By Aaron Warner
“Mass delusional psychosis” is a term that almost broke the internet last week. Why?
Several of the world’s leading experts are speaking out against global mandates and the creep toward totalitarianism. Who are the experts? Dr. Mattias Desmet, a psychologist and professor from Ghent University in Belgium; Dr. Mark Macdonald is a clinical psychiatrist born and raised in Los Angeles where he is in practice; Dr. Robert Malone, educated at UC Davis and Harvard is credited as a co-founder of the new and experimental MRNA vaccine technology currently being used to treat SARS-COV2; Dr. Peter McCullough, a practicing academic physician at Baylor University is the world’s foremost published cardiologist with a curriculum vitae that would make most doctors blush; lawyer and environmental law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from Massachussetts and son to former U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and nephew to the great deceased president John F. Kennedy; and Joe Rogan, comedian, actor and now host of the most listened-to podcast in America.
These leaders have reached their conclusions coming from widely different, authentically diverse backgrounds. Dr. Desmet arrived at his hypothesis and conclusion as one of the world’s foremost experts on the field of mass psychology research in Bulgaria. He is a clinical psychologist with a Masters Degree in Statistics, he is credited with the term “mass formation.” Politically, he seems to be a centrist of European influence.
Dr. McDonald’s psychiatric practice is in Los Angeles. He specializes in working with children. He recounts the events during an interview with Del Bigtree that led to his offering the term “mass delusional psychosis”. He is a Christian with no offered political views. However, I would say he’s conservative.
Dr. Malone has spent over forty years in the field of vaccines and virology having worked at the Jonas Salk Institute, part of the team contracted by the military to develop treatment for the Zika virus, and the chief medical officer at Alchem Laboratories, a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Florida. Politically, he appears to represent a centrist secular world view.
Dr. McCullough, originally from Buffalo, NY, holds degrees from Baylor University, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Washington University in Seattle, having published over 600 peer reviewed articles in his field and been either a member, president or founder of several medical review and/or advocacy groups. Politically, he represents a conservative Christian worldview.
Kennedy became a vaccine watchdog by dint of conscience having been persuaded by women in his neighborhood to investigate their potential harms. He has won several court cases against big pharmaceutical companies, though his passion is environmental law. Kennedy is a professor emeritus of environmental law at Pace Law School having been educated at Harvard, London School of Economics, the University of Virginia and Pace. Kennedy describes his politics as decidedly left of center having been a life-long Democrat concerned with the environment.
Lastly, Rogan, the unlikely catalyst of this group having grown his podcast to a whopping 11 million plus regular listeners, which dwarfs the listenership of mainstream media outlets such as Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC. He is openly a left-of-center atheist and has voted almost exclusively Democrat.
How are these divergent world views seeing the same stunning problem? It began with Dr. Desmet noticing his town starting a “mass formation.” Around the same time Dr. McDonald in Los Angeles was observing what he labeled “mass delusional psychosis.” Doctors Malone and McCullough during their Joe Rogan interviews combined the terms to say “mass formation psychosis. Rogan’s listeners dutifully shared the information with their friends and shortly thereafter Google was scrambling to figure out what was happening. Within a few days the doctors and Mr. Kennedy were the most sought-after guests on the internet.
So what is “mass formation psychosis”? These experts agree on four distinct features.
- Free floating anxiety
- Free floating discontent/aggression
- Prolonged isolation
- Lack of sense making/meaning
Pronounced periods of isolation, such as lockdowns, are necessary to disrupt the sense of connection and community. Isolation is used in the extreme as a punishment for prisoners. This disruption of social bonds encourages the following.
Lack of sense making/meaning happens when information fails to be consistent and coherent.
“Fifteen days to flatten the curve” turning into two years. Doctors and nurses are heroes one year, jobless the next. Riots are called protests when done by BLM setting cities on fire, and protests are called insurrections when patriots storm the capitol building. White people with no history of racism are now white supremacists whether they like it or not.
Free floating anxiety arises when fears become excessive. These may be based in real or imagined threats, such as a virus or the climate. This anxiety is destructive by hyper-stimulating the fight or flight response and short circuiting executive function, a characteristic of serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder.
Free floating discontent/aggression builds when the fear associated with the discontent find a target to aggress toward. Blacks are told to fear whites and vice versa, likewise Republicans and Democrats, the “woke” versus patriots, women against the patriarchy, the US and China. Aggression runs like a noisy engine in the background of society.
How do we know if we’re there? We can heed the expert’s warnings and simply look around. Have you ever seen so many anxious looks on people’s faces? Have you ever seen so many joyless children? Conversations have become either hurried or stultified. Younger generations seem almost out of touch with basic civility and reality, left instead to battle the urge to disconnect on a device or misconnect with socially awkward outbursts.
Media is saturated with constant messages of COVID cases and joblessness, or climate change, or racial issues, or political battles. The cycle of bad to worse builds in a crescendo of lonely, discontented, anxious and angry people looking for a savior who will offer some semblance of relief.
One day it’s Tony Fauci, the next it’s a vaccine, or reparations, or pronouns. As anxiety builds a critical mass forms around a common threat. To relieve their anxiety the hypnotized mass look to leaders, even unscrupulous and inconsistent ones, who offer a scapegoat. This is known as the Hedonic Treadmill. Who will it be? Racists, the unvaxxed, truck drivers, free thinkers?
The educated are oddly more likely to participate, which explains some of the challenge to reversing this trend. This is explained in this interview with doctors Mattias, Malone and McCullough. This same cohort was used in Jacobin France, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russa.
Can we turn this around? Yes, but with great effort and courage. The doctors advise speaking up against things as we know are nonsensical. Vermonters did this by voting down mask mandates. Sharing articles and videos of experts pushing back against the fear mongering media narratives helps. Most importantly, offering friends and loved ones community, love, and strength against the creeping mind games.
You can’t rescue everyone from the illogical delusion, which is true of about 30% of people. To those 30%, you cannot change their views no matter what information you present against their safety net. `
Some will have to sacrifice personal comfort and even stare down job-loss or cancel culture to expose the web of lies that created the delusion. In doing so, you tell your friends and neighbors, not only does the emperor have no clothes, he is most definitely out of his right mind.
Categories: Commentary
So you say that the problem is the educated professionals. Who do they listen to? Doctors. But doctors are coerced to not challenge the political narrative from health tyrants and employers. Doctors need protection from medical license review boards and from retaliation by employers.
Doctors need to be able to speak to patients privately without coercion and to other doctors without being coerced to keep quiet. Ditto as regards speech to the general public.
Speaking to patients privately will increase the public’s resistance to mandates–especially among the educated professionals. Being able to speak to other doctors openly will result in more discussion and doctors being exposed to evidence that had been hidden.
So, can the VDC somehow help groups that will fight for free speech for medical professionals–especially doctors?
I’m thinking especially of groups for health freedom that educate and lobby state legislators.
I didn’t say the problem is there, even the uneducated can be susceptible. The point is it’s not weak minded or poorly informed people who can fall prey. It can destabilize anyone.
The tactics and resulting malaises presented in this article form the basis and platform of the democrat party and their progressive allies over the last 60 years. In terms of planning and implementation, these political entities are to be congratulated on their success. Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot would blush with pride.
Phil Scott and Mark Levine have been pushing this scam since day 1.
There can be no doubt that through them they have sold this bunk pandemic to our local media who in turn have lied to us for 2 years about it to scare us into blind submission.
Communist Russia never had it so good.
Speaking of sheep… “Rogan, the unlikely catalyst of this group having grown his podcast to a whopping 11 million plus regular listeners, which dwarfs the listenership of mainstream media outlets such as Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC.” – Aaron Warner
“You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view…the truth is often what we make of it; you heard what you wanted to hear, believed what you wanted to believe… “Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?” – Obi Wan Kenobi
Cognitive dissonance is in all of us. Whatever we do, it’s best to consider all sides and then trust our rational and intuitive personal judgment of as many facts as we can consider. Of equal importance is our understanding that others, with whom we may disagree, are doing the same. And, lastly, that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. Caveat emptor. Caveat emptor.
This journalist gets it!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/sharyl-attkisson-how-propagandists-co-opted-fact-checkers-and-the-press-to-control-the-information-landscape_4221537.html
So…can you say that again young Jedi? I’m not sure I’m picking up what you’re laying down.
Good question. It’s not easily answered beyond my initial statement. But I’ll try – because you asked, and because I too am always looking for more information on which to base my personal decisions.
Your missive implies that we must choose a side… not a variety of sides…. but one of two sides: those for mandates and those against mandates. I’m simply pointing out that Mass Formation Psychosis (MFP – aka Mass Delusional Psychosis) applies to everyone. Characterizations such as ‘free floating anxiety’, ‘free floating discontent/aggression’, ‘prolonged isolation’, and the ‘lack of sensemaking/meaning’, are sufficiently vague so as to describe anyone – those ‘for’ or those ‘against’ mandates. People on both sides are subject to the psychosis, however you characterize their position.
“How do we know if we’re there? We can heed the expert’s warnings and simply look around. Have you ever seen so many anxious looks on people’s faces? Have you ever seen so many joyless children? Conversations have become either hurried or stultified. Younger generations seem almost out of touch with basic civility and reality, left instead to battle the urge to disconnect on a device or misconnect with socially awkward outbursts.”
So, who are you addressing? Joe Rogan’s ‘whopping 11 million plus regular listeners’? Or ’the listenership of mainstream media outlets such as Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC.’
“Can we turn this around?”
Turn what around? That some people believe one set of experts and not another? For example, some Vermonters voted down mask mandates. Some didn’t. Some, my town for example, abstained.
When you say: “You can’t rescue everyone from the illogical delusion, which is true of about 30% of people”, I disagree with you. You can’t ‘rescue’ anyone from ‘illogical delusion’. And neither can I. We can only consider as much information as we have about a subject, make an assessment, decide what we should do individually (if anything), and accept the consequence of our decision.
Here’s the primary difference between those suffering from MFP and you and me. The MFP crowd has stopped asking for more information. They are entrenched (hypnotized). It doesn’t matter whether they are for or against mandates. They’ve chosen their respective poison. They see what they choose to see. They hear what they choose to hear. They believe what they choose to believe. All the while basing their belief on a limited source of information – because they’ve stopped looking.
You and I, on the other hand, are looking for ever more information. We’re aware of the pitfalls in MFP. We’re aware that the only way to ‘rescue’ ourselves is to always keep an open mind, whether or not we are for or against mandates. But Joe Rogan’s ‘whopping 11 million plus regular listeners’, or ’the listenership of mainstream media outlets such as Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC’ seem to me to be, for the most part, ‘entrenched’ in their points of view. They’ve all stopped looking for information. They are all fools, subject to their ‘illogical delusion’, be they for or against anything.
Ergo, “Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?”
This, also by Sharyl Attkisson from 2015, before the era of Trump, is more relevant today.
Great share on the Sharyl vid. THX
This link is to a recent interview with Ms. Attkinson. She gets it!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/sharyl-attkisson-how-propagandists-co-opted-fact-checkers-and-the-press-to-control-the-information-landscape_4221537.html
My apology for this redundant post – I didn’t realize that I’d ‘already said that’.
Nonetheless, Ms. Attkisson gets it!
Thankyou, Aaron Warner! Delicious food for thought. “Mass Delusional Psychosis” will become a normalized state to far too many, especially arrogant barre Times liberals who peer down their noses at you, but one cannot tell because they always wear three masks even when they bath and sleep, support Antifah, despise Israel because Ilhan Omar and Tlaib told them so, always feel The Bern, and will believe when the aliens arrive via extra-dimensional spacecraft that they must be extraterrestrials because they look like it, and Pelosi told them so.
Amen.
I blame most of this on the media. We are giving people too much credit for being able to think for themselves. We’ve had a couple of generations that have been indoctrinated by the leftist education. When I attended collage, I was 7 years out of high school and had been in the working world as a young police officer. When I attended class it was with mostly 19 year old’s who sat there and never challenged the professors. I always did because I was the one paying to be there.
Students are no longer taught how to think for themselves, they are taught what to think and we are seeing the results now. There are also large segments of society that have no clue about anything because they aren’t motivated to learn. These are the useful idiots that tune into the corporate media to be told what to think.
This psychoses is all around us, just go to a grocery store. With all the facts being exposed about mask wearing being worthless, no one hears it. After 3 injections of poison they still aren’t able to go out without a mask on. I call this the Idiot Apocalypse. Very few people here in Vermont are getting the real information because they have to dig it out themselves and through forums like this. Do you think the people over at VTdigger are reporting the news or pushing their ideology and censorship. I don’t know how we can wake the braindead out of their WOKE PSYCHOSES but we better hope it happens soon. I’ve never considered myself to be an elitist but I have never witnessed this amount of ignorance from all areas of our state and government before. It is hard to soar with eagles when you are lied to and governed by agenda driven turkeys. There should be an avenue for class action lawsuits against the media and government for (as they call it) misinformation.
This is a great commentary – thank you Aaron Warner for knitting together the varying strands of mass formation psychosis/ the message from Orwell’s 1984. It’s so difficult to communiicate with friends who get their news only from “fake news” and you’re so right about the amount of (willful) ignorance but we must keep trying. There’s a great article in today’s Tablet on-line magazine that offers some enlightenment about the “Mitwits” who inhabit much of the midlevel functionary class in so many institutions. (“Mitwits” are a level abut nitwits). Enjoy!