About Mass Formation Hypnosis

Dr. Robert Malone recently discussed "Mass Formation Hypnosis" on Joe Rogan's show:

I decided to do a deeper dive into this topic.  Clinical Psychologist Dr. Mattias Desmet discusses Mass Formation Hypnosis with Max Blumenthal in this video:

As Desmet describes at 14 min (and summarizes at 19:45), there are four conditions for MFP:

1. Lack of social bonds

2. Lack of meaning making

3. High levels of free floating anxiety. They don't know why they are anxious and it is very distressing/painful for humans to experience because of the lack of control, resulting in risk of developing panic attack. They actively look for something to which they can attach the free-floating anxiety, something they can control.

4. High levels of free floating frustration and aggression

What happens when these conditions exist? Desmet explains: A narrative is disseminated that A) indicates an object for the anxiety and B) offers a strategy/solution for this object of anxiety. As a result of this narrative, all of the free-floating anxiety attaches to the object of anxiety offered by the narrative, resulting in a over-willingness to participate in the strategy.

In present times, the object of the anxiety is the virus and the strategy is the lockdown, social distancing and other corona measures. MFH allows people to feel that they can control their anxiety by participating in the strategy. When large groups of people participate in the strategy, it leads to a new social bond, new connectedness, a new solidarity, and this leads to a new sense-making in life. In other words, life becomes meaningful through the heroic struggle with the object of anxiety (the virus). COVID led to a new solidarity because everyone participated in a heroic collective battle with the virus. As social beings, we switched from isolation to the new strong social bond (or solidarity) with large masses of other people. This is why people enthusiastically buy into the corona narrative even if it is utterly absurd. For those not caught up in MFH, they are amazed that others so often utter such absurdities.

Those caught up in the narrative don't do so because the narrative (the set of extreme COVID measures) is correct. Rather, they do so because they seek the new powerful social bonds. Many of the measures are not relevant or true, but they function as rituals in which people participate in order to connect to the masses of others caught up in the narrative. The more absurd and unscientific the COVID measures and the more that sacrifice is demanded, the better the measures function as rituals. This fits the general function of rituals: a behavior that you participate in not because it is functional to protect you from the virus, but to show to the tribe/collective that the collective is more important than the individual. You would be in error to think that as COVID measures become more absurd, more people will wake up to the insanity, but that is an illusion. The more absurd the measures become, the more blinded certain people will become.

Mass Formation is a type of hypnosis. In hypnosis, the attention of an individual is hyper-focused on a very small part of reality, making the rest of reality disappear into darkness. People caught up don't realize that in obsessing over the COVID measures, they are losing much else, meaning that they lose interest in cost/benefit analyses. Even substantial losses are a small price to pay in order for one to feel that one is part of the heroic struggle against COVID. This has led to an aggressive stance toward heterodox outsiders, people who question the narrative, such as Dr. Robert Malone. The masses always need a common enemy, which includes the virus as well as the people who don't fall completely in line.

At Min 30, Blumenthal applies the theory to many political movements in sadomasochistic fashion. These phenomenon are always destructive and self-destructive. Desmet adds: The exclusive focus on one part of reality to the neglect of the rest of reality inevitably leads to self-destruction. George Orwell noticed that the masses, the crowd, exists because it has to channel/satisfy its frustration/aggression and it needs to attach its anxiety to a certain object--and once an object of anxiety is destroyed, the crowd seeks a new object of anxiety, which also must be destroyed. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She noticed the in its effort to keep reattaching its aggression to new objects of anxiety, the masses become a monster and the system destroys itself.

Desmet fears that we are seeing the emergence of a new totalitarian state, exactly as Hannah Arendt predicted, not led by gang leaders but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats, pursuant to her concept of the banality of evil. We can see this by the extreme COVID response in Australia. These measure are palpably absurd to those not caught up in the narrative. Arendt warned: once you accept the starting point, there is no stopping. You feel compelled to accept all the rest.

This theory of Mass Formation Hypnosis would appear to have ubiquitous applications--wherever anxiety is widespread. This theory has screamingly obvious application to the formation of many religions, for example.

Relevant to the above: Joe Rogan's guest, Dr. Robert Malone was recently deplatformed by Twitter, a stunning development, given Malone's credentials:

Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment.

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The World is Flat

I have increasingly had the thought that I no longer trust most American institutions. Today, I read an article that said I'm not alone. See this excerpt from "Everything is Broken: and How to Fix It" by Alana Newhouse at Tablet, a website enthusiastically recommended by Bari Weiss.

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart. Michael Lind explains this better than anyone else:

The strategy of American business, encouraged by neoliberal Democrats and libertarian conservative Republicans alike, has been to lower labor costs in the United States, not by substituting labor-saving technology for workers, but by schemes of labor arbitrage: Offshoring jobs when possible to poorly paid workers in other countries and substituting unskilled immigrants willing to work for low wages in some sectors, like meatpacking and construction and farm labor. American business has also driven down wages by smashing unions in the private sector, which now have fewer members—a little more than 6% of the private sector workforce—than they did under Herbert Hoover.

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

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The “Race” Endgame

Sam Harris appeared on stage with Scott Galloway to discuss many topics, including "race." I am using these scare quotes because I do not recognize "race" to be a reality-based category, but only an extremely toxic temptation for both well-meaning people and power-seekers. I'm convinced that from Day One, recognition of "race" was always a bad idea and it continues to be a bad idea that needlessly tears people apart, often causing physical violence and sometimes causing death. The concept of race has the scientific validity and reliability of astrology--both concepts are gross miscategorizations, attempts to silo complex human beings (and all human beings are complex) on the basis of immutable irrelevant characteristics. The less credence we grant this concept, the better, in my view. Here's what Sam Harris had to say about his view of the best endgame for the concept of "race."

The goal has to be to get to a society where we care less and less about the superficial differences between people. It seems to me patently obvious that there can't be a matter of caring more and more about these differences. [There are] people who were actually living in a post-racial society in the sense that they weren't they did not care about the color of anyone's skin or anyone's sexual preference or gender identity. There were many people living truly ethical lives having broken out of this this truly toxic past with respect to those forms of bigotry. They're getting pushed back. They're being told by this corner of the culture “No no no! It's too soon to say that. It’s always going to be too soon to say that you're post-racial or blind with respect to these differences among people. These differences have to be ramified. They have to be acknowledged. You as a white person have no standing with which to say anything about race.” That's madness. It's absolute madness.

The goal for us ethically and intellectually has to be to arrive at a time where we don't care about these things no more than we care about hair color. Just imagine if we were coming from a time where people had been discriminated against based on hair color. That would be totally perverse.

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The Death of Romance?

What's going on with romance?

Earlier this year (2021), the Pew Research Center asked a representative sample of adults “What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying? What keeps you going and why?”

Psychology Today summarizes the responses related to romance:

In 2017, 20 percent of adults in the U.S. mentioned a spouse, romantic partner, marriage, dating, or romantic love as a source of meaning, fulfillment, or satisfaction. By 2021, only 9 percent did so. Of the 16 sources of meaning and fulfillment that participants mentioned, none showed a sharper drop over time. (The decrease was the same for the category of material well-being.) . . .

The 9 percent who found fulfillment in romantic partners in the U.S., though, was the highest percentage of all the places studied, . . . In France, Greece, and Spain, only 3 percent mentioned a spouse, romantic partner, marriage, dating, or romantic love as a source of meaning, fulfillment, or satisfaction. In Japan and Singapore, only 2 percent did. And in South Korea and Taiwan, a mere 1 percent mentioned any sort of romantic theme.

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Princeton University Posing as a Critic

Excerpt of "Letter from Princeton Open Campus Coalition to Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber":

When university administrators speak officially on controversial matters of social importance, they must be cognizant of the fact that––as faculty at the University of Chicago recognized at the height of the Vietnam War––“[t]he university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”[1] If the university itself becomes the critic––which occurs when administrators qua administrators opine on controversial issues not bearing a tangible impact on the university’s ability to function––it diminishes the openness of an academic climate that would otherwise invite dissenters to engage boldly with their peers and colleagues. This truth led the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee to recognize that institutional neutrality enables the “fullest freedom of its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action…” [2] We believe that the institutional neutrality principle, so articulated, reasonably restricts university officials’ speaking in their official capacities.

Unfortunately, recent events at our University suggest that the neutrality principle has been dangerously dishonored. In the case of Dean Jamal’s November 20th statement regarding the Rittenhouse verdict, the significant factual errors (while embarrassing) are not the cause of our protest. [3] What motivates our letter is a concern about the implications of a University administrator, speaking in her official capacity, promulgating to an entire community of students her moral evaluation of the outcome of a highly publicized and controversial trial. Her doing so in effect places SPIA’s institutional support behind a particular position on a matter which, as it engages the interests of so many, should invite a vigorous and respectful conversation amongst students and faculty alike.

Instead, students and faculty are left to read that a Dean has adopted a definitive stance on a matter about which reasonable people of good will can and do disagree. Dean Jamal writes with a “heavy heart” as she decries the “incomprehensib[ility]” of a not-guilty verdict, labels the defendant a “minor vigilante,” and situates the alleged outrageousness of the trial’s outcome within the broader context of racial inequalities pervading “nearly every strand of the American fabric.”

Each of these features––the verdict, the alleged vigilantism, and the systemic racism claim––are the subjects of genuine debate among serious legal commentators and academics. Contrary to Dean Jamal’s forceful assessment that some of these issues––viz., the systemic racism allegation––are settled “without a doubt,” these topics occupy the debates of students, faculty, and the public at large. Though no one claims that Dean Jamal’s statement directly forces dissenting students to remain silent or to affirm what they do not believe, it is no stretch to conclude that the establishment of an institutional position tends to draw restrictive parameters around a dialogue that would be otherwise unfettered.

[Emphasis added]

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