“Mass formation psychosis”
Also in Y R people so dumb, a made-up mass delusion is made up.
An unfounded theory taking root online suggests millions of people have been “hypnotized” into believing mainstream ideas about COVID-19, including steps to combat it such as testing and vaccination.
In widely shared social media posts this week, efforts to combat the disease have been dismissed with just three words: “mass formation psychosis.”
Sounds technicalish and sciencey and psychologicalesque, doesn’t it. That was Freud’s way of bullshitting too.
The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.
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CLAIM: The concept of “mass formation psychosis” explains why millions of people believe in a mainstream COVID-19 “narrative” and trust the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” Malone said. He claimed such people will not allow the “narrative” to be questioned.
Uh huh. It can’t at all be a matter of on the one hand people with long careers in public health and on the other hand internet personalities and Donald Trump. It can’t possibly have to do with more reasons to trust public health experts than random shouters and ragers and makers up of stuff.
Crediting a professor in Belgium, Malone also said in a December blog post that this “mass hypnosis” explains millions of people becoming captivated by the “dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines.”
Or, there are two choices, vaccination or no vaccination, and given what we know about vaccination and what they’ve accomplished, we have pretty good reasons to think vaccination is better than no vaccination to avoid a serious disease. There are reasons life expectancy has risen dramatically since the 19th century, and successful vaccines are one of those reasons, a major one of those reasons.
The description of “mass formation psychosis” offered by Malone resembles discredited concepts, such as “mob mentality” and “group mind,” according to John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. who studies collective behavior. The ideas suggest that “when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control; they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate,” he said in an email.
That notion has been discredited by decades of research on crowd behavior, Drury said. “No respectable psychologist agrees with these ideas now,” he said.
They make such a good story though.
Although…….I would be ok applying these concepts to certain things. Like Trump won the the 2020 election. Or trans ideology?
Steven – quite. That was my meaning.
Brian – Sure, there’s social contagion and so on, but Malone claims it’s literal hypnosis.
If nothing else, this idea of “mass formation psychosis” of the hypnotized is unnecessary even if we grant that the whole Covid & Vaccination Narrative is a hoax. If people have been told by trusted authorities that the reason they have to continue wearing masks, maintaining social distance, and avoiding their favorite restaurant is because of the unvaccinated, you don’t have to resort to oogedy-boogedy pod people theories to explain why they’re not keen on others discouraging vaccination. I wouldn’t even invoke this to explain the No Debate mantra of the TRAs. They think “having to defend their right to exist” harms the trans community.
It is far more likely that ideologies with pathological features appeal to ordinary people through plausible stories and attractive moral payoffs than that they turn people into hypnotized minions. That’s an analogy, not a diagnosis.
Are the people working in the health systems of every country on the planet under hypnosis, and merely imagining their patients and colleagues dying horribly?
There’s also the personal touch. When countless people are sharing heart-breaking stories of their own and other people’s battles with the disease, it’s unlikely that they are all imagining that they were seriously ill, or that their loved ones died as a direct result. And those of us who managed to avoid contagion until fully vaccinated, and have watched as a fully-vaccinated family member tested positive but didn’t get sick, and all the fully-vaccinated-and-boosted people who were in contact also didn’t get sick and, indeed, tested negative, only a lunatic would suggest that the vaccines didn’t work.
I keep going back to an old post from my archives about this sort of thing.
https://farcornercafe.blogspot.com/2022/01/repost-its-all-trumps-from-here-on-in.html
So THAT is what all this “mass formation” nonsense being blithered by the usual suspects on Twitter is all about. I was curious, but not so curious as to want to track it down.
Pretty sure Savage Minds had the mass formation originator guy a month or two ago… Right before she went full Bret Weinstein…
Who? Or is she a typo for he?
Julian Vigo at Savage Minds is the one. I thoroughly enjoyed her interviews until she started attributing nearly every social ill to neoliberalism and then began on Covid government responses and also minimized the deaths as largely being among the old.
Ah. I had…er…conflicts with her early on. She can be remarkably aggressive, for no apparent reason. I’m not a fan.
That’s the bunny… Got in a real snit with Helen Joyce too…
Of course hypnosis itself is hardly all it’s cracked up to be in popular fiction, or at least that’s my impression so far. Hypnosis seems to me like one of those phenomena (like the “Placebo Effect”), where, the more you read about it, the less you know about it (including if there’s even such a thing or what that even means). We’re all familiar with the science fiction version of hypnosis where you put someone into a sleepwalk-like state such that they have to obey you, even against their conscious will, maybe don’t even know what they are doing, don’t remember doing it when they “wake up” etc. Not being an expert on the matter, at least I’m pretty sure there isn’t that.
The same goes for “brainwashing” which conjures up associations to all sorts of science fiction-like methods for “reprogramming” people’s brains and turning them into obedient robots. Again, from what I have thus far gathered, I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing, which is why many cult experts prefer to talk about “coercive persuasion” and “undue influence” rather than “brainwashing”. One of the reasons cult members never think they’ve been subjected to “hypnosis” or “brainwashing” is that their experiences hardly ever correspond to the science fiction trope. No one ever started dangling a pocket watch before their eyes, telling them to “focus on the sound of my voice” etc.
There is really nothing mysterious going on, just the normal process of breaking down people’s resistance through peer pressure, shame and guilt, physical exhaustion and sleep deprivation, pressuring them (in this weakened state) to make a few small concessions and relying on cognitive dissonance and rationalization to make them justify these concessions (“only a weak-minded dolt would concede something like that because of simple psychological pressure, but I’m not a weak-minded dolt, and I did concede, so it must have been the rational thing to do”), getting them caught in the logic of their own rationalizations (“I have already justified concessions a,b,c in ways p,q,r. By that same logic it would be inconsistent or hypocritical to refuse making concessions d,e,f.”) etc.
Anyway sorry if this is derailing. It’s tangential, I know.
Not all that tangential, and interesting. Verdict: not derailing!
Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.
That’s partly because to many, many people ‘narrative’ is the same thing as ‘evidence’. I mean this in the most literal sense; I come across many people, especially on social media, who seem to sincerely believe that being able to tell a story about something – even if that story doesn’t really seem to explain the facts – is the same as providing huge great chunks of evidence of something being true.
In fact, they feel it gives them license to dismiss evidence, because to them, that evidence belongs to a different story so just isn’t valid. They’re happy to cite ‘evidence’ when it appears superficially to support their story but they’re unable or unwilling to distinguish between what is evidence and what is not.
So they get to tell their lovely story and cite any willy-nilly thing as evidence because the story is always so meandering and vague. And they also get to dismiss our evidence because they believe it belongs in another, nastier story they want nothing to do with.
Meanwhile, we are explaining what our evidence says and why it says what it says (and doesn’t say) and it’s being entirely ignored.
This is the culture war.
Yes it is.
[…] a comment by latsot on “Mass formation […]
Wow, this entire “article” was just one big exercise in Ad Hominem and rhetoric. Cognitive dissonance, much? Looks like SOMEONE must be suffering from, you know. Mass Formation Psychosis?
It’s always good to question Authority and Motives. When did that become a bad trait? Only in a compliment society filled with followers and few leaders.
To the responder of testing positive with no symptoms, asymptomatic has occurred before the shot was introduced.
As a side anecdote, ask any tradesman how effective a mask is let a lone a cloth mask. There is no common sense anymore?
Narrative may be a poisonous word but having people remove what they deem as disinformation and not allowing people to discern and research for themselves is far more dangerous to a so called free society.
Is it always good to question authority and motives? Is it good when the questioner knows absolutely nothing about the subject? Is it good when people who know nothing about viruses or vaccinations or medical history question the authority of the CDC? If so, why?
God bless Malone, but I dont buy Mass Formation Psychosis. The Germans had centuries long feuds with France. Versailles was a travesty inviting German hate and revenge. The average German did not know or chose not to hear about concentration camps. Their complicity in WWII was rational.
Nazism and the Holocaust were not aberrations or “psychosis”. They were the culmination of hardship and propaganda, and the orchestrated goals of ELITES to conquer the world and create empires.
We would be wise to eschew sensational terms and extreme psychological diagnosis to describe the ongoing, inevitable and unchanging fact of man’s inhumanity to man and the dangerous, genocidal intentions of the political and economic ELITES.
They are at it again and rational people are being convinced that authoritarianism, submissiveness and injustice are noble and intellectual options.
Lol, all of you proving Malones’ points beautifully.
Surely an educated person should be able to do better at rational critical analysis?
“Sounds technicalish and sciencey and psychologicalesque, doesn’t it. That was Freud’s way of bullshitting too.”
Trivialisation.. Of very well grounded narratives by extremly accomplished professionals. Make you the idiot.
“Ah that word narrative – be very cautious around anyone telling you something is a “narrative” when it bears no resemblance to a story. It’s a favorite of bullshitters.”
You are in solipsistic territory here. Each of use has different understandings of the difference, some none.
To me a narration is a personal account of lived experience, or an interpretation of a pattern of observed/ or generally agreed facts that provides a plausible explanation/theory of a phenomena. A story may or may not be grounded in fact but provide a useful understanding of an issue, or fantasy.
“Or, there are two choices, vaccination or no vaccination,”
Presenting a binary choice in a complex situation, is disrespectful to the others persception of the situation.
All in all a nasty disrespectful commentary that reflects badly on the authors state of mind and self awareness.
Boy, you guys sure sing in harmony. Pity about the song.