Yes…but you don’t want to get the Covid. You have bad lungs.” “For better or for worse… in sickness and in health.” “But better in health,” came the answer. We made our bed in a spare bedroom.
Finally, a Covid Insider… All over the world, according to the press, noses are running, people are sneezing… wheezing… and the hospitals fill up. Bloomberg: "Almost twice as many people were diagnosed with Covid-19 in the past seven days as the pandemic’s previous weekly record thanks to a tsunami of omicron that has swamped every aspect of daily life in many parts of the globe."
We were proud to be among the 10 million cases last week. No longer an outsider… a contrarian, a “marginal,” as the French put it – now we are one among millions… firmly in the middle of a mass movement. But moving towards what?
Looking back at the last two years, the virus caused confusion, intemperate reactions, and mass hysteria. Like Joe Biden, the authorities were determined to take charge and defeat the virus. But after nearly two years of lockdowns, social distancing, zooming, masking, and vaxxing… the Covid romps over the planet like the Sioux at the Little Big Horn.
On March 13, 2020, Donald Trump called a ‘State of Emergency’… and he then set in motion Operation Warp Speed to get an experimental vaccination approved in record time. It was war! Soon, the entire economy was put on a war footing – plans interrupted. Airplane travel halted. Restaurants closed. Trillions of dollars of spending approved. And practically everyone drafted into the fight. Fauci et al claim these shutdowns saved lives. But for however many years may (or may not) have been gained by the rich, the old, and the infirm… many times that were probably lost among the world’s poor.
The World Economic Forum estimates the cost of these Covid reactions at $11 trillion. But who pays? Nearly half the world’s people – 3.4 billion of them – live on less than $5.50 per day… with a life expectancy of 50-60 years. Life expectancy rises with income. In the US, for example, the upper 1% lives about 14 years longer than the average. But for the world’s poor, living hand to mouth – with barely enough food to keep themselves alive, let alone attend to matters of hygiene – a financial setback is a death sentence.
By the middle of 2020, the world turned its weary eyes to Pfizer. Universal vaccinations were supposed to save the day for everyone… allowing us to resume our normal lives and recover lost ground. At first, the vaccination was intended to keep people from dying. But it was clear from the evidence coming from Italy in March 2020, that few people were actually at risk. And they were mostly people who were in danger of dying anyway… from old age or related ‘comorbidities.’ For others, the danger was no greater than driving to work, hunting with Dick Cheney or making a movie with Alec Baldwin. And then, it turned out that the average age of death for those “with covid” was not much different from the average age of death without it.
What a boon to virology and vocabulary the Covid proved to be! We all now know about co-morbidities… infection rates… case fatality rates… and the difference between prepositions ‘with’ or ‘of.’ As the virus became an international sensation, more and more people were tested… and more and more of the dying were found to be “with” Covid. How many actually died ‘from’ Covid… we still don’t know. It might be impossible to tell.
Cometh the ‘Big O’: But then began the second public policy pitch: while most people got little benefit from the vaccine, we were told that we all needed to get vaccinated to avoid ‘overwhelming our exhausted front-line health care workers’… and to ‘protect others’ from the disease. Vaccines were no longer a prudent medical precaution, in other words, they were a social responsibility.
This argument, too, fell apart as the public’s knowledge of virology increased. It was revealed that the ‘vaccine’ was no real vaccine at all. It doesn’t keep people from getting sick… and doesn’t keep them from transmitting the disease to others – which is what a vaccine is supposed to do. We don’t worry about getting polio, for example, because a genuine vaccine prevents transmission of the disease.
In that regard the Covid vaccine was a flop. The Robert Koch Institute in Germany reports that the Omicron variant is “very easily transmitted and often leads to infections that can be passed on, even in those who have been completely vaccinated and recovered.” It goes on to tell us that 19 out of 20 of the new cases of Covid in Germany are among those who have been fully vaccinated. In other words, getting vaxxed doesn’t keep you from getting… or spreading… the ailment. It just makes you feel like a good citizen. Or a chump. But Thank God for the omicron. It makes people sick but it rarely kills them. And it crowds out the more deadly forms of the disease.
Peter McGinn was the first in America diagnosed with the disease. Here’s how he described it: “It honestly felt like a mild cold for about a day,” he said. “I had light fatigue, a runny nose and a sore throat. And after a day those symptoms went away.” And so, in the struggle between virus and man… the tiny bug and the big one… it is the tiny one that has prevailed.
Here in the Bonner household, the battle appears to be over. We raised the white flag and surrendered. The sick are rising from their beds… and we give thanks to the Great Omicron for sparing us over to fight another day."
"Beware of Banking Cyber Attacks - Worldwide Problem"
"There was a simulated cyber attack on the world’s banking system. This involves 10 countries and we should all be concerned. Branches are changing throughout the world to give less personal service and have us not go into the branches."
"Over the past several days I have had some time to think, and my thoughts have repeatedly turned to the current state of the Internet. For a couple of decades after it was popularized, the Internet was one of the greatest tools for free speech that the world has ever seen. It allowed ordinary people like me to share truth on a massive scale with other ordinary people all over the planet. I have always been grateful for that opportunity, but now our ability to share truth with one another over the Internet is being systematically eroded. Nobody can deny that this is taking place, because it is literally happening right in front of our eyes. Over the past decade, control of the Internet has become increasingly centralized. The big tech companies have become exceptionally powerful, and they have become addicted to using that power to suppress speech that they do not like.
This is an extremely dangerous trend, because the Internet has become the primary way that the vast majority of us communicate with one another. It truly is our modern version of “the marketplace of ideas”, but now the big tech companies are absolutely determined to distort it into something else entirely.
At this point, there are a whole host of ideas that you aren’t allowed to freely discuss on the Internet anymore. In fact, there are a whole host of questions that you aren’t even allowed to ask. When a society gets to a point where you aren’t even allowed to ask questions, that is a very clear sign that you are living under a very oppressive authoritarian regime.
Years ago when they started banning various prominent voices we all knew that it wouldn’t end there. And it hasn’t. Today, the big tech companies have no problem banning literally anyone. For example, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene just got permanently banned on Twitter… "Twitter permanently blacklisted the personal account of a sitting member of Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) over the New Year’s weekend. “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” Rep. Greene said, in a statement responding to the ban. “That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.”
Rep. Greene has one of the largest followings on social media of any Republican member of Congress. Prior to her ban, she had over 465,000 followers on Twitter, meaning the Republican party and conservative movement has lost one of its most influential accounts on the platform.
Five years ago, if you told me that the big tech companies would start banning our politicians in Washington, I would have told you that you were crazy. But now nobody is safe. Once Twitter and Facebook banned a sitting president, we all knew that there was no going back.
Of course the pandemic has given the big tech companies an excuse to push their levels of censorship to even higher levels. Just a few days ago, Twitter banned Dr. Robert Malone just before he was interviewed by Joe Rogan… "Dr. Robert Malone played a key role in the invention of the mRNA vaccine, the type of vaccine that is being administered to many Americans in an effort to stave off COVID-19. Malone has often been critical of the use of the vaccines, as well those in the media and government who support them." He shared a great deal of research on his Twitter account, which had more than half a million followers.
“We all knew it would happen eventually,” Malone said on his Substack. “Today it did. Over a half million followers gone in a blink of an eye. That means I must have been on the mark, so to speak. Over the target. It also means we lost a critical component in our fight to stop these vaccines being mandated for children and to stop the corruption in our governments, as well as the medical-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industries.”
So now it appears that Twitter is preemptively banning people. We truly have entered “Minority Report” territory, and that is extremely chilling.
Considering everything that has been happening with the pandemic, you would think that we would want to hear what one of the inventors of mRNA technology has to say. Dr. Robert Malone has decades of experience, and he had been one of the most respected names in his field. But because he has viewpoints that don’t align with the official narratives being pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, he is being blacklisted by the big tech companies. If you think that you can get around all the censorship by simply refusing to use the big tech company platforms, you are wrong.
Just consider this example. Gateway Pundit is reporting that T-Mobile is literally erasing links to their articles from text messages… "Hi Jim. In one of the screenshots you can see where my sister tried to send me your website link four times but I never got it. The other two screenshots it shows me sending a link to one of your articles, that’s the one with the picture of the fox in it. In the other screenshot from my sister it shows that she never received the link. The text message it still has the fox in it. I hope this helps. But what I realized is it’s actually just my boost T-Mobile carrier that’s blocking your links. I have a friend in the 949 area code and he was able to send it to his wife, however, I can only receive it in a group text. Let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks. Mark."
I have had a similar experience with articles written by Mike Adams of Natural News. When I try to send links to Natural News through Facebook Messenger, the links are simply erased from the messages somehow. That is the level of censorship that we are now facing. They literally want to control what we see, what we hear and what we think. And of course this is setting the stage for a level of authoritarianism unlike anything we have ever seen before in all of human history. Without freedom of speech, all of our other freedoms will rapidly become meaningless.
Sadly, at this point freedom of speech in the United States is getting pretty close to being completely wiped out. Our Republic is rapidly dying, and millions upon millions of Americans are cheering as it happens. The big tech companies have become the arbiters of truth, but most of the “truths” that they are relentlessly pushing are actually lies. I don’t know if there is a way out of this mess, but we must find one, because the future of our society hangs in the balance."
"The year of sickening global psychosis ended with virologist and vaccine-uberspecialist Dr. Robert Malone truth-bombing the Internet with three hours of straight talk about the US health authorities’ campaign to destroy the lives of at least half a million US citizens (so far) and, leading by example, to harm multiples of that number of innocent people across all of Western Civilization. Podcaster Joe Rogan assisted skillfully in an interview that is finally rocking the world out of an epic consensus trance. (Listen.)
By health authorities I don’t just mean Dr. Anthony Fauci, the designated National SARS-CoV-2 Coordinator, or his accomplices in the Dept. of Health and Human Services agencies, CDC, NIH, NIAID, etc., but also the purblind US medical establishment of actual doctors in clinical practice, researchers, hospital administrators, and pharma executives who acted with a collective stupid malevolence not seen since the crematory-stuffers of the Nazi bureaucracy carried out their final solution.
We know what you did. You engineered and patented a gain-of-function virus at the same time you conspired with pharma companies to devise and patent pseudo-vaccines, and then you loosed both of them on the public. You didn’t just fail to adequately test the “vaccines” cooked up by Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, but you deliberately botched the trails and lied about it. You created rich $$ incentives for hospitals to mis-treat Covid patients by failing to use known, safe, effective anti-virals.
You conspired with social and news media to suppress information about those common anti-viral drugs that would have informed many patient’s decisions and saved thousands of lives. You treated late-stage patients dying of Covid-induced vascular disorder with the ineffective and toxic drug remdesivir that Dr. Fauci had developed unsuccessfully for an ebola outbreak years ago. (Nurses turned so cynical about the remdesivir protocol that they nicknamed it “run-death-is-near.”) You prompted government officials to lockdown society, force useless masking, and now to coerce “vaccination” by threatening to deprive citizens of their livelihoods.
The US Supreme Court will entertain arguments this Friday, January 7, to enjoin against “Joe Biden’s” mandates to coerce “vaccination” in companies that employ more than a hundred people and a separate mandate forcing vaxxes on staff at Medicare/Medicaid certified “providers” (meaning most hospitals and doctors’ offices). There’s a pretty good chance the court will decide against the mandates. They’re expected to rule Monday, January 10, the day that the mandates are supposed to take effect.
The government’s actions around the Covid-19 event look more and more to be deliberately and maliciously intended to harm lives and cause social and economic breakdown. In the last weeks of 2021, federal public health officers even blocked shipments of monoclonal antibodies around the country, despite their proven efficacy. The CDC scheduled the use of PCR tests for Covid-19 to end on December 31, after declaring them unreliable in August. Why the five-month lag? (To keep case numbers jacked up, that’s why.)
Every effort is being made to extend emergency use authorizations for unsafe and ineffective “vaccines” in order to sustain shields against liability for the benefit of their manufacturers. Pfizer refuses to release in the USA its FDA-approved comirnaty version of the EUA-protected BioNTech product for that reason. The Pentagon has lied and confabulated its use of the two Pfizer products in order to illegally force unapproved BioNTech vaccinations on enlisted men and women.
Hospital directors, doctors, and their professional associations continue to persecute colleagues who speak publicly against the “vaccines.” The “vaccine” makers refuse to disclose the exact contents of their products, and were permitted to withhold data on safety trials until a half-century into the future. The obvious conclusion is that they don’t want the public to be informed about any of this. The net effect is that medicine in the USA has destroyed its own authority. Who can trust his doctor knowing that they’ve gone along with all this epic dishonesty?
The country is heading into an agonizing reality-test at a scale and speed never seen before in world history. You can already assume that government has lost control of the Covid-19 story. The Omicron scare is failing miserably. Lots of cases, few deaths, mild symptoms. Government’s credibility is shot. In the months ahead, we’ll learn just how harmful those “vaccines” were - especially among American children - as deaths mount from damage done to people’s organs and immune systems.
The perfidious news media is scrambling now to adjust its narratives, but they won’t escape the record of falsehood they’ve sedulously laid down. They can’t delete or rewrite every story in their archives, and many of these are printed out in hard-copy anyhow. Next, they’ll try apologizing. (“Sorry, but the pandemic drove us a little nuts.”) That’s hardly enough. They have to answer in courts of law - or else we must just declare the USA a lawless state.
The Covid-19 crimes against our fellow citizens amount to only one piece of a package of reality-tests coming our way in 2022. Do you think Special Counsel John Durham skulked off to drink pina coladas in oblivion after indicting a couple of errand boys (Danchenko and Sussman)? He is a hypersonic force orbiting over a well-known cast of political criminals who are headed for prosecution. Next up will be the train wreck of the US economy. Do you think the crimes around the 2020 national election are buried and forgotten? You’re in for some harsh surprises. Things have truly flipped. You just don’t realize it yet."
"Stocking Up at Kroger! Checking Rising Prices, And Empty Shelves!"
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger with a lot of empty shelves. We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and to get a few items of course they don't have. It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
“Sometimes falling ice crystals make the atmosphere into a giant lens causing arcs and halos to appear around the Sun or Moon. One Saturday night in 2012 was just such a time near Madrid, Spain, where a winter sky displayed not only a bright Moon but four rare lunar halos. The brightest object, near the top of the featured image, is the Moon. Light from the Moon refracts through tumbling hexagonal ice crystals into a somewhat rare 22-degree halo seen surrounding the Moon. Elongating the 22-degree arc horizontally is a more rare circumscribed halo caused by column ice crystals.
Even more rare, some moonlight refracts through more distant tumbling ice crystals to form a (third) rainbow-like arc 46 degrees from the Moon and appearing here just above a picturesque winter landscape. Furthermore, part of a whole 46-degree circular halo is also visible, so that an extremely rare - especially for the Moon - quadruple halo was captured. Far in the background is a famous winter skyscape that includes Sirius, the belt of Orion, and Betelgeuse - visible between the inner and outer arcs. Halos and arcs typically last for minutes to hours, so if you do see one there should be time to invite family, friends or neighbors to share your unusual lensed vista of the sky.”
"We never know when our last day on earth will be. So, love with full sincerity, believe with true faith, and hope with all of your might. Better to have lived in truth and discovered life, than to have lived half heartedly and died long before you ever ceased breathing."
"Key mRNA contributor Dr. Robert Malone, a prominent skeptic of mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, gave an interview to popular podcaster Joe Rogan - days after Malone was suspended from Twitter - during which he suggested the United States is in the midst of a “mass formation psychosis.” “Our government is out of control on this,” Malone said about vaccine mandates in the interview, which was published over the weekend. “And they are lawless. They completely disregard bioethics. They completely disregard the federal common-rule. They have broken all the rules that I know of, that I’ve been trained [in] for years and years and years.”
Malone, an expert in mRNA vaccine technologies who received training at UC Davis, UC San Diego, and the Salk Institute, was banned by Twitter last week. Malone told The Epoch Times last week that Twitter offered no explanation for why his account, which had amassed 500,000 followers, was suspended.
A spokesperson for Twitter told the left-wing Daily Dot outlet that Malone’s account “was permanently suspended for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy… per the strike system outlined here, we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of this policy.” Twitter has not responded to an Epoch Times’ request for comment on Malone’s suspension.
“These mandates… are explicitly illegal” and “are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code,” Malone said during his Rogan interview, referring to the set of research ethics principles against human experimentation. “They are explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont report,” Malone added, referring to the 1978 report published in the Federal Register regarding ethical principles and guidelines for research involving human subjects. “They are flat out illegal,” Malone added, “and they don’t care.”
Toward the end of his interview, Malone suggested that people are in the midst of what he called “mass formation psychosis,” drawing parallels to the mentality that developed among the German population in the 1920s and 1930s. In those years, Germans “had a highly intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad,” Malone said.
“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,” he continued. “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. They will follow that person. It doesn’t matter if they lie to them or whatever.” Several years ago, he said, people were “complaining, the world doesn’t make sense” and that we weren’t “connected socially anymore, except through social media.” “Then this thing happened,” Malone said, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic. “That is how mass formation psychosis happens and that is what has happened here.”
"I think over the course of three hours Joe and I lay out just how dire the situation is in the USA. I know it is a long interview, but please try to get friends and family to watch or listen to this - maybe it can change some closed minds. I seriously hope so." Robert W Malone
"The 20-minute video above, “Mass Psychosis - How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill,” created by After Skool and Academy of Ideas, is a fascinating illustration of how mass psychosis can be induced. Mass psychosis is defined as “an epidemic of madness” that occurs when a “large portion of society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions.”
One classic historical example of mass psychosis is the witch hunts that occurred in the Americas and Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, when tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were tortured, drowned and burned alive at the stake. The rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century is a more recent example of mass psychosis.
Man’s Worst Enemy: As noted in the video: “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.” That’s a quote attributed to Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist renowned for his study of crowds. His book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,” takes a deep dive into the characteristics of human crowds and how, when gathered in groups, people tend to relinquish conscious deliberation in favor of unconscious crowd action.
Similarly, psychologist Carl Jung once stated that: “It is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
When a society descends into madness, the results are always devastating. Jung, who studied mass psychoses, wrote that the individuals who make up the affected society “become morally and spiritually inferior.” They become “unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic and unreliable.” Worst of all, a psychotic mob will engage in atrocities that any solitary individual within the group would normally never consider. Yet through it all, those affected remain unaware of their condition and cannot recognize the error in their ways.
What Causes Mass Psychosis? To understand how an entire society can be driven to madness, you must first understand what drives any given individual to insanity. Barring drug or alcohol abuse, or a brain injury, psychosis is typically triggered by psychogenic factors, i.e., influences that originate in the mind.
One of the most common psychogenic factors that can trigger psychosis is a flood of negative emotions such as fear or anxiety that drives the person into a state of panic. When in a panic, the natural inclination is to seek relief. A psychologically resilient individual may adapt by facing their fear and ultimately defeating it.
Another coping mechanism is a psychotic break. As explained in the video, a psychotic break is not the descent into chaos, but rather a reordering of one’s experiential world in a way that blends fact and fiction, reality and illusions, in such a way that a sense of control is restored and panic ends. The psychogenic steps that lead to madness can be summarized as follows:
Phase of panic: Here, the individual begins to perceive the world around him or her in a different way and is frightened on account of it. There’s a perceived threat, whether it be real, fabricated or imagined. Confusion grows as they can’t find a way to rationally explain the strange occurrences taking place around them.
Phase of psychotic insight: Here, the individual manages to explain his abnormal experience of the world by inventing an illogical but magical way of seeing reality. The term “insight” is used, because the magical thinking allows the individual to escape from the panic and find meaning again. However, the insight is psychotic, because it’s based on delusions.
Just as a psychologically weak and vulnerable individual can be driven to madness, so can large groups of weak and vulnerable people descend into madness and magical thinking.
Totalitarianism is a Society Built on Delusions: In the 20th century, we’ve seen a rise in totalitarianism, defined by professor and religious studies scholar Arthur Versluis as: “The modern phenomenon of total centralized state power coupled with the obliteration of individual human rights: In the totalized state, there are those in power and there are the objectified masses, the victims.”
In a totalitarian society, there are two classes: the rulers and the ruled, and both groups undergo a pathological transformation. Rulers are raised to a god-like status where they can do no wrong - a view that easily leads to corruption and unethical behavior - while the ruled are transformed into dependent subjects, which leads to psychological regression. Joost Meerloo, author of “Rape of the Mind,” compares the reactions of citizens living in totalitarian states to that of schizophrenics. Both rulers and the ruled are ill. Both live in a delusional fog, as the entire society and its rules are sustained by delusional thinking.
As noted in the video, only deluded people regress to a child-like state of total submissiveness, and only a deluded ruling class will believe they possess the knowledge and wisdom to control society in a top-down manner. And, only a deluded person will believe that a power-hungry elite ruling a mentally regressed society will result in anything but mass suffering and financial ruin.
The mass psychosis that is totalitarianism begins within the ruling class, as the individuals within this class are easily enamored with delusions that augment their power. And no delusion is greater than the delusion that they can, and should - indeed are destined to - control and dominate all others. Whether the totalitarian mindset takes the form of communism, fascism or technocracy, a ruling elite that has succumbed to their own delusions of grandeur then sets about to indoctrinate the masses into their own twisted worldview. All that’s needed to accomplish that reorganization of society is the manipulation of collective feelings.
Killing of the Mind: Menticide is a term that means “killing of the mind,” and it’s an ancient way of controlling the masses by systematically killing the human spirit and free thought. It’s a system through which the ruling elite imprints their own delusional worldview onto society.
A society is primed for menticide by the intentional sowing of fear. A particularly effective way to induce fear and panic that results in psychosis is the unleashing of waves of terror, and it doesn’t matter if the “terror” in question is real or fictitious. The waves of terror technique can be graphed out as an escalating wave pattern where each round of fear is followed by a round of calm.
Contradictory reports, nonsensical recommendations and blatant lies are deployed intentionally, as it heightens confusion. The more confused a population is, the greater the state of anxiety, which reduces society’s ability to cope with the crisis. As the ability to cope withers, the greater the chances a mass psychosis will develop.
After a short period of calm, the threat level is elevated again, with each round of fearmongering being more intense than the one before. Propaganda - fake and misleading news - are used to break down the minds of the masses, and over time, it becomes easier and easier to control everyone as confusion and anxiety give way to the magical thinking and psychotic insight presented as solutions through the media.
Contradictory reports, nonsensical recommendations and blatant lies are deployed intentionally, as it heightens confusion. The more confused a population is, the greater the state of anxiety, which reduces society’s ability to cope with the crisis. As the ability to cope withers, the greater the chances a mass psychosis will develop. As noted in the video, “Confusion heightens the susceptibility of a descent into the delusions of totalitarianism.” Or, as Meerloo noted in his book: “Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot. It confuses those who think straight. The big lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more of an emotional appeal… than logic and reason. While the people are still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault them with another.”
The Rise of Technocracy: What sets modern-day totalitarianism apart from previous totalitarian states is technology. The means to incite fear and manipulate people’s thinking has never been more efficient or effective. TV, internet, smartphones and social media are all sources of information these days, and it’s easier than ever to control the flow of that information.
Algorithms automatically filter out the voices of reason and rational thinking, supplanting them with fear narratives instead. Modern technologies also have addictive qualities, so many voluntarily expose themselves to the brainwashing. Commenting on man’s reliance on technology, Meerloo notes: “No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation. The senses are continually overloaded with stimuli. Man doesn’t learn to question his world anymore. The screen offers him answers already made.”
Isolation - A Mass Psychosis-Inducing Tool: Aside from the onslaught of fearmongering and false propaganda, the ultimate tool to induce psychosis is isolation. When you are deprived of regular social interactions and discussions, you become more susceptible to delusions for a number of reasons: You lose contact with corrective forces of positive examples, role models of rational thinking and behavior. Not everyone is tricked by the brainwashing attempts of the ruling elite, and these people can help free others from their delusions. When you’re in isolation, the power of these individuals greatly diminishes.
Like animals, human behavior is significantly easier to manipulate when the individual is kept in isolation. As animal research has discovered, conditioned reflexes are most easily developed in a quiet, secluded laboratory with a minimum of stimuli to detract from the indoctrination.
When you want to tame a wild animal, you must isolate the animal and patiently repeat a particular stimulus until the desired response is obtained. Humans can be conditioned in the same manner. Alone, confused, and battered by waves of terror, a society kept in isolation from each other descends into madness as rational thought is obliterated and replaced with magical thinking.
Once a society is firmly in the grip of mass psychosis, totalitarians are free to take the last, decisive step: They can offer a way out; a return to order. The price is your freedom. You must cede control of all aspects of your life to the rulers, because unless they are granted total control, they won’t be able to create the order everyone craves. This order, however, is a pathological one, devoid of all humanity. It eliminates the spontaneity that brings joy and creativity to one’s life by demanding strict conformity and blind obedience.
And despite the promise of safety, a totalitarian society is inherently fearful. It was built on fear, and is maintained by it too. So, giving up your freedom for safety and a sense of order will only lead to more of the same fear and anxiety that allowed the totalitarians to gain control in the first place.
How Can Mass Psychosis Be Reversed? Can totalitarianism be prevented? And can the effects of mass psychosis be reversed? Yes, but just as the menticidal approach is multipronged, so must the solution be. To help return sanity to an insane world, first you need to center yourself and live in such a way as to provide inspiration for others to follow.
As noted by Jung: “It is not for nothing that our age cries out for the redeemer personality, for the one who can emancipate himself from the grip of the collective psychosis and save at least his own soul, who lights a beacon of hope for others, proclaiming that here is at least one man who has succeeded in extricating himself from the fatal identity with the group psyche.”
Next, you need to share and spread the truth - the counternarrative to the propaganda - as far and wide as possible. Because truth is always more potent than lies, the success of propaganda relies on the censoring of truth. Another tactic is to use humor and ridicule to delegitimize the ruling elite.
A strategy proposed by Vaclav Havel, a political dissident who became the president of Czechoslovakia, is called “parallel structures.” A parallel structure is any kind of business, organization, technology, movement or creative pursuit that fits within a totalitarian society while being morally outside of it. Once enough parallel structures are created, a parallel culture is born that functions as a sanctuary of sanity within the totalitarian world. Havel explains this strategy in his book, “The Power of the Powerless.”
Last but not least, to prevent the descent into totalitarian madness, sane and rational action must be taken by as many people as possible. The totalitarian elite do not sit around twiddling their thumbs, hoping and wishing to increase their power and control. No. They are actively taking steps to augment their position. To defend against them, the would-be-ruled must be just as active and resolute in their counter-push toward freedom.
All of this can be extremely challenging as people around you succumb to collective psychosis. But as Thomas Paine once said: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."
However detached from the reality of life dreams may seem, they affect our every waking momentand even help us regulate our negative moods. And yet, try as we might to control our dreams, we still know so very little about where we go when we slip into that nocturnal wonderland. For all the advances science has made, it still seems best left to the poets - and the best of poets only.
In one of the many masterpieces in his "Collected Poems" (public library), Pulitzer-winning poet and MacArthur “genius” Mark Strand (April 11, 1934–November 29, 2014) explores the delicate and disorienting world of dreams with unparalleled elegance. The poem is a supreme testament to Strand’s belief that it is the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe, within and without."
