Back in February, the English Libertarian 'think tank' The Academy of Ideas produced a video exploring this idea.
source: https://www.theguardian.cm/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/us-billionaires-hard-right-britain-spiked-magazine-charles-david-koch-foundation
In a rare public statement, in an essay published in 1978, Charles Koch explained his objective.
Defund the State and all social care programs under the guise of creating freedom for the Free Market. Pre-empt regulation of the Wealth Extractor class. Survival of the fittest, economic eugenics for billionaires who believe they are superior to all others. The weak and vulnerable must be allowed to fall.
Mass Psychosis.
The Academy of Ideas produced this video on the question of mass psychosis in the context of The Pandemic, and I think they were seeking to undermine the obvious need for collective action, supported by populations and their Governments, working as a co-operative to take preventative public health measures to protect everyone's health.
Anti-masking is based on the idea of freedom, not the evidence of efficacy.
The NeoLiberal Anti-Statist
The - the Kochs, Rineharts, Rees-Moggs, Murdochs, Sunaks, Trumps et al liken support for preventative public health measures, (which the English and American Government cast as 'restrictions' - a deliberate trigger) to tyranny, while carefully ignoring the obvious insanity, cruelty and adverse outcomes of the English and US Governments repetitively failing strategies on limiting the harms of the spread of the SARSCOV2 virus.
1.3 million horrific Covid deaths across USUK/EU compared to China, with a similar population and 5k Covid deaths. China stopped the spread, USUK/EU enabled more spread.
Just the same as they ignore the obvious cruelty of allowing climate change to run, maintaining poverty and warfare, and doing little to prevent pollution. None of their wealth is invested into fixing the problems - it is directed to profit from the problems. COP26 was a failure. COP has always been a failure because it is adversarial - the people who show concern and empathy in an uneven struggle with the people who wish to retain power, and continue to extract wealth from the population.
One of their tactics is citing the harms of bad policy to argue for even worse policy options - an old trick.
The Academy of ideas video opens with the following :
“All one’s neighbours are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.”
Carl Jung, Psychology and ReligionSimilar to the old accusation of Hysteria as a uniquely female disorder, rather than understandable symptoms of trauma. When it comes to the Pandemic the vast majority of people in every country are showing more genuine concern than fear, we are demonstrating a desire to care for one another.
That is what wearing a good mask is about - preventing oneself becoming a vector of transmission.
Anti-masking is selfish and stupid but it must be noted it's only happening where well funded misinformation is allowed to circulate. And it's only occurring in people who have been mislead, persuaded , groomed through their biases, fears, insecurities - the groomed are being victimised. The people who organise the grooming are the real problem.
Equating people's genuine concern to Fear is gaslighting.
The narrator continues...
"According to the psychologist Carl Jung the greatest threat to civilization lies not with the forces of nature, nor with any physical disease, but with our inability to deal with the forces of our own psyche. We are our own worst enemies or as the Latin proverb puts it “Man is wolf to man”.
They cited the following as part of their hypothesis:
"When it is understood that a flood of negative emotions, in conjunction with a weak and insecure sense of self, can trigger a descent into madness it becomes clear how a mass psychosis can occur. A population first needs to be induced into a state of intense fear or anxiety by threats real, imagined, or fabricated and once in a state of panic the door is open for either the positive or negative reaction to unfold. If a society is composed of self-reliant, resilient and inwardly strong individuals a positive reaction can take place, but if it is composed of mainly weak, insecure and helpless individuals a descent into the delusions of a mass psychosis becomes a real possibility. Great stress, in other words, can bring out the best in an individual or society at large, but it can also bring out the worst, or as the psychologist Anthony Storr writes about the potential for a mass psychosis:
Storr's book is about the need for solitude as a resource for creatives... the tone is one of individualism rather than one of creatives as part of a healthy community. That said Storr's view of humanity at large is rather negative.
"it is only if we accept the existence of a latent paranoid potential lurking in the recesses of the normal mind that we can explain the mass delusions which led to the persecution of witches and the Nazi slaughter of Jews,"
This is a deeply negative view of our species in general. And it is utterly incorrect. Behaviour, good or bad, is learned. Very little is innate. Which is why the diversity of culture exists..
Culture and Behaviour
Alice Miller wrote in "The Roots of Violence" that the culture of parenting handed down by 'authorities' can, if it is adult centered, punitive and set to meet adult needs above children's needs, afflict a population, generation after generation.
She shows in her book, and in interviews, how a culture of authoritarian parenting promoted by State and Church, and tinged with intergenerational trauma, leads to varying degrees of harmful behaviour as a normal across a community. Misogyny, Racism, Class and Caste ideologies are fed by this unhappiness.
It's not everyone.
However it is not the case that all Germans bought the lies of anti-Semitism and Nazism. There was a resistance to that. Those who resisted were persecuted, publicly. Others who disagreed remained more or less quiet, in order to survive and protect their families and communities.
Storr and many others lay the blame on the ordinary people who are ruled over, citing their 'weakness' without making the effort to understand the nuances and variations to be found in a population being ruled over in such an oppressive manner. Blaming the victim.
It is a world view held by Ruling Classes who assume they are superior to the ordinary folk, and thus entitled to Rule.
If a society is composed of self-reliant, resilient and inwardly strong individuals a positive reaction can take place, but if it is composed of mainly weak, insecure and helpless individuals a descent into the delusions of a mass psychosis becomes a real possibility. "
This text suggests that there is an innate quality of us human beings that reflects the validity of a classification of superior and inferior, that the inferior are weak and prone to stupidity, ignorance, delusion, insanity and mass hysteria.
Scapegoating?
I would say the psychosis is in fact resident in the Hierarchies of Wealth Extraction and Violence that intentionally dominate entire countries, afflicting their populations.
The Academy of Ideas rejects this, and harnesses the Jungian view of people as possessed by 'demons' to pull the cart of the Libertarian ideology that the Sovereign Individual should take precedence over collective good governance.
By claiming that existing (all) Governments are inherently oppressive and that ordinary people are generally weak, and prone to psychosis, therefore 'tyrannical' Governments must be restrained so as to protect the people (cover story).
The actual objective is to enhance the Liberty of the Free Marketeers to engage in wealth 'creation', by which they mean wealth extraction which relies upon externalised costs, a process that causes so much harm because externalising refuses to pay to prevent the harms and refuses to make good what has been harmed.
The Neo-Libertarians making the case that small weakened State government is needed in order for Civilisation to progress.
What they really mean is democratic regulation of Wealth Extraction must be pre-empted as we all face the challenges of Climate Change, Pollution, Poverty and War Fare. Obviously they cannot say that openly. That is a psychopathic stance.
Too close to the bone.
In Nuremberg the Allies brought to trial a small number of active Nazi's and did not put the German population on trial. They did impose forms of collective punishment during the war and in the aftermath.
The pursuit of Nazi's who fled Germany did not include those adopted by the US for their 'research' under Operation Paperclip.
The Allies also rejected putting Japan's Ruling Class on trial, in the same manner as they did at Nuremburg, because to do so would have exposed the realities of colonialism as a crime given that the practice followed by Japan had indeed been followed by Britain for centuries.
"Justice Radhabinod Pal argued that the exclusion of Western colonialism and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the exclusion of the fire bombings of German cities from the list of crimes and the lack of judges from the vanquished nations on the bench signified the "failure of the Tribunal to provide anything other than the opportunity for the victors to retaliate".
In this he was not alone among Indian jurists, with one prominent Calcutta barrister writing that the Tribunal was little more than "a sword in a [judge's] wig."
Justice Röling stated, "[o]f course, in Japan we were all aware of the bombings and the burnings of Tokyo and Yokohama and other big cities. It was horrible that we went there for the purpose of vindicating the laws of war, and yet saw every day how the Allies had violated them dreadfully."
Source : Wikipedia
Lesson to learn - the Ruling Class will always defend their interests, and bend every tool to that task.
#MassPsychosis - has been trending on Twitter and I saw this post, and responded to it. That response initiated this blog article.
"Twitter Thread : As #MassPsychosis trends. It seems timely to highlight the following: that most, if not all, governments suffer a recurring problem. That power & the quest for it, attracts pathological personalities. It’s not simply that power corrupts, but that it’s magnetic to the corruptible."
I think that the hash tag #masspsychosis' is in part a distraction, a scapegoating trend that could be used to scapegoat the people most afflicted by the malign behaviour of powerful institutions that influence Governments.
I think we have to be very careful with this.
I also think that there is a form of psychosis that is inherent to Ruling Class behavioural dynamics within a Hierarchy of Wealth and Violence system. Monarchy is the original knife crime syndicate, and as far from the claims of 'nobility' as any other claim ruling class entitlement makes.
I think that the effects of that psychosis is institutionalised and that the institutionalised power of those who Rule (rather than Govern healthfully) generates further psychological distress as a symptom within the population afflicted by the dominance systems of any Wealth Extraction system that is protected by violence.
Low wages, cheap labour costs, externalised environmental costs are the basis of Wealth Extraction and these impose intense chronic stress upon any population so afflicted. Inequity harms populations. Equity and Justice nurtures populations.
"The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better was published in 2009. Written by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, the book highlights the "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption". It shows that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries."
Climate Change is one of many examples of this. Many older cultures have understood this and have adopted stewardship behavioural dynamics. sustained over many thousands of years. Those cultures tended to be egalitarian, generating a diversity of organisational systems and ways of living attuned to their shared environment.
Ruling systems have always studied carefully how people either react or respond, and have devised many strategies and tactics to maintain disunity (Left vs Right, promoting ideologies of Adversarial Politics to counter Co-operative Governance) by triggering the reactive, exacerbating and heightening fears and insecurities and knowledge gaps in order to 'nudge' the behaviour of the majority in favour of the Ruling Class. Ruling systems must groom the population they dominate to accept the status quo as natural. Deference must be inculcated, 'your Majesty'.
Destitution and Poverty are essential to maintenance of a cheap labour workforce, which is the basis of Wealth Extraction from 'human resources'.
“This is a book about a radical idea. An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history. At the same time, it’s an idea that’s legitimised by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life.”
and
"“In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’47 He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’.
Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.48 And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her.49 ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”
'Do we have to be this screwed up?' written by Suki Price looks at this too, from an anthropological angle.
"Modern life is full of problems - in individuals and in society too. Increasingly we see damaged and disturbed children, mental health problems, addictions of many kinds, antisocial behavior, and crime, violence and war. So it seems sensible to ask: does life have to be this way? Was it always like this for human beings? We ve been around for maybe as much as two million years: surely we didn t evolve to live such difficult and dysfunctional lives? Do We Need To Be So Screwed-Up?! sets out to discover the answer to this question and finds plentiful evidence to show that, on the contrary, human beings evolved to be naturally egalitarian, cooperative, and peaceful. Indeed, for over 95% of our history until about 10,000 years ago - that is how we were: kind, cheerful and happy! This is a paradigm-busting re-evaluation of human nature and our potential for happiness."
"it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.
Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”
Corneilius
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