As the year began, the western world was introduced to a concept that is currently barreling its way to the forefront of many conversations, and it was delivered to us by a man named Dr. Robert Malone. The concept is so dangerous that the left began attacking Malone, and Twitter went so far as to ban him completely for spreading anti-vaccine “misinformation.”
The only issue is that Malone is, himself, famous for being the man who created vaccines as we know them today. As my colleague, Mike Miller wrote in more detail, Malone’s knowledge on vaccines led him to conclude that the vaccines meant to fight the COVID-19 virus aren’t everything the big pharmaceutical companies are cracking it up to be and even might be dangerous in ways they aren’t coming forward about.
But the good doctor is just as concerned about the divisiveness surrounding the vaccine in that you can’t even discuss these problems without being attacked in various ways, be it the powers that be or even your neighbor. An “othering” has occurred around those who have refused to take the vaccine. It’s as if a mass hypnotization has happened. In the past, you’ve likely noticed the same. I’ve referred to it as a sort of folie à deux, or a shared madness between many.
As it turns out, Malone has seen it as well and knows exactly what it is. He calls it “Mass Formation Psychosis” and it’s something we’ve seen before:
[We had] basically a European intellectual inquiry over what the heck happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s. Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. How did that happen? The answer is mass formation psychosis.
When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other, and has free-floating anxiety, and a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.
One of the aspects of [the] phenomenon is the people that they identify as their leaders — the ones typically that come in and say ‘You have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone. Then they will follow that person through hell — it doesn’t matter whether they lie to them or whatever.
Whether it’s Hitler, Stalin, or Biden, each of them had a specific issue that was going to destroy us all lest they and they alone are allowed to interfere. Biden had several things that were going to destroy us all, those being a rampaging virus that was going to kill everyone and an orange man who was going to kill everyone else. There was no length they wouldn’t go to and no depth they wouldn’t sink to in order to sell America the fear of both of these things.
Looking back, we can see how it happened and what lessons we can learn from it.
For one, the left has near-complete control of our news and information with few leaks in the dam. From ABC to MSNBC, what does and doesn’t get talked about, and how it’s talked about when it is is a carefully controlled dance. Anything that is out of step, or is dancing to a different beat, is attacked relentlessly. As an example, Media Matters is an organization specifically designed to attack right-wing narratives and organizations, be they media or political, take their narrative from that organization.
On top of that, leftists also control the prime method of communication with one another through social media. Permanent bans have been handed out to conservatives en masse, and anyone who espouses ideas they don’t like meets their end on the platform. Case in point, authoritative people like Malone have been banned as well as the President of the United States.
With so many voices gone from the conversation, a bubble has begun to form that puts a lot of pressure on the mind of anyone who doesn’t know any better.
The result is exactly what you see today. It’s a bunch of people who are panicking despite all the evidence telling them there’s not much to panic about. It’s a lot of people hating people they don’t actually have any reason to hate. It defies all logic, but that’s what happens with Mass Formation Psychosis. It is a sort of shared madness that people arrived at through a mixture of fear and narrative control.
How do we break out of it?
It begins when we as a society realize that Twitter isn’t real life. It begins when we as a society realize that our media isn’t a public service but an ideologically charged business whose primary export is narrative.
But most importantly, it begins when we see past the politics we each carry and begin to see the human underneath.
