The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Mass Formation Psychosis: What Is It and Why Is Everybody Talking About It Now?

Posted on | January 27, 2022 | 2 Comments

Have you ever heard of “The Streisand Effect”? It’s what happens on the Internet when someone tries to suppress the truth:

Barbra Streisand . . . in 2003 had sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia[dot]com for violation of privacy. The US$50 million lawsuit endeavored to remove an aerial photograph of Streisand’s mansion from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. Adelman photographed the beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project, which was intended to influence government policymakers. Before Streisand filed her lawsuit, “Image 3850” had been downloaded from Adelman’s website only six times; two of those downloads were by Streisand’s attorneys. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased greatly; more than 420,000 people visited the site over the following month. The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman’s legal fees, which amounted to $155,567.

In a free society, such censorship efforts always fail, if citizens understand what is at stake. Today was Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day, an effort to bring attention to a dangerous censorship effort. Last month, William Jacobson blogged about Mass Formation Psychosis and linked to this short primer on the subject:

A brief overview of Mass Formation, which was developed by Dr. Mattias Desmet. He is a psychologist and a statistician. He is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. I think Dr. Mattias is onto something about what is happening and he calls this phenomena:
MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS
So, when he says “mass” formation, you can think of this as equivalent to “crowd” formation. One can think of this as:
CROWD PSYCHOSIS
The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible “object of anxiety” and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.
As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view. Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong.
Left unabated, a society under the spell of mass formation will support a totalitarian governance structure capable of otherwise unthinkable atrocities in order to maintain compliance. A note: mass formation is different from group think. There are easy ways to fix group think by just bringing in dissenting voices and making sure you give them platforms. It isn’t so easy with mass formation. Even when the narrative falls apart, cracks in the strategy clearly aren’t solving the issue, the hypnotized crowd can’t break free of the narrative. This is what appears to be happening now with COVID-19. The solution for those in control of the narrative is to produce bigger and bigger lies to prop up the solution. Those being controlled by mass formation no longer are able to use reason to break free of the group narrative.

Do you grasp the significance of this concept in our current situation? Guess what happens if you tell the truth in a world where major institutions are devoted to promoting official lies?

Twitter on [Dec. 29] suspended the account operated by Dr. Robert Malone, a U.S.-based virologist, and immunologist credited for significantly contributing to the invention of the mRNA technology, the foundation of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against Covid-19.
The ban came just hours after the AP posted a controversial “fact check” report claiming Malone “misled” people by claiming the vaccines are failing against the Omicron variant.

It is self-evident that vaccines haven’t stopped the Omicron variant, which produced a surge of “breakthrough” COVID-19 infections in vaccinated patients, even those who had gotten “booster” shots. Yet not only did Twitter ban Dr. Malone for “misinformation,” but because popular podcaster Joe Rogan hosted Dr. Malone on his program, everybody is now trying to ban Rogan:

Biden-appointed U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Silicon Valley tech companies have an “important role to play” in preventing the spread of alleged coronavirus “misinformation.” His comments came during an MSNBC interview that specifically mentioned Joe Rogan.
Murthy made the comments during an appearance on MSNBC, in which host Mika Brzezinski asked Murthy what should be done about alleged misinformation from Joe Rogan and social media posts.
“What do you think are the best ways to push back on misinformation about COVID that continues to be aggressively pushed, whether it be Joe Rogan’s podcast or all over Facebook?” asked Brzezinski.
“We can have the best science available, we can have the best public health expertise available. It won’t help people if they don’t have access to accurate information,” responded Murthy. “People have the right to make their own decisions, but they also have the right to have accurate information to make that decision with.”
The Biden-appointed health official went on to urge private companies to use their power to limit the spread of alleged misinformation.
“This is about companies and individuals recognizing that the only way we get past misinformation is if we are careful about what we say and use the power that we have to limit the spread of misinformation,” said Murthy.
With an average of 11 million listeners per episode, Joe Rogan is arguably the most popular pundit in the western world.

Do you see the point? If indeed our “leaders” are trying to hypnotize the masses, the one thing they can’t allow is for anyone to tell the masses, “Hey, they’re hypnotizing you.” So the silencing of dissent is essential to the propaganda campaign that fuels Mass Formation Psychosis.




 

Category: Media Bias, Science

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2 Responses to “Mass Formation Psychosis: What Is It and Why Is Everybody Talking About It Now?”

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    […] Mass Formation Psychosis: What Is It and Why Is Everybody Talking About It Now? 357 Magnum EBL […]

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    […] Mass Formation Psychosis: What Is It and Why Is Everybody Talking About It Now? Have you ever heard of “The Streisand Effect”? It’s what happens on the Internet when someone tries to suppress the truth […]