COVID and mass formation psychosis (Part I)

Now that crowds can be created, they can be used.

This is the first part of a series of articles by Alexander Adams about COVID-19 and the behaviour of crowds in the modern era.

A recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast trended on the internet before being suppressed by social-media censors. It was an interview with Robert W. Malone MD, which received tens of millions of listens within a few days. Malone (an American immunologist and virologist) spoke about the violation of ethics and legal precedent by US Federal authorities under the guise of anti-COVID measures. Malone explained that this was enabled by mass formation psychosis.

“Basically, [there was a] European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the ‘20s and ‘30s – very intelligent, highly educated population and they went barking mad. The answer is mass formation psychosis. When you have a society that has been 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 focussed by a leader or a series of events on one small point (just like hypnosis), they literally become hypnotised and can be led anywhere. And one of the aspects of that phenomenon, is that people that they identify as their leaders, the ones that typically that come in and say “You have this pain and I can solve it for you. I, and I alone, can fix this problem for you” – they will follow that person through hell. It doesn’t matter whether they lie to them or whatever. The data are irrelevant and furthermore anyone who questions that narrative is to be immediately attacked. They are the other. This is central to mass formation psychosis and this is what has happened. [sic]” (This part of the interview can be heard here, at 1:20:27.)

Mass formation psychosis was described by Sigmund Freud in 1921 in his study Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He was responding to The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), in which French sociologist Gustave le Bon observed that, “Organised crowds have always played an important part in the life of peoples, but this part has never been of such moment as at present. The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.” (the book is available to read here.) Le Bon was writing in an age of mass media, when the common man in every part of the country read regional newspapers and had access to national and international news. He was susceptible to being swayed by politicians, public figures and leading thinkers, who disseminated ideas through books, pamphlets and periodicals. Before the era of mass media – what le Bon calls “the era of crowds” – mass movements (beyond responses to the exigencies of war, famine, fire, invasion and natural disasters) were rare, local and arose from religious or tribal conflict.

Le Bon notes that three factors determine the nature of crowds: a sense of invincibility, contagion of ideas and actions, and suggestibility. These qualities are largely out of the control of an individual who has been bonded in a crowd. “He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity.”

This can only be attained through preparation that paves the way to mass action. This is done through the spread and normalisation of values, often quite contrary to the individual’s starting beliefs and even best interests. “It is not only by his acts that the individual in a crowd differs essentially from himself. Even before he has entirely lost his independence, his ideas and feelings have undergone a transformation, and the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a spendthrift, the sceptic into a believer, the honest man into a criminal, and the coward into a hero.” Le Bon goes on to note how even many of the aristocrats of France were swept up in mass action during the revolution. “The renunciation of all its privileges which the nobility voted in a moment of enthusiasm during the celebrated night of August 4, 1789, would certainly never have been consented to by any of its members taken singly.”

Now that crowds can be created, they can be used. “Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act. As the result of their present organisation their strength has become immense. The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion. The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.” It is not that the crowd commands but that it is commanded. The crowd is the hammer but the brain that directs the hammer is detached from the crowd. These masses are directed by the elite – the politician, aristocrat, demagogue, cleric, general or captain of industry – who communicate wishes through the press, schools, universities, trade unions or churches. Sometimes the elite struggle to control momentum or finely direct action, for (as le Bon observes) “Crowds do not admit doubt or uncertainty, and always go to extremes”. They are also “irritable and impulsive”. (They are subject to their national characteristics. “Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics, but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all.”)

This sounds primitive but it is the basis of behavioural science, a branch of sociology that is founded on the principles of coercion and incentive operating upon large groups of people. SAGE, which has largely directed the British government’s response to COVID-19, is composed of scientists including behavioural psychologists, health officials, managers, civil servants and other individuals who might be described as professional people controllers, in other words technocrats. One might describe armies as directed crowds, ones dedicated to the purpose of killing and prepared to suffer and die to effect the will of the crowd under the leadership of a single man.

Le Bon took an epochal view. “Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.”

Yet technocrats differ on this point, not seeing unthinking crowds as a sign of civilisational collapse but as a permanent feature of mass societies at all times. Although you will not have one that admits it publicly, technocrats see their role as directing the crowd’s destructive force for social good. By using the crowd to exert public pressure, technocrats target opposition by making it more difficult to maintain and publicly express behaviour or values the elite hold as obstructive. In the case of COVID-19, newspapers are forever reproducing data that suggests the public backs harsh measures on lockdown, mandated injections and elaborate bio-security measures – policies that the government has already lined up. Indeed, the government has already started to test, implement and budget for such measures before the opinion polls affirm public assent. The cycle is this: elite technocrats sketch out the direction of travel through their NGOs and working groups; politicians (largely uninformed, unqualified, mired in daily business, engaged in internecine power struggles) are presented with guidance from technocrats through experts; civil servants refine, test, implement, cost and tender for measures; test programmes are implemented and contracts signed; legislation is drawn up; the press is primed through briefings and “leaks” to float think-pieces about such measures; selected favourable surveys are publicised; legislation is passed by an uncritical ignorant parliament (regardless of manifesto commitments); measures are imposed upon the population. Parliamentary democracy at its finest.

Confronted by demonstrations of public support for authoritarian measures (in a mass and social media that restricts dissent), the opposing minority are marginalised and demoralised. This use of surveys is the origin of the “72%” meme. Whenever a YouGov survey (of pre-vetted, self-selecting participants) reveals support for the government measures, it comes out at 72% - a figure that seems substantial while also being unverifiable as a measure of the true population-wide outlook.

In the next part, we see how the crowd is manipulated and motivated to act against assigned targets.