Now apply the same reasoning to the global warming hysteria, and you'll understand why westerners are willing to destroy their lives and return to a pre-industrial world
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I spent 47 minutes this morning watching a video on an interview with Mattis Desmet discussing how so many people could go so wrong on the worldwide reaction to COVID. The interview was conducted by someone named Jimmy Dore, who, looking him up, seems a bit whacky and someone who’s as blind to his own mass psychosis about a different topic — he’s a socialist and endorsed both Bernie Sanders and AOC — as the COVIDians he criticizes here, but he’s spot-on about COVID, and Mattis Desmmet is brilliant. I just ordered Desmet’s book, “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” and bought it in book, rather than digital form in a nod to modern censorship (I also highly recommend Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic, Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds — this stuff have been going on for centuries, and some people have noticed).
The interview is fascinating and answers a question that’s been plaguing me: how can so many seemingly otherwise-intelligent people abandon their reason and skepticism when it comes to matters like global warming, transgenderism, and yes, COVID? Desmet offers a more satisfying reason other than they’re all stupid. Many are, of course, but surely, I’ve thought, that can’t fully explain the phenomenon.
PJ Media’s Ben Bartee doesn’t do justice to Desmet’s thinking, in my opinion, but as I’ve just discovered, trying to summarize a 45-minute talk in a few paragraphs is an impossible job. Here’s Bartee:
Psychologist breaks down how society descended into COVID insanity
The gist of Desmet’s analysis is that before a mass formation psychosis of the kind seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, certain preconditions must be met.
The population must first be atomized and stripped of any sense of meaning. This process in the West had been underway for many centuries before COVID, perhaps accelerating in the digital age.
I have previously written about the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s 19th-century proclamation that “God is Dead” and what it means for the modern human. What he foresaw was that, with the decline of religion and the embrace of modernity, the Western population would suffer from a lack of meaning. A colleague of Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim, described the draining of meaning from life at the population level as “anomie,” meaning a breakdown of society previously predicated on a sense of shared meaning, usually found in religion.
Desmet went on to explain that, having met this first condition, the population is afflicted with what he calls “free-floating” anxiety and aggression, by which he means anxiety that does not have a clearly identifiable source. There is nothing in the environment to attach the anxiety to and therefore no obvious solution to remedy it.
That’s when demagogues with a narrative to push — who, in the context of COVID in the West, also happened to enjoy an iron-clad grip on the corporate media — seize on this anxiety to present those suffering with something, or someone, to blame. Those people then seize on the opportunity to, they hope, soothe their anxiety by neutralizing the enemy — which, in this case, was both the virus itself (which justified lockdowns and vax mandates) and anyone who resisted the lockdowns — their fellow countrymen.
The COVIDians found community — something they longed for but had not found in their meaningless jobs or on Twitter or wherever they had been looking — in banding together to defeat the unvaccinated. In this way, otherwise rational human beings …. are turned into vicious, rabid animals willing to condone the most inhumane treatment of their enemies, weaponized cynically by the social engineers as they are unleashed on the public.
A Rasmussen survey from 2022 — two full years into the pandemic when evidence contradicting every Public Health™ narrative from masking efficacy to the alleged threat to children to the vaccinated preventing transmission was widely available — found a disturbing willingness among Democrat voters to sanction extremely harsh state persecution of “anti-vaxxers”:
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine…Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.
And this reminder of what just was:
Here’s the interview
More Than 200 Bodies Recovered, 600 Still Missing In Alleged Starvation Cult
Officials have recovered more than 200 emaciated bodies from mass graves in Kenya reportedly belonging to members of a starvation cult who were encouraged to starve themselves to gain salvation.
Is that so different from what we’re doing here in the western world in the name of Mother Gaia? I think not.
