Whipnosis, Part 3 (of 3)

Mass psychosis is real. Its purpose: to facilitate the creation of a pseudo-reality, supplanting the actual world and drawing humanity into its fictions, to unleash mass demoralisation and compliance.

Into the Womb of the Tyrant

The Covid ruse is without doubt the most extravagant confidence trick ever perpetrated on human society. It has been astonishing to watch — how easily the politicians were able to sell their message, how relentless the media in promulgating it, how effectively all dissenting voices were suppressed, marginalised or cancelled. It has been truly astonishing — and also terrifying — coming to understand that Covid was no more than a smokescreen to cover the overnight transformation of the economies, societies and legal systems of the hitherto free world into something akin to a neo-Bolshevik totalitarianism. Only when you consider the events of the past 24 months beyond the reach of their pretext do you come to understand that we in the West have arrived at a real problem moment. 

The most critical factors were the acquiescence of the people and the connivance of the media. Our skunkish politicians would have been powerless had they not succeeded in corrupting beyond redemption what had been our Fourth Estate. But this in turn would have been impossible without the malleability of entire peoples in the face of a ‘threat’ that a ten-year-old child, left to her own devices, would have seen through in an hour of study and reflection. As, back in April 2020, the former judge of the UK Supreme Court, Lord Jonathan Sumption, said in a BBC interview: ‘The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it's not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It's usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated.’

Covid provoked such conditions, he added, and the people demanded action of some kind. Anyone who has studied history, said Sumption, will recognise in this the classic symptoms of a collective, infectious hysteria, where the need for action exceeds the appetite for reason. This, he warned, is ‘how societies become despotisms.’

At the beginning of January this year, Joe Rogan interviewed on his podcast the scientist Dr Robert Malone, the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were initially filed in 1989 — including the idea of mRNA vaccines, which in 2021 emerged as the basis for Covid vaccines proffered by Pfizer and Moderna, which Dr Malone then warned about in the strongest imaginable terms, demanding in a July 2021 interview with Del Bigtree that they be removed from the market: https://thehighwire.com/videos/mrna-vaccine-inventor-calls-for-stop-of-covid-vax/

Many lies have been told about Dr Malone, but the most controversial aspect of his Joe Rogan interview had to do not with his areas of specialisation, but a more general commentary he had offered on the conditions of hysteria which had been visited on the public in order to impose this lethal programme. Back in November 2021, he had had a conversation with the Belgian psychologist, Professor Mattias Desmet, who had been dissecting for some time the bizarre phenomenon whereby it appeared to be possible to, in effect, mesmerise entire populations in such a way as to persuade them to accept even self-destruction. 

‘Now what Matthias Desmet has shared with us — brilliant insight!’ Malone told Rogan, ‘is another one of those, “Aha! — now that part makes sense!” [moments] — which is that this comes from basically European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the ‘20s and ‘30s, you know — very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. And 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 in a sense that things don't make sense . . .  we can't understand it, and then their attention gets focussed by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotised and can be led anywhere.’

It was alleged by ‘fact checkers’ that Dr Malone’s characterisation of a ‘mass formation psychosis’ was not a scientific concept. Strictly speaking, this is true, but it is also disingenuous to the extent that it seeks to deny, in the same stroke, the existence of ‘mass formation’, a long established concept, and also — similarly —  ‘mass psychosis.’ This became, too, an interesting exposition of the machinations of ‘fact-checkers’ — essentially paid pedants seeking to highlight any minor flaw or weakness in the argument of anyone deemed to be unfriendly to the Covid agenda. 

Dr. Malone made no secret of the fact that he had gleaned his understandings of crowd psychology from Professor Desmet, who had emerged as the most compelling voice on these subjects. Malone is a non-specialist in this area, in effect a layman, and understandably extrapolated from Professor Desmet’s explications an understanding that, whatever its clinical basis, is in harmony with the interventions of both Professor Desmet and Lord Sumption. This would perhaps not be such a serious matter had it not led to the intervention of rock ‘n’ roll veteran Neil Young, who tried to have Rogan cancelled from Spotify on account of ‘misinformation’ he alleged had been peddled in the Malone interview. 

Desmet has for some time, in analysing the Covid context, been applying some very cogent reinterpretations of the work of the French philosopher, Gustave Le Bon, and the German/Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, to the matter of the condition of the public mind under saturation propaganda.  The phrase Desmet has repeatedly used is ‘mass formation’ (Le Bon's term) which he plausibly linked to hypnosis, and from there to propaganda. By the time Malone got to the Joe Rogan podcast, however, he had added the word 'psychosis' to the mix, implying some kind of mass pathology, rather than mass indoctrination. Desmet, in a subsequent interview with Gemma O'Doherty, clarified that he would never seek to extrapolate an individual pathology to a mass context, as the two are entirely different. He correctly pointed out that he had never used the term 'mass formation psychosis’ — in effect a layman's extrapolation, which works at a certain level of analogy, but is also loose and confusing and, in that sense, unhelpful. But, in fact, Professor Desmet may be mistaken, and Dr Malone actually — if purely by accident — correct. The concept of collective psychosis is a long-establised clinical definition, having been comprehensively studied and written up by the Dutch psychiatrist Dr Joost A. M. Meerloo, and greatlly elaborated in his 1956 book The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing

‘Menticide’ — the killing of the spirit — is a long-accepted term for what happens to a population under a process of manipulation in which a powerful tyrant transfers his own thoughts and words into the minds and mouths of the ‘masses.’  Dr Meerloo, who coined the word ‘menticide,’ was born in the Netherlands and remained there until the Nazi occupation forced him to flee in 1942. His focus was on the techniques used in interrogation — mental torture, brainwashing, what he called ‘verbocracy’ and the use of fear as a tool of mass submission. He focussed also on the question of loyalty and treason — the possibility that, through studied manipulation, anyone can be turned into a ‘traitor.’ This he calls ‘the rape of the mind,’ or ‘menticide.’ It might also be categorised as brainwashing, or cultivated groupthink — the process by which a psychotic ruling class imposes on the collective mind of the population a programme for the achievement of its own aspirations to total power and control. Modern psychiatry and the behavioural ‘sciences’ offer several of the key tools required for this perversion.

The process begins, invariably, with a programme of fear-mongering, which is gradually escalated to ramp up the state of delusion and derangement of the mob. For maximum effect, this is carried out in a series of waves, punctuated with quasi-normalising breaks, enabling fear-levels to be increased by building them layer-upon-layer like a lasagne, until the dish reaches boiling point. The breaks are just as important as the periods of fear-mongering. The processes of disinforming, bewildering, confusing and scapegoating are orchestrated to enflame the mob, providing it with a clear sense of an enemy. Confusion is a critical instrument, creating an atmosphere of chaos among the crowd that prevents it constructing things in a rational manner. Technology makes easy such a process of emotional ‘jamming’. Separating, isolating people, interrupting the normal interactions of the population, are key instruments also, causing the individual, even in the midst of the mob, to become isolated from others, and increasingly mistrustful of his fellows. 

In The Rape of the Mind, Meerloo describes the transformation of the free human mind into a machine by the use of cultural undercurrents and techniques of mental coercion and manipulation — ‘among the oldest crimes of mankind.’ The word ‘rape’ comes from the Latin rapere, to snatch, but is also relates to rave and raven, intimating overwhelm, enrapture, usurp, pillage, steal. ‘The danger of destruction of the spirit may be compared to the threat of total physical destruction through atomic warfare,’ he writes. ‘Indeed, the two are related and intertwined.’ Menticide can turn a man into a ‘mechanical imitator of his tormentors. “Menticide,” is a word coined by me and derived from “mens,” the mind, and “caedere,” to kill [and] “genocide,” meaning the systematic destruction of racial groups. (NOTE: Here I followed the etymology used by the United Nations to form the word.) Both words [“genocide” and “menticide”] indicate the same perverted refinement of the rack, putting it on what appears to be a more acceptable level. But [“menticide”] is a thousand times worse and a thousand times more usęful to the inquisitor.’

The first aim of the Gestapo, Meerloo outlines, was to force prisoners under torture to betray their friends and provide new victims for torture. He and his colleagues in the Resistance experimented with narcotics in the hope of hardening themselves against pain. What they gained in physical results was lost in the mental realm, as the narcotics made them more vulnerable to mental pressure. He describes the responses to torture as a form of trance: ‘Fear, and continual pressure are known to create a menticidal hypnosis. The conscious part of the personality no longer takes part in the automatic confessions. The brainwashee lives in a trance, repeating the record grooved into him by somebody else.

‘The demagogue, like the totalitarian dictator, knows well how to lay a mental spell on the people, how to create a kind of mass suggestion and mass hypnosis. There is no intrinsic difference between individual and mass hypnosis. In hypnosis — the most intensified form of suggestion — the individual becomes temporarily automatized, both physically and mentally. Such a clinical state of utter mental submission can be brought about quite easily in children and in primitive people, but it can be created in civilized adults, too.’ Crowds are easier to manipulate than individuals, because each individual tends to go with the group’s shifts and drifts. 

In these ways, he writes, the tyrant can construct what he calls a ‘Totalitaria,’ which he characterises as a kind of ‘cold war’ occupation of the mass mind. ‘Totalitaria’ is a mythical place capable of being recreated in the imaginations of the majority of humans, ‘a monolithic and absolute state in which doubt, confusion, and conflict are not permitted to be shown, for the dictator purports to solve all his subjects’ problems for them, allowing the uncivilised child in everyone to embrace a kind of liberation from responsibility and ethical frustration.’ 

The media are central to this process — in a Totalitaria it is their sole function. ‘He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses.’

TV, he writes, is central. Whereas ‘every step in personal growth needs isolation, needs inner conversation and deliberation and a reviewing with the self,’ this is hampered by television, which ‘prepares the mind more easily for collectivization and cliché thinking,’ persuading onlookers ‘to think in terms of mass values’, intruding into family life and cutting off ‘the more subtle interfamilial communication.’ Television, because it leads to mental apathy, has hypnoidal powers over human beings by virtue of closing down the necessary inner conversation. Totalitarianism, Meerloo argues, is nothing other than the dominance of technology over humanity, the mechanisation of our lives and our minds.

‘The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions,’ he claims. ‘It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one.

‘Readymade opinions can be distributed day by day through the press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian theoreticians, of good propaganda technique, and the polls [are] a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind.’

Demoralization of the target audience is yet another step in successful mind control, and numbing the senses by repeated assertion are key elements in utilising mind control techniques. ‘The big lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason.’ He examines also public opinion, the role of the human need for companionship, psychological shock,  regression (infantilisation), the manipulation of guilt feelings and the growing modern tendency towards masochism and the strange pact it engenders with tyranny. ‘The bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic societies are men and women who are attracted to this destructive way of life for inner emotional reasons unknown to themselves.’

Man, he stresses, requires to be constantly on the look-out for verification of his impressions and perceptions of the world, lest he develop delusion, and most of the causes of delusions are not purely organic: The same effect could be produced by hypnosis and mass hypnosis, which, by dislocating the person from the higher forms of alert consciousness, reduce him to the primitive stage of collective participation, creating an experience of oneness with the crowd. 

Totalitarianism is the sum of the personalities of its subjects’ minds, broken down and subjugated. It is the tapping into the childlike fears and dependencies of the individual, which make him crave protection and security over freedom. The leaders of Totalitaria employ catchwords instead of philosophies. Words like ‘communism’ and ‘democracy’ are merely instruments in the hands of the would-be tyrants, what Meerloo calls the ‘labelomania’ of ‘verbocracy.’ 

‘We can say that verbocracy turns [citizens] into what psychology calls symbol agnostics, people capable only of imitation, incapable of inquisitive sense of objectivity and perspective that leads to questioning and understanding and to the formation of individual ideas and ideals. In other words, the individual citizen becomes a parrot, repeating ready-made slogans and propaganda catchwords without understanding what they really mean, or what forces stand behind them.’ Thus, ‘a common delusion is created: people are incited to think what other people think, and thus public opinion may mushroom out into a mass prejudice.’

In such a culture, rhetoric increases in inverse proportion to sense. ‘Many speakers use verbal showing off to cover an emptiness of thought, to stir up emotions and to create admiration and adoration of what is essentially empty and valueless. Loud-mouthed phoniness threatens to become the ideal of our time.’

Our societies, he believed, are far more primitive than we like to imagine, and the more technologised they become, the more true this is. Humanity’s love affair with technology has gestated a society of ‘opinionated robots,’ who seek the irrational as a form of escape from reality. ‘Public opinion moulds our critical thoughts every day. . . We crave excitement, hair-raising stories, sensation. We search for situations that create superficial fear to cover up inner anxieties.’ 

‘The mechanization of modern life has already influenced man to become more passive and to adjust himself to ready-made conformity. No longer does man think in personal values, following more his own conscience and ethical evaluations; he thinks more and more in the values brought to him by mass media. Headlines in the morning paper give him his temporary political outlook, the radio blasts suggestions into his ears, television keeps him in continual awe and passive fixation. Consciously he may protest against these anonymous voices, but nevertheless their suggestions ooze into his system.’

These undercurrents, running wild in human society, turn everyone into a potential controller and a prospective victim. ‘If one reasons with a totalitarian who has been impregnated with official clichés,‘ Meerloo writes, ‘he will sooner or later withdraw into his fortress of collective totalitarian thinking. The mass delusion that gives him his feelings of belonging, of greatness, omnipotence, is dearer to him than his personal awareness and understanding. ‘What is perhaps most shocking about these influences is that many of them have developed not out of man's destructiveness, but out of his hope to improve his world and to make life richer and deeper. The very institutions man has created to help himself, the very tools he has invented to enhance his life, the very progress he has made toward mastery of himself and his environment — all can become weapons of destruction.’

This process of robot-construction reduces each one ‘to the mechanical precision of an insectlike state.’ The subject ‘cannot develop any warm friendships, loyalties, or allegiances because they may be too dangerous for him. Today's friend may be, after all, tomorrow's enemy. Living in an atmosphere of constant suspicion not only of strangers, but even of his family — he is afraid to express himself lest the concentration camp or prison swallow him up.’

No nation, he wrote, is immune from becoming a Totalitaria, a country in which political ideas degenerate into senseless formulations made only for propaganda purposes. ‘Totalitaria’ is to a high degree a synonym for Andrew Lobaczewski’s characterisation of the ‘pathocracy.’ It is any country in which — in Meerloo’s words —  ‘a single group, left or right, acquires absolute power and becomes omniscient and omnipotent, any country in which disagreement and differences of opinion are crimes, in which utter conformity is the price of life.

‘The citizens of Totalitaria do not really converse with one another. When they speak they whisper, first looking furtively over their shoulders for the inevitable spy. The  inner silence is in sharp contrast to the official verbal bombardment. The citizen of Totalitaria may make noise, and utter polite banalities, or they may repeat slogans one after another, but they say nothing.

‘Totalitaria makes the thinking man a criminal, for in our mythical country the citizen can be punished as much for wrong thinking as for wrongdoing. Because the watchful eyes of the secret police are everywhere, the critic of the regime is driven to conspiratorial methods if he wants to have even a safe conversation with those he wants to trust. What we used to call the “Nazi gesture” was a careful looking around before starting to talk to a friend.’ In these conditions, dissent equals criminality. From one day to the next, a citizen can become a hero or a villain, a scapegoat or a statesman, depending on strategic party needs. ‘The ordinary, law-abiding citizen of Totalitaria, far from being a hero, is potentially guilty of hundreds of crimes. He is a criminal if he is stubborn in defense of his own point of view. He is a criminal if he refuses to become confused.’

Moral inversion rules. ‘Nearly all of the mature ideals of mankind are crimes in Totalitaria. Freedom and independence, compromise and objectivity, all of these are treasonable. In Totalitaria there is a new crime, the apostatic crime, which may be described as the obstinate refusal to admit imputed guilt.’

‘In Totalitaria, there is no faith in fellow men, no “caritas,” no love, because real relationships between men do not exist, just as they do not exist between schizophrenics. There is only faith in and subjection to the feeding system, and there is in every citizen a tremendous fear of being expelled from that system, a fear of being totally lost, comparable with the schizophrenic’s feeling of rejection and fear of reality. In the midst of spiritual loneliness and isolation, there is the fear of still greater loneliness, of more painful isolation. Without protective regulations from the outside, internal hell may break loose. Strong mechanical external order must be used to cover the internal chaos and approaching breakdown.’

As with schizophrenia, he writes, a Totalitaria prevents a manoeuvrable and individual ego from emerging. ‘In schizophrenia the ego shrinks as a result of withdrawal; in Totalitaria, [it shrinks] as a result of constant merging in mass feelings. If such a shrunken ego should grow up, with its own critical attitude, its needs for verification of facts and for understanding, it would then be beaten down as being treacherous and nonconforming.’

All this, says Meerloo, leads inexorably to a collective psychosis, a delusional thinking that begins with the leaders but soon infects their subjects, unleashing all kinds of demons and leading the society towards self-destruction. Each human surrenders his individuality to the collective, subjecting himself to integration and standardisation, which in turn escalates the emptiness of the robot, fuelling the collective desire for destruction. By isolating individuals within the mass, allowing no free thinking or exchange, no external corrections of the drift of public thinking, it becomes easy to ‘hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and television.’ Through the use of fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be instilled. ‘People will begin to accept the most primitive and inappropriate acts. Outside occurrences are usually the triggers that unleash hidden hysterical and delusional complexes in people.’

Meerloo’s words, perhaps more clearly than those of any other analyst of these conditions, resonates with the agonies we have experienced over the past two years, perhaps most of all the growing sense of an imposed loneliness that seems to envelop us and spread as though a virus preying on human souls. Isolation, claims Meerloo, is the most essential implement in the totalitarian’s kit. 

‘Pavlov formulated his findings into a general rule in which the speed of learning positively correlated with quiet isolation. The totalitarians have followed this rule. They know they can condition their political victims most quickly if they are kept in isolation. In the totalitarian technique of thought control, the same isolation applied to the individual is applied also to the groups of people. This is the reason the civilian populations of the totalitarian countries are not permitted to travel freely and are kept away from mental and political contamination. It is the reason, too, for the solitary confinement cell and the prison camp.’

Fundamentally, says Meerloo, man fears his own liberty. ‘Above all, to live is to love. And many people are afraid to take the responsibility of loving, of having an emotional investment in their fellow beings. They want only to be loved and to be protected; they are afraid of being hurt and rejected. Totalitarianism is man's escape from the fearful realities of life into the virtual womb of the leader. The individual's actions are directed from this womb — from the inner sanctum. The mystic center is in control of everything; man need no longer assume responsibility for his own life. The order and logic of the prenatal world reign. There is peace and silence, the peace of utter submission. The members of the womb state do not really communicate; between them there is silence, the silence of possible betrayal, not the mature silence of reticence and reservedness’.

It is frequently observed that totalitarianism differs from tyrannies involving an individual dictator, being really a form of ‘conspiracy’ between the oppressors and the oppressed — indeed, a form of sadomasochistic conspiracy in which both participants crave that which they experience. But a further difference that reveals itself in this present situation of the world is that totalitarianism, instead of emerging from a singular nation and spreading outwards, has this time emanated from the centre, in a top-down manner seeking to conquer the whole world from above. The ‘Great Reset,’ and ‘New Normal’ are expressions of this new form of tyrannical imposition — deeply pathological programmes of control and coercion that suddenly, in early 2020, manifested throughout the hitherto Free World from a deceptively auspicious sky. The purpose has already revealed itself as totally total. It is no longer local or distant, but ubiquitous. It seeks total power over not just behaviours and actions but over thoughts themselves. 

This new form of totalitarianism has all the hallmarks of the twentieth-century model, but also several important new dimensions. We have experienced, at the hands of our own ‘democratic’ leaders, the abrogation of  ‘inviolable,’ ‘inalienable,’, ‘indefeasible,’ and ‘fundamental,’ human rights and freedoms, receiving in ‘return’ rule by decree, propaganda, the marginalisaton of opposition, the scapegoating of a demonised Untermenschen, censorship, social segregation, et cetera.

And yet, paradoxically, this new form of totalitarianism remains, in a sense, invisible. Such is the nature of the ‘training’ being administered to the populace that, for most people it does not seem to be there — the very suggestion of it appears preposterous. This new totalitarianism, having camouflaged itself in the white-coat uniform of the medic, presents itself as a benevolent and caring phenomenon. It suggests itself not merely as reality, but as benign reality. At first sight, even at second and third sight, it does not appear to be a political or ideological phenomenon. Who could question the project of ‘saving lives’? Its pathological nature, in other words, has folded itself into the phenomenon of its own claimed good intentions. It is a pseudo-reality, but more convincing than the real one. No matter how preposterously implausible its governing narrative and impositions, it is much more credible than that idea that it is not real. This totalitarianism appropriates to its purposes the coercive licence of the state, but mostly subtly, generally delegating the use of menace and implied violence to citizens themselves, who voluntarily elect to police their fellows. It has all the outward appearances of democracy, an illusion greatly assisted by the maintenance of the ‘free’ market, and the consumerist diversionism it begets. As Larry Fink, CEO of investment behemoth BlackRock lip-smackingly declared, this totalitarianism is a much better match for capitalism than democracy has ever been: ‘Markets don’t like uncertainty. Markets like actually . . . totalitarian governments, where you have an understanding of what’s out there . . . And democracies are very messy. As we know, in the United States we have opinions changing back and forth.’

In such a society is embedded the violence that is essential to its continuance. The ‘measures’ and ‘restrictions’ appear to be consensual, in the sense that they are insinuated as a response to a public demand for increased safety, but that is a trick. They are ‘justified’ by industrial lying and enforced, ultimately, by state coercion: The people’s right to protect themselves by forming police forces and armies has been turned against them, this civic authority delegated to waiters, bouncers, robocops, security personnel, who assume the right to deny citizens their most basic entitlements with the insinuation of compulsion, even violence, which remains an ever-present implication. This represents the refinement of totalitarianism into a model that acquires a degree of plausible deniability even as it becomes more powerful, pervasive — and invisible — as it stretches into every nook and crevice of the intimate lives of the citizenry. 

Of course the difference between the present totalitarianism and the twentieth century kind is a difference in method rather than a difference in principle. Lies and covert coercion — the iron fist in the velvet glove — have long been part of the early phases of totalitarian creep. Pseudo-reality — a planned parallel reality — is always the foundational layer of the pathocracy. Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false actuality. The pseudo-reality is constructed in the public mind in the way a cult constructs a version of reality to draw in its devotees.  It is also, in a way, analogous to the suspension of disbelief entered into in a cinema or theatre, in which the participant enters in on the basis of trust and agrees to go where he or she is led. This is very close to, if not synonymous with, a hypnoidal trance, being dependent on the leveraging of repose, imagination, suggestibility and emotion. The dominant emotion is usually a negative one — fear or anger. Of course this trance, like the movie or play, has a finite life; in the end, the participant must get out of his seat, blink, and walk back into the real world, with a sense of emerging from a kind of dream state. Some commentators have suggested that this is more or less what confronts us here, implying that in due course we can all simply stand up and walk away. This is a questionable theory, as we shall see. 

The purpose of the pseudo-reality is to create a path towards the utopian future that is the destination of all totalitarian projects. But there are differences of gravity and scale. Here — in this ‘play,’ this ‘movie’ — the set has supplanted reality; the movie ‘location’ is where you live, where you work, in the pub (when it’s open) and the café (when you’re allowed in), in the actual cinema or theatre.  The pseudo-reality is not the alternative world, but for all intents and purposes the ‘real’ one. You are in it almost all the time, so that, occasionally, when the ‘real’ world attempts to break though, it is like watching a snatch of a movie on a big screen in a darkened theatre through a swinging door as you cycle past at speed. 

The ultimate purpose of propaganda is to construct at the centre of reality something akin to a kaleidoscopic projector casting lies on to the vacant space in the public imagination, which expands exponentially under that influence), persuading or compelling the population to live inside its projections and agree that they amount to reality. The endlessly repeated reflections and refractions of the same untruths render the overall effect misleadingly coherent and seemingly unassailable. Here, the functions of inclined mirrors of the kaleidoscope are carried out by multiple media screens and platforms which reflect and deflect, refract and defract back the same images and thoughts, so that, without some external point of reference, it becomes impossible to perceive the total effect as other than actuality Just as the kaleidoscope can create infinite patterns of the same image, a corrupted media sector can create countless versions of the same lie. 

The pseudo-reality is constructed linguistically with the objective of convincing/recruiting a significant minority of  — generally — pathologised individuals, and sufficiently terrifying another quotient of the population that they do not question the imposed fictions. Often, too, the pseudo-reality requires a lens of expertise, requiring to be described by ‘specialists’  — a kind of priesthood — whose functions include ‘educating’ the public in the language of correct description, much as the tailors in the fairytale ‘described’ to the emperor and his courtiers the non-existent clothes they were weaving for his Excellency. For these reasons, the manipulators tend to concentrate their attentions at first on the ‘educated’ classes, which is to say heavily schooled, moderately intelligent and ‘informed’ people in the fields of politics, media, academia and the broader ‘educational’ sector. This addresses an apparent paradox of the mass formation phenomenon: that it affects the more ‘intelligent’ at least as much as the less so. In fact, it is better adapted to minds that depend largely on rote learning in a discrete area among a narrow range of disciplines. Totalitarianism also holds greater attraction for such people, because their ‘intelligence’ depends on having an existing structure to fit into. Generally, too, such people tend to be afflicted by a vanity that exaggerates their own level of intelligence, and so are easily flattered into acquiescence in a schema with the external appearance of complexity — thus requiring something like their ‘exalted cognitive abilities’ to comprehend. This syndrome is subject to convenient disincentives: Should they cling to notions suggested by objective reality rather than, for example, ‘the science,’ they render their ‘intelligence’ open to question, a risky embarkation in a nascent totalitarian context. Fearing being shunned or cast out by their peers, and thereby coming to the unfavourable notice of the Regime, they will prefer to acquiesce in the pseudo-reality. Here, then, a moderate degree of intelligence can become an impediment, causing some to construct complex fabrications to rationalise the pseudo-reality and thereby becoming its more enthusiastic adherents. In such manifold ways, many citizens hand their power up to the Regime. 

The thinly-disguised mediocrity that tends to flourish in such conditions provokes a constant insecurity which pushes the subject into a central role in purveying the false narrative, and this is where the downright nastiness arising from scapegoating and demonisation campaigns initially takes root. But, for related reasons, the ‘intelligent’ subjects of these processes are also prone to hubris — born of continuously trying to pretend that they are smarter than they are — and this tends to be the cause not just of their own undoing but of the undermining of pseudo-reality projects, including narrative-building, in which they have a vital function.

It is a hallmark of totalitarian thought processes that they generate a phenomenon that in the former ‘eastern bloc’ was termed ‘absurdistan’ — a satirical appellation for a country with absurdity as its central cultural hallmark. The only logic to such jurisdictions and their internal systems is a certain internal coherence of the ubiquitous illogic. Thus, for example, someone who dies within 14 days of receiving a vaccine is deemed to be unvaccinated, nominally because the ‘effects’ of the vaccine do not fully kick in for two weeks, but really because this is an ideal way of laundering the mortality figures, since about half of vaccine deaths occur within a few days. If this seems confusing, it can be only because of an inability to enter into the logic of the pseudo-reality — a clinging to the ‘real’ even though this has been declared morally suspect. Thus, ‘intelligent’ people tend to be quicker at creating an adequate rationalisation, this being how the technical brain tends to work. Combined with the techniques of demonisation directed at outright critics, these factors help to drive the middle-ground into the arms of the Regime, at first by causing waverers to distance themselves from outright unbelievers, and then incrementally by absorption into the herd. Thus, we can observe the configuration of the three-part compartmentalisation outlined by Mattias Desmet: 30 per cent utterly bought in; 30 per cent resistant; and 40 per cent in the middle who go along with whichever side seems to be winning. Fear of ridicule by peers is a strong force in compelling those in the middle ground to deny their own sense of what is true. 

Words, phrases, sentences, provide the building blocks of the pseudo-reality. This involves a conscious use of the language emanating from power centres as something other than a tool of communication and understanding. The purpose is, essentially, mendacious. Its objective is to deceive, but not in minor ways. It is directed at the construction of an alternative version of reality that becomes so persuasive as to obscure what is real. It constructs in words and images a kind of imaginative stage-set, before which an entirely fictional version of reality can be enacted. The more people come to accept the pseudo-reality, the closer they move to the mentality of the governing narcissist/psychopaths. This is why it is foolish for ‘normal’ people to try to ‘understand’ why their neighbours accept the pseudo-reality, imagining them to be misinformed or simply emotionally overwrought. In fact, according to Andrew Lobaczewski, in Political Ponerology, they have become functionally pathologised, which is to say that they have come to find the false reality more tolerable than the real one, because the false reality relieves them, at least temporarily, of the pathologies they had developed within normal society. This may be a relatively small sector of the population — 6 per cent in Lobaczewski’s direct experience in Poland — but its influence is infectious upon a segment of the ‘normal’ population, which will adapt to its thinking so as to rationalise the pseudo-reality sufficiently to be able to exist within it. Normal people don't think like psychopaths or schizoids but, presented with the double-binds of the constructed reality, may engage in mental gymnastics of accommodation so as to make their sense of reality approximately fit the imposed everyday understandings. 

As the process develops, the grey areas in the middle tend to disappear and a clear polarisation develops between those who believe in the pseudo-reality and those who continue to dissent. This renders real violence inevitable. Gulags, show trials, zero tolerance towards even minor dissenters, and other extreme symptoms of the twentieth-century model inevitably follow, though bearing different names, like ‘mandatory hotel quarantine,’ ‘naming and shaming,’ and ‘emergency measures.’ 

This process of creating a pseudo-reality is very similar to certain forms of religious adherence, and therefore works very well in societies in which a once ubiquitous religiosity is on the wane. It is remarkable that this process involves the constant insinuation of a moral system, overturning the normative rational process by which reality is objectively described, and inverting also the cultural context, placing pressure on the ‘normal’ people to justify their understandings of reality, while elevating the pseudo-reality to the level of fact. The ‘morality’ thereby generated, because it is pathological, feels infinitely more powerful — and therefore more ‘moral’ — than any normative moral system. The rhetoric of the totalitarian drive incorporates elements of moralism, sanctimony, pietism and authoritarianism. 

Over the long run, a process of incessant gaslighting pressurises dissenters to accept the pseudo-reality, if only for a quiet life, which works in many instances, since believing the lie is socially much more advantageous than insisting upon objective reality.  The suspected ‘denier’ will always be presumed guilty, the onus of proof residing with  him or her to demonstrate compliance and good faith; failing to do so is deemed to be the basis of self-exclusion. The rules are always blurred, so that everyone is always on the back foot, always open to a charge of non-compliance coming from an unexpected quarter. A strange dissonance enters in: Those who continue to see reality in objective terms, and to that extent to deny the pseudo-reality, are deemed to be the ignorant ones. Societies that are culturally inclined towards ‘agreeableness’ can be the most susceptible to this syndrome, placing their members under extreme pseudo-moral pressure from their pathologised neighbours/compatriots and conniving regimes, until they succumb to the lie. This process recruits ordinary people as its agents of enforcement, not just as spies and snitches, but as actual enforcers who accuse their fellows of immorality on the grounds of their non-acceptance of the pseudo-reality. 

Clearly, these conditions are not acceptable to the kind of people who in the everyday course of events in ‘normality’ might themselves be deemed ‘normal’, or to the logic of what is called ‘common sense.’ In these condition, such ‘normal’ people either eventually conform or enter a long process of dissent. But, as things develop, the society thus afflicted becomes increasingly psychopathic, as more and more people are absorbed into acceptance of the pseudo-reality. Many do so because they lack the fibre to resist, or find it congenial to be on the side of Power. Many normally sane and reasonable people will become ‘infected,’ coming more and more to resemble the tyrants they initially looked askance at. From the inside, this appears to be ‘normal,’ for there is nothing to alert the sufferer to the distortions he has entered into. He sees only the pseudo-reality, which is by now the only reality he knows. Those who remain outside are the strange ones, the ones to be regarded with suspicion and caution, and perhaps removed from society for the good of everyone, as in Justin Trudeau’s infamous question: ‘Do we tolerate these people?’ In this we can detect an answer to the perennial question as to how ‘good’ people become complicit in genocide. 

In the description of these conditions, we can more readily see how ‘the unvaccinated’ become ‘the Untermenschen,’ how face masks function as Swastika lapel pins, how ‘green passes ’ become as Aryan ID papers. Objectively senseless social restrictions and mandatory public-obedience rituals — ‘lockdowns,’ ‘social distancing,’ ‘sanitisation’ — are directed at the familiar smear of the human person as biohazard, an offence to hygiene. In this pseudo-reality, the world is united in a total war, not against an external enemy but against an internal, biological one.

The intensity of such pressures drives the ‘normal’ person, even despite his own rational understandings, towards acceptance of the lie. The total nature of their neighbours’ acquiescence, together with the effects of being constantly gaslighted, make even reasonable people acquiesce in the broader cultural conditions, growing convinced that their own intuitions are wrong or that they ought to at least appear to be of the same mind with their neighbours for the sake of social harmony.

The pseudo-reality is almost impossible to describe in sentences owing any allegiance to factuality, logic or moral order. It is constructed precisely to bypass such phenomena, albeit in a way that augments its own appearance of internal coherence for those disposed or motivated to examine it. It must by definition remain partly mysterious to those who remain within the normal human world, and indeed it may seem not merely improbable but impossible to someone who has had no previous direct experience or opportunity for observation of its like, or is not in a state of delusion. And because it is completely concocted, it cannot be checked or even coherently critiqued. It operates at the level of pure sentiment, by the most literal interpretations of words and responses, almost at the level of parody.

This process serves at once to ‘evangelise’ further compliance with the lie and to demoralise those who knowingly acquiesce in it. Thus, the ultimate objective is the insinuation of pseudo-reality as sole reality, while at the same time permitting an unspoken awareness that it is utterly false. The resulting total demoralisation is in fact the destination-state.  By all accounts, because such edifices of pseudo-reality lead to unrestrained amorality and illogic, they eventually collapse under their own weight, though not without bringing down the affected society also. It is self-evident that a utopia based on such foundations is impossible, so that all that endures for long is raw power and brute force. This means that many people will die before the turnaround occurs, and entire countries may be brought to their knees. 

The seizure of the nation’s media is a sine qua non for a Totalitaria/pathocracy. The conditions of modern society — mass media, personal computers, smartphones, tech surveillance and data processing — render most people susceptible to the insinuation of a pseudo-reality. In the nature of things, we must of necessity live in a bubble in which a fog of lies is being constantly generated and renewed by propaganda. Such a fog became almost omnipresent in the Time of Covid. 

The fog does not tell of the virus: It is the virus — in the sense that its constant presence informs everyone that the virus remains and is deadly and therefore to be feared. We have learned that people do no use the media as a source of information, but as a kind of mediator between themselves and the truth. It is like the way passengers on an airplane immediately look to the trolley-attendants when there is a sudden outbreak of turbulence. They do not ask the stewardesses if it is serious, or what might be the cause, or how long it is likely to last, but instead simply watch the stewardesses for signs of panic. If the stewardesses are continuing to serve drinks and talk to one another, most of the passengers (apart from those with bad nerves or serious hangovers) go back to reading their magazines. In the same way, people no longer read newspapers or even listen to the TV news; instead, they assess the general content and the manner of its delivery with one question uppermost in mind: Should I be worried? They do not apprehend facts or data, but simply signals.

Editors and journalist have learned that this new tendency can be manipulated. For example, they know that, to cover themselves, they can actually publish information that, of itself — in the old days — would have been sufficient to bring the whole thing to an end (for example, the truth about the PCR test or the trick of counting all deaths of people ‘with Covid’ — according to a PCR test! — as if they had died ‘of Covid’). Many people may read such a report and at first ask themselves if it might be true and, if so, why this revelation has not brought the whole thing to a halt. But then, watching the 9 o'clock news and seeing nothing about it, they assume that they must have misunderstood. Thus, a Big Lie is not so much retold as simply maintained, much as a bouquet of flowers might be maintained in a vase for a fortnight by topping up the water every day. A Big Lie is easier to 'maintain’ than a little lie, because the little lie has, by virtue of being little, not yet gotten off the ground, and by virtue of its unfamiliarity, attracts more scrutiny and scepticism. With the Big Lie, which of necessity must become ubiquitous, it is simply a matter of looking — perhaps just looking at, for example, the masked face of a neighbour — to be assured that the virus is still ‘in the news,’ and therefore still 'deadly'. 

Most people by now require to know almost nothing factual about the virus, the vaccines or the reasons behind the suspension of human life for two years. Today, they may catch a headline on the front of a newspaper, and that is the sum total of their intelligence-gathering. The text underneath might be total gibberish (it would be an interesting experiment) and no one will notice. All that is important is that their neighbours remain convinced — or at least appear to remain convinced — that there is a serious crisis and that it shows no signs of abating. That is enough for them. They cannot be bothered with facts, for what difference could knowledge make? Moreover, the lie is not passive, but incessantly proactive. It issues constant information and instructions concerning itself. In a sense, the acquiescent do not have to be ‘believers’ as long as they obey these instructions, which many of those within the middle ground may do just for a quiet life. In this miasma, then, it does not matter that the lie is a lie: it has consequences as if it were the truth, and soon its adherents begin to think not in terms of truth or falsity but of what its power over them amounts to. They do not necessarily wear a mask because they are afraid of becoming ill, but because they fear even more the disapprobation of their neighbours. And this may happen at an unconscious level, so they would deny it if confronted, and thereafter continue denying it to themselves. 

The modern ‘newspaper’ (especially online) is designed to assist this process. Many of the articles are mostly behind paywalls, which means that most readers see only the headline and the first couple of paragraphs. This is in most cases enough to ‘inform’ them, in the sense of topping up their certainty that an enormous threat to their safety lies just six feet away, and conveying some — implicit or explicit — call-to-action on the basis of this fear. We need a new word for this, since it no longer has anything to do with journalism or publishing the news, but is really an adjunct to the process of mass formation/hypnosis. Perhaps we might borrow a word from the masters of the three-card-trick, in which the process of ‘showing’ the ‘money card’ to the ‘mark’ who has already been set up by the card shark’s ‘shills’ is an intrinsic part of the deceit. ‘Money rag’ would be a better term than ‘newspaper’, though it lacks something. 

Perhaps never before has humanity witnessed such a split in human society where one side cannot see what the other sees, or thinks it sees, to the point where those who see what isn’t there demand that those who see what is there be silenced lest the blindsided have to listen to descriptions of what the cast-out insist is reality. We deal, then, with not so much a plague as a play — an ‘interesting’ play, engaging even. The problem is that we are not members of the audience, but characters on the stage, unwitting ‘actors’ in a drama scripted by others, with eclipsed motives, who are not part of the apparent action. And we cannot escape from the theatre, until we find a way of resolving the plot in our favour.