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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Contempt of court.
seems if they won’t exert left in any party can’t get through their evil policies or find it inconvenient to do do using Parliament they can use the judiciary to deliver.
Now it is clear they over ride even their left wing judges when the answer is inconvenient.
Any decent, honest, law-abiding, patriotic Prime Minister would have forced the resignations of all those engaged in this juvenile plotting.
That sums up the state of this country today.
I am ashamed to think of this man as our Prime Minister.
Why is this Trans Craziness so important to the Uniparty?
Is it just part of the general Satanic Destruction of God’s Creation?
Or is it a convenient Distraction from the Invading Muslim Army still swarming in every day?
Small boat arrivals: last 7 days – GOV.UK
Good question. The most obvious explanation for me is that it’s part of a divide and conquer strategy. I doubt that Starmer cares much about trannies or any of the other “oppressed minorities” he pretends to champion, beyond they are useful to him.
He doesn’t care much about anything. He’s so self obsessed and enamoured with globalism he sees being PM as a stepping stone to an EU/WEF job so he’ll let the country go to ruin, that’s what globalisation wants, the end of nation states.
It is a vital item in the ‘Progressive’ policy agenda being pushed as hard as possible around the world in recent years. I call it the ‘smash society’ agenda. See Canada under Turdew, see USA under Biden and of course see the EU, supporting it to the hilt. Anything to help to ‘smash society’.
Starmer told us serfs, back in July last year, in his speech in the ‘Rose Garden’, after the summer riots, where he said … ‘The Labour Government will continue to introduce progressive policies in order to combat populism and right-wing extremism.’ That’s why he will not do anything to stop the boats.
When the Government circumvent the Courts the whole thing is close to collapse.
I hope.
What rights do trannies want that they don’t already have?
The right to decree that humans must not have a sex would be my guess.
Yet again, another article that avoids to.mention Starmer’s vested interest in the issue.
I recognize that ‘hate crime’ of a skirt! Someone ring the police.
Look at them, hanging round the bogs like a bad smell.
If only more men agreed, James. Imagine stating that women wanting to keep their toilets as female only is somehow a ”privilege”…
”I’ll tell you something for nothing…
If I was with my mother, or my sister, or my aunt, or my nieces, or any of my female friends, & I witnessed them being intimidated, harassed & hectored by this rabble, as they attempted to use THEIR OWN SPACES…
I’d be having words.”
https://x.com/DreyfusJames/status/1914321320235483442
Look at these mingers. Adam’s another decent man unafraid to stand up for women’s rights and protect his female loved ones from this insane ideology. Much respect for the real men out there;
”It is my f*****g business, because my loved ones will be in women’s single sex spaces with you lot & stats suggest that 96% of you still have full male genitalia.
This is a cult.”
https://x.com/EssexPR/status/1914286426453160200
The State Loves Useful Idiots
If he’s no careful this issue will bring him down.
It us SO ludicrous and he is so egregiously on the idiotic side of it…
You can understand them not wanting to offend the muslim vote, but the trans lobby? Purely from cynical self-interest, it makes no sense – can they be motivated by sincerely held principle!
“Principle?”
Not one of Kneel’s mob could define principle.
The Supreme Court was one of Blair’s wondrous pieces of legislation…now it doesn’t suit the new Labour PM.
Arise Sir Kneel stop grovelling to the twisted cult, you absolute hypocrite.
Two-Tier regards “The Law” as the equivalent of Holy Writ. So he can’t condemn this judgement. But he can change “The Law.”
However, McSweeny knows that the vast majority of the electorate agrees with the Supreme Court, so any attempt Two-Tier makes to change “The Law” will get a severe electoral backlash.
So I expect they will “reach out” to the ECHR who will declare what “The Higher Law” is … and Two-Tier will claim that he is obliged to follow “The Higher Law.”
We’ll see ….
I am not left wing biased myself, but I know people who are, and many of them are not in favour of trans ideology. I don’t understand what branch of the left the Labour Party is part of that is against the correct ruling by our judges that Trans “women” are not women. I’m pretty sure many genuine socialists would not want to be part of it.