“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
The Cheshire Cat, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
When I look around me nowadays, I find it hard to disagree with the Cheshire Cat – and I say that in full knowledge that he lived down a fictitious rabbit hole and his party trick was to spontaneously morph into a disembodied smile. That said, ‘madness’ is such a maddeningly ambiguous term that I feel obliged to clarify what it is exactly that I am agreeing with. It isn’t that I believe that we are all suffering a mental illness, because that would be a mad thing to claim. What I mean instead is that we seem to live in a world where extremely foolish and irrational beliefs and actions seem to have become the new normal. Worse still, it seems that it is no longer possible to have two opposing, rational views on a given subject – instead there has to be one’s own view, and that held by your mad opponent. And since one can assume that your mad opponent feels the same way about you, that means we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.
In the two great debates of our generation — climate change and covid-19 vaccination — such accusations and counter accusations of craziness have a strong tradition, heavily fuelled by acrimonious and largely fruitless internet exchanges. For the most part the accusations are born of frustration that the other guy just can’t seem to grasp the obvious. More worryingly, however, some of these accusations have been elevated to the status of pseudoscience by a vocal coterie of academics who should know better. Take, for example, the climate change debate, in which the so-called denier’s cognitive shortcomings and irrationality have been extensively analysed and pathologised by the psychology profession. It’s an analysis that is supposed to be founded upon expertise in cognitive bias, and yet the psychologists’ accusations of such biases are made in a manner that itself exhibits extreme cognitive bias. Unfortunately, the profession has been allowed to get away with this to such an extent that the received wisdom is now that climate change ‘denial’ goes beyond simple foolishness and ill intent and strays into the territory normally occupied by the psychotic.
A good example of such an accusation can be found in an article written by Australian activist, Jeff Sparrow. In a rambling diatribe, he accuses sceptics of engaging in ‘kettle logic’, which is an irrational ability to simultaneously entertain two contradictory conspiracies, usually to avoid having to admit having been wrong. Of course, in an individual, such irrationality would be a sign of madness. Nevertheless, the accusation is made in all seriousness and is intended to apply to all climate change sceptics. Interestingly, however, the only evidence Sparrow offers for the existence of this mass pathology is the ability of sceptics to disagree with each other at conferences and their ability to form conditional arguments (along the lines of ‘I don’t believe x but even if I did there would still be y’). I think you would have to be mad to find any of this convincing, but such accusations are seriously entertained by psychologists. Somehow they are able to misinterpret incoherent thinking within a group as being multiple cases of incoherent thinking within the individual. This is known as a ‘category error’.
But where it really gets interesting, as far as I am concerned, is when the boot is on the other foot and the accusations of psychosis are made by the sceptic. That’s when the fun starts. That’s when the psychologists really adopt the rampant pose and start clawing at the sceptic’s throat.
Enter the ‘formerly’ reputable…
The theory that seems to have severely rattled the psychologists’ cage is the brainchild of Robert Malone MD, who chose to share his ideas with the world in a Joe Rogan podcast back in December 2021. Malone starts by asking “What the heck happened to Germany in the 20s and 30s? Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad.” He suggests that similar mass behaviour can be discerned in the response to the covid-19 epidemic. He dubs it ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’, and he explains it thus:
When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.
The podcast went viral and the psychology profession went apoplectic. Typical of the negative response was that given in a New England Psychologist article written by John Grohol Psy. D.
If this doesn’t sound particularly scientific or based in psychological science, you’d be right. Malone isn’t a psychologist and doesn’t have any background or experience in psychology, human behavior, or psychiatric research. Instead, his description sounds like some sort of pop psychology mumbo-jumbo from someone who took Psychology 101 in college.
Grohol continues by doubling down on Malone’s lack of required qualifications:
None of his work touched upon psychology or psychological theory. Suddenly, however, Malone feels qualified to express his expertise about “mass formation psychosis.” He knows so little about the field, he basically invented a term (or repeated something he heard once somewhere), instead of using the already well-known and accepted terms, mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness.
This all sounds rather damning, but before I go any further I think it would be worth my while to reflect upon one particular statement made by Grohol that he thinks gets to the heart of Malone’s failure to understand the basics:
Anyone who suggests there’s “free-floating anxiety” that’s “just like hypnosis” has a very limited understanding of what these things mean. People just can’t be hypnotized without their knowledge or consent — that’s not at all how hypnosis works. And while anxiety is indeed a significant issue for many people, it doesn’t “float” from person to person or otherwise become infectious.
My qualifications to discuss psychology may be no better than Malone’s, but I will venture to suggest that the above quote demonstrates, more than any other, just how seriously Grohol has failed to understand Malone’s ideas. As a psychologist, surely Grohol knows that free-floating anxiety is a technical term, defined by the American Psychological Association as “a diffuse, chronic sense of uneasiness and apprehension not directed toward any specific situation or object.” It is in that sense that it floats; it isn’t anchored to anything specific. By saying that it is free-floating, Malone isn’t suggesting that it is an anxiety that transmits from one individual to another; instead he is referring to a chronic and pervasive societal unease exhibited by a decoupled society. Furthermore, by virtue of its detachment from any specific and discernible cause, the unease can be readily co-opted by leaders with an agenda. The impression of hypnosis comes from the readiness by which the masses can be persuaded of the cause of the diffuse societal anxiety, and thereby led.
Anyone, such as I, who has been diagnosed with free-floating anxiety can attest to its irrational nature. The anxiety is intrinsic; it doesn’t need a trigger or explanation. And yet there will always be plenty of environmental factors upon which it can be pinned – if you are so inclined. Malone obviously knows this and adds the insight that societies can exhibit traits that are akin to an individual’s emotional states. But he doesn’t offer the rationale for this comparison and so leaves himself open to accusations of mumbo-jumbo from the likes of Grohol. Grohol simply dismisses the concept of societal anxiety as a category error and further proof of Malone’s incompetence. I think it is anything but, and I’ll tell you why.
Enter the ‘never has been’ reputable…
I would like to remind you at this point that some six months before Malone introduced the world to Mass Information Psychosis I had written an article here at Climate Scepticism espousing a very similar theory. The starting point was to suggest that, at its essence, emotion is the name we give to a complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system’s cognition of its internal state. Our bodies are such a system and our central nervous system provides the self-monitoring. Emotion is what we experience as a result. Consequently, insofar as our decision-making relies upon an awareness of our internal state, we are doomed to rely upon emotion to make a decision. Furthermore, since societies are also complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring systems, they too will exhibit decision-making that is essentially emotion-based in the system theoretic sense, i.e. a society’s pre-occupation with its internal state constitutes an essential element of its decision-making. A consequence of this is that, just as individuals can suffer neurotic and phobic anxieties in a literal sense, so can societies in a more abstract sense.
This is not a category error, because in both cases we are dealing with the same class of object, i.e. a decision-making, complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system. One can only start making a category error if one takes the analogy too far in believing an abstract concept such as ‘society’ can actually experience emotion in the same sense as a conscious entity can. The term ‘anxiety’ is used in an abstract manner when applied to societies, as indeed are terms like ‘panic’, ‘phobia’, ‘psychosis’ and ‘hypnosis’. But there is a legitimacy to the use of this terminology that goes beyond metaphor. Despite his remark about ‘literally’ becoming hypnotised, I believe that is what Malone is doing. He didn’t use the ‘already well-known and accepted terms, mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness’ because they are quite different to what he was talking about. They are group behaviours that emerge when the emotional states of individuals interact and feedback upon themselves. They result in collective emotional behaviour and, as such, are psychological phenomena. That’s not what I am talking about, and I don’t believe it is what Malone is getting at either. As I put it:
To be clear, I am not saying that societal decision-making is essentially emotional just because the decisions are being made by individuals who are acting emotionally. This may be true, but I am referring to a more profound sense in which society’s decisions are emotionally driven. They are emotional in the sense that the cognition of the internal state of a complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system (i.e. society) is the driving force.
Whilst there are similarities between my thoughts on the matter and Malone’s, there are important differences. Firstly, I have chosen to focus upon the importance of internal monitoring as an essential component of emotional phenomena. In particular, I have pointed out that this can lead to phobic anxiety in the individual and, by analogy, to a legitimate concept of societal phobia. I speak, for example, of societies having panic attacks. Malone doesn’t do this, preferring instead to reflect upon free-floating anxiety in the individual and suggesting the possibility of an analogous societal free-floating anxiety. The propensity for society to ‘panic’ is therefore replaced in Malone’s version by a propensity for it to be persuaded to act in a tendentious manner, simply by offering it an after-the-fact rationalisation for its diffuse anxiety. This is a different emphasis to mine but, even so, it isn’t a major divergence. In fact, both theories entertain the idea of diffuse societal anxiety, albeit with different causations (hyper-sensitivity to internal states in my theory, or a ‘decoupled’ society in Malone’s). And both theories recognise a tendency for societies to rationalise such anxiety. As I said:
Having established [through hyper-sensitive self-monitoring] a self-inflicted sense of crisis we have compounded the error by then looking for external threats and causes of internal dysfunction that could possibly explain our extreme agitation.
Put another way, societies take their free-floating anxiety and anchor it to a causation. Furthermore, such anchorage can be easily facilitated by those with an agenda. Consequently:
One has to wonder, if we didn’t obsess so much over the ills of society, what appetite would remain for rebooting it to address climate change.
We band of disreputable brothers
It’s a funny thing, but when Grohol and his fellow professionals looked at Malone’s theory, all they could see was an unqualified charlatan attempting a psychological thesis without even understanding the basics of the subject. I, on the other hand, could see a kindred spirit, crossing disciplines in an effort to understand what seems on the face of it a quite incomprehensible phenomenon – why seemingly intelligent and sane people can be so easily swept up in an insane enterprise. I was not troubled by Malone’s use of non-standard terminology; one would not find it in the cannon of psychology because, at its essence, his wasn’t really a psychological thesis. It’s a theory about control, and the decision-making of what is actually a complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system. As such, his thinking, whether he appreciates it or not, benefits from a paradigm that can apply to more than one application area. Moreover, his is an attempt to explain how individuals may find themselves able to entertain personal suboptimal thinking simply in order to fit in with decision-making at the societal level and yet, at no stage, experience any cognitive dissonance.
But let us not kid ourselves here. Malone’s greatest sin was not to overreach himself by proposing an inchoate theory in an area outside of his expertise. It was that he chose to apply himself to finding an explanation for a phenomenon that the orthodoxy does not willingly accept exists. He sought to explain why there was so much eagerness to engage in an irrational project when, as far as the powers that be are concerned, the project is perfectly rational. To those who get to decide who is mad and who is not, he was looking for an explanation for a madness when part of that madness is to declare that only the mad would think an explanation were necessary. That’s what made it so easy for Grohol to see the lack of academic grounding in Malone’s arguments and yet fail to see the wisdom in his metaphor.
When Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook developed their ideas regarding the alleged madness of conspiracy theorists, none of their fellow professionals thought to step forward and point out the category errors upon which they were based. Far from it, they received European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) funding to write them up in a handbook. But when Malone only appears to commit a category error, the whole world explodes in an orgy of indignant rebuttal. At the end of the day, however, this is the asymmetry we have to deal with. Any opposition to the authorized view will be automatically branded as irrational in a way that compliance never will. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. But not everyone has keys to the asylum.
Alice wasn’t too impressed with the Cheshire Cat’s philosophy and objected to being called mad.
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, `or you wouldn’t have come here.’
I think I know the feeling. Sometimes there is something irrationally futile about trying to make sense of the world.
Climate Scepticism 
The mass formation madness was earlier described by Mattias Desmet, Ghent University. Short video here:
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Ron,
I appreciate that, but I chose to overlook it because it was Malone who popularised the term and received the approbation. I believe it is also Malone who first used the full term ‘mass formation psychosis’ as opposed to ‘mass formation’.
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PS. I had intended to acknowledge Desmet’s precedence in a footnote but, in the end, decided I wanted to write an article free of footnotes. Your comment, however, achieves that purpose for me, and for that I thank you.
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I suspect Jaime might have something to say about the madness of those in charge, and I suspect that I will be inclined to agree.
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It is also worth pointing out that Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology, so Grohol’s accusations of ‘Psychology 101’ would not stick. In fact, if I had chosen to write about Desmet rather than Malone it would have been quite a different article. You only have to look at the articles written about the Joe Rogan podcast to appreciate just how important it was to Malone’s detractors to paint a picture of an ignorant conspiracy theorist, way out of his depth, and peddling dangerous misinformation that only looks vaguely scientific. It’s as if the psychology profession’s reaction to Malone has been one of Mass Formation Psychosis.
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Malone’s theory of mass formation psychosis, or at least his attempted application of Desmet’s mass formation psychology to explain the Covid phenomenon has become a phenomenon in itself. I was never particularly taken with the theory used to explain the mass hypnosis of the population by Covid-19 hysteria, but, besides ‘experts’ having a go at Malone for daring to step outside his own area of expertise, Malone was increasingly vilified by a significant clique of those opposed to mass vaccination and lockdowns, i.e. people supposedly on ‘the same side’. They formed the opinion that he was ‘controlled opposition’ and was just trying to get the perpetrators of Covid crimes off the hook by proposing some madcap theory involving mass delusions, which removed some measure of personal responsibility from those who had acted so terribly – both leaders and the public in general. It got so personal, so obsessive, so spiteful with these people that I called it mass formation psychosis psychosis! Malone is still pursuing a lawsuit against a couple he claimed defamed him. I have always considered Robert Malone to be honest, forthright and intelligent, and still do, though I do think he became a little too fixated with his (or Desmet’s) theory of mass formation psychosis. It’s a very weird world at the moment.
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I suppose a better discussion of mass formation and the extreme response to detractors is in a Brownstone article of the same vintage (mid 2022):
https://brownstone.org/articles/mattias-desmet-on-totalitarianism-of-mass-panic/
“This is precisely Desmet’s point: mass formation is associated with – almost requires – a blurring of the line between fact and fiction: The story matters; The in-group belonging matter. Whether the stated goal is desired or whether the actions taken towards it makes any sort of sense or could at all further the stated goal, is beside the point. “In all major mass formations, the main argument for joining in is solidarity with the collective. And those who refuse to participate are typically accused of lacking solidarity and civic responsibility” – thus, all the accusations of wanting grandma dead and sacrificing the elderly.”
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For example:
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Jaime,
In this article I may be guilty of projecting my own thoughts onto Malone too much, but I was keen to defend the use of terms like ‘psychosis’ and ‘hypnotised’ when applied to societies as a whole. I think establishing the legitimacy of such metaphor is important for Mass Information theory to work but, at the same time, the theory does seem to attribute those mental states to the individuals within society. Either way, the criticisms were frenzied, and we all know about frenzy and madness 🙂
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Yep, Malone uncovered a goodly vein of the truth, and got flamed for his efforts by the various orthodoxies that want views they disagree with to stay on the denialist naughty step. However, I too disagree about some specifics. I think for the best explanatory framework, one should come at this from a group perspective, because I believe that this is the evolutionary context the behaviours stem from, and this also helps avoids inappropriate interpretations such as hypnosis or individual pathologies; instinctive group behaviours are neither, while they are not rational either. “Fitting in to the societal level” appears to be acknowledging this angle. And I’m not keen on the term ‘mass formation psychosis’, not because I object to any new terms (I use some myself), but because this one can conflate things that already have separate old terms; it kind of paints everything with the same brush, whereas one may be able to trace events to say mass cultural belief, mass cultural rejection (which is not a mirror image of belief), or herd instinct (which all work emotively, and with subconscious coordination), although indeed these can all interact too. I think a tendency to view what is happening now as new and different or at least exaggerated in our era*, also hasn’t helped understanding; as far as I can see humanity has always behaved like this, yet the assumption means the many things that are known about such behaviours aren’t assumed to be relevant (or maybe aren’t applied due to bias).
* = Some orthodox psychology tends to do this in order to help bend the rules against denialists. But some in the camps sceptical of CC or other subjects, also seem to think we’re in new territory too.
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P.S. I think ‘hypnosis’ is okay as a metaphor, as long as it isn’t taken too literally, not least that there isn’t a deliberate hypnotist anywhere in the picture
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Andy,
I think I agree that we are not really in new territory here, though the kickback against those who are trying to explain why sane people are signing up to insane projects seems to be pretty extreme at the moment. As I tried to imply in my article, it wasn’t really the quality of Malone’s thinking that upset the protectors of the orthodoxy, that was just the handle upon which they hung their outrage. The real problem was that he dared not only to question the orthodoxy, but also offered a way of seeing it as basically irrational. That’s not allowed. Irrationality has to be the sole preserve of the outgroup!
As for madness and hypnosis being a literal attribute of the individual, I think the reasoning goes like this:
a) You have to be mad to do things you must realize will cause you harm
b) Acting under the thrawl of the authorities to do the above, requires a mental state that shares some of the attributes of being hypnotized.
I’m not convinced by the above arguments. I prefer to think of these matters as being a group phenomenon and I don’t see any problem in using terminology borrowed from descriptions of psychological states as long as it can be justified by reference to the expected behaviour of a complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system.
I’m gonna come straight out and say it. I think my theory is more coherent than that of Desmet/Malone.
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PS. It occurs to me that I never gave my theory a name. I don’t know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.
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Andy,
Actually, on second thoughts, there is a sense in which we are entering new territory. Insofar as society’s free-floating anxiety (or whatever you want to call it) is fueled by societal naval gazing, social media does seem to have turned up the dial somewhat. Same old social processes, but on steroids. We seem to be able to reach a state of global fervor now much more speedily, and way before common sense has chance to kick in.
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“The real problem was that he dared not only to question the orthodoxy, but also offered a way of seeing it as basically irrational. That’s not allowed. Irrationality has to be the sole preserve of the outgroup!”
Couldn’t agree more!
“a) You have to be mad to do things you must realize will cause you harm”
The weakness with this part is that if one’s reason is bypassed, one won’t achieve such a realisation, but neither does the bypass amount to madness if it’s a standard group-invoked behaviour. So…
“I prefer to think of these matters as being a group phenomenon”
…as do I, and I agree that what matters is not a finesse of terminology, but the general principle one is driving at. Sometimes, it even takes an outsider to see things in a better way, because those on the inside, so to speak, have managed to entrap themselves in walls of encumbering terminology.
“I’m gonna come straight out and say it. I think my theory is more coherent than that of Desmet/Malone.”
Way to go 🙂
“Actually, on second thoughts, there is a sense in which we are entering new territory. Insofar as society’s free-floating anxiety (or whatever you want to call it) is fueled by societal naval gazing, social media does seem to have turned up the dial somewhat. Same old social processes, but on steroids.”
I don’t agree with this. There have been big boosts before, e.g. writing, printing, broadcast media, email. But I reckon all of these still significantly underperform the speed of the system during the typical situation throughout the whole immense period when the behaviours originally evolved. Then, every single bit of conscious and subconscious communication would percolate ‘the whole of society’ within 1 day maximum, because ‘the whole of society’ amounted to just extended families up to a small tribe, all co-located (and with intense communication occurring continuously also, probably more even than social media screen-time in the West currently, because it occurred throughout all other activities). And this was happening in parallel in many many thousands of ‘whole of society’ instances, which were geographically separated. Only when populations later exploded (in a relative sense), did ‘the whole of society’ then consist of much bigger populations that also stretched geographically far wider, causing interaction speeds to drop dramatically until various technologies worked to catch them up again, and also with the drudge manual labour of agriculture as the mainstay, far less time devoted to communication too, and more hierarchical layers to penetrate as well. I think it may well be that even with Twitter and FB and the rest, we still haven’t yet caught up to the speed of events and the 100% participation rate for an enclosed hunter-gatherer tribe.
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I think it is almost certain that a large number of climate catastrophists are indoctrinated members of a cult and have abandoned all reason and are essentially unreachable, i.e. technically insane. You might say they are labouring under some sort of mass psychosis. The ‘shock and awe’ Covid drama, intentionally amplified by ‘nudge’ units feeding fear-based propaganda to the populace, resulted in a huge number of people being ‘hypnotised’ into believing government BS re. a deadly virus, the necessity of lockdowns and other restrictions and the miraculous scientific ‘cure’ presented by the ‘vaccines’. Covid was climate change, packaged in a short, sharp shock treatment. Brainwashing was no longer a slow, laborious effort over years; with the right triggers, it could be achieved almost overnight. That was the lesson of Covid. Malone chose to call it mass formation psychosis and he was shot down in flames by both sides. Dr. Mark Changizi still maintains that it was a bottom-up emergent phenomenon, not primarily top-down. He didn’t get any of the heat which Malone suffered. All I know is that very, very bad decisions were made by those in charge, and whether or not they were suffering from some degree of contagious mass delusion or psychosis is beside the point – they MUST be held individually accountable for their catastrophically harmful decisions if we are to pride ourselves on living in a sane, rational, democratic and lawful society. This applies as much to Covid as it does to Net Zero.
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I’ve been thinking about how to express my reaction to this thread. To me, it seems a sort of theoretical discussion about why these days people are saying and doing crazy things more and more; you know, madness of herds and all that. Is it mass formation or an individual thing, etc.
I had thought that the major Anglo nations, UK, Australia, US and Canada were securely committed to their heritage of liberty, free enterprise and democracy. The craziness is now manifest mostly in those same places. Look at what happened during Covid in Australia. Look how UK started on a rational response, then caved in to the mob. Look how totalitarian Trudeau could be when truckers came to express their dismay over blue-collar livelihoods crushed by his mandates from the throne. And watch how the emergency US declaration for two weeks to stop the spread was finally rescinded this month.
Whatever you call it, there is an overturning of norms and civil customs in these societies, purposefully and intending a far different future where individualism is marginalized. This in itself is not new. What is different is the massive wealth and resources of the over-class, and the social, media and information technologies to make it happen. The craziness is not simply the birthing of a new culture and way of living. It is orchestrated for the concentration of power in the hands of technocrats, mostly self appointed.
I don’t know where this ends up, and likely will not live to see the full manifestation of this brave new world. Some who are younger are imagining what life will be like when the deconstruction is complete.
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H, Zinsser’s book ‘Rats , Lice and History, ‘ describes epidemics
of dancing mania in the Middle Ages known as ST Vitus Dance
which became common after the miseries of the Black Death.The
dancing manias presented no characteristics which we associate
with epidemic infectious diseases of the nervous system, Zinsser said,
but seemed rather like mass hysterias brought on by terror and despair
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The Seducers went ‘full scale berserk’. Berserkers – Viking warriors dressed in bear or wolf skins who fought with unbridled ferocity in a trance-like state. This might explain how “two weeks to flatten the curve” turned into two years of unmitigated madness, instigated top-down by predatory, wolf-like ‘leaders’ hypnotised into extreme excess by the compliance and meek acquiescence of the herd.
“The Violation
Coercive propaganda; psychological operations; damnable censorship of Critics; an unceasingly, frequently unfathomable tide of “lies, damn lies and statistics,” coolly prepared in the minds of unaccountable technocrats — academics, civil servants and Machiavellian political operators — hidden behind layers of obfuscation, generously funded by the Public, the demos, upon whom were trained these efficiently operated weapons of social manipulation. In. The. Name. Of. Science. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” became two years of slowly turning screws that undermined the economic, social, intellectual, cultural, political, democratic health of nations, piece-by-piece, one-by-one; in a series of actions justified by seducers — I refuse them the title of “leaders” — who invented, then perpetrated one social crime after another, thinking nothing of overriding the collected Wisdom of Ages, including natural immunity, Parliamentary scrutiny and moral transparency, as hubristic political executives, stuffed with enthusiastic Davos-Acolytes, went full-scale berserk: wilfully ignoring painfully-won freedoms, designed to protect members of the public from Demented Medico-Science and underwritten in human blood — including the Nuremberg Code; the Declaration of Helsinki and the principle of Informed Consent — in their pseudo-heroic rush to cover-up their previous injurious, knee-jerking proclamations, starting with:
Lockdowns and masks — an escapade of breath-taking (sic) unscientific ineptitude, stalling the education and social development of infants and youth and bringing widespread economic misery — an initiative only surpassed in stupidity by
‘Vaccines’ — the “miraculous” (read: “highly experimental; hardly tested”) mRNA jabs and boosters — (seemingly) developed in months, incautiously rushed through safety vetting procedures that formerly, rightly took decades, before being pushed, with even less caution, into the arms of a harried populace, keen to believe a Lie that promised deliverance from an unceasing nightmare. All evoked in response to a easily-treatable disease — identified asymptomatically by a ubiquitous, unfit-for-purpose diagnostic test — striking chiefly at the elderly and infirm in patterns not dissimilar to influenza. This failed initiative, horribly expensive in both human and financial terms, then became the subject of a massive
Cover Up — a cynical, tyrannical tirade of intrusive, repetitive, illogical propaganda, accompanied by covert and overt censorship of authentic scientists, honourable medics, renegade journalists and refuseniks, constantly foisted upon us by a coven of “Big Tech” corporations, engaging dishonestly with desperate, despotic politicians.
The Violation will not be denied, overlooked, forgot.”
https://writethevision.substack.com/p/not-safe-not-effective-not-necessary
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Jaime,
The article from which you quote is typical of the many that have expressed anger and concern regarding the way in which the coronavirus crisis was handled. The language may seem extreme but it is carefully designed to capture the emotions raised. The issues are quite fundamental.
When I think about the idea of Mass Information Psychosis in the context of lockdowns, I can’t help but reflect upon the Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent lockdown of the majority of Massachusetts whilst the authorities searched for the remaining bomber who had just escaped a police shootout. As an example of a societal panic, one could not find a better example, since the liberties willingly ceded by the citizens to deal with the problem seem now (as they should surely have been seen then) to be totally disproportionate. There must have been a pre-existent and deep-seated societal angst for the authorities to tap into for the call for such a large-scale lockdown to have been effective. I decided this morning to look for any articles that may have been written on this subject and I found this rather interesting one published by the American Institute for Economic Research:
“The 2013 lockdown experiment in Boston”
https://www.aier.org/article/the-2013-lockdown-experiment-in-boston/
It concludes:
“The post-Boston Marathon bombing lockdowns were, explicitly or implicitly, part of the calculus of the coronavirus lockdown decision. Policy choices are a result of many inputs. Historical precedent, predominant theories, and anticipated public responses factor into political decisions. What remains now is to return to a time – a mindset, an attitude, a courage – where concerns regarding the indefinite suppression of human life rate a close, if not equal, ranking to overall risk in crisis response prescriptions.”
Not as colourful as your quote, but to my ear just as powerful.
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The Boston Marathon lockdown does indeed look like a primer for the Covid lockdowns, a dry run, if you like, for the swift curtailment of civil liberties in response to a perceived crisis, perhaps, as you suggest, tapping in to some of that ‘free floating anxiety’ which Malone talks about. That’s what happened with the Covid lockdowns, but the problem faced by the authorities then was how to justify their continued indefinite extension. That feat was achieved by a relentless, pervasive, 24/7 fear-based propaganda, misinformation, disinformation and ‘nudge’ campaign, all backed up by extremely dodgy ‘science’, continuing up until the ‘only way out’ from the imposed nightmare – the vaccines – could be rolled out to the masses.
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“…continuing up until the ‘only way out’ from the imposed nightmare – the vaccines – could be rolled out to the masses.”
And of course it doesn’t end there. Anyone who said “Yeh, what about those vaccines? Are you sure they are safe and effective?” has been met with howls of “My God, these mad conspiracy theorists are going to get us all killed!”
When a fear-based societal order has become established, it is very difficult to overturn. We are all mad here, I tell you.
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John,
‘Men, it is said, go mad in herds, but only recover their senses slowly, one by one’.
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“As an example of a societal panic, one could not find a better example, since the liberties willingly ceded by the citizens to deal with the problem seem now (as they should surely have been seen then) to be totally disproportionate.”
I was in Boston at the time, and I don’t think there was any such perception of disproportionality, more a question of ‘what more can we do’. There are deep-seated emotions constantly available for expression via group mechanisms, and always have been; far more than just angst, a whole range of emotions. The positive ones tend to win out more during expansionist phases of cultures, for instance, but can be accompanied by cruelties too. Throughout history, the more unusual case is that these are all reasonably balanced and fairly subdued, such that ‘rationality at scale’ (democracy, the law, science) can hold a majority sway for sustained periods. The long post-war period in the West is unusual in this respect, and the triumphs of science in the period and before likely contributed to this, to the extent of science almost being treated culturally itself (which is where things start to go down). Although I’m not up to date with the latest polls, not too long ago I recall that similarly, and despite everything negative that has come to light since, sizeable majorities in the UK were still behind the lockdowns.
This is another reason why I don’t like any term including ‘psychosis’, because it has far too strong an implication of mental or medical disorder. There is no such thing, because it’s a feature not a bug, built into the hardware of all of us for evolutionary advantages (which may well be redundant now in our modern technological era, or possibly even net deleterious, but are still built into our genes nevertheless). It’s worth remembering that many animals practice instinctive social distancing; we will not have simply left this behind because we can speak and write, rather we will implement it in speech and writing (and TV and the internet). And regarding cultural group behaviours, ‘cultural disbelief’ is also one, aka instinctive and not rational scepticism, which may sometimes be apt and sometimes inapt, but means that even those who claim to believe in no cause and no person, will not necessarily be free of group biases.
To return to technology and modernity as reiterated by Ron, this has benefitted all interactions, those that are instinctive and those that are rational. So like giving both sides in a native war rifles, it may not change the balance too much. Nor per above do I think we are yet operating at the participation rates and speed of the scenarios in which these behaviours evolved over an immense span of time. The problem for us is that ‘the balance’ is and always has been lumpy, and the lumps may be on a generational scale, as those unlucky folks whose span encompassed WW1, extreme cultural streams of 1930s Europe, the Holodomor, WW2 & the Holocaust, followed by many years of cold war group paranoia (unfortunately another medical word), before it started to fade. Or in China, say, the cultural revolution, only the worst part of longer cultural excess. I don’t think any of these examples are somehow less extreme than today because the communications technology was worse or the rich/poor ratios were somewhat different. And indeed whatever the effects of the rich/poor ratio, publics are immensely healthier and wealthier than then overall, demonstrating that distance from hand-to-mouth is probably not a main driving issue. Anyhow, to date, thank goodness, things are not yet as extreme.
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Andy,
Thank you for the Boston insight. I’m not surprised by your experience and that is why I said ‘should surely have’ rather than ‘would surely have’.
As for the use of the language of psychiatry, I think we have agreed that it should only be used metaphorically with regard to society as a whole and not literally at the level of the individual. It is not a question as to why people go mad but why sane people do mad things when society goes ‘mad’. I do not think Malone and Desmet have been sufficiently clear on this but I certainly want to be.
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John, just in case, you have indeed been clear on your own perspective. But others, less so, and even if the general idea is a useful step forward in grasping what is going on, one may still hope and push for further clarity to follow.
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Andy,
I think that if one is to argue by analogy there has to be a clear rationale underpinning it. That’s why I am sticking to reasoning based upon the nature and causation of emotional states. The justification for this, I believe, is the relevance of complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring systems at both individual and societal levels (the latter being such a system comprising such systems). I’m not so sure how to use that rationale to make a case for the existence of societal psychosis, but I feel it could be done. However, I am less confident with regard to the concept of societal hypnosis. After all, I’m not even sure how hypnosis works within the individual. Nevertheless, I think I have a useful metaphor to work with, much like memetics is a useful metaphor based upon genetic principles.
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“I’m not so sure how to use that rationale to make a case for the existence of societal psychosis, but I feel it could be done.”
I believe the key is: ‘why would such behaviour be (historically) an evolutionary advantage’? And rather than only ‘societal psychosis’, using similar metaphors and so also the same cautions, also societal rapacity, societal euphoria, societal sacrifice, societal audacity, even societal self-harm, and more.
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Andy,
Just to underline what you said regarding the Boston bombing shutdown, there is this article:
“When Greater Boston shut down in 2013, we came together — we can again for the coronavirus”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/16/opinion/when-greater-boston-shut-down-2013-we-came-together-we-can-again-coronavirus/
It claims that the 2013 shutdown was effective, not because the authorities exercised their power but because the citizens exercised their sense of civic duty – a duty that ultimately became embroiled in the #Bostonstrong tagline. This is something that we need to keep in mind when we complain about the removal of liberties. During the covid-19 epidemic the law was indeed used, often in unsubtle and draconian ways, but a lot more was achieved through propaganda that played upon the average sense of civic duty and our vulnerability to the ‘social amplification of risk’. That’s the dynamic that we now see playing out with regard to Net Zero.
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Author and engineer Robert A. Heinlein, encapsulating the whole issue with one test:
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
Of course, the distinction is not absolute. These days, a rider on NYC subway is not left alone because others do not control themselves. Texas is needing to pass a law requiring prosecutors to do their job.
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Andy,
“I believe the key is: ‘why would such behaviour be (historically) an evolutionary advantage’? And rather than only ‘societal psychosis’, using similar metaphors and so also the same cautions, also societal rapacity, societal euphoria, societal sacrifice, societal audacity, even societal self-harm, and more.”
Certainly, whatever the case, the argument has to acknowledge the imperative of evolutionary advantage. I think the point regarding societal psychosis is that it implies that society as a whole has lost touch with reality, in a way that the other societal conditions you have listed do not. At first blush it seems that losing touch with reality would violate the condition of evolutionary advantage but this may not necessarily be true of course. I’m sure you can think of many reasons why societal collapse does not invariably result from such a societal condition, or why individuals can actually benefit from being members of such a society (it’s not as if religion is well anchored in reality). My challenge is to work out how a complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system can lose contact with reality – something that would manifest as psychiatric psychosis in the individual or its metaphorical equivalent in society. It doesn’t feel like a difficult challenge.
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Is this what’s happening in the Netherlands?
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I largely agree re civic duty, yet nevertheless still have some reservations about the line: “but a lot more was achieved through propaganda that played upon the average sense of civic duty and our vulnerability to the ‘social amplification of risk’.” If the public are pushing the authorities into it (public majorities, and the media who amplified their appetites, were generally more gung-ho than governments, at least initially), then it’s not so much ‘propaganda’ in the sense this is often understood as a tool of rational and nefarious manipulation, but much more in the sense of a true reflection of societies (majority) herd/cultural instincts at the time. IOW, publics conspired to remove their own freedoms, even if governments were rather too happy to comply.
This is a much more difficult problem to solve, because it doesn’t come down to improved limits upon the powers of governments (difficult enough as that may be), but the far harder prevention of deleterious group instincts in everyone, without which any extra limits can easily be bull-dozed away.
There is more hope re Net Zero, because this is driven by cultural group behaviour rather than herd instinct. Hence there is far more instinctive scepticism against it, and can only be more as the obvious downsides become clearer even to those with no technical knowledge (when their car or gas heating is stolen!)
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“I think the point regarding societal psychosis is that it implies that society as a whole has lost touch with reality, in a way that the other societal conditions you have listed do not.”
Then I didn’t make myself clear – all the other conditions are just as out of touch with reality, indeed the more false they are, the better the system works.
“At first blush it seems that losing touch with reality would violate the condition of evolutionary advantage but this may not necessarily be true of course. I’m sure you can think of many reasons why societal collapse does not invariably result from such a societal condition, or why individuals can actually benefit from being members of such a society (it’s not as if religion is well anchored in reality).”
Indeed 🙂
“My challenge is to work out…”
Go for it!
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Andy,
Such are the subtle mechanics of propaganda, sometimes it can be difficult to decide who is pushing whom. Are the children really pushing us into Net Zero of their own volition? Would Tony Thomas think so?
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Yes Andy, that dynamic was described by Bernie Lewin in his 2017 book “Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The Origins of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” A series of expanding environmental “crises” involved creating alarm in the public awareness, resulting a clamor for elected leaders to “do something”.
My synopsis is https://rclutz.com/2017/11/29/progressively-scaring-the-world-lewin-book-synopsis/
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“Such are the subtle mechanics of propaganda, sometimes it can be difficult to decide who is pushing whom.”
Exactly! (this is a feature of emergent systems)
“Are the children really pushing us into Net Zero of their own volition?”
They don’t have volition when they are young enough, but children are primed for the installation of cultural templates. Once they have acquired a template for climate-catastrophism, they will indeed push of their own volition. But it was society that allowed the template into school and parental environments.
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Andy,
“…all the other conditions are just as out of touch with reality…”
Yes, but I am thinking of a society that is genuinely deluded, beset with imaginary demons that seem so very real to it; and one that is prepared to inflict serious self-harm to escape them. Basically, the society we live in 🙂
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I think we may be all agreed here that the true art of the propagandist is to make the masses feel that it is they who are demanding the change that he had in mind. When in 1931 the American social scientist, William Wishart Biddle, wrote his groundbreaking ‘A Psychological Definition of Propaganda’ he enunciated four principles, one of which was:
Hide the propagandist as much as possible.
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“Yes, but I am thinking of a society that is genuinely deluded, beset with imaginary demons that seem so very real to it; and one that is prepared to inflict serious self-harm to escape them. Basically, the society we live in 🙂”
Sadly, this describes most societies most of the time. Currently, we are nowhere near the worst this can be, has been in the past. Let’s hope we never get there again.
“I think we may be all agreed here that the true art of the propagandist is to make the masses feel that it is they who are demanding the change that he had in mind.”
Yes. And this is why it works best when the propagandist is themselves a true believer, in some emergent group behaviour that at least many of the public likewise believe, even of there are still swathes who (very puzzlingly to believers) don’t, and so towards whom the propaganda is aimed. This makes them far more persuasive. One of the greatest propagandists, Goebbels, once wrote in his diary: “Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.” He was a true believer in the personality cult that arose around Hitler.
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John, that’s a fair summary. It reminds of a recent interview with B.J. Dichter, a leader of the Canada trucker convoy.
“The other thing I’ll say about this, when I tried to engage with people who disagreed with me about what you were trying to do, what the goal of the Convoy was, the discourse would be civil, and it would be polite, until one thing happened:
When I challenged their source of news. When I called into question the veracity of the mainstream media, the conversation turned nasty immediately. So what I found very odd about this is you can oppose people’s premises and you can attack even their beliefs. But if you attack their support structure for how they base their knowledge, they get defensive and they come out swinging.”
“Yeah, because once you challenge their belief system, you’ve triggered them into cognitive dissonance. That’s what you’ve done, you’ve managed to force them, into second guessing their belief system. Because we’re no longer a science-based society, we are now a belief-based society. And we don’t challenge our own beliefs.”
My comment: I wrote a post-graduate thesis on the religious beliefs of leading 19th century scientists, so I know that faith and science bases have always been present in a kind of creative tension. I would rephrase the last sentence to say that no longer does objectivity rule over feelings in much of today’s society.
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To gain a flavour of how my thinking could be extended to embrace the concept of societal psychosis, one needs to appreciate that the interoception that provides the basis for emotional states also plays a role in the determination of self. Just as aberrations (such as over-active interoception) can lead to emotional illness such as phobias and panic attacks, in more extreme cases they can lead to psychotic conditions. Take the following paper, for example:
“Aberrant Interoceptive Accuracy in Patients With Schizophrenia Performing a Heartbeat Counting Task”
https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/2/1/sgaa067/6007509
From the abstract:
“Although self-disturbances and emotional disturbances are common in schizophrenia, there is no integrated understanding to explain these symptoms. Interoception has a crucial role in the development of self and emotion, and interoceptive abnormality could lead to such symptoms.”
I think I’m on the way already. Furthermore, I have a name for my theory:
“Aberrant Societal Interoception Theory”
Surely that is fancy enough to convince even Grohol that I know my stuff, even if he can’t find it referenced anywhere 🙂
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“Aberrant Societal Interoception Theory”
Well I think it’s certainly fancy enough. But also vectoring in the wrong direction from the off. ‘Aberrant’ implies something has gone wrong, either with participating individuals, a societal group, or both. But nothing has gone wrong; the behaviours have existed essentially forever, and hence they are not aberrant in any way. An inclusion of this word in your title would encourage an inevitable stepping over the line of those who hear it, from medical metaphor to an assumption of something medically or mentally wrong. If the explanation cannot address how whole swathes of society, indeed virtually all society sometimes, behaves, which by definition is normal, it cannot succeed. Only very small minorities in society are considered abnormal or aberrant in some way, and indeed most in different ways.
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But you are talking about how societies work. I’m talking about their dysfunctioning. Therefore ‘aberrant’ is exactly the word I am looking for.
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“But you are talking about how societies work. I’m talking about their dysfunctioning. Therefore ‘aberrant’ is exactly the word I am looking for.”
What is happening now, the type of behaviour you’re addressing, has also happened all throughout history, inclusive of most people in most societies, and is not dysfunction. The nearest one can say to approach such a statement, is that the original net advantageous purpose *may* be outdated, so perhaps in the modern era it is net deleterious, (I doubt anyone could say for sure) despite which it will happen anyhow because our genes are still very predisposed to such behaviours and haven’t yet ‘caught up’. Even if a net disadvantage is now the case, or at least is sometimes now the case for particular societies, this doesn’t make the behaviours aberrant; they are a universal product of a past system that has become sub-optimal. Or IOW, what we see now *is* part of how societies work, it is there for a reason, and is not how they *don’t* work.
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P.S. as is so often mentioned in Holocaust programs and indeed is also true many other negative cultural phenomena such as the Chinese cultural revolution, the lesson is not that these were unique aberrations that hence were dependent on some unique combination of factors, which we tell ourselves are very unlikely to occur again, but that they could happen at any moment anywhere, because they are part of the ‘normal’ operation of human societies.
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Just in time Andrew Doyle posted at Spiked: The New Puritans Must be Stopped.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/05/04/the-new-puritans-must-be-stopped/
My Synopsis:
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Andy,
I don’t dispute any of that. But remember that it is the interoception that is aberrant. Interoception can be normal and it can be aberrational. When it is aberrational in people it can result in emotional or psychological pathology. And if it can be aberrational in people, I say it can be aberrational in societies. My interest is to explore what features of society can be explained in terms of such aberration. It might be that these are features that have always formed part of the workings of societies, just as emotional and psychological malaises have been a feature of the human condition from year blob.
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Ron,
Just in time indeed. The concerns raised in the Doyle article look like a good example of the aberrant societal interoception to which I allude.
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“And if it can be aberrational in people, I say it can be aberrational in societies”
This projects an essentially individual and very specific medical aberration, which by definition is rare within the population otherwise it wouldn’t merit the descriptor, onto an entire healthy population who have no such aberration. Hence looking extremely like it crosses the line from metaphor to actuality.
Exploring all the workings of society is great, by any route trodden or untrodden. But there are plausible reasons for the long-standing behaviours you cite that require no abnormalities at all, and are expressed by swathes of completely healthy people mentally and physically; essentially all people, since I suspect none of us are completely free of cultural or anti-cultural biases or herd instincts. And all societies too, which makes it very hard to call anything abnormal. And the behaviours are strong and very highly systemic, which gives a clue to their origin; they are not vague or unstable.
If you pursue this route as an alternative theory, the key factor to demonstrate would be a solid mechanism for how a medical abnormality at an individual level, is promoted to a population, while still retaining similar enough characteristics to draw valid comparisons, and what are the specific effects one might expect (to say simply ‘disturbed’ or ‘unstable’ behaviour, could essentially be applied to anything one feels is not like society ‘ought’ to be, whereas existing theories can trace reasons for very specific behaviours such as out-group demonization, hope-and-fear memes, narrative policing, and so on, as they appear within racist or ideological or whatever scenarios). Otherwise any exploration of societal features is just that, rather than one where these can be tied to your particular causation. There is however far less existing mileage on, for instance, instinctive human behaviours in social distancing, as far as I know, and hence more opportunity too. But still, everything will rest on the viability of that mechanism.
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“he concerns raised in the Doyle article look like a good example of the aberrant societal interoception to which I allude”
I think I can explain this too. But not via anything aberrant 0: I look forward to your explanation!
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Andy,
Now you seem to be confusing ‘aberrant’ with ‘abnormal’. I think it is quite normal to encounter aberrant interoception in the individual. It is happening every time you panic. So I am quite inclined to expect that aberrant societal interoception would be quite normal also, and I am interested to see where that thinking leads. If you feel that there is nothing in society that can’t be explained in terms of things functioning as they must be expected to, then that’s fine. If you have no use of my hypothesis, that’s fine. But I like to think of societies as complex, autonomous, adaptive self-monitoring systems – and systems, from time to time, can operate efficiently, inefficiently, effectively or ineffectively. I have not heard anything from you that discourages me from pursuing that idea within the paradigm offered by systems theory’s equivalent of interoception.
As for my quip to Ron, there is nothing for me to explain. I think what he described looks like societal interoception and it’s operating in a manner that a large part of society seems to think aberrant, if only because it is hypersensitive. I did not offer a reason for that hypersensitivity. Mine is just the observation that we don’t seem to be very tolerant with our fellow man at the moment.
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Ha, if you ever considered your theoretical pursuits to be dependant any needs or thoughts of mine, I should definitely become worried that you had gone aberrant on me. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t provide some challenge, after all this is part of the whole point of constructing theories.
“Now you seem to be confusing ‘aberrant’ with ‘abnormal’. I think it is quite normal to encounter aberrant interoception in the individual. It is happening every time you panic. So I am quite inclined to expect that aberrant societal interoception would be quite normal also, and I am interested to see where that thinking leads.”
The paper you exampled was talking about patients with Schizophrenia, which is definitely abnormal, and I think any terminology system that calls the entirely standard and extremely frequent reaction of panic ‘aberrant’, is probably in need of main revision anyhow. However, and notwithstanding abnormal is often given as a synonym of aberrant, if that’s the appropriate word in some academic field, then fine. But given there’s already much unfortunate misunderstanding about mental illness in the social behaviours you are seeking to shed more light on, I’d have thought pretty much the last thing you would need is to import a term that will inevitably make this misunderstanding much worse, whatever your theory actually said once people had got past the title, if they ever do get past the title.
One problem is not that societies may operate in theory more or less efficiently, but no-one knows what more or less efficient means anyhow; politics is one of the ways main disagreements about how they should operate are argued. Science can’t solve political problems either, so it can’t know what an ideal society should be anyhow, but it can estimate roughly how they operated in the past, not only when things were much simpler but more importantly, in a time that defined our genetic (gene-culture co-evolved) bequeathal; it was optimal then even if similar modes are not optimal now, so at least it can stand in for a default normal. But beyond the general metaphor of the madness of crowds, you seem to be saying that the specific (individual) mode of aberrant interoception has meaningful parallels with social operation, despite the architecture of the two systems has nothing remotely approaching the common features that inspired the the gene/meme metaphor. If a society was an entity like a living thing, it likely would be a lot more primitive than a nematode, possibly down to an amoeba, which doesn’t have any significant interoception architecture to go aberrant in the first place 0:
Re Doyle, yes indeed, for some reason much of society does thinks ‘the new puritans’ type of operation is aberrant, despite Doyle’s kind provision of the clue that it happened with the puritans too, and practically every other society in every era also, at some phase of their existence. However, I meant it when I said I look forward to your explanations. Who knows what novelty may bring; my explanations are novel to some people much further up the creeks of various orthodoxies than me.
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I was wrong to accuse you of confusing aberrant with abnormal but you are certainly confusing me by first objecting to the use of the concept of malfunction and then raising an objection based upon rarity. Also, I think your objections to an attempt to treat society as something akin to a lifeform is silly. If you go back to my original article you will see that I am keen to avoid such a comparison. All I claim is the relevance of the complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system. As such, aberrant system functioning, such as aberrant ‘interoception’, should be of interest, even if it is to explain phenomena that can also be described without recourse to the idea of system failure.
I also agree that deciding what constitutes a working society will be very subjective, but I think most people would agree that a society that has repurposed the further education system from being an institution designed to encourage free thinking to one that does the opposite has gone wrong somewhere. One might say it is unhealthy.
But finally, and most importantly, I’m not sure I want to spend my bank holiday defending a title that was clearly offered tongue-in-cheek. Did you not see the smiley face?
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“All I claim is the relevance of the complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system. As such, aberrant system functioning, such as aberrant ‘interoception’, should be of interest…”
My observation is that interoception in the context of say panic or Schizophrenia, is a feature of a very advanced living thing, and society is not alive in this sense. But I didn’t say it wasn’t of interest; this does however suggest a need to demonstrate some relevant parallels between the two systems, in normal operation so to speak, in order to validate the assumption that they can also be aberrant in the same ways. I don’t think this will be easy, but that’s not intended to squish your claim; maybe you still think it’s just silly anyhow and if the latter is strong it should survive my mumblings with ease. I had rather hoped that the mumblings might be useful too, theories need challenge in order to improve, don’t they?
“but I think most people would agree that a society that has repurposed the further education system from being an institution designed to encourage free thinking to one that does the opposite has gone wrong somewhere”
From my PoV (which is not necessarily right!) this is not aberrant operation, it is undermined operation, from an invading culture, and of a nature which has also occurred essentially forever (children are primed for cultural templates so make highly desirable targets, also society considers them innocent, so cultural sayings out of their mouths are much harder to combat – “they cannot be lying” – well of course they’re not lying). This is a very different model to yours, one much more similar in biological parallels (as long as the metaphor isn’t taken too literally again) to catching a disease. I say all this only to highlight that ‘wrong’ is itself a very vague term and also subjective, that does not cover the reason why ‘wrongness’ has occurred – it covers both your model of aberrant operation and mine of cultural invasion (which if the culture gets to write the later history, will also flip to ‘right’). As such one can’t rely on two systems simply being ‘wrong’, or indeed ‘aberrant’, to necessarily have any common reason why. But this caution is perhaps way too obvious for you, and your model is already stepping along the way to a great explanation; so fine, as I say I look forward to it.
I knew the title had an an element of jest, but memes that spread the wrong ideas often start in jest. The social psychologist Dan Kahan once used a title partly in jest that was something like ‘smart people are ruining society’, which did not truly reflect his findings, and still worse gave more than a nod to old and terrible memes which had the Red Guard of Stalin or whoever killing off intellects. I challenged him on his blog about this; though he took the point, he was a bit huffy because it wasn’t done too seriously. Some time later an article came out in a major magazine or newspaper (can’t recall which), and lo and behold, it had the same title. Bad meme in his name now escaped to the world. When I pointed this out, he said in his defence that he’d had no control over the title, which the editor had picked. But this could only have been from seeing Dan’s blog, or copies of this element distributed by others. When your theory is famous, this might matter a great deal! However, of course I had not meant to spoil your Bank Holiday ):
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Andy,
I honestly don’t think I have to worry about anything I say on the internet going viral 🙂
I think there are actually two technical challenges to be met. Firstly, one has to establish the pertinence of the workings of a complex, autonomous, adaptive self-monitoring system in explanations of emotional and psychological phenomena, and how failure modes of such a system can provide a good model for thinking about pathologies. Then one has to establish, in equally well-defined terms, the pertinence of the workings of a complex, autonomous, adaptive self-monitoring system in explanations of social phenomena and how failure modes of such a system can provide a good model for thinking about any developments that seem unexpected or sub-optimal.
Good progress has been made on the first problem by neuroscientists whose success seems to have depended upon not getting bogged down in detail. In a nutshell, emotional malaises and certain psychotic conditions can be understood in terms of aberrations of interoception, or the cognitive appraisal of such. See, for example, appraisal theories of emotion or Anil Seth’s interoceptive inference theory. The system under study may be complex but the understanding is based upon relatively simple concepts. With sociology being a softer science, I’m not sure to what extent a human society is currently understood as a complex, autonomous, adaptive self-monitoring system. Progress with such a model may appear to onlookers to be more about metaphor than science but I am relaxed about that. I have never claimed anything greater than metaphorical value. Just remember that the motive behind the writing of this article was to hint at the potential legitimacy of using a metaphor such as ‘psychosis’ when applied to societies. If it has any legs then I believe that thinking of society as a complex, autonomous, adaptive self-monitoring system with potentially aberrant self-monitoring will be its starting point, noting that a similar thinking in the realm of neuropsychology has provided insights into the understanding of both emotional ailments and psychosis.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a more fully developed and well-defined version of this thesis. I am not an academic, I do not get paid for any of this and I have no professional obligations to fulfil. It’s just a bit of fun for me and, as such, it competes with a lot of other things that are likely to get much more attention.
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“I think there are actually two technical challenges to be met. ”
Agree. The first one is doable. It’s the second (and appropriate parallels) that I figured is very hard.
“With sociology being a softer science, I’m not sure to what extent a human society is currently understood as a complex, autonomous, adaptive self-monitoring system.”
It gets you into a big bun-fight, is my guess, which also means conflicting literature. There tends to be bulk general resistance to such ideas in social science, and those individuals or disciplines that suggest a more ordered operation, even for instance that society can be investigated via reductionist techniques, have tended to get jumped on from a large height. This is in part why memetics became so stigmatised, some of its ideas still roll on, but in a form that uses no memetic terminology, so that the stigma isn’t inherited. Regarding my own efforts, there is often attack from those who think I’m proposing that cultures are ‘alive’ in some sense, which is probably the biggest no-no of all, despite to pre-empt this I constantly say they are neither sentient or agential, adapting only via selection and having probably less information coding than a cold virus. But in drawing comparisons between living biological systems and social operation, you will attract similar attack even if the comparisons are not literal enough to deserve it. This may not matter for the audience here, but it also means that the existing literature may not be too helpful for you. I think the fringes are the best place to look, so memetics as was, evolutionary psychology (lots of social science doesn’t like evolutionary explanations, so these guys are often the black sheep), and the part of neuroscience that deals in social thinking (Michael Gazzaniga is the only name I can actually recall), which may give you an angle on both systems and any overlaps at the same time. All these fringes kind of have social science surrounded and tend to emphasize structurally simple explanations and a kind of ‘system’ approach, but a lot of stuff from the middle is just tosh.
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Andy,
“…a lot of stuff from the middle is just tosh.”
You’re not wrong there. You may recall that when commenting on my original article I said this:
“Incidentally, by way of research I had googled ‘systems theory emotion’ whilst writing this article, but I immediately regretted it! There’s an awful lot of crap out there.”
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Malone at the International Covid Summit held in the EU Parliament. Not a single mention of mass formation psychosis, just this:
“Nick Hudson (South Africa) from PANDATA (Panda), who I have known personally and who has worked very, very hard with his group (always been willing to challenge the dominant narrative) shared with us that we really have had false narratives dominating world discussion and press for these last three years. That false narratives included that these were deadly viruses, that there was no preexisting immunity, that this was a novel virus, that everyone was susceptible to this disease, that we had asymptomatic transmission, that the lockdown saved lives, that the mask mandates reduced transmission. Every one of these things was a lie, and yet they were repeatedly propagandized and distributed throughout the world in a harmonized fashion that I think has left all of us in awe.
If nothing else, we must give credit to those who have deployed this propaganda. I think it is one of the most amazing demonstrations of modern PSYOPs and propaganda, as was well demonstrated during the various presentations.”
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/ics-at-the-eu-parliament-summary
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