Mass Formation And Psycho-Drama

How ancient political technologies see the light of day

Jan 18, 2022

Belgian psychologist Matthias Desmet draws flak for highlighting Mass Formation.
Techniques of religion and hypnosis are used by politicians and tech giants.
Google plays dumb after Rogan podcast points spotlight at psychological operation.
Ritual is ages old, revealing gap between trivialized culture and ancient know-how.
(1,800 words, a six-minute read)

One goat is sacrificed. The scapegoat is sent into the wilderness. ClipArt ETC/USF

Jan 18, 2022

In the ancient tradition of theatre and magic, psycho-drama or psyop is not a "cover" for anything. Narrative is politics. Theatre must happen in order for the people to be governed; ritual reinforcing the right of the ruler or community.

So it is with scapegoats. Whether they are accused of being witches, parasites or the undosed does not matter. Their job is to be “othered” so that society strengthens its cohesion.

What links these two is the trance-like state of heightened suggestibility in which fears may be summoned and memories implanted — by Mass Formation Psychosis, a well-researched phenomenon which Google briefly memory-holed, pretending it didn’t exist after it gained prominence on the Joe Rogan podcast with Dr Robert Malone. [1]

It shares aspects of religion, and politicians use its techniques, as do social media corporations. Theatre has always been the way you establish legitimacy. That is why Shakespeare was central to the Tudor police state. And if the Tudors demonized their predecessors and flattered their own claim to the throne, don't all rich or powerful families and parvenus do the same?

On a superficial level, the process of retailing the narrative gives the audience an opportunity to comment from the stalls or, formally, through the chorus. On a deeper level, it manufactures consent.

"In Seleucid Babylonia... the temple, theatre and ritual were established as a middle ground between the different populations." [2]

It became the model for aeons, through the Greeks who copied the Babylonian temples, and gave their name to synagogues and their architecture to Rome.

Beyond Chaplin

It’s rare to have anything good to say about big media, but Spotify is big media and Joe Rogan’s platform has taken the concept of Mass Formation mainstream.

This is the process by which masses emerge in society, as described over centuries by names like Gustave Le Bon, Hannah Arendt and Solomon Asch. It’s neither obscure nor debunked as the press tells you.

It is shows the “new normal” is about more than Covid. Mass Formation is a path to The Great Reset, a plan for cybernetic governance, in which corporations will decide the solutions, then nudge you towards them. Think advertisers in place of politicians.

Governments and paid flunkeys deny it. They ridicule the idea that anyone wants to “take over government.” It is “implausible,” said The Guardian in Dec 2020. The BBC said there were several books of that title (Great Reset) but they got “hijacked by conspiracy theories.” Reuters Fakt Cheka debunk this or that but they never tell you what the Reset actually is. See Moneycircus, Nov 2021, The Great Reset Is Complete — A future retrospective.

After WW2, psychologists identified the "authoritarian personality" but research now focuses increasingly on group think. These are more subtle techniques of mind control than the Chaplinesque Great Dictator. It is totalitarianism without the dictator; absolutism without the moustache or crown.

This change of perspective was little known outside academia but bureaucrats were alert to it, and have hired psychologists to head off dissent, an increasingly virulent threat to insolvent governments.

Behavioural psychology is presented blandly as outcomes management — a benign short-circuit to get people where they ought to be, by influencing their decisions in the community’s best interest.

Social bankruptcy

This would be morally dubious if the ends justified the means, but they don’t. Many nation states are financially bankrupt and unable to pay pensions, welfare and health obligations. Citizens have paid their taxes and social security and could reach for the pitchforks if they come to their senses, combine and act in their own interest.

The market analyst Martin Armstrong points out that Europe is the most bankrupt — measured by its inability to finance the pledges of its welfare system or, in the case of the EU, manage its own currency.

It’s no coincidence that Europe is where the old money has the greatest incentive to retain control. Hence the appeal of the Davos dossier, or Klaus Schwab’s prescription for “agile” government in which corporations lead and regulators get out of the way.

Europe is where ruling families like that of EU President Ursula von der Leyen, Sweden’s Wallenbergs, Germany’s Quandts, along with bankers and royals, are most desperate to preserve their status and control.

That is why one can be confident this crisis is not about masks and passports, which are only a stepping stone to The Great Reset: the pandemic being “the great opportunity” that must not be missed.

Hystory made

Hysteria was for centuries laid at the feet of women, until it was buried by psychotherapy, feminism, agency and empowerment. Elaine Showalter, in “Hystories: Hysterical Epidmics and Modern Media” (1997) says hysteria is not only alive but may be even more prevalent in the the the form of “hypnotically-induced pseudomemories” and “imaginary illnesses” — or fear of plagues.

“But hysteria has not died. It has simply been relabeled for a new era. While Ebola virus and Lassa fever remain potential — psychological plagues at the end of the twentieth century are all too real. In the 1990s the United States has become the hot zone of psychodenic diseases, new and mutating forms of hysteria amplified by modern communications and fin de siècle anxiety.
Contemporary hysterical patients blame external sources — a virus, sexual molestation, chemical warfare, satanic conspiracy, alien infiltration — for psychic problems. A century after Freud many people still reject psychological explanations for symptoms; they believe psychosomatic disorders are illegitimate and search for physical evidence that firmly places cause and cure outside the self.”

Wandering psychologist

Mass Formation Psychosis came to the fore six months ago when the German lawyer Reiner Füllmich, of the Corona Investigative Committee, took evidence from the Belgian professor of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Dr Matthias Desmet. He also has a masters in statistics and found the Covid numbers did not justify the outbreak of fear in society. Turning to psychology he noted that the lockstep reaction of the population suggested some kind of hypnosis in at least 30 per cent, and that this mass was followed obediently by a further 50 per cent.

He continues to refine his analysis that lonely or isolated people, experiencing free-floating anxiety, buy into a narrative because it provides a new social bond; that even when the narrative becomes absurd and blatantly wrong people continue to buy it because they value this new solidarity.

"The more absurd the measures become, the more about 25 to 30 per cent of the population will applaud it because the corona measures become a kind of ritual through which the individual shows that the collective, its solidarity, is more important than its individual interests. Ritual is a kind of behaviour which has no pragmatic meaning and through which the individual sacrifices part of its individual interests for the sake of the group."

Since the start of the pandemic, a strong pychological effect has been obvious — not just in the population but also the copycat response of politicians and the unified voice of the press.

Where were the psychologists? All working for the government, it seemed. The wandering few included Gary Sidley, a former NHS consultant clinical psychologist, who pointed out that people have not gone mad nor had their brains rewired as vindictive germaphobes. They have been made fearful on purpose. See Moneycircus, Sep 2021, The Never Normal is Forever — UK Gov aims to Embed Control through 'New Identities'.

Behavioural insights

From the beginning, politicians but also much of the population did not care that the cure might be worse than the disease. They ignored the damage caused by the response, cancelled all other surgeries and treatments, and zeroed in on Covid alone — almost as a patient under hypnosis who cannot feel pain. There was no cost-benefit analysis; only a focus on cutting out the organ: zero covid. [3]

Lonely, lacking meaning, anxious without knowing why, a population will be come aggressive. “If a society is in this state, it becomes vulnerable to mass formation. We saw it before the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.”

The Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness was set up by the British lawmaker shortly before her death in 2016. The next year the UK government became the first in the world to publish a loneliness reduction strategy. Yet this is the government that created stratgies to manipulate public behaviour (see SPI-B, SAGE, the Nudge Unit and MINDSPACE). It would be intriguing to know if the Cox Commission was used to exploit loneliness to drive government objectives.

The co-founder of the Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the Nudge Unit, says it was originally intended to change public behaviour without coercion or legislation but later switched to fear tactics — used to terrorize the public during the pandemic.

Simon Ruda said by focusing on case numbers, officials created a feed-back loop, in which fear creates cases creates fear creates cases. [4]

Socializing losses

Entitlement is an over-used phrase. What else can one say when The Investors — being the families and foundations who control the biggest corporations, through assest managers like Vanguard, State Street and BlackRock — subvert not just the democratic, legislative process but the entire political system, to “go direct.”

Going Direct was BlackRock’s proposal in Aug 2019, since implemented, to create central bank money and channel it directly to corporations and governments, thereby financing and enabling the suspension of economic activity and lockdown of society.

Privatising profits and socializing losses, as the banks did in the financial crisis of 2008, has increased massively in terms of credit creation. In 2019 there were $4 trillion in existence. The bankers have printed $16 trillion more. Put another way, 80 per cent of all the money, ever, has been created in the past two years. That’s many times more than in any financial crisis, bank bailout or world war. See Moneycircus Jan 13 2022, Crisis Update — Bankers bribe schools with billions to take dose that the military called 'too dangerous'.

It’s not surprising that this ethos trickled down, from the banks to the people. The popular variant might be, “My achievements are my own (and everybody gets a trophy). I don’t have faults and anything that causes me offence is oppression by a system that is racist, misogynist, patriarchal or something-phobic.”

This is communitarian. The demonization of the individual, who is seen as a challenge to the blessed mass. The mass-denizen turns to the system to answer all his needs — the same system which a moment ago he blamed for conspiring against him. Communitarianism has never solved this paradox, except by scapegoat.

Its answer, historically has been to project this inner conflict upon another, to expel the scapegoat into the wilderness or to re-educate people in the camps — only other people, of course.

Moneycircus