Psychologists and sociologists have been pondering the mechanism of crowd formation for years. The mechanism of applying polarization to chaotically behaving human beings so that they start to follow a selected direction. Understanding of this mechanism has been of interest for centuries, and above all since the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. It’s hard to really understand how Hitler, a little complexed cramp who gagged like a drunken jazz singer during his speeches, could drag an entire nation along with his criminal delusions.
A group of people always forms against someone. It is a law of nature and not – contrary to popular belief – the result of upbringing or manipulation. Anyone who deals with a group of children in a kindergarten or school has the opportunity to observe how a children’s group is formed. There will always be a child who is too fat, too thin, too smart or red, with whom no one wants to play or even pair up. Efforts of a teacher to break this ostracism bring quite the opposite result. The innocent child is called a snitch and his fate is sealed. Working at school, I strongly advised my students’ parents against bribing the group. I advised that the child be immediately transferred to another school where care should be taken not to become a victim again.
Recently, the conditions and context have become even worse. The development of the Internet has meant that the group’s branding of a victim carries with them to the next school, just as the opinion of a loser or a wanker carries a convict to the next prison. There is no escape from being stigmatized by the group. As a group expands to form a larger community, scientists call the phenomenon of this collective bias crowd psychosis.
The term came up recently in Joe Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone. Robert Wallace Malone is an American physician and biochemist. His early work was in mRNA technology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Malone came into conflict with the “scientific community” by promoting what was believed to be misinformation about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. For example, claiming that there has been half a million excess deaths in the U.S. due to decisions to deliberately blocking early treatment.
Crowd or mass psychosis has also been the focus of dr. Peter McCullough (a Buffalo cardiologist). He argues that the current world is in the formative stage of mass psychosis. It occurs when groupthink is so strong that it leads to incomprehensible and consequently terrifying results, while mentally healthy people feel in this world as in a madhouse. Dr. Mattias Desmet of the University of Ghent in Belgium believes that if sober people, not succumbing to mass psychosis, came together, they could oppose the collective madness. I believe this is the core of the problem: from a certain critical moment, the organization or mutual understanding among people is no longer possible. Like a specific phase change of matter, which is only possible on the “correct” side of the triple point. The identification of such a triple point in social life would perhaps explain the phenomenon of mass psychosis.
Crowd formation, i.e., triggering mass psychosis, is a specific type of group formation that has significant effects on the individual. It makes people unable to critically distance themselves from what the group believes. And eventually the group starts to believe the most absurd things. During the revolution in Iran in 1979, people believed that an image of the Ayatollah appeared on the surface of the moon and stared madly at its shield during the full moon. This is an example of how absurd the beliefs of a crowd can be, and at the same time it is one of the typical characteristics of crowd formation.
Formed people become ready to sacrifice everything that was important to them before formation began. And most importantly, they tend to stigmatize people who disagree with them. They begin to commit atrocities against them, and eventually try to eliminate them. Typically, they do it as if destroying these people is their ethical duty.
The French Revolution, the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are historical examples of mob psychosis formation. However, for this to happen, the population must be in a certain psychological state.
Most of humanity is susceptible to manipulation. In other words, almost anyone can become a Nazi if given the right circumstances and the right training. Neither intelligence nor level of education protects against it. The currently targeted education of doctors about vaccines is obedience training. It is a kind of Milligram experiment, and masks are a symbol of community submission.
For crowd formation to succeed, people must feel lonely, as Hannah Arendt called it, atomized.
Before the COVID-19 crisis, the number of single people in Western society and the world peaked. In a global Gallup poll, more than 30% of people reported that they had not a single genuine relationship. In the UK, Theresa May appointed a minister for loneliness, and in 2017 the US Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic in the US.
Another condition resulting from the first one is the lack of a sense of the meaning of work and the meaning of life. Before the COVID-19 crisis, more than 60% of people in the world said their work was meaningless, and only 15% considered their own work important. The third condition is a common sense of threat combined with the need to participate in a strategy of disarming this fear.
During the Crusades, the object of fear and the enemy were the Muslims, during the witch hunts, the object of fear was witches, during the French Revolution and in the Soviet Union, it was the aristocracy, and in Nazi Germany, the Jews. During the COVID-19 crisis, the enemy is not only the virus, but all the people who have refused to participate in the fight against it.
All people’s attention is directed to one properly exposed fragment of reality. And the rest of reality is drowning in darkness.