I would just note to those discussing sexual orientation that you should be discussing the excesses of patriarchy which is the basis for all this reactionary/defensive “orientation” instead
But then again,
I am the guy that thinks there should be more discussion about the God of Mammon cult’s control of and influence over our world instead of all the proxy war discussions.
I am hearkened back to the recent quote I read from Henry David Thoreau, who said, “For every thousand men hacking at the branches of evil, there is one hacking at the root.”
Please help us hack at the roots of the evil in our world instead of the branches.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Aug 8 2022 1:15 utc | 104

MASS PSYCHOSIS – How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL
This is where we are.
Truth comes from evidence and reason.
Posted by: Norwegian | Aug 7 2022 13:02 utc | 51
I do not think this is what is happening. I go back to what the Russians experienced under Communism, the Ukrainians have experienced with the nazi repression. The latter we don’t entirely know, but I do not think it is mass paranoia. The Ukrainian government is having to use repression; clarity comes from repression, and as you say, from evidence and reason.
The Russians have two words for truth – Istinia and Pravda. We may remember that ‘pravda’ became divorced from reality during later USSR experience. But istinia saved them.

Posted by: juliania | Aug 8 2022 1:48 utc | 106

These NYT stenography pieces aren’t even fit to be called bad journalism because no journalism was involved in their production. They are indeed produced and assembled according to a template, which is probably why there are four people listed as contributors to an “article” that offers nothing except the same old reheated BS from various US and European officials and the usual denigration of Russia. Each “journalist” contributes a few official statements and anti-Russia tidbits and its cobbled, sorry “edited”, together into an “article” that reinforces the standard DoS via MSM propaganda narratives.
When that Larry Johnson fellow says he thinks laziness(!) is to blame for the NYT’s pseudo journalism he is either being disingenuous or else he’s dumber than a bag of hammers. Yes Larry, the reason the regime’s organ of record produces “regime bullsh!t” is because their staff are lazy mofos. Nothing a few motivated new hires can’t fix. Jesus wept…

Posted by: Harry Haller | Aug 8 2022 1:59 utc | 108

@ Norwegian and others
I am just about to finish reading the recently published book from Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
Desmet’s interviews in the last two years is where the recent surge of interest in Mass Formation comes from. Incidentally, he doesn’t himself use the term “psychosis”, just mass formation.
I expect to have a lot to say about the book and related concepts of mass propaganda and our weaponized mass media. But it’ll be next weekend I imagine before I can put thoughts together. The book raised a lot of related thinking – I highly recommend it, but I would like to say more about it in a decent summary later.
There are two other interviews with him that I have to finish watching, and now your whiteboard video. The interviews are one with Bret Weinstein and another with Ivor Cummins.
I look forward to discussing these matters more.

Posted by: Grieved | Aug 8 2022 3:39 utc | 110

“…Soviet Union had perhaps the best in the world education system. In the end days the soviet citizens did not believe the propaganda.
The opposite is true for the west. Very poor education system and majority believe or go along with the propaganda.”
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 8 2022 2:00 utc | 110
That’s a paradox isn’t it, Peter? Or, perhaps it should give us hope. The ‘best’ education system may not be the answer – perhaps with a worse one, there’s more hope for westerners to break out of the rut we’re in? Take a ‘street smarts’ leaf out of Abraham Lincoln’s book and educate ourselves, maybe? (That was actually Socrates’ route as well, come to think of it.)

Posted by: juliania | Aug 8 2022 4:01 utc | 112

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 8 2022 2:00 utc | 110
The opposite is true for the west. Very poor education system and majority believe or go along with the propaganda.
——
Soviet propaganda was relatively straightforward and easy to spot and was delivered primarily via newspapers and official pronouncements while in the west it has long been subtly embedded not just in the news media but also in almost every mass consumed cultural product.
Western propaganda has its roots in advertising, marketing and “public relations”. PR is just a polite word for propaganda… it was coined by Edward Bernays after World War I saddled that term with negative connotations. The modern west, unlike the Soviet Union, was built around a consumer capitalist society in which citizens are subject from birth to mass psychological manipulation in the form of advertising and “PR”and conditioned to accept this as a normal part of the social fabric. It’s so pervasive they don’t even notice that it’s happening. I remember in high school my friends trying to convince me that advertisements in magazines and on TV (this was before the internet) had no effect on them whatsoever because they never read the ads and paid no attention to them.
For propaganda messaging to be effective it needs to be repeated often, very often, before it is unconsciously accepted by the masses. The internet era with its ubiquitous personal digital devices, instant communication and global news and entertainment networks has made this much, much easier… and made westerners even more susceptible to psychological manipulation. An extremely oversimplified example: A kid playing the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series might not consciously ponder why the games’ villains are overwhelmingly Arabs and Russians or why the world outside of the US/UK is portrayed as buffoonish, backwards and dangerous, but when combined with negative news headlines he glimpses about those countries and their people and that BBC documentary his class just watched at school about “Putin’s Russia” helping the “Assad regime” in Syria the message is delivered as intended.
Forget weapons systems or “freedom”, it’s mass psychological influence where the west still “shines” and has no peers. Propaganda is most effective when it’s indirect and embedded in everyday life. The west all but controls the global news media system and can easily disseminate its mind viruses around the world. But with other countries launching their own media and information networks its influence is waning, hence the panic in the west over “disinformation” and “interference”.
I do wonder how long westerners will accept the “it’s China and/or Russia’s fault” line as an “explanation” for why things keep falling apart and why western leaders never take responsibility for their momentous botch ups? How long will westerners, particularly EU residents, accept economic deterioration, austerity and money being shovelled into Ukraine to “defeat Putin’s aggression”? Will giving the people an external enemy, a scapegoat, to hate on tickle the primitive part of their brains enough to keep the focus perpetually shifted away from the realities of the internal, domestic situation or will there be a collective enough is enough moment where the dam finally ruptures and the propaganda filter is recognized for what it is?

Posted by: Harry Haller | Aug 8 2022 7:14 utc | 114

juliania | Aug 8 2022 4:01 utc | 113
I guess as much as the STEM subjects, I was thinking of how we are taught to understand the world. Current Russian leadership went through soviet education. They have a natural ability to connect with other cultures. For me that came late in life. My time with the aboriginal people in the northwest gave me a different perspective on other cultures.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 8 2022 7:39 utc | 116

I used to think that the NY Times was the leader that was copied by other newspapers. And for some newspapers it probably still is.
But I saw something similar to this Times article first in Nieuwsblad (www.nieuwsblad.be) and then in the Guardian. Nieuwsblad – the most pro-Ukrainian source I know – is usually first with this kind of articles. It makes you wonder what the real source is.

Posted by: Wim | Aug 8 2022 14:36 utc | 118

ditto – thanks @ harry haller.. excellent post…

Posted by: james | Aug 8 2022 17:18 utc | 120

What happens when people awake to the deceit of Totalitarian-Lite posing as liberty and individualism (let alone democracy)?
Well, this piece is from the leading Establishment journal from the Deep-State-linked, Anglosphere, the Daily Telegraph:
“This is the summer before the storm. Make no mistake, with energy prices set to rise to unprecedented highs, we are approaching one of the biggest geopolitical earthquake in decades. The ensuing convulsions are likely to be of a far greater order of magnitude than those that followed the 2008 financial crash, which sparked protests culminating in the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring …
“Carnage has already arrived in the developing world, with power outages from Cuba to South Africa. Sri Lanka is just one of a cascade of low-income countries where leaders face being driven out of power in an ignominious blaze of petrol droughts and loan defaults.
“But the West is not going to escape this Armageddon. In fact, in many ways, it looks set to be its epicentre – and Britain, its Ground Zero. In Europe and America, a technocratic élite system built on mythology and complacency is crumbling. Its founding fable – which prophesied the nation states’ glorious enmeshment in world government and supply chains – has metastasised into a parable of the perils of globalisation.
“This time, élites cannot shirk responsibility for the consequences of their fatal errors … Put simply, the emperor has no clothes: The Establishment simply has no message for voters in the face of hardship. The only vision for the future it can conjure up is Net Zero – a dystopian agenda that takes the sacrificial politics of austerity and financialisation of the world economy to new heights. But it is a perfectly logical programme for an élite that has become unhinged from the real world”.
Yes, the western sphere has become so prone to a ‘head-spinning’ disorientation (as was intended), through the constant rain of disinformation labels, stuck haphazardly across anything critical of the ‘uniform messaging’, and by outrageous, obvious lying, that a majority in the western world has begun to question their own and surrounding levels of sanity.
In their bemusement, they have come to see the ‘messaging’ of sacrificial politics and the financialisation of absolutely everything as ‘perfectly rational’. They have been rendered helpless, held immobile in a spider’s web. Bewitched.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
(Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass)
Yes, the Beast’s Siren Call is for sacrificial politics to be levered down upon the people, whilst the horsemen of War and Pandemic all scream out that an apocalyptic hour approaches. We may call it a collective syndrome – similar to the Witch Craze of the 14th–17th Centuries – but today, the phenomenon WB Yeats termed the ‘rough beast’ with its’ gaze as ‘blank and pitiless as the sun’, is better known simply as Ideology.
The word ‘ideology’ is often used as a synonym for political ideas, a corruption of language that conceals its fundamentally anti-political, latent totalitarian character. Ideology is incapable of treating human beings as distinct participants in a shared, non-political social life. Today’s woke ideology sees human association rather, as groups to be acted upon. It is explicitly anti-National, anti-Sovereign, anti-Traditional Religion, anti-Traditional Culture, anti-National Infrastructure, and anti-Family.
The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who conceived of idéologie as a social science of ‘ideas’ that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened élite, whose technical expertise would justify their claim to rule.
These contours to European ideology, as they emerged during the French revolutionary era, largely were cast by the Franks in the period before, and after Charlemagne. It was then that the doctrine of racial superiority arose (‘others’ were ‘barbarian’ and Pagan and served only as slaves). It was then too, that outward, predatory expansionism (the Crusades, then colonialism) was embedded in the European psyche.
The Charlemagne era further cemented an unbridgeable social schism. The Frankish oligarch in his castle; his Frankish bishops inculcating his villein serfs, living by the foot of the castle, with vivid fear of eternal Hell. To which, the non-elect was pre-destined, unless improbably, they gained the grace of God. This nascent Frankish ‘idea’ was precursor to how we Europeans are today: the sense of absolute superiority; of belonging to an elect; and Europe’s class divide – are today’s shadows from that totalitarian era.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
What the French Revolution added was raw ideology, through the radical shift in the relation between state and traditional society. Rousseau is often taken as the icon of ‘liberty’ and ‘individualism’ and is widely admired. Yet here we have that clearcorruption of language which conceals ideology’s fundamentally anti-political character.
Rousseau explicitly refused human participation in non-political, shared life. He saw the human associations rather, as groups to be acted upon so that all thinking and daily behaviour could be folded into the like-minded units of a unitary state.
It is that unified state – the absolute state – which Rousseau upholds at the expense of the other forms of cultural tradition, together with the moral ‘narratives’ that provide context to terms such as good, justice and telos.
The individualism of Rousseau’s thought, therefore, is no libertarian assertion of absolute rights against the all-consuming state. No raising of the ‘tri-colour’ against an oppressive state.
Quite the reverse! Rousseau’s passionate ‘defence of the individual’ arises out of his opposition to ‘the tyranny’ of social convention – the forms and ancient myths that bind society: religion, family, history, and social institutions. His ideal may be proclaimed as that of individual freedom; but it is ‘freedom’, however, not in a sense of immunity from control of the state, but in our withdrawal from the supposed oppressions and corruptions of collective society.
Family relationship is thus transmuted subtly into a political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals. With these atoms today groomed further to shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity, they are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state.
This is the deceit concealed in the ideologues’ language of freedom and individualism. It is rather, the politicization of everything into the mould of an authoritarian singularity of perception. The late George Steiner said the Jacobins “abolished the millennial barrier between common life and the enormities of the historical [past]. Past the hedge and gate of even the humblest garden, march the bayonets of political ideology and historic conflict”.
This Jacobin inheritance was polished further by the Fabians and the likes of HG Wells, who wrote in his new Bible Trilogy, published in 1901,
“It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental to the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.”
Bertrand Russell (linked with the same current of thought) would put it most succinctly in The Scientific Outlook (1931):
“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important all the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “cooperative” i.e.: to do exactly what everybody else is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished will be scientifically trained out of them”.
In sum, today’s ‘Totalitarianism Lite’ (Niall Ferguson coinage) of contemporary western life, accepts that whilst human beings naturally form social groups for common purposes, today’s woke ideology assumes that organic associations natural to any rooted community, cannot support a good society (because of ingrained racism, etc.), and therefore must be cleansed from the top down to rid it of such legacies. This is the ‘Bolshevik’ seed that Rousseau sowed.
Here is the point: Our disorientation and sense of disappearing sanity owes not a little to the psychic stress of embracing an ideology that purports to be exactly what it is not. Or, in other words, it proclaims liberty and the individual, when concealed within is absolute statism.
Alain Besançon remarks that “it is just not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology”. Intelligence, after all, is an ongoing attentiveness to reality, which is inconsistent with willfulness and fantasy. Nor can it take root in the sterile soil of widespread cultural repudiation. This is why all ideological regimes are without exception plagued by sheer ineptitude.
Which neatly returns us to the afore-quoted Telegraph piece:
“Nor is there any explanation for this fiasco apart from decades of failed assumptions and policy missteps by our governing class. In the wake of the [2008] Great Financial Crisis, the Establishment just about managed to convince the public to submit to the purifying rigours of austerity [sacrificial politics] – persuading voters that we all shared the blame for the crisis and must all play a role in atoning for the country’s mistakes. This time, élites cannot shirk responsibility for the consequences of their fatal errors.
“Carnage has already arrived … And Britain is not going to escape [it]. In fact, in many ways, it looks set to be the tinderbox of Europe.
“The predicament we face is likely game-changing. We have barely begun to grasp how unpredictable the next few years are likely to be – and how poorly prepared we are to face the consequences. This may sound like a grim prognosis, but particularly in Britain, it does feel as if we just may have entered the final act of an economic system that has patently failed. It is clearer than ever that the emperor has no clothes and has no more stories to distract us with”.
The author is right. There will be public protests – in some states, perhaps, more than others; civil disobedience – such has already been launched in the UK and in the Netherlands: ‘The Don’t Pay’ campaign, which is urging people to join a ‘mass non-payment strike’, is the first token of pushback.
This, however, is but the initial step. When the western financial authorities say they ‘welcome’ a recession to destroy demand – and so to reduce inflation – implicit in this statement is an élite conviction that protest can and will be successfully squashed.
All the signs are that a ruthless, violent, and administrative suppression of popular disquiet is being contemplated.
Every so often, throughout history, humans have periodically experienced a deep sense of their lives being somehow hollow, of nothing realised, and of the world about them being sham – being somehow illusory and empty of meaning.
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
But if we look back at this pattern, repeating itself, time and time again, we get a clear sense of both the event and of the repeating experience of void. For, it is the insecurity and fearfulness associated with ‘void’ which causes torpor to fade, and people to erupt into rebellious disorder. And why also the attempt by the élite inner circle ‘to manage away’ such awakenings, so easily ends in tragedy (and bloodshed).
But there is a further – major – difficulty in today’s situation. Even if the ‘doors of perception were cleansed’ (Huxley), it is that there is no ‘there – there’. No neat conceptualisation to which he or she can say: ‘here is to ‘where’ we should be going’ – or, at least, there is ‘no-where’ that would make sense to those already becoming half-panicked at what they perceive to be the assault on all the landmarks by which they have lived their lives.
What then might ultimately break a collective psychosis caught up in some irresistible, ‘magical’ spell? Well, put simply, pain. Pain is the great clarifying agency.
What happens when people awake to the deceit of Totalitarian-Lite posing as liberty and individualism (let alone democracy!). The question then becomes: To what other ‘image-idea’ will the people collectively migrate?
The geo-political implication is that Italy may migrate to one; Germany to another; and France to yet another, and others may just ‘give up’ on the whole mess of European politics (and nihilism will rise). Does this matter? Might it possibly be revitalising?
It does let us address directly the ‘Beast of ideology’, who through ‘his’ own ineptitude, has inadvertently stripped Pandora of her masque, thus opening her box. Who may say which masque she will don next!

Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 8 2022 21:21 utc | 122

Since this thread is largely about propaganda – and is filled with many references worth keeping – some may find this interview interesting, just republished a few minutes ago at StalkerZone:
How the American Brainwashing Machine Works

Military expert Aleksandr Svinukhov just before the start of the special military operation in Ukraine returned from the United States, where he was sent to study at Johns Hopkins University. Aleksandr agreed to talk about his studies and how this type of military activity, which is usually called psychological warfare, is organised in the United States.

This is pretty deep rabbit hole stuff, but it carries a military heft, and it makes a lot of sense. Is it true? Who can say? This far down the hole, is anything completely true? Johns Hopkins of course is a central strategist and game-player in the narrative and population control exercises that came to the aid of authorities dealing with the disease outbreak of 2020 around the world.
I found it interesting, and more on the side of truth than on the side of opposing truth.
It must be apparent to everyone that we are in a situation where the truth is a priceless commodity, whose value is continually bid up by those who operate narratives designed to hide it.
So take it as you will, but I expect it will continue to figure in our discussions as we continue to pierce the veils that intentionally blind us.

Posted by: Grieved | Aug 9 2022 3:09 utc | 124

@126 David Levin | Aug 9 2022 15:08 utc
Looks like Andrei Martyanov features the StalkerZone story for a few minutes early in his latest video (I haven’t watched it yet but he mentions it in the description). He says people in his field knew all that already – makes it a pretty strong validation in my book:
People Started Asking Me…after I made my latest video today

Posted by: Grieved | Aug 10 2022 2:18 utc | 126