Thinking Like A Mob
"Before there was MAGA, there was MGGA."
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
—Gustav Le Bon
According to 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. “Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious,” he wrote, “that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
When a mass psychosis occurs, Jung observed, the individuals who make up the infected society “become morally and spiritually inferior;” they “sink unconsciously to an inferior…intellectual level.” They become “more unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable,” and worst of all, “crimes the individual alone could never stand are freely committed by the group.”
Pizzagate Conspiracy
In March 2016, the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, was hacked in a spearphishing attack. WikiLeaks published the emails, which were then claimed to contain coded messages that connected several high-ranking Democratic Party officials with human trafficking and a child sex ring. It was like playing the White Album backwards and hearing “Paul is dead.” On October 30, 2016, a Twitter account posting white supremacist material claiming to be written by a Jewish New York lawyer said that the New York City Police Department had discovered a pedophilia ring linked to members of the Democratic Party while searching through Anthony Weiner's emails. You can’t make this stuff up. Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., was said to be a meeting ground for Satanic ritual abuse.
The story was then picked up by fake news websites, starting with Your News Wire, which cited a 4chan post from early 2016. That article was subsequently spread by pro-Trump websites, including SubjectPolitics.com, which added the claim that the NYPD had raided Hillary Clinton. By this point Pizzagate had gone viral, never to return to earth. Later, it would morph into QAnon and lead to the storming of the US Capitol and the deaths of four Capitol Police officers.
As American as Pizza Pie
Our reactive, instinctual, voracious, and cruel wolf side emerges most often in times of societal stress. The Tulsa Race Massacre (1921). The Red Terror (1966). The Kielce Pogrom (1946). The McMartin Pre-school (1983).
Tulsa came at a time of a resurgence of the KKK and when Black veterans were returning from WWI and asserting new-found claims to equality. A small incident of a black teen entering a white-only elevator ballooned into an 18-hour race riot that killed up to 300 people and left 8,000 homeless. Mass hysteria infected thousands of white citizens who looted and burned black homes and businesses over an area of 35 city blocks. Firefighters who arrived to help put out fires testified that rioters had threatened them with guns and forced them to leave.
The Red Terror ignited when Ms. Bian Zhongyun, the deputy principal of the Beijing Normal University Female Middle School, died after enduring hours of humiliating treatment and brutal beatings by her students. According to the People’s Daily, the main goal of the students was to “Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits,” which not only included the “Five Black Categories” (landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists), but also “capitalist-roaders in the Party” and “reactionary academics.” By August 1966, 333 had been killed at Beijing middle schools, 114,000 homes were invaded and ransacked, and foreign currency, gold, and other valuables worth 44.8 million dollars were stolen.
The Red Guards burned 2.3 million books and 3.3 million paintings, art objects, and pieces of furniture. An estimated 4,922 of the 6,843 officially designated “places of cultural or historical interest” in Beijing were destroyed. With the help of the city’s public security officers, the Red Guards expelled 77,000 people (1.7 percent of the population of Beijing) from their urban homes to the remote countryside. The mass killing peaked the last week of August when an average of more than 200 people perished every day.
The Kielce Pogrom began when a nine-year-old non-Jewish boy left his home in Kielce without informing his parents, who became distraught. When he returned he told his parents and the police that he had been kidnapped and hidden in the basement of the local Jewish Committee building. The story was faked. The building didn’t even have a basement. By day's end, civilians, soldiers and police had killed 42 Jews and injured 40 others. The social context was the collective guilt and trauma of non-Jewish poles under Naziism and the antisemitism of the mid-20th century.
In 1983, Judy Johnson, mother of one of Virginia McMartin's Pre-School’s students, began circulating letters to parents and reported to the police that her son had been sodomized at the school. She accused schoolteachers of oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of "taking the child's temperature.” Several hundred children were then interviewed by a Los Angeles-based abuse therapy clinic. The interviewing techniques were coercive and directive in a way that forced the children to follow a rigid script and invited them to pretend or speculate. By the spring of 1984, it was claimed that 360 children had been sexually abused. In addition, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken through underground tunnels. One child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of his abusers. There were claims of orgies at car washes and airports, and of children being flushed down toilets to secret rooms where they would be abused, then cleaned up and presented back to their parents. The case lasted seven years and cost the government $15 million. Ray Buckey was jailed for five years without ever being convicted of a crime. Nine of 11 jurors said they believed the children had been molested but the evidence did not show which teachers committed the abuse beyond a reasonable doubt.
In The Devil in The Nursery, Margaret Talbot summarized the case:
Similarly to what occurred at McMartin, teachers at the Fells Acres Day School in Massachusetts were accused of sexually abusing children and engaging in Satanic rituals. The accusations grew increasingly bizarre. Hysteria was whipped into a frenzy. The convictions were eventually overturned after the elderly teachers had served years in jail and their school was financially destroyed, as were 7 other pre-schools in the area.
Mob Psychology
Consider the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s. Underlying tensions:
Disillusionment after World War I: Germany lost the war badly and faced a harsh treaty that many Germans felt was unfair. This humiliation and anger created a desire for a strong leader to restore national pride.
Economic woes: The Great Depression hit Germany especially hard. Millions were unemployed, inflation was extreme, people were hungry, and the government seemed helpless.
A weak government: The Weimar Republic hadn't yet figured out how to function and its instability made people question the government's ability to fix the problems.
Charismatic tyrant: Hitler was a brilliant propagandist. He blamed Germany's woes on communists, Jews, and the Treaty of Versailles. He promised to restore Germany's greatness and make the country strong again (MGGA). His grandiose speeches and soaring rallies appealed to many.
Prejudice and scapegoating: Antisemitism and anticapitalism ran rampant, making Jews and educated elites easy targets for people's anger.
In Khalid Elhassan’s “12 of History’s Most Baffling Mass Hysteria Outbreaks” article for History Collection, he writes that mass hysterias are “sociogenic, mental illnesses that propagate and spread rapidly within a community, with psychological symptoms sometimes manifesting themselves as physical conditions caused by longstanding stresses and fears.” Within a community, symptoms build slowly before emerging suddenly after weeks to months. “They usually explode in a rapidly contagious outbreak that engulfs the community or a large portion thereof, before subsiding over a period of weeks or months.”
In The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn describes the paranoias that accompany apocalyptic moments. "Those who are first attracted," he writes, "will mostly be people who seek a sanction for the emotional needs generated by their own unconscious conflicts. It is as though units of paranoia hitherto diffused through the population suddenly coalesce to form a new entity: a collective paranoiac fanaticism. But these first followers, precisely because they are true believers, can endow their new movement with such confidence, energy and ruthlessness that it will attract into its wake vast multitudes of people who are themselves not at all paranoid but simply harassed, hungry or frightened.”
Elaine Showalter writes:
According to a study at Harvard Medical School, 8o percent of those with chronic fatigue syndrome are women. More than 60 percent of those who say they've recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse are women. lan Hacking concludes that nine out of ten patients diagnosed with multiple personality disorder are women. Researcher Debby Nathan observes that accusations of satanic ritual abuse come primarily from women. Even among those who claim to have been abducted by aliens, a field where science fiction and technology mix, women outnumber men about three to one and, according to ufologist David Jacobs, "seem to have a larger number of more complex experiences.” Showalter offers a partial explanation:
Accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse rose rapidly during the 1980s and declined in the 1990s. A national survey of a sample of 706 district attorneys, 1,037 social service workers and 2,912 law enforcement agencies found that 302 respondents had encountered at least one SRA case. Nonetheless, across a spectrum of countries, no corroborating evidence has emerged for the existence of satanic cult abusers. Similarly, instances of recovered memory account for a large portion of abduction by space aliens stories.
A journal article from the Institute for Psychological Therapies describes a case of alleged Satanic ritualistic abuse that occurred during mid-1987 in the small village of Oude Pekela in The Netherlands. The study describes allegations that dangerous child molesters were operating in a small village in the Netherlands and the subsequent multiple interrogations of nearly all the preschool children in the village. This started as a result of slight anal injuries resulting from play between two small boys. Over several months the stories grew to include fecal and urinary games, sexual abuse, vaginal and anal rape, sadomasochistic performances, manufacture of pornography, drug administration, bizarre rites, and the sacrificial torture and murder of infants. There were no physical injuries apart from the slight anal injuries in the first two children and no pornography or other evidence was found and the police eventually declared the episode to be an outburst of mass hysteria. However, the allegations are still taken seriously by some people in the Netherlands.
Sociologist Jeffery S. Victor says a consensus that the threat is real and serious can develop even though the numbers of deviants are minimal or even non-existent and their harm is very limited or even non-existent. Victor writes:
But then, that is how memory works. It is literally a bedtime story (because our brains organize memories while we sleep), told and retold to ourselves, remembering parts we like, forgetting parts we don’t, embellishing and revising like an editor at a publishing house. After enough years, our memory of a distant event may be no more accurate or reliable than our memory of a dream.
Enter Donald Trump
The mass psychosis of totalitarianism has been induced many times throughout history, and as Joost Meerloo, in The Rape of the Mind explained: “It is simply a question of reorganizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way.” The general method by which the members of a ruling elite can accomplish this end is called menticide, with the etymology of this word being ‘a killing of the mind.’
Priming a population for the crime of menticide begins with the sowing of fear so as to place a population into a state of panic that primes them for a descent into the delusionary beliefs of a psychosis.
A particularly effective technique to accomplish this end is to use waves of terror. Under this technique, the sowing of fear is staggered with periods of calm, but each of these periods of calm is followed by the manufacturing of an even more intense spell of fear, and on and on the process goes, or as Meerloo writes: “Each wave of terrorizing . . . creates its effects more easily – after a breathing spell – than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effects of each new propaganda campaign become stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.”
Never before in history have such effective means existed to manipulate a society into the psychosis of totalitarianism. Smartphones and social media, television and the internet, all in conjunction with bots that spread propaganda and algorithms that quickly censor the flow of unwanted information, allow influencers to easily assault the minds of the unwary. The addictive nature of these technologies means that many people voluntarily subject themselves to a non-stop bombardment.
“Modern technology” explains Meerloo “teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect. Technology lures him on, dropping him into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation – the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli. [Man] doesn’t learn to question his world anymore; the screen offers him answers—ready-made.”
Isolation during Pandemics
When alone and lacking normal interactions with friends, family and coworkers, an individual becomes far more susceptible to delusions for several reasons: they lose contact with the corrective force of the positive example; the power of positive examples greatly diminishes; isolation increases the efficacy of menticide because human beings are more easily conditioned into new patterns of thought and behavior when isolated. Meerloo explains:
Alone, confused and battered by waves of misinformation, a population under an attack of menticide descends into a hopeless and vulnerable state. The never-ending stream of falsehoods turns minds once capable of rational thought into playhouses of irrational forces and with chaos swirling around them. Writes Meerloo: “Whether gradually or suddenly, reason and common human decency are no longer possible in such a system: there is only a pervasive atmosphere of terror, and a projection of ‘the enemy,’ imagined to be ‘in our midst.’
According to Jung, for those of us who wish to help return sanity to an insane world, the first step is to bring order to our own minds, and to live in a way that provides inspiration for others to follow.
As Thomas Paine observed: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph.”
References
After Skool, “A Killing of the Mind,” YouTube video
Bottoms, B.L., Shaver, P.R., Goodman, G.S. and Qin, J., 1995. In the name of God: A profile of religion‐related child abuse. Journal of Social Issues, 51(2), pp.85-111.
Clancy, S.A., McNally, R.J., Schacter, D.L., Lenzenweger, M.F. and Pitman, R.K., 2002. Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens. Journal of abnormal psychology, 111(3), p.455;
Cohn, N., 2011. The pursuit of the millennium: Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the middle ages. Random house.
Davis, D. and Loftus, E., 2020. Recovered memories and false memories. New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry, pp.884-893.
Elhassan, N., 2017. 12 of History’s Most Baffling Mass Hysteria Outbreaks
Jonker F., & Jonker-Bakker P. (1991). Experiences with ritualist child sexual abuse: A case study from the Netherlands. Child Abuse and Neglect, 15, 191–196.
Jung, Carl Gustav. The symbolic life: Miscellaneous writings. Routledge, 2014.
Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd. Routledge, 2017.
Meerloo Joost. The Rape of the Mind. New York: Grosset & Dunlap; 1961.
Paine T. The American Crisis.(No. I.). Sold [by John Gill] opposite the Court-House, Queen-Street; 1777.
Power, M.J., 2001. Memories of abuse and alien abduction: Close encounters of the therapeutic kind. Recovered Memories: Seeking the middle ground, pp.247-261;
Rogers, M. L. (1992). The Oude Pekela Incident: A Case Study of Alleged SRA from the Netherlands. Journal of Psychology and Theology.
Sacks, Oliver (2022). Radical Minds, Chapter 5: Remembering is About the Future
Showalter, E., 1997. Hystories: Hysterical epidemics and modern media (Vol. 2). Columbia University Press.
Victor, J.S., 1998. Moral panics and the social construction of deviant behavior: A theory and application to the case of ritual child abuse. Sociological Perspectives, 41(3), pp.541-565.
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當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。
When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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