Mass Formation Psychosis
A lot of people experience a lack of social bond and feel socially isolated
Letters from Vienna #17
An acquaintance of mine, a former teacher and pensioner, didn’t have time and had to rush home for something important. I asked her what it was. To watch the news! It was only with great difficulty that I managed to suppress an obnoxious laugh.
Her adopted son, a former Heroin junky, is, like her, also addicted to fake news. It is a common phenomenon nowadays and one could term it a veritable pandemic. It shouldn’t thus surprise when over half of Democrats support incarcerating innocent people in concentration camps, Russell Brand is accused of being “right-wing” or when the perfectly legitimate discussion of whether Covid-19 originated in a lab is deemed “racist”! The world is, as one journalist recently pointed out, barking, raving mad.
The former Heroin junky, who is now a fake news junky, is passionately convinced that he knows exactly what is going on and that everybody should get the jab; it is the final solution.
He got vaccinated thrice because it protects both himself and his family! There might be a slight (!!!) risk of injury but he is OK with that. He himself feels fine, as do thirty in his immediate circle. It is better, in his opinion, to get the jab than to get Corona! Those who don’t believe this patent nonsense are, in his eyes, out of touch with reality, conspiracy theorists, Neo-Nazis and members of crazy, weird sects who imagine themselves persecuted by an “evil” New World Order, sound much like Donald Trump and believe that the NWO is out to “chip everyone”. They are, in short, irrational, delusional, paranoid, sick anti-Semites!
Those who compare the current campaign with the Holocaust, in his opinion, only denigrate the latter. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if they denied it in its entirety. There is nothing more ridiculous, according to him, than the unvaccinated feeling “locked in”, “excluded from society” or wearing stars of David!
In his own eyes, he’s a “man of integrity” who questions everything, which is why he doesn’t do any research, refuses to watch any videos and listens to what doctors, “experts” and the government says!
He might not be a scholar and might lack a doctor’s title but he knows with bedrock certainty that Ivermectin is a horse de-wormer! He also knows that conspiracy theorists and other fascists manipulate the anxious in order to gain control over them!
He is, in short, a classic example of “Mass Formation Psychosis”, a phenomenon Mattias Desmet, a professor in clinical psychology at Ghent University (who also has a degree as a Statistician) has talked an awful lot about lately.
Mass Formation Psychosis is essentially a “group hypnosis” that emerges in societies where people are lonely, isolated, social bonds are weak or wholly lacking and in which many experience life as meaningless. Further conditions include “free floating” anxieties, “free floating” psychological discontents, and “free floating” frustration and aggression.
“Around the end of February 2021,” Mattias Desmet told Aubrey Marcus, a holistic health podcaster based in Texas, “I took the perspective of a statistician. Indeed, I started to study some numbers and some figures and some mortality rates, the infection fatality rate, the case fatality rate… And I immediately got the impression that most statistical models overestimated the dangerousness of the virus.”
Imperial College in London, for example, predicted that if Sweden didn’t go into lockdown, 80,000 people would die of Covid by the end of May 2020. The country famously didn’t do so and only 6,000 people “with Covid” actually died; although the true cause of their deaths remains uncertain.
“And the strangest thing was” so Desmet, “that the people in charge always claimed that they relied on mathematical modelling and science… But when it was proven beyond doubt that the initial models were completely wrong, the measures continued. The Corona measures continued as if nothing was wrong, as if the models were right. So, for me, it was a strong sign that there were things going on at a psychological level that were really powerful.”
Furthermore, political leaders fully ignored the collateral damage the measures would inevitably do. “In my opinion,” Desmet stated “if you take measures against the virus, the first thing that you would consider is whether the measures you take, for instance, the lockdowns, will not claim more victims than the virus.”
It took him “until August 2020 to…see that what we were dealing with was a large-scale phenomenon of mass formation…”
This, according to Desmet, is a psychological process which doesn’t involve an evil intent or a powerful cabal but is merely a psychological process that is extremely difficult to resist.
Mass formation, so Desmet, is a specific kind of “group formation”, which emerges in a society when specific conditions are met, the “most central” being “that there should be a lot of people who experience a lack of social bond; a lot of people who feel socially isolated.”
We are suffering, so Desmet, a crisis of “lack of community” while “a lot of people experience life as meaningless or senseless”.
“According to the National Survey published in the American Sociological Review, 25% of people reported that they didn’t have a single close friend, not one…” and it is, interestingly enough, the millennials and generation Z who are lonelier than any other US demographic.
“From this first condition follows the second one, which means that a lot of people experience life as meaningless or senseless. And, for instance, think about the phenomenon of the bullshit jobs…Professor Graeber in Great Britain wrote a book about it, which was titled “Bullshit Jobs”. He describes how research shows that when you ask people whether they think their job is meaningful, 50% of the people answered “not at all””.
“A Gallup poll from 2012 polled people in 142 countries. 63% of respondents admitted to being so disengaged at work that they were sleepwalking through their work day, putting time but not passion into their work…There’s a lack of meaning and purpose in what people are doing.”
“And the third condition follows actually from the first two conditions. The third condition is that in order for mass formation to emerge, there should be a lot of what psychologists call free floating anxiety and free floating psychological discontent. Meaning that if you’re anxious of a lion, you know what you’re anxious for. So, the anxiety is connected to the mental representation or the mental image of a lion. But if people feel socially isolated and if they feel that their life has no meaning, then they are confronted with a kind of anxiety that is free floating. That means that it is not connected to a mental representation. And also, we see very striking things, namely, that, for instance, in a country such as Belgium, each year, 300 million doses of antidepressants are used in a population of about 11 million. And then we are talking only about antidepressants. There are also antipsychotics and sleeping pills and anxiety medications…”
“And then the fourth condition is that there should be a lot of free floating frustration and aggression. And that actually follows from the other conditions as well. So, people should feel frustrated and aggressive without also really knowing what the cause of the frustration and aggression is. And if these four conditions are fulfilled in society, then the population is in a mental state in which something very specific can happen. Meaning that, if under these conditions a narrative, a story is distributed through the mass media, indicating an object of anxiety, and at the same time providing a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety, then the following happens or might happen…all this free-floating anxiety is attached to, connected to, the object of anxiety indicated in the narrative. And there is a huge willingness to participate in the strategy to deal with this object of anxiety because in this way, people feel that they can control their anxiety and their psychological discontent better. So, all this anxiety connects to the subject of anxiety, and there is a huge willingness to participate in the strategy and that leads up to something very specific. People suddenly feel connected again in a heroic struggle with the object of anxiety. So, a new kind of solidarity, a new kind of social bond and a new kind of meaning…emerges in society. And that’s the reason why people follow the narrative, why people buy into the narrative and why they are willing to participate in this strategy, even if it is utterly absurd. Because the reason why they follow it has nothing to do with the fact that it is correct or accurate or scientific. Not at all. The reason why they buy into the narrative is because it leads to this new social bond; this new solidarity.”
Junkies famously have no friend and the lonely ex-Heroin junky, and current news junky, is no exception to this rule. His life is thoroughly meaningless and he is nearly universally despised. Whenever he says anything he is simply ignored and it doesn’t disturb a soul when he is humiliated in public. It is the natural state of things. It should hardly surprise that he should invest himself in a false narrative and defend it so passionately and so aggressively. He has no time for evidence but merely dismisses it as “deep fake news”. Nor does he have any time or feel any inclination to question or to do any research. It is a waste of his limited intellectual activity, his limited energy and even more limited abilities. Above all: in his narcissistic, provincial, ego-centric universe he simply cannot imagine the world being in any way different to the way it is portrayed in the media. It is everyone else who is wrong and he alone who is right.
The key question is: how did this fake narrative come about and who perpetrated it? But this question will be reserved for a later essay.
Notes:
https://covidvaccinesideeffects.com/mattias-desmet-on-mass-formation-psychosis/