The Real Covid Cancellation
As of this issue, please welcome a new name: “The Covid Mirror.” “Covid Mirror” is somewhat more to-the-point than “Covid Hologram,” I think, because less esoteric. As you will see from the topic I am about to discuss, being to the point is of the essence!
The question I would like to raise in this issue is this: is the global response to Covid a a wake-up call that we are careening toward totalitarianism? To get us started, I offer the following from nineteenth-century crowd psychology theorist Gustave Le Bon, of whom we might imagine Hitler and Stalin were aware.
Man, as part of a multitude, is a very different being from the same man as an isolated individual…. The collective mind, momentarily formed, represents a very special kind of aggregate. Its chief peculiarity is that it is entirely dominated by unconscious elements, and is subject to a peculiar collective logic.
Among the other characteristics of crowds, we must note their infinite credulity and exaggerated sensibility, their shortsightedness, and their incapacity to respond to the influences of reason. Affirmation, contagion, repetition, and prestige constitute almost the only means of persuading them. Reality and experience have no effect upon them. The multitude will admit anything; nothing is impossible in the eyes of the crowd.
And Belgian psychology professor Mattias Desmet states, in an interview about “mass formation” and Covid 19:
The large scale mass formation that we’ve seen from the twentieth century on, it can never exist without mass media. That is clear. So you need mass media who distribute the same narrative time and time again to make this large-scale and long-term mass formation happen.
Desmet has got me reflecting on the totalitarianism being revealed by the Covid mirror, and its various adjuncts. Although, the notion of totalitarianism had already been sitting in the environment of my thought life when Covid came along.
Conditions for totalitarianism and its hallmark canceling of independent actors seemed to be ripening. From their bully pulpits, people in positions of greatest authority became increasingly brazen in their manipulations, their messaging amplified through a variety of echo chambers. Passionate dissent concerning well-documented corporate/governmental—and yes, medical—collusion was already shuttled to the margins. Unhealthful policies were instituted to the benefit of corporations, and leaders demonstrated increasingly less responsibility toward regular people. Yet, keeping one’s own head above water in the increasingly stressful environment seemed all a person could do. Who even had time to reflect on the meaning of all of this?
It’s painful to even look at a mirror containing such darkness. Though, maybe by looking at just that part of the mirror that reflects the virus, we can recognize power that we do have, and be the actors totalitarianism cannot tolerate.
It is us, or it!
I was struck early on that it was feasible for the virus to have been handled in many ways. Indeed, many gloriously credentialed, previously celebrated scientists and doctors got busy creating solutions to the virus immediately. But thinking that contradicted the mainstream narrative, no matter how protective of health, was so tyrannically expunged from the major informational thoroughfares that it took a person’s breath away. To give one particularly striking example, numerous doctors worked creatively to devise early treatment protocols (emphasis on “early,” before the virus gets a chance to replicate and create its scariest harms). Early on in the pandemic, those protocols reached an effectiveness rate in excess of 99% even among high-risk patients.
I personally did not learn of these protocols until summer of 2021, when I finally chanced upon a trustworthy informational site in trialsitenews.com. Sadly, people I tell of them seem dumbfounded when I mention them. Those protocols, as fate would have it, stood to interfere legally with the vaccines getting “emergency use authorization” status. After all, if the protocols worked, there was no emergency to speak of. Could that have something to do with why it was so hard to find out about them? (Surely, asking such a question does not make me a conspiracy theorist!)
Anyway, this was the environment in which the persistent drumbeat for vaccines got loud very quickly, and most of the people I knew reflexively joined in propagating that beat. Practically all of them (and their kids!), within mere months of a novel virus showing up, could seemingly speak of nothing else, even though we scarcely knew anything about the virus at that point. If you turned only to the usual places for news, vaccines were all you could hear about aside from the ridiculing of alternatives.
Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. That’s a part of the scenario that made the current state of affairs--whereby our “solutions” have clearly not worked and yet many continue to prop them up through words and actions--possible. For those of you who believe our solutions are working fine, please give me a moment. In the meantime, let’s turn to professor Desmet for some help finding actionable meaning in this uncomfortable state of affairs.
Desmet, who lectures on “mass formation” at the University of Ghent, points out that modern totalitarianism is only possible with mass media and its ubiquitous, uniform messaging. Through this propagation (note the relationship between that word, “prop,” and “propaganda”) people suspend pesky independent thinking as their own small voices grow to feel foolish. Under the able mentorship of media, they fall into ridiculing people who still demonstrate the small voice—or, later on in the process toward totalitarianism, turn them in to the authorities. Elite narratives of meaning replace ones people might have otherwise created for themselves.
Hitler, a brilliant tactical propagandist, set such a process in motion some twenty years before the explosion in number of death camps. In the thirties in particular, he demonstrated his understanding that a totalitarian system required total control of the channels of information. Thus, book burnings, nightly radio broadcasts, ubiquitous anti-Semitic posters, government control of print media, speeches broadcast by loudspeaker into city streets, control over cultural production paved the way for mass consent to the Final Solution and other atrocities. Such tactics would seem ham-fisted these days, as our media have much more sophisticated tactics at their disposal. Casting a further haze over the current picture is that our mainstream media are controlled by a small number of oligarchs rather than a single dictator, and they work hard to project an impression of independence. Still, it isn’t hard to find parallels, and Desmet gets us started.
No one can make you give up your individual perceptions, your moral grounding. Nonetheless, people fall under the sway of totalitarian propaganda through predisposition. Desmet gives us four necessary preconditions if totalitarianism is to gain a foothold in a population:
1) A pervasive sense of social disconnection.
2) Generalized, free floating anxiety, not connected to a particular mental representation.
3) A lack of sense that life is meaningful. This lack of meaning is plausibly tied to media consumption, creating an undeniable circularity to the problem.
4) Individuals feel an undertow of aggressive affect.
Desmet thinks that the four types of instability are in ample evidence these days, and I think most of us would agree. Desmet explains mechanisms through which people under totalitarian pressure disengage critical thinking circuits to embrace the absurd. Under the four circumstances I just listed, people who are offered a concrete enemy, alongside a strategy for alleviating the free-floating anxiety, will cave in a heartbeat--and won’t care to look back. When all the kinds of media jointly present this enemy as a target of mass focus, you get a situation where “mass formation psychosis” becomes possible.
Desmet’s theory that mass formation explains why people are now cleaving to a narrative in violation of much science—not to mention basic precepts of respect and decency--is compelling. The ubiquitous narrative—that the virus in our midst is so lethal, so frightening, that we must suppress all dissent to escape it; that we must implicitly trust and obey the alleged expert class at any cost because to do otherwise would risk our very lives--is seductive to people desperate to solve the four intransigent problems. Besides providing a target for *free-floating anxiety,* the narrative affords an opportunity to *connect* with like-minded people, engaging in a *meaningful activity* while also directing *aggression.* Four extremely painful emotions eviscerated at a single go, in one instant magical “poof!”
For the many people troubled by the present climate of oppression (and there are actually a lot of us), the central problem appeared to be that, in an epic shit show, the media ubiquitously ridicule, ignore, or build straw horses against science that contradicts their repetitive messaging, with the full participation of corrupted regulatory agencies. The dissidents thought their job was to become versed in the rampant high quality, scientifically valid information about the dark side of Covid inoculations, masking, distancing, and so forth, to spread the word, and then sit back and allow critical thinking and reason to take care of the rest. This assumption turned out to be entirely wrong, and Desmet can finally explain why: It’s because the people buying into the narrative have remarkably deep, generally unconscious investments in not seeing that science.
Thus, though even the trusted Fauci himself notes that the inoculations do not prevent transmission (and this is scientifically beyond dispute) many are impervious to the huge ramifications of that. Most particularly, if the inoculations don’t prevent transmission (and plenty of scientists understood this all along) the public health strategy of inoculating everyone to get to herd immunity is severely mistaken. The unvaccinated are no more filthy spreaders of disease than are the vaccinated! Again--even though the inoculations do not prevent transmission--millions of parents willingly subject children who have a snowball’s chance in hell of dying from Covid to the novel therapies, while hiding from the many risks that have surfaced with them. The situation is painful, and painfully absurd—except that the historic models of totalitarianism show people accepting horrifying levels of risk for themselves and loved ones. It’s in the nature of the beast.
Messaging abounds that the unvaccinated person is a selfish degenerate, a rabid danger, a legitimate target for discrimination. Any garden variety marketing expert or totalitarian wannabee knows humans have visceral reactions to filth and pathogens. The latter would know that totalitarian systems require enemies, as per Hitler’s and Stalin’s examples. The widely held perception that the unvaccinated are threats to public health has no scientific basis. Plausibly, the basis lies in the objective to commandeer minds.
Speaking of what our masses are strangely willing to tolerate, here is a punch list of the collateral damage our public health strategy has brought humanity. As we know, this financially costly strategy focused on aggressive vaccination, social distancing, masking, and lockdown campaigns. Obversely, it rejected cheap early treatment protocols and invested nothing in campaigns to help people shed unhealthy pounds, stop smoking, boost their immune systems through healthy diet and supplementation--all of which have been shown to be significant preventatives of Covid hospitalization and death.
Americans gained an average of two pounds per month during lockdown, and walked 28% fewer steps each day. At the same time, 78% of Americans hospitalized for Covid are overweight or obese. Carrying extra pounds is associated with numerous other illnesses, including heart disease and diabetes. In other words, our tactics increased vulnerability to serious Covid and fostered conditions for more serious illness up the road.
Overdose deaths increased by 30% in 2020, then by another 9% (to over 100K) in 2021.
In the US, homicides rose by 30% in 2020.
Strictures resulted in widespread business closures and job loss, with accompanying anxiety, depression, stress: significant quality of life markers, as well as preconditions for physical illnesses.
Visits to the ER by girls 12-17 for suicide attempts were up 51% in winter of 2021 from the same time in 2019, according to the surgeon general’s report.
There were striking increases in spousal, child, and elder abuse: often in the 25-30% range where reported at all. (Imagine being in lockdown with your abuser!)
Elderly people experienced the end-of-life transition without being allowed to choose to have loved ones nearby. (RIP, my own beautiful mom.)
Isolation and loneliness is known to dramatically degrade physical health.
It is hard to even imagine the harm we have done to children’s cognitive and intellectual development through distancing, isolation, and masking. It will be years before we do. But for the time being:
The British Medical Journal reported on a study showing that IQ scores of children born during the pandemic were 22 points below average scores from the previous 8 years.
Evidence is piling up that inoculations are causing a lot of injury, including startling rates of stillbirth and miscarriage.
The billions spent on the chosen campaigns were billions not spent on education, social programs, infrastructure, etc..
World wide inflation, with devastating consequences for the world’s poor. And that brings me to the final item, the worst of all though most hidden from westerners:
Globally, pandemic-related disruptions to supply chains have created astronomical increases in hunger. To provide some particularly harrowing statistics: According to the US Global Leadership Coalition, “the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated child hunger and malnutrition as the pandemic forced more than 1.6 billion children out of school in 199 countries, depriving nearly 370 million children in 150 countries access to nutritious meals.” According to Oxfam, “11 people are likely dying every minute from acute hunger, now outpacing COVID-19 fatalities.”
All this devastation sits on one side of the balance created by our precautions against a single pathogen. Some of this collateral damage involves fatality in the short term, some in the long term. For some of it, we will not understand the extent of damage done for years. Some of it creates deep psychic wounds, and some of it simply damages perception of the meaning of the life experience, not that there’s anything trivial about that. Now let’s look at the other side of that balance, the side with the single pathogen.
The US has some of the worst Covid death numbers in the entire world, dwarfing most African countries as well as India. Those places are doing much better with Covid in spite of being scantly inoculated.
I learned from the New York Times that, since its arrival to this country, Covid 19 has killed 788,000 here. This number is not iron-clad but for the sake of argument let’s go with it for now. The US has 329.5 million residents. Doing the math, Covid has killed .0023% of Americans over the 20 month period. Even for those unfortunate victims, many deaths could have been averted through a different public health strategy, most notably involving early treatment. On the other hand Nigeria, with its 1.3% vaccination rate, is doing a hundred times better than us in terms of fatality, as per statistics from OurWorldInData.com. Furthermore, you can’t credit inoculation programs with the mildness of our fatality rate because there appear to have been more Covid deaths post-inoculation than pre-.
I see a shit show, if ever there was one! At what point, I wonder, would our government decide that our solution of choice has generated too much collateral damage? “Never” is the likely answer, without an insistent prodding from people who think like individuals and not like the stoked mass does.
There are a few positive highlights in Desmet’s stark analysis. He says that along the way to full-blown totalitarianism, 30% are fully hypnotized, 40% aren’t but go along anyway, and the other 30% actively resist. He says that as long as the latter 30% keep talking and challenging at least the 40%, the messaging is prevented from going deeper. That is where the hope lies of averting the atrocities to which full-blown totalitarianism (which relies on terror tactics alongside the propaganda) invariably leads.
How about you: Where would you place yourself in this sad mix?
It Could Never Happen Here
In Australia, a system of camps for the Covid-positive has been created. If the government tells you to go there, you go. In this video, Freddie Sayers interviews a young woman who was extra-judicially shipped off to such a camp as a punishment, in spite of testing negative for Covid. I still can’t wrap my brain around it.
Then, here is a troubling and yet strangely entertaining lecture by Jordan Peterson about the human revulsion for pathogens and its political ramifications. Though presented years ago, it appears to be entirely relevant to the current situation.
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