The Problem of Mass Psychosis

in the twenty-first century

In the past few years the world has been through much. Madness has piled on madness to the point where it is not unreasonable to suggest that we are losing contact with reality.

Waves of Extreme Events

In an earlier post I explored how clusters of exceptional events periodically occur, as they did for example in 1793, 1914, 1940, 1968 and 1989, and how the worst such cases are in fact examples of 'mass psychosis'. That condition is characterised by 'a lack of ability to make sense of things', and 'free-floating anxiety': Problems too big or too numerous to be confronted are pushed away into the unconscious. The anxieties and fears associated with them become detached from their source. They get distorted, and then projected onto other situations which were not their origin. Destructive situations erupt as both the general public and those in authority become fixated on single issues, fearful, irrational, easily steered both by external forces and by their own repressed fears.

How truly devastating the consequences can be we shall see below – but what is equally important to recognise before proceeding is that the human capacity to respond is ever-present: If we find the courage to acknowledge the present departures from reality then we might, if not avert the bigger calamity which is hovering, then at least in some degree mitigate it.

Signs of Psychosis

For the most part, the world runs along with the assumption that wherever there is a problem 'the government has to fix it', while at the same time belief in government, everywhere, is virtually non-existent. Not coherent. We have an education system that nobody believes in, not students, nor parents, nor teachers, and we pretend that is OK. We have just nine giant interests controlling 70% - 80% of the information in the world,¹ yet people act as though the media, and the governments which form part of the same infrastructure, are in the business of keeping them as well informed as possible. Also not coherent. Businesses drown in bureaucracy. Censorship rises. We are lied to all day everyday and many people are losing the will to believe that it could or even should be different. Not looking good so far for a society which wants to claim good contact with reality.

Conditions able to contribute to 'free-floating anxiety' have been abundant, even if we take it only from 2007: A major financial collapse. Tens of millions of people world-wide lose their savings, their jobs and their homes. Whole countries go to the brink of bankruptcy. Years of deepening problems and uncertainty. The Arab Spring, the 2011 'England Riots' and the Spanish '15th May' movement. The ´Occupy´ movement erupting in 82 countries around the world.² Terrorism and mass shootings. Massive, under-reported unrest in Brazil, Turkey, Romania, and elsewhere. The emergence of ISIS. The long-running phenomenon of the French 'Yellow Jackets'. And that's only the beginning of the list.

The Covid Years

In the spring of 2020, the World Health Organisation first assures everybody that there is no need at all for action - and then lurches to wanting the entire population of the world incarcerated in their homes. Subsequently Nigerian security forces shoot dead 18 people for daring to come out of their houses³ and Nepal puts such offenders in cages in the street to humiliate them.⁴ The UK parliament debates ten-year prison sentences for people who break the rules, while members of that same parliament (like others elsewhere) themselves break the rules. Canada freezes the bank accounts of citizens who dare to protest.⁵ People are obliged to die in isolation from their families. Tens of thousands of companies are destroyed and inflation explodes. Long term damage, including collateral deaths, is massive. (And thus far unmeasurable).

In parallel, we witness the first American presidential inauguration in history to be surrounded by razor wire and armed soldiers. And, in response to the death of George Floyd, the burning of American cities - in which innocent people are killed in protest at the killing of innocent people.⁶ While the flames are still burning however, writer, film maker and activist Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, a Somali-born woman and a first generation migrant to the USA speaks for many in so-called minority groups when she says“What the media don't tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans, or what have you”.⁷ The political left and right both ramp up the gravity of their professed concerns about the end of democracy, and blame each other for it. Armed conflict erupts in Ukraine and truth, as always, is 'the first casualty of war'.

Pseudo-Religious Fervour

The most telling sign of psychosis however, is the one which underlies and animates all the others. That is, the pseudo-religious attitude which has permeated everything: From Brexit as 'the end of civilisation as we know it', to US politics polarising into Trump's MAGA movement on one side and frenzied attempts to abolish gender and castigate society for 'past sins' on the other. Everywhere there is a kind of religious fervour, an aversion to the seeking of common ground. Fears spread that a volcano in Las Palmas is going to create a tsunami which will engulf the USA, covid is the Black Death, and CO2 is going to end the world in 12 years.⁸ 'We are right and you are wrong'. And everything is existential: The future of the world depends on the fact that 'we are right'.

Then comes the rise of 'scientism', an ugly phenomenon in which:

• There is a refusal to question, or allow questioning of, the starting assumptions upon which the edifice is built.

• Funding and publishing of results is controlled by 'interests'.

• The dubious and much-used expression 'The Science' means cherry-picked institutions and conclusions, used for political and commercial ends, and not 'an open and fair contest for the best claim to the truth'.

To be fair to those scientists who still practice the real thing however, the 'priesthood of scientism' is very mixed and includes, as well as some scientists, perhaps rather larger numbers of politicians, media executives, financiers, and CEO's.

As Niall Ferguson noted, those most strident about 'The Science' of the pandemic were frequently not scientific at all. Rather, they appeared to be 'in thrall' to some unseen and unrecognised new form of religion.⁹ Meanwhile certain elites, Ferguson said, became prone to strangely ritualistic behaviours and various “strange uses of language”. As if to verify him, CNN then warned that things can never return to how they were in ‘The Before Times'.¹⁰ Within the scientific community meanwhile, biologist Rupert Sheldrake equated 'scientism' with an unreasonable belief that science can solve all the problems of the world, becoming a religion and a form of salvation. At it's most extreme, he declared, it becomes a “messianic saviour cult”.¹¹

We should pay gravely serious attention to these various warnings, for similarly pseudo-religious madness preceded the burning of witches in the 17th century, the French 'Great Terror' of 1793, and the parallel savageries of the World War One and the Bolshevik revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. As well as the rise of German Nazism in the 1940s. And also, come to think of it, the hypothetical scenarios of Orwell and Huxley.

The Courage to Look at it

We have been paying too little attention to certain trends: The corruption of many of our institutions, the takeover of the world's media by 'interests', the perversion of the education system, the disenfranchisement of young people, the drift toward authoritarianism in government, and the failure to meet the human challenges inherent in technological change. All compounded by a widespread inclination to look the other way while one gets on with the not- inconsiderable challenges of day to day life. These and other trends are coalescing into a level of threat to humanity which has not been seen in a long time.

In that sense, a normal pattern is occurring: Such crises come as a 'call for correction'. Something has gone too far: Psychosis is a sign that a limit has been reached. Thereafter, the possibilities are a complete 'psychotic break' with all the horror that entails, or, if courage be found, a transcendence and a new reality. Not the phoney kind of new reality however of the World Economic Forum and the organisations, corporations and governments which are collaborating with them. Not the aspirations of ideologues in general to play at redesigning the world and everything in it. Rather, a genuine transformation of the greater society from within, emerging from the shared psyche of humanity.

The existence of such a shared field of consciousness is the very reason that mass psychosis can occur at all. It is the source and the cure: Consider here the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Drawn into a mass psychosis himself, Solzhenitsyn temporarily abandoned his spiritual beliefs and joined the Red Army. Later, on recognising the system he was part of to be psychotic he, at personal cost, contributed much to its collapse and dissolution. The key, he later wrote, is simply for enough people to commit to a “a personal non-participation in lies”,¹² which becomes in a sense contagious. Similarly, Czech dissident Valcav Havel, also involved in a dramatic overcoming of damaging webs of untruth, subsequently noted that political reform does not lead to society’s re-awakening, but the other way around.

False realities – let's call them 'psychotic systems' – can come into being by design, or via their own semi-autonomous momentum, born of free-floating anxieties, pseudo-religious reactionism, and peoples' hunger to escape a perceived bogey-man. Despite the omnipotent aspect they present, it is clear that even small doses of truth corrode them rapidly. That's why they mobilise so vigorously against all dissent. And this we are increasingly seeing.

Nonetheless, it is not so so difficult to take advantage of that 'Achilles heel': Today, it can be done by listening directly to what scientists are saying, instead of what journalists and politicians say they are saying. By giving special attention even, to those scientists who are being censored, smeared and attacked.¹³ And by investing some time in evaluating more diverse sources of more general news. Since there is a historically unprecedented amount of truth available, all this is very possible. But not easy of course – the truth is mixed with untruth, and today 'being informed' requires significant effort. That is what we might call an 'inconvenient truth'.

Mainstream news sources have become blatantly manipulative and orchestrated, but the irrepressibly creative human impulse has answered: Hundreds of smaller and more independent sources have flourished. The mainstream frantically tries to suppress and discredit them, but in fact many are highly objective, and in some cases even notably non-partisan. That's very encouraging, because if we cannot be non-partisan about this, we are lost. (Finding sources must be a personal matter, but I'll list a handful below for those who might want a starting point).¹⁴

Realistically, it may be that before there is any major 'overcoming', much of the horror which has already gathered momentum will have to have its way – and perhaps over an extended period. If that is so, our task will be to work courageously toward minimising the depth and duration of its dark reign. The descent into psychosis has to be seen as part of an evolutionary process which brings on suffering and darkness but paradoxically also brings on the good. Right now it is calling forth in growing numbers of 21st century souls deep responses of love, intelligence and willingness to endure hardship and embrace genuine creative change. And that has always been the way of it. It begins with a decision to take a good look at what has previously been pushed away because it is uncomfortable. All on its own, that act begins to make a difference to the world, and far more than most people realise: Within that shared field of consciousness, every contribution of every human being who choses engagement over avoidance becomes like 'the beating of the butterfly's wings in Brazil' that ultimately changes the weather systems of the world.

1. This is not an arbitrary number. I will substantiate it in later articles.

2. The 'Occupy' movement claimed ´951 actions in 82 countries´. When Britain´s Guardian newspaper set out to explore the veracity of that reference, they were quickly able to document 750 actions, spanning from Budapest to Bogotá, Barcelona to Berkeley, Christchurch to Copenhagen, Helsinki to Houston, London to L.A., Melbourne to Munich to Manchester, and from from Quebec to Rio to Reykjavik to Taipei and Tokyo.

3. See 'Coronavirus: Security forces kill more Nigerians than Covid-19', BBC 16th April 2020, and 'Nigerian security forces killed 18 people during lockdowns: rights panel', Reuters, 16th April 2020.

4. See ‘Locked in Cages, Beaten and Shamed’, Bloomberg News, 2nd April 2020.

5. In early 2022 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked an emergency powers act which was originally intended for time of war. That empowered his government to summarily suspend the bank accounts of protestors – which they proceeded to do. Outside of Canada most of the media preferred not to report on this, and most people never knew it happened.

6. When numerous buildings were set on fire in Minnesota, at least one man was burned alive inside. When part of Seattle was held 'under siege' by protestors for some weeks, two people were shot, one fatally. And these without considering the many cases of reprisal murders of policemen, individually guilty of nothing, around the U.S.A. in the following months.

7. See 'The Case Against Revolution', with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, interviewed on 'Uncommon Knowledge', June 2020.

8. A repeated assertion which was raised to high profile especially by the newly-influential U.S. Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

9. See ‘COVID, Lockdowns and Authoritarianism’, an interview with historian Niall Ferguson on the internet channel ´Triggernometry´, June 2021.

10. See ‘CNN raises eyebrows with dystopian report referring to pre-Covid era as the Before Times’, Russia Today, October 2021, and ‘Grocery store shelves aren't going back to normal this year’ CNN, October 2021.

11. See ‘Science Does Not Tolerate Dissent', an interview with Rupert Sheldrake, on Unherd TV, July 2021.

12. See 'The Gulag Archipelago', Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1974.

13. Professors Sucharit Bhakti, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, John Ioannidis, Martin Kulldorff and Paul Marik, and Doctors Geert Vanden Bossche, Vernon Coleman, Simone Gold, Pierre Kory, Tess Lawrie, Robert Malone and Peter McCullough are just a few of the highly qualified people who have been smeared, attacked or actively censored for sharing their professional views and research. Go to Wikipedia or the press if you want politicised opinions on their work. Otherwise go directly to the credentials, papers and reports of the scientists themselves.

14. Freddie Sayers' show on 'Unherd TV' is one of the most objective and least partisan examples, but there are plenty of others who, even while open about their political preference, still know the difference between objective reporting and political campaigning. Some examples are Sharyl Attkisson, Vanessa Beeley, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Paul Craig-Roberts, Niall Ferguson, Tulsi Gabbard, George Galloway, Brian Gerrish, Globalresearch.ca, Joe Rogan, Kimberly Strassel, Matt Taibbi, The UK Column, Uncommon Knowledge, Brett Weinstein/Heather Heying and Bari Weiss.