We need to talk about grooming. Again.

We need to talk about grooming.

Grooming is an active component, a strategic operation that runs though the core of every hierarchy of wealth, distal power and violence that has ever existed. 

Update: 2024 February 24th

Update: Paper on Cognitive Warfare 2023

"This article characterises the nature of cognitive warfare and its use of disinformation and computational propaganda and its political and military purposes in war and in conflict short of war. It discusses both defensive and offensive measures to counter cognitive warfare and, in particular, measures that comply with relevant moral principles."

Cognitive warfare has been defined in various ways.

Here are a couple of influential definitions to give the flavour of what is meant by this term: “Cognitive Warfare is a strategy that focuses on altering how a target population thinks and through that how it acts” (Backes & Swab, 2019)

“the weaponization of public opinion, by an external entity, for the purpose of (1) influencing public and governmental policy and (2) destabilizing public institutions” (Bernal et al., 2020, p. 10)

example : encouraging a cohort of voters to not vote, convincing them not voting is cool, in order to give another group an advantage ; behavioural modification driven by online and real world grooming operations informed by harvested behavioural surplus data.

example : running a decades long mis and dis-information news media campaign slandering the EU

example : encouraging a cohort of voters that their lives are at risk unless the vote for a certain candidate

example : Brexit!

example : Covid masks are Muzzles!

end of update.

I suggest reading that article before continuing.

Let's face it, the structure of the dominant Industrial Militarised Culture is a hierarchy structure of wealth, distal power and of violence, and it is inherently adversarial in that it suppresses the voices of those most harmed by it's operations in order to maintain it's status. This is what is happening all around us, all the time. The oppressed are being silenced, especially when they speak out and organise to confront and end the oppression they face.

To ensure the case for the oppressed is not heard by most ordinary citizens, grooming is deployed to divert the minds of the more comfortable 'well adjusted' citizens, to exploit key vulnerabilities such as insecurities, biases, knowledge gaps and fears in ways that can drive behaviour that the grooming entity can then exploit.

Thus negative stereotypes about Gypsies, for example, published in mainstream News papers, can lead to enough people thinking 'Gypsies are a problem' to enable Governments to seek to pass legislation criminalising the nomadic way of life of the Gypsy culture..
What is grooming?
Grooming is studying a person or a group of people, identifying their fears, biases, insecurities, blind spots, knowledge gaps and other dysfunctional behavioural patterns in order to exacerbate those, and thus drive predictable behavioural change that can be exploited for sexual, economic, religious, ideological or political advantage.
Grooming is fundamentally an act of psychological abuse in that rather than help the target resolve the issue, the issue is exacerbated - offence number one. 
Then the target is manipulated into behavioural changes that can be exploited  - offence number two.
Grooming is a double crime.
We need to be able to define such activity as a criminal offence as part of preventing grooming as an activity.
We also need to be able to define grooming in a way that helps those targeted for grooming to recover from such targeting, and to be able to address their fears, biases, insecurities, blind spots, knowledge gaps and other dysfunctional behavioural patterns with an eye to resolution of those, a healing outcome.

A letter I wrote to UK News Papers, defining grooming as an act of psychological abuse and suggesting it be made a criminal offence,  which was published in Ireland and Scotland. The letter looks at grooming in the context of the revelations of Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen. Ms. Haugen was a senior executive within Facebook, she was a product manager in the Facebook civic integrity department. 

In this video Ms. Haugen presents her evidence concerning Facebooks activities that exacerbated known conditions of users in order to generate traffic, through which they sold advertising, to a British Parliamentary Select Committee on Digital Media.  When challenged on this Facebook doubled down on the practice. This led Ms. Haugen to go public.



It is clear that Facebook/Meta is not taking independent action to confront this kind of abuse, and is continuing to generate vast revenues from such activity, and is lying to the public about it's actions and intent. Here Ms. Haugen explains how and why Facebook is lying to the public.

It gets worse.

Facebook is just one operational platform among many. Political Grooming operates online and in the real world of print and broadcast television, and is infecting legislatures.

We saw operatives from Cambridge Analytica move on to COVID misinformation activities early in 2020.

This is just one of many examples of this activity being very well funded, linked to right wing lobbying groups with access to legislators, and influencing COVID policy away from the Scientific advice and consensus.

https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/02/cambridge-analytica-psychologist-advising-global-covid-19-disinformation-network-linked-to-nigel-farage-and-conservative-party/

The former lead psychologist of Cambridge Analytica – the notorious digital analytics firm which disseminated fake news on behalf of the Brexit and Donald Trump election campaigns – is advising some of the leading pandemic disinformation platforms in Britain and is connected to COVID-19 conspiracy theory groups in the US, South Africa and elsewhere, Byline Times can reveal.
Many of these platforms and groups have direct ties to hard-right politicians in the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Patrick Fagan, a behavioural and consumer psychologist, was head of psychology at Cambridge Analytica from October 2017 to May 2018. He worked on “local and presidential political campaigns in Europe, Africa and North America”, according to his own website. 
He is currently the chief scientific officer for Capuchin Behavioural Science, which claims to “apply a range of scientific behavioural methods including psychometrics, implicit testing, eye-tracking, facial coding, EEG, and more to deliver measurable commercial results”.
Byline Times writer Karam Bales has investigated, researched and written a series of articles exploring this nexus of deliberate Covid disinformation. The evidence is damning. 
A threat to democracy, a threat to healthy Governance.

"https://blog.f-secure.com/the-psychology-of-election-hacking/

An article from Finland on election hacking.

Election hacking is perhaps the most topical example of what the combination of hostile information-technological and information-psychological activities can mean in the modern information environment. It has government officials asking whether malicious information activities targeting elections could be the new normal.

When the news about the French election hacking broke, many recognized the timing was due to French legislation. The leaks happened just moments before the legally enforceable election silence started, making it impossible for the media to report on, and for the campaign staff to correct any falsehoods and disinformation.

But last-minute election hackings and strategically timed document leaks are more than just a media game. In fact, the leaks during the election campaigns both in the U.S and in France are textbook examples of how psychological operations can be applied to serve not only warfare, but whatever we call those illegal, malicious and democracy-threatening information influence activities. 

This includes not just hacking and leaks, but how this information is used in addition to fake news and other forms of illegitimate manipulation."

From an article about election hacking, written by  Saara Jantunen, a researcher at the Finnish research Agency of the Finnish Defence Forces, entitled 'The Psychology of Election Hacking.'
This describes in brief the activities behind the Brexit Campaign, and indeed the grooming activity can be traced back to Boris Johnson's writing career in Brussels, in the mid 1980s, where he was paid £250,000 annually to write lies about the EU for the English Conservative audience.
To the present, then.
NATO, Ukraine and Russia

NATO, topically enough, is up to it's eyeballs in this kind of psychological grooming. 

It issued a report in 2020, entitled Cognitive Warfare. There are more documents available here : NATO's officials are quite brazen about this.

NATO is quite clear, as this text taken from the report, demonstrates.

"While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon".
"The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”

"Cognitive Warfare is therefore the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural and societal fields. "
In other words, none of this is new. What is new is the enhanced capability offered via social media and online microtargeting. The ability to influence individuals in private which enables a layer of ersatz secrecy. A sibling might share a home, but not a content feed. In that context civil war becomes easier to foment in the minds of targets within any given community. An advertising budget is now a utility of the battlefield.
 We can see the real world effects of this on our screens and news papers right now, today, as USUK media ramp up war speech, even as Ukrainians on all sides say nothing much is happening and that they don't want much to happen, either.

Attack people's minds through cognitive biases and ramp it up towards real world violence against political and economic hubs.
Weaponising the minds of any vulnerable part of the population. The NATO report says this:

"As defined by Clint Watts, cognitive Warfare opposes the capacities to know and to produce, it actively thwarts knowledge. 

Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic and more).3 

Cognitive Warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce or thwart knowledge. Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic and more). 

Cognitive Warfare is therefore the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural and societal fields. 

Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital."

Cognitive Warfare - Political Grooming Gangsterism -  targets the whole of a nation’s human capital - Brexit, Trump, anti-masking, anti-lockdown, anti-vax, climate denialism, online and real world misogyny, the denial of Racism as a problem within Britain's institutions - Police, Military, Government, Civil Service and NHS, in spite of ample evidence of racism causing harm in all these institutions.

Corbyn and the Sabotage

Without any shadow of doubt this is intentional psychological abuse, and it has been the a core component method of mind games and sectarian warfare within the Labour Party, waged to sabotage the Socialist membership and ensure that neither Corbyn nor any Socialists would gain high office by Labour winning a majority in Parliament. This amounts to am amoral and disgusting betrayal of the right of the British electorate to fair elections and a healthy governance system.
We really need to get on top of this, rapidly.
Why is this important in terms of democratic deliberation?
Because effective policy must be based on reliable, real world evidence, rather than belief or opinion.
And, with climate change ahead of us, the need for reliable evidence based policy on almost every area of our way of life is essential. Pollution in the air, on land, in all our waterways, environmental destruction, misogyny, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, racism and poverty are all areas that demand an evidence led response to resolve those problems, and the need is urgent.
There can be no room for error driven by belief or opinion - if we are to make errors, let it be based on the best available evidence and aware of the limitations inherent in such a position being that as new information becomes available, changes to policy can be made addressing that new situation.
Grooming as an activity is all about entrenching beliefs that deny evidence, in order to render the target exploitable. It is a direct threat to solving real world problems.
"A problem fully understood is half way towards resolution. A problem incompletely understood is insoluble."

We need to define grooming activity as an intentional act of psychological abuse, and we need to pass legislation that criminalises such behaviour, and the criminal law should impose severe penalties, financial and custodial, for such criminal activity especially so when it is aimed at a population, because it is a fundamental abuse of Human Rights.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Why are the Oligarchy at War against Health and Democracy?

The Oligarchy are at War against Healthy Democracy.

here's why, in a brief outline.

The Fossil Fuel and Mining Oligarchy knew about Climate Disruption 50 years ago. Their own Scientists confirmed it. The Shareholders decided to deny the Science. They wanted to keep drilling, producing, maintain and increase consumption in order  to amass ever more Wealth as Power.

That makes them culpable for the avoidable harms they chose not to avoid.

That culpability also makes them liable for the costs of the harms caused, and other ancillary costs associated with all of this.

They KNOW this.

They understand that if ANY Democratic Legislature upholds, enforces or passes Laws to hold them accountable that they will lose their Wealth and more importantly, they will lose the Political Power as a Ruling Class Lobby.

This they have chosen to not cede.

They are therefore waging an all out war against Democratic Accountability.

Most ordinary people do not understand this because we are still fixated on the idea of Greed for Money rather than the matter of Wealth as Power, Wealth as a Ruling Lobby that dictates how society is to be run.

This war is a war against all of us, irrespective of our political leanings.

Solidarity is the only power we can exert. This they know and that is why they spend so much energy on dividing us......

When we build a rational solidarity, their Rule is over.

I wrote this as a short explanation of Healthy Governance - if it existed at all healthy governance would regulate toxic industry and excessive wealth extraction.

It's just basic common sense.  However currently the worlds political and economic system is controlled by a toxic combination of owners of industry operating working with a wealth extraction oligarchy, who use that wealth as a political utility and as a weapon.

They understand that climate change has changed everything - the externalised costs that underpin excessive wealth extraction cannot be allowed to continue to undermine our stability as a species. 

They know this.

However they are unwilling to cede their power or change their behaviour, and they are placing the species in great danger.

The SARSCOV2 virus, and indeed Climate Disruption, is telling us that if we do not co-operate and work for each others mutual aid, we are lost.

Boris Johnson is the perfect symbol of this loss.

What's his game? 

Who are his sponsors and and what do they want?

Why the West rejected suppression of the virus.
To carry out such a policy - effective, continued suppression of community transmission of the virus, so that people can work, live, play and not spread the infectious pathogen SARSCOV2 - requires that the State supports the population's Right to Health with economic support, logistical support and local empowerment to operate the find, test, trace, quarantine and isolated treatment. 

It also requires that the State works with the population as partners, equals in the effort. Ruling over a population will not deliver the social cohesion necessary to supress the virus.
This means the Industrial, Finance and Corporate Services sector must also support the people. 
Debt relief, mortgage rest, and other measures to abolish poverty are necessary to deal with the virus, and indeed, to deal with climate change, air, land and sea pollution and other system level problems.
All of these are Democratic Socialist Strategies.
These are humane strategies, designed to avoid avoidable harm to the people.
The West's Governance systems are dominated by the NeoLiberal Free Market ideology Oligarchy.
They know that if a  policy to protect the population's Right to Health was enacted, if  humane strategies, designed to avoid avoidable harm to the people were implemented they would in all likelihood succeed.
The lived experience of a population who saw a more humane policy stance functioning well, improving all our lives, that would bring the spell of the NeoLiberal Free Market Ideology to an end.
The Free Market claim to be the best possible economic system would be seen as the falsehood it is.
Egalitarian Humanity

The Free Market Fundamentalists have been writing about the collapse of the Welfare State for decades. 
Welfare systems and Health Care systems do not collapse, they get taken down. 
A well funded,  properly resourced healthy health care system caring for a healthier population is a sustainable reality, a practical solution. 

Which is ironic, because once again, they cannot but confess by their behaviour who they really are and what they are really like and how much disdain they hold for us ordinary people - by refusing to suppress the virus in the community, they have proved that the NeoLiberal Free Market Ideology will not protect the people's right to health, and that by choice, it does not support the people in a wide range of important areas. 
This is why the Wealth Extraction Grouping dominate our legislatures, making healthy governance impossible. They fear accountability, above all else.
The thing to understand its that healthy governance tends towards prevention rather than towards punishment. There is nothing to fear in facing accountability in a healthy way, for harms caused. Loss of power is not a healthy rational fear. A sense of superiority and entitlement is not healthy nor is it a rational sense of self to internalise. Inciting hatred is not a healthy or rational way for a human to behave.
All they have to lose is their dysfunctional behaviour characteristics and behaviour patterns. Why the fear? 
Don't they know who we really are?

I wrote a blog exploring a metric for genuinely healthy governance, based on evidence, nurturing community and environment, preventing harm. 

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-metric-for-governance-uk-election-2017.html

"I think of Healthy Governance as being focused on the practical realities of administering a communities shared resources for the equal benefit of all members of that community. 

Healthy governance sets the context of governance as operating within the dynamic of a shared responsibility of duty of care for one another.  In that regards healthy governance has to be evidence led at all times. Opinion and belief are insufficient to meet the responsibility of duty of care.

Healthy governance sets the global context of governance as nurturing, caring for and stewarding of the habitat within which the community lives and from which that community draws living materials and other resources. 

In the case of States, and in relation to healthy Governance we can apply this metric of care to taxation, which is collected from all, in one way or another, by the State, and is therefore a primary community shared resource. Healthy governance will determine that that resource is deployed with wisdom and equity to nurture the whole population."

The Oligarchy refused to take the correct action because they feared that they would lose traction. 
Democratic regulation of toxic industry in order to prevent avoidable harms, which is also a rational and healthy policy stance if enacted would Wealth Extraction - which Wealth Extraction Grouping would oppose on every footing. 
When Greta Thunberg said "I do not want to believe that!..(You are evil)" she was on the cusp of the most honest expression of the political truth of our era. We all were. We still are.
Even when a human does monstrous things to another, repeatedly, aware of the harm he or she is still human, what they do is monstrous, they are not monsters. They are human beings, they are people... we all are. 
Solidarity among the people, the families and communities and language groups and faiths and cultures  has to be deeper than any other political loyalty on the menu. We must really love each other to do this. A lot more.

Billionaires funded Cambridge Analytica and Trump and Brexit.
The majority of Covid and Climate misinformation networks are funded by the Wealth Extraction Oligarchy. 
So too so much of our News Media, Magazines and Publishing Corporations, through advertising revenue, and though direct ownership, and then there are their networks of pseudo-intellectual think tanks and a range of NGOs, large and small, all driven by the Oligarchy lobbies...
They know if democratic regulation to meet climate change happens, they will lose the ability to extract wealth firstly be by being forced to pay externalised costs. Then through a reparations process, to account for the harms caused to date, their entire wealth might be reduced to less than needed to exercise such great power to such adverse effect, and they would become disempowered. 
Royalty no more. Elites not more. Just people with more than enough to get by on. But no.
They prefer war to the loss of that long held capacity, intent and ability to extract the Wealth they need by exploiting populations, deploying a significant part of that wealth as a weapon to maintain a dominant position in political establishments and legislatures, and thus protect Wealth Extraction. At a terrible costs to humanity and our shared environment.
This is not a conspiracy, it is not a theory - it is simply describing what is happening.
Brexit is about unilaterally breaking from international treaties, by grooming a population. 
For the Oligarchy, the Wealth Extractors Freedom from the 'tyranny' of sensible, evidence based regulatory policy designed to reduce harms caused by industry is their goal.
To achieve that they must break social democratic solidarity and sow layers of belief based emotionally charged divisions across the available electorates.... when ordinary people hate each other driven by fear, anger, distress, chronic stress, the Oligarchy retain their power.
To protect the Hoard, the Herd must take it on the chin, again and again and again.
Suppressing the virus requires fully resourced pro-social human centred policy, which if the population experienced it, would be another example that would undermine the obviously false Neoliberal free market claims about the 'Free Market' being the best of all possible economic systems.
So we - the ordinary folk with little material power, you and I, and everyone else we meet, day to day, we must pay the price, so that the Oligarchy don’t have to carry the cost of avoiding avoidable harm...
Climate Change is entirely a matter of avoidable harm not avoided - they knew 50 years ago fossil fuel was going to alter the climate and they did nothing. They externalised the costs. They must be held accountable for that. What they did was criminal in intent, lethal in outcome and they persist.
That must cease. That state of affairs cannot be permitted to continue.

Social belief divisions
Anti-mask, anti-suppression of the virus, Covid Hoax, Lab Virus bio-Weapon, Global Tyranny Conspiracy obsession, pro-Brexit, anti-State, Freedomeers, Woo Woo New Age, Libertarian, Racist, Misogynists, Nationalists,  - ,all emotional belief based - are all enrolled through the Oligarchy grooming operation which has found a series of psychometric keys into their emotional hooks associated with quite understandable distrust, anger, fear, knowledge gaps, beliefs, biases....
These different groups are all forming adversarial  belief position divisions within the electorate - the available population who are entitled to vote and who, if they voted together could remove the oligarchy political establishment in our legislatures and councils, and instead elect honest, evidence based men and women who would write laws to protect the people from the excesses of the Wealth Extraction Class.

They are not at war with Russia, but with us, their citizens, over Climate Change and Covid.

That's the struggle we are in.

Solidarity and evidence, and grass roots political organisation and action, and the taxation stream of democracies are the powers the grass roots can muster.
Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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Mass Psychosis Hashtag Trend - where the psychosis originates, who it afflicts, whom it harms and what steps might be taken to prevent it.

#Masspsychosis is trending on Twitter.

Back in February, the English Libertarian 'think tank' The Academy of Ideas produced a video exploring this idea.  
The Academy of Ideas is an offshoot of The Institute of Ideas, led by Claire Fox, which itself was an off shoot of Living Marxism the magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which folded in 1981. The staff of Living Marxism created Spiked Magazine, which is funded by The Adam Smith Institute, a creation of  Right Wing Billionaires the Koch brothers. Academy of Ideas is funded by a number of global Corporations notably Pfizer and Novartis, and others similarly inclined.

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. 
“Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm. Our goal is not to reallocate the burden of government; our goal is to roll back government. We should consistently work to reduce all taxes, our own and those of others.

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.
They do so by claiming that various governments existing strategies are driving an irrational tide of mass fear which is leading to an insanity that threatens 'our freedoms'. They accuse people of action driven by fear, when it is driven by concern, care and empathy.

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 Religion

Similar 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”. 
In Civilization in Transition Jung states that this proverb “is a sad yet eternal truism” and our wolf-like tendencies come most prominently into play at those times of history when mental illness becomes the norm, rather than the exception in a society, a situation which Jung termed a psychic epidemic. "

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: 
“. . .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. Vast numbers of ordinary men and women held beliefs about witches and Jews which, if they had been expressed by one or two individuals instead of by whole communities, would have been dismissed as paranoid delusions. There are extremely primitive, irrational mental forces at work in the minds of all of us which are usually overlaid and controlled by reason, but which find overt expression in the behaviour of those whom we call mentally ill, and which also manifest themselves in the behaviour of normal people when under threat or other forms of stress.”

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.
She described some of the psycho-dynamics of Nazi Germany and the cult of Hitler (and others) as outcomes of a culture of child abuse. 
At that time corporal punishment of children was the norm across Europe, and was supported by the various authorities, state, educational and religious. 
A nation that bullies most children can indeed lead to the emergence of widespread bullying among adults, layered into the social hierarchy. Hurt children can become adults who hurt others. Authoritarian parenting can also lead to leaders emerging who have deep issues, presenting as irrational hatreds rationalised, veiled by claims to be seeking freedom and justice.

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.  
The poor are blamed for their impoverishment. 
The subtext, given the date of publication, is that support for preventative public health measures such as suppressing community transmission, to better manage the Pandemic, are a form of tyranny. A mass psychosis.
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

So we see that a significant difference between Japan and Germany in WWII was that whilst the Nazi project was not an overtly Colonial project, and the prosecutions of German war leaders were for War Crimes, the Japanese project was definitively a colonial project and given that the British Empire project was still extant, active and globally powerful as an economic hierarchy of wealth extraction that was oppressing and exploiting hundreds of millions of people the focus on Japan's War as a Colonial War would have drawn attention to the British and their crimes, not least from those countries still under the thumb of Britain.

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."
-- source: https://twitter.com/OxfordDiplomat/status/1477659141388832769?s=20 
my response: 
https://twitter.com/coreluminous/status/1477711001005006849?s=20
For this piece I have expanded from the thread I wrote on twitter, to add some more detail and a few relevant references (not exhaustive...).

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.
What follows is the expanded text, working from my response to the tweet.
1. I think that the issue is Power Disparity and lack of Accountability. Distal Power is a term that describes the greater the distance between those who have power and those who are disempowered, the greater the disempowerment, and the greater the distress endured by the disempowered due to actions of the powerful. It's one thing to be stressed, it's another thing to be chronically stressed with few social material means to alleviate the stress, let alone prevent it.
2. The first power disparity we all experience is as infants relating to parents. The bio-logical default is to nurture our children in ways that allow them to become high functioning adults by meeting all their needs, in a timely fashion.
3. The degree to which parents use their power to nurture the child or to use their power to get the child to meet the parents perceived needs determines much of adult behaviour. The roots of adult behaviour are often established in the first four years of their lives.
4. Self regulation of Affective State (the ability to regulate one's emotional content) is biologically mandated to complete by 18 months after birth.  External chronic stressors  undermine the ability of many parents to provide the kind of caring relationship that establishes healthy self regulation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY7XOu0yi-E - Allan Schore on the biology of affective state self regulation. I hour long, quite detailed and superbly laid out. It is a video I return to frequently, and his other work on this is, I think, essential study for anyone concerned with these matters.
5. In any culture predicated upon Rule or Domination by Extreme Wealth Extraction from a population and their shared environment,  or any system of dominance and extraction protected by violence, then we see that warfare and poverty are defining characteristics, they are maintained as active and intentional counterparts to the extraction and concentration of wealth.

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 book 'The Spirit Level' written in 2009, examines this in great detail, looking at the evidence from countries and their economic systems and prevalence of distress.
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/the-spirit-level

"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."
6. Any human culture, where it breaks with well observed and understood biological mandates, must induce chronic stress - it cannot do otherwise. 

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.

7. Rulers  - those who dominate a population - pay close attention to the behaviour of those they dominate, in the same way those who groom vulnerable people do.

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'.
8. Thus we see clearly in the Cambridge Analytica 'scandal' that a core component of the exercise of Rule as opposed to healthy government is to be able to target insecurities within the population, heighten those insecurities,  and then use those to drive behavioural dynamics that can be exploited.

Destitution and Poverty are essential to maintenance of a cheap labour workforce, which is the basis of Wealth Extraction from 'human resources'.
9. Lack of self-reflection is not a barrier to this capability. If anything it enhances that capability due to the fact that a lack of conscience releases the actor from any sense of responsibility for harmful outcomes others are forced to endure, as long as power is retained over the population targeted.
10. Rulers cannot rest from their task to manipulate/habituate those they dominate because, in spite of all of the above, most people are decent, kind and loving and most people do the best they can do, in terms of genuine caring for family/community, in spite of the systemic barbarism of Rulers. 
Left to our own devices, most of us would veer towards egalitarian modes of behaviour, co-operative organisation, profit sharing.
11. This is good news. Our default setting as a social species is very robust. Rutger Bregman's "Human Kind" explores this in some detail looking at examples of massive trauma events and how people tend to look after each other more often than not.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/humankind/rutger-bregman/9781408898956
“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."
source : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17048084-do-we-need-to-be-so-screwed-up

I wrote two pertinent articles on this. (well, I think they are pertinent...)
a)  https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2010/10/two-poles-of-society-everything-in.html - on the emergence of hierarchically violent cultures and why the dynamic of domination rides roughshod over co-operative cultures.
b) https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-human-species-is-fine-its-culture.html - the species is not the problem, the culture is the problem. A message of hope and potential.
12. That said, chronic stress and unresolved trauma are trickle down behaviour changing dynamics of being Ruled over by  Wealth Extraction and Violence. It is clear that this is the case.
"Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment. One in four adults in the UK today has been diagnosed with a mental illness, and four million people take antidepressants every year. ‘What greater indictment of a system could there be,’ George Monbiot has asked, ‘than an epidemic of mental illness?’
The shocking extent of this ‘epidemic’ is made all the more disturbing by the knowledge that so much of it is preventable. This is due to the significant correlation between social and environmental conditions and the prevalence of mental disorders. Richard Bentall, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, and Peter Kinderman, president of the British Psychological Society, have written compellingly about this connection in recent years, drawing powerful attention to ‘the social determinants of our psychological wellbeing’. ‘The evidence is overwhelming,’ notes Kinderman, ‘it’s not just that there exist social determinants, they are overwhelmingly important.’"
source : https://www.redpepper.org.uk/a-mad-world-capitalism-and-the-rise-of-mental-illness/
A sick society or a traumatised cult enduring a traumatising cult is not the same as a 'dysfunctional species'.  Indeed the concept of a dysfunctional species is nonsense, biologically inept and a negative, adversarial ideological stance.
13. There's a series of layered problems inherent to the current Hierarchically Violent Power and Wealth system. The matter is complex, because we are diverse but it is made complicated because the urge to power prevents resolution in order to avoid relinquishing Power.
- the System itself, it's behavioural dynamics as a cult. Admitting this with some degree of empathy and a desire to correct rather than extract retributive punishment is a big ask.
- the adverse effects of chronic stressors such as destitution, poverty, warfare, marginalisation, class/caste beliefs and other dynamic features of being dominated. The need for this understanding to be integrated into education in general is clear.
- the 'need' of The System to cow populations, and to habituate or condition the majority to acceptance of The System as the 'natural state of affairs'. Herbert Spencer's misappropriation of the work of Darwin and Wallace is a case in point. Racism is another example of a falsified claim of 'natural' state of affairs and the Human Condition.
- as long as the resistors remain a minority, Power retains it's grip. 
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-the-power-of-the-1-percent/

"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.”

When resistance is well informed, and is widely supported by the population, then the power dynamics can be altered towards less malignity.

- resisters that are reactive can be manipulated. Political, Ideological and Religious Grooming all operate on this basis. 
https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/06/grooming-how-it-operates-why-it-works.html
My article, an exploration of why grooming works, how it was engineered citing Brexit as a case study, how to disarm it with awareness and a suggestion on how to prevent it being deployed across media platforms by making defining grooming as serious intentional psychological abuse and as a criminal offence.
- responsive resistors are much more difficult to handle. Structures are built to offer hope, and thwart it. We see repeated efforts to undermine emerging movements, and their leaderships and to prevent them from accessing the legislative power necessary to regulate the Wealth Extractor dynamic. Corbyn, Sanders and others knocked back, time and time again.
- until the grass roots understands this psycho-dynamic, I think we are facing a steeper uphill struggle than we would if that understanding was common across the grass roots. Trade Unions in a very short time frame, between the 1840s and the 1960s demonstrated the utility of grass roots solidarity and political organisation grounded in well understood evidence.
- Political Grooming Operations are designed in part to prevent that understanding emerging, Establishment News Media have the same function.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ourbeeb/general-strike-to-corbyn-90-years-of-bbc-establishment-bias/
A good article on how this works, using the BBC as a case study.
- Political Grooming Operations are also designed to obscure honest appraisal of problems, they are deployed to generate adversarial dynamics across the population (divide and conquer by diluting grass roots solidarity though triggering arguments and beefs) and they are also used to recruit un-witting operatives who can be exploited by the system.
14. Psychology, as a Science, and as a social health institution must confront this - Psychology must eschew its allegiance to the Establishment, align with the humanity of us humans, as an egalitarian social species.
15. Equity oriented political organisation must become trauma informed, understand the effects of unresolved trauma, chronic stress, poverty and other factors external to the individual that impact each persons living situation.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/trauma-informed-practice-toolkit-scotland/pages/3/
An example from the Scottish Government of how this might be implemented.
16. Without these concerns correctly addressed, it is very unlikely this culture will turn away from the current destructive trajectories.
17. Systemic Power without love or accountability is similar to the Abusive Parent or Partner or Sibling within a family, without love, who is causing harm, maintaining dominance. 
Institutionalised and at scale.
https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2020/07/this-is-abuse-relationship-dynamic.html
An article I wrote to suggest this model, using the English Ruling Class as a case study, in 2020.



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Corneilius

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