We’re publishing an original essay today by Kathrine Jebsen Moore, a freelance writer based in Edinburgh who exposed the woke capture of the online knitting community in a now famous piece for Quillette in 2019. In this piece, she writes about the eagerness with which apparently liberal people have blamed the unvaccinated for the waves of Covid infection currently engulfing parts of Europe, even though the evidence for that is questionable at best. In this extract, she draws on the work of Mathias Desmet, a clinical psychologist at the University of Gent in Belgium, to try and understand this sinister development.
The clinical psychologist Mathias Desmet from Ghent University in Belgium has an interesting explanation. In a conversation with Markus Aubrey, he argues that society was ripe for what took hold in the spring of 2020: a phenomenon called ‘Mass Formation’, a precursor to full-blown totalitarianism, which explains why people who would otherwise not agree with draconian measures and the vilification of other people happily do so during a crisis of this kind.
According to Desmet, various conditions have to be present for the phenomenon – which can be compared to a kind of mass psychosis – to take hold.
For instance, there must be widespread social isolation and disconnectedness. This, he explains, is exemplified by the number of people who find their jobs meaningless. Around 50% of workers in so-called ‘bullshit jobs‘ don’t see any purpose in their roles, for example. When the grand narratives such as religion fall away, we are left looking for meaning elsewhere. For many, the ‘health and safetyism’ of the Covid state filled that gap.
The lack of meaning feeds into social isolation, which is widespread and has increased in the past few years. When people lack close friendships and social bonds, the result is a what Desmet calls free-floating anxiety, aggression and discontent. With a high level of general anxiety – anxiety that is not attached to a single object – the population is ready to attach its aggression and angst onto something. When the virus came along, the narrative that was constructed about it served as a perfect receptacle for negative emotions. By channelling these emotions into something concrete, people started to feel the connection and meaning they’ve been lacking. In joining the ‘fight against the virus’, a new kind of social bond and sense making emerged.
Desmet explains: people suddenly feel connected again, in a heroic struggle, and that’s the reason why people buy into the narrative and why they are willing to participate in a strategy even if it’s utterly absurd. The reason why they follow it has nothing to do with the fact it’s correct or scientific, but because it leads to a new social bond. People are social beings, and being socially isolated is painful, and through the process of ‘Mass Formation’ they switch from the very negative state of social isolation to the opposite state of maximal connectedness that exists in a crowd.
Desmet draws on the work of Gustave Le Bon, the father of crowd psychology. When an individual becomes part of a crowd, he undergoes a profound psychological transformation and ceases to operate as an individual. Le Bon argues: “He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will,” he writes in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Read novelist Paul Kingsnorth’s account in UnHerd of why the demonising of the unvaccinated caused him to switch sides in the vaccine wars.
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More BS modelling.
More WHO
You walk down the street and you might get run over or get you brains blown out. Who gives a f***, it is the risk that makes it all worthwhile.
Try to stay off London Bridge and the risk of being slaughtered drops fairly sharply.
How many of the peeople shitting themselves actually bothered with health, wellness, fitness, immunity. As far as I can see the histrionic people seem to be the sort of vegetables that would be wiped out by a slap in the face. Work on your body and your mind and etheric body then you won’t give a shit about viruses.
That is what has frustrated me most, queue up for a jab in the arm and then back to McDonalds for breakfast, idiots.
I think you are spot on in the main but I do think the elderly have been abused and manipulated by the government ,nudge unit/BBC etc .Now a fair percentage are just plain petrified .I see them most days all probably triple jabbed and still masked up inside and out .Very sad and a truly despicable result of the Pig dictators policies.
And probably wearing their mask in bed and in the bath.
I agree – My elderly parents follow MSM religiously and they have done a sold job of scaring the living daylights out of them
They were never at risk from the virus. What has indubitably harmed them greatly is the triple jabbing – I can literally see the damage to my mother’s body which she jut puts down to ‘old age’
Sorry, but … well-known prophet of Corona’s witnesses repeats ever-repeated claim about new variant … yawn. They’ve said this everytime. It always turned out to be wrong. Hence, it’ll turn out to be wrong this time again.
Professor Adrian Esterman is much more infectious than measles. With every so-called new Corona variant (and they don’t even have variants anymore, they’re now trading subvariants[*]), he’s going to infect 100% of the people listening to him with this idea.
[*] If they can keep this nonsense going for long enough, they’ll simply rename Sars-CoV2 every day. After Sars-CoV2 2022/03/15 comes Sars-CoV2 2022/03/16, something we absolutely don’t know anything about yet but ICUs are quickly filling up with terribly sick children …
I am starting to worry about what will happen when there really is a deadly pandemic.
Cry Wolf…
Example for that: When Biden started talking about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, I immediately discounted that as propaganda story likely intended to deflect from the domestic Corona-mess. I couldn’t imagine that anything our dear political leaders said could possibly be something other than more COVID-related BS.
It’s all been done before – in 1997 Hollywood- Wag The Dog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=steA_PZPkc8
Coming soon according to Billy.
Some of these boffins are going to suffer from the attention seekers’ version of postpartum syndrome, once they have to go back in their boxes.
Well isn’t that what Original Antigenic Sin would look like? They better hope that the “benefits” of “vaccination” eventually wear off after they stop being “boosted”. It’s a good job it is currently such a comparatively mild virus.
The removal of the idea of reincarnation was very convenient for the powers that be, especially if it was replaced by a belief in a heavenly future. I know for certain that reincarnation is a reality. If we could resurrect this idea it would change everything. We are all coming back. If you begin to understand karmic forces then you will see this clearly.
Don’t believe in either no heavenly future no reincarnation this is it so make the best of it.
No, there’s far, far more to existence than merely this life on Earth. It’s not about what you merely ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’; the actual nature of reality (which includes the proven fact that we all survive [in our immortal spirit body form] the death of our physical body ‘coat’) is the way it is, regardless of what uninformed sceptics merely ‘believe’.
See my post to Jabby McStiff, above.
And NO, I’m most definitely NOT a ‘christian’. I am, however, a factually-informed Spiritualist.
I don’t want to come back. I’ve had enough.
You are absolutely right. What a great pity that there are still so very many spiritually-UNenlightened people on the planet.
There are many thousands of high-quality, scholarly books that have been published on this ultimate truth of existence (the proven fact that we all survive [in our immortal soul/spirit body form – which has in fact been SEEN, by the many people around the world who are lucky enough to possess clairvoyant vision; and the latter includes some doctors and nurses] the immensely illusory event that’s wholly incorrectly termed ‘death’, AND that reincarnation is indeed a very real truth; we are each an eternal soul which has many, many lifetimes), and a large percentage of those many thousands have been written BY the many PROPERLY-enlightened, spiritually-enlightened scientists, doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, lawyers, etc etc, around the world.
People who ‘disbelieve’ in survival of ‘death’ and reincarnation will one day discover that both those statements ARE indeed the truth. It’s the way life/existence truly works. All the many (sadly) uninformed sceptics will, on the eventual day on which they do what is so very incorrectly termed ‘die’, discover that the actual nature of ‘death’ is so very, very different to what it merely seems to be, when interpreted on its immensely illusory face-value mere appearance.
We actually live in a multi-dimensional cosmos; ie, there is far, far more to existence than merely this physical dimension.
Question: what other no-to-low symptomatic infectious disease / “disease” have we ever tested / “tested” for as thoroughly as the coofs?
For example, what’s the R number of viruses so mild that we’ve never even noticed that they exist?
It’s another yawn.
1
So what? it’s even less virulent than omicron. Stop with the incessant fear porn you snivelling idiot.
The supposed argument behind this is that this (effective virulence) doesn’t matter because it’s sooo infectious that it will infect sooo many people that the health system will sooo collapse nevertheless. Exactly what used to be told when the would-be infection controllers wanted to a second Christmas in lockdown last year.
Ease-up, buddy. You’re talking about his career here.
You want him to start crying?
“What do the data show”…..
Where did you get the picture of Neil Fergusson at work …
Brilliant – I needed a good laugh!!!
“Leading epidemiologist”…..”WHO scientist”….LOL.
Fantasist, liar, attention whore.
A bit unkind to the hookers they do at least provide a service
The common cold is probably as infectious as measles isn’t it?
The issue is whether it is as dangerous, which it obviously isn’t.
My mother sent me to stay with a school friend who had measles.
Saved queuing up to see a doctor.
Athletes Foot is highly contagious but hasn’t killed anyone.
Bit like Omicron.
I stopped reading after I read this Professor Adrian Esterman, a leading epidemiologist in Australia,
Not surprised considering how australia has put their citizens under house arrest
Oh God – yet more embarrassment.
We are living under totalitarian dictatorships – please read officially published material (governmental and all MSM) accordingly.
It quite possibly is this infectious — in the vaccinated.
My unjabbed self did my level best to catch ‘it’ (thought I might as well get it over with/get the antibodies etc) after my triple jabbed hubby succumbed to whatever a couple of weeks ago, but I remained in rude health; unless I had it so mildly I didn’t even notice. Similar to last summer when my jabbed daughter ‘caught it’ and I didn’t, nor my unjabbed son.
Does it matter any more who caught what and when and from whom? None of the official data is worth jack shit, and as for that coming out of China, I mean, really?
About twenty years ago I had real ‘flu, swirling pits, head felt full of thick soup, in bed for four or five days. Knew I’d get better and did.
I now have the footprint of ‘flu in my DNA because my immune system records and retains it do it can nail it next time it appears.
But if I was to get tested I would be clocked up as a ‘positive’ case and the Feds would be sending the white coats to lock me away, as a danger to the nation.
Almost every doctor knows this is a scam but they are too chicken-#hit scared to say it is a scam.
Oh how I miss my old doctor, Frances Mules of Bromley. A good old-fashioned, Brexit-voting, forty a day smoker, always with an open bottle of decent red wine on the table. She’d have sworn blue murder at what politicians have wrought.
Hubby had real flu in 2019, symptoms exactly as you say, and I came down with the same within a day – both of us completely floored.
I then had ‘long flu’ (lol) and wasn’t right for months, but nobody gave a shit. How I miss those days
So bloody what! Its a cold! Measles is dangerous, this is not.
More scare mongering to keep the fear alive. Ex-WHO …ex-Gates employee…say no more.
For academia and science in general covid is big business even now. Friends who work in research are dropping other projects to concentrate on covid. They need to keep Ovid in the media to keep the shitshow going
There’s a wolf coming ….. a wolf I tell you, a wolf.
(Yawn).
Contagious ≠ dangerous. Modelling ≠ actuality. Forecasts = rollox!
Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic. You will be alright. Just keep taking your hiv boosters, I mean your covid boosters. You will be fine.
But I thought panic was the order of the day. Every day.
Another bloody “scientist” seeking 15 minutes of fame.