The Madness Of Crowds

[GURPS]

MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS

So, when he says “mass” formation, you can think of this as equivalent to “crowd” formation. One can think of this as:

CROWD PSYCHOSIS

The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible “object of anxiety” and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.

As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view. Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong.

Left unabated, a society under the spell of mass formation will support a totalitarian governance structure capable of otherwise unthinkable atrocities in order to maintain compliance. A note: mass formation is different from group think. There are easy ways to fix group think by just bringing in dissenting voices and making sure you give them platforms. It isn’t so easy with mass formation. Even when the narrative falls apart, cracks in the strategy clearly aren’t solving the issue, the hypnotized crowd can’t break free of the narrative. This is what appears to be happening now with COVID-19. The solution for those in control of the narrative is to produce bigger and bigger lies to prop up the solution. Those being controlled by mass formation no longer are able to use reason to break free of the group narrative.

MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS

or... mass hypnosis- the madness of crowds

rwmalonemd.substack.com

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

― George Carlin

 

[GURPS]

 

[stgislander]

That's why I hate people.

 

[vraiblonde]

The bots are trying to censor the phrase "mass formation psychosis" and pretending it's not a thing, but anyone who has taken a college psychology class has heard of it and can cite examples of it.

Rejecting the condition of mass formation psychosis is itself a form of mass formation psychosis, which is pretty hilarious.

 

[GURPS]

The bots are trying to censor the phrase "mass formation psychosis"

FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures

The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.

But psychology experts say the concept described by Malone is not supported by evidence and is similar to theories that have long been discredited. Here’s a look at the facts.

CLAIM: The concept of “mass formation psychosis” explains why millions of people believe in a mainstream COVID-19 “narrative” and trust the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

THE FACTS: Malone highlighted the unfounded theory on a podcast hosted by comedian and commentator Joe Rogan. During the episode, Malone cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccine safety and claimed the mass psychosis has resulted in a “third of the population basically being hypnotized” into believing what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and mainstream news outlets say.

 

[vraiblonde]

But psychology experts say the concept described by Malone is not supported by evidence and is similar to theories that have long been discredited.

The Democrats get their "experts" out of an alley - give 'em a pack of cigarettes, sober 'em up, the put them on TV with their talking points.

Mass hysteria is in FACT a thing and always has been. There are any number of examples throughout history.

 

[GURPS]

Doctors and scientists say it's time for Spotify to better police its podcasts.


Rogan, who signed an estimated $100 million exclusivity deal with Spotify in 2020, recently interviewed Robert Malone, a medical doctor who claimed US citizens became "hypnotized" into wearing masks and getting COVID-19 vaccines due to a concept he called "mass formation psychosis."

Psychology experts said there is no evidence for Malone's claims, and the phrase "mass formation psychosis" does not exist in the American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology.

The open letter from the medical community states that Spotify allowing "The Joe Rogan Experience" to air Malone's claims unchecked can "damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals." Rolling Stone first reported on the letter.



We don't like what you said, so we want you removed from society ......


Well if Dr Malone is so wrong, they should have many research studies, reports and documents to counter the assertions and let people decide who is correct.

 

[GURPS]

 

[GURPS]

Mass Formation Psychosis. The Madness of Crowds. And The End Of Progressive America.



I hadn’t heard of Mass Formation Psychosis before, but I’m not sure it’s really anything novel as an explanation for mass hysteria. Malone’s subheadline on his substack references “the madness of crowds.” Ah, now that is familiar to me.

I am familiar with, and often quote, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay (1841, revision 1852)(emphasis added):

PREFACE to the Edition of 1852

IN READING THE HISTORY OF NATIONS, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of Europe its population lost their wits about the sepulchre of Jesus, and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land; another age went mad for fear of the devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands of victims to the delusion of witchcraft. At another time, the many became crazed on the subject of the philosopher’s stone, and committed follies till then unheard of in the pursuit. It was once thought a venial offence, in very many countries of Europe, to destroy an enemy by slow poison. Persons who would have revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his pottage without scruple. Ladies of gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable. Some delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for ages, flourishing as widely among civilised and polished nations as among the early barbarians with whom they originated,—that of duelling, for instance, and the belief in omens and divination of the future, which seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate them entirely from the popular mind. Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one….

[clip]

You see, I was writing about the Madness of Crowds and Tulipomania long before I heard of Mass Formation Psychosis. Political Tulipomania, to be more precise, on October 10, 2009:

I have described Obamamania, as evidenced most recently by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, as farce. I stand by that description. But farce is not the only apt term. I think the “folly” described by Charles MacKay over 150 years ago fits as well.
Where are we on the chart of Obama’s rising star at this moment in time? Hard to say. The Dutch tulip mania lasted years. And as with The Tulipomania, the worship of Obama by a large portion of the population is based upon expectations and imaginations beyond any rational measure, rising to the level of mythology.

Alas, the Obamamania bubble never fully burst, though the 2010 midterms did cause major leakage. Maybe it took until now.
So are we in the midst of another madness coming to an end when we least expect it?



Liberalism is a MENTAL Disease

 

[GURPS]

Media Bias Alert: AP and Reuters’ Fact Checks on “Mass Formation Psychosis”


AP, Reuters Focus Only On Voices Who Agree

AP quotes four psychologists and professors who reject the concept that a population could experience mass psychosis, and omits voices that support the concept: Stephen Reicher, a social psychology professor at the University of St Andrews in the U.K.; Jay Van Bavel, an assistant professor of psychology and neural science at New York University ; John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K., and Steven Jay Lynn, a psychology professor at Binghamton University in New York.

Reuters’ piece quotes some of the same psychologists — Durry, Van Bavel, and Reicher. (AP’s piece was posted one day after Reuters’.)
According to AP, Van Bavel reportedly “said he had never encountered the phrase ‘mass formation psychosis’ in his years of research, nor could he find it in any peer-reviewed literature”; Drury reportedly said the concept “resembled discredited concepts, such as ‘mob mentality’ and ‘group mind,’” ideas that suggest “when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control; they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate.”

Both AP and Reuters note that the term also does not appear in the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology.


Fact Checking Opinions

A common way fact checkers show bias is when they “fact check” things that are largely subjective in nature — things that fall in the realm of opinion or theory, rather than that which can be objectively measured or observed empirically.

Some psychologists support the idea that groups of people can fall under a mass delusion, and that mob mentality is real, but AP and Reuters didn’t include their voices. When a journalist presents all sides of an issue and allows the reader to decide for themselves, it builds trust — when they don’t, suspicion may arise.

It’s largely a matter of opinion as to whether or not people are (or can) undergo some sort of mass delusion, and the nature of psychosis itself can be fuzzy — it’s something that is hard to study empirically or objectively prove through observation. That perhaps makes this concept ill-suited for a definitive “fact check.”

AP states that it did reach out to Desmet, a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium who speaks about “mass formation psychosis”; he reportedly did not return AP’s requests for comment.

But Desmet has appeared in YouTube videos giving interviews about the idea. If AP and Reuters wanted to give the concept an honest exploration, they could have added balance to their pieces by including quotes from someone on the other side — Desmet — by pulling from his publicly available interviews. Of course, if they had done this, they would have had to reframe their piece, and not pass them off as fact checks, but rather pose a question or exploration that allows the reader to decide for themselves.

AP also could have quoted others who have written on the topic of the dark side of mass psychology, such as Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, arguably one of the world’s most famous psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.

He wrote at length about the dangers of a “psychic epidemic” in his book The Symbolic Life. A psychic epidemic, he writes, is when people get caught up in delusion, fear, anger or anxiety, and an entire population becomes mentally ill. Jung, like Desmet, argued the rise of totalitarian regimes are the result of such mass psychological phenomenon.

 

[GURPS]

 

[GURPS]

Doctors and scientists say it's time for Spotify to better police its podcasts.

'270 doctors’ called out Joe Rogan, but the authors of the letter and the vast majority of its signatories are not medical doctors



Well, I reviewed this open letter, and it turns out that only around 100 of the 270+ signatories to the letter are people with qualified medical degrees. And a large chunk of that 100 or so medical doctors are MDs employed at universities who are not in fact practitioners of medicine.


[clip]

Paradoxically, the disseminators of this petition are guilty of the very misinformation label that they’ve attached to Rogan. In fact, neither of the two reported co authors of the letter — Jessica Rivera and Ben Rein — possess medical degrees. Rivera holds a master’s degree and Rein is a PhD academic who researches psychiatry.

The letter denouncing Joe Rogan and pressuring Spotify to censor his speech has all kinds of random signatories. By my count, the letter is signed by over 50 PhD academics, around 60 college professors, 29 nurses, 10 students, 4 medical residents, and even a handful of… science podcasters.

The letter, which uses the word misinformation nine times in five paragraphs, concludes with a call for Spotify to censor Rogan as part of a policy to “moderate misinformation on the platform.”

Notably, there is no information on who or what group is behind the creation and circulation of the open letter. Rivera, the reported lead author of the letter, is associated with the far-left Rockefeller Foundation and The Atlantic, and she is a CNN contributor.

 

[vraiblonde]

They think Jill Biden is a doctor so...you know...

 

[Merlin99]

George Carlin put it better
:Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups"

 

[Kyle]

 

[GURPS]

 

[GURPS]

“Whatever the memo was, it hadn’t reached me,” the rocker said in an interview with The Real Music Observer. “Then I started to realize there was really a memo, and a guy, Mattias Desmet [professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium], talked about it. And it’s great. The theory of mass formation hypnosis. And I could see it then. Once I kind of started to look for it, I saw it everywhere.”

Clapton went on to describe his new-found awareness. “Then I remembered seeing little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising. It had been going on for a long time: that thing about ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy.’ And I thought, ‘What’s that mean?’ And bit by bit, I put a rough kind of jigsaw puzzle together. And that made me even more resolute,” Clapton said.

In New York state, there’s nothing subliminal at all. Advertisements outright instruct people to get vaxxed, and many feature masked people.

Clapton’s outspokenness on COVID issues has been met with a lot of criticism, but he says he spoke out anyway because his “career had almost gone anyway.”

“At the point where I spoke out, it had been almost been 18 months since I’d been forcibly retired,” he explained. “I joined forces with Van and I got the tip Van was standing up to the measures and I thought, ‘Why is nobody else doing this?’ so I contacted him. He said, ‘I’m just objecting, really. But it seems like we’re not even allowed to do that. And nobody else is doing it.’”

He Don’t Lie: Eric Clapton Makes Quite the Statement About Vaxxed People

pjmedia.com

 

[GURPS]

Ed Stetzer, dean at christian Wheaton College, published a critical op-ed in USA Today on Wednesday titled “Some Evangelicals Spread Falsehoods About Covid Vaccines While The World Is Desperate.” Shame on those evangelicals.

Stetzer compared disinformation to sin, begging evangelical Christians to stop “falling into disinformation,” and just take their shots already. He PROMISED that the shots are completely safe and effective — all the GOOD doctors say so — and they don’t pose any single risk of any kind to anybody. So stop being stupid. It’s just RIDICULOUS that evangelical Christians are twice as likely to rule jabs out completely as compared to other groups (30% to 15%).

In his column trying to shame christians into rolling the long-term dice on the experimental drugs and potentially permanently polluting their bodily temples, Stetzer quoted Franklin Graham, who compared people who agree to take the jab to the Good Samaritan.

It’s JUST like that, Graham said.

Hahahaha! It was a self-own. Brother Graham, by glibly re-purposing Jesus’ parable, accidentally condemned himself. Jesus’ main point in that parable was actually a sharp critique of hypocritical and out-of-touch RELIGIOUS LEADERS. Hypocritical and out-of-touch religious leaders like Franklin Graham, say.

☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Thursday, May 5, 2022 ☙ FOCUS 🦠

We need to focus; a new study finds microplastics in lungs for some reason; another DC super-spreader; Uber ends mask mandates; censorship metastasizes; an op-ed against hesitant evangelicals; more...

www.coffeeandcovid.com

You really can’t make this stuff up. Mass formation psychosis?

 

[GURPS]

The best refutation of Mattias Desmit’s popular theory about mass formation is that compliant people sensed, perhaps unconsciously, the danger posed by an out-of-control government, and rationally went along with the program to avoid becoming targets themselves.

In other words, they were even more terrified of what the government could do to them than they were scared of the virus. They were so terrified that they willingly lined up to be injected with a highly-questionable, unproven medication, with all its unknown and unknowable risks. Many of them — the guilty AND the innocent — are now paying dearly for that choice, in ways small, large, and darkly permanent.

I haven’t decided yet which of those two theories I favor, mass formation or rational self-interest. But I’m leaning toward people making rational, self-interested choices, maybe because my background is in economics and law, not psychology. If I’m right, Oster’s initial instinct was to protect her family from powerful, unaccountable authority by cooperating. Later, her instincts shifted to identifying that resisting the narrative protected her family better then complying.

Some of us recognized the real danger earlier than Oster. But the bottom line is, we need as many people as possible to wake up and recognize the real danger. So our rational self-interest requires that it be EASY for them to join Team Reality.

Reality isn’t an exclusive club. Just THINK about it, that’s all I’m asking.

☕️ C&C NEWS ☙ Wednesday, November 2, 2022 ☙ AMNESTY 🦠

More celebrity SADS; CDC's war on women; the worst flu season in 13 years, for some reason; mask appeal rejected by SCOTUS; my thoughts on the Atlantic's infamous call for grace; and more.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

[Clem72]

FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures

The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.

But psychology experts say the concept described by Malone is not supported by evidence and is similar to theories that have long been discredited. Here’s a look at the facts.

CLAIM: The concept of “mass formation psychosis” explains why millions of people believe in a mainstream COVID-19 “narrative” and trust the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

THE FACTS: Malone highlighted the unfounded theory on a podcast hosted by comedian and commentator Joe Rogan. During the episode, Malone cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccine safety and claimed the mass psychosis has resulted in a “third of the population basically being hypnotized” into believing what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and mainstream news outlets say.

I take offense at this blatant mischaracterization of the facts.

Joe Rogan is not a comedian.