It’s official: according the latest news, young people in particular, and the population in general, are experiencing levels of anxiety never seen before. The data suggest that this is largely a phenomenon across countries in the wealthy West, and especially where extreme Covid policies have been enacted. Here in the U.K., the SPI-B unit within SAGE has played a largely unrecognised role in using psychological techniques to shape behavioural responses during the Covid crisis. Led by SPI-B advisors, including Communist Party Member and behavioral scientist Dr. Susan Michie, Government and health policy has been nudged along by generating a climate of fear and anxiety.
Those of us who have studied anxiety extensively are fully aware of the strength of this psychological state to interfere with our thoughts and feelings. As many clinicians and eminent psychologists acknowledge, anxiety, once it takes hold, tends to take over the whole of our personality. The famous existential psychologist Rollo May noted that prolonged exposure to anxiety can, in some cases, lead to a clinical condition he referred to as neurotic anxiety. This is a form of mental illness, and one of its features is that the individual tries to avoid the experience of anxiety by choosing to restrict their own freedoms and choices. Unfortunately, this strategy usually tends to make matters worse, with the result that the sufferer becomes even more afraid of their freedom and the ability to think for themselves and make their own decisions. Such people could be described, as the philosopher-psychologist Martin Buber said in his famous book, Ich und Du (‘I and Thou’), as possessing “a stunted person centre”. By this dramatic expression he conveyed the idea that to avoid the positive anxiety of freedom, people will sometimes diminish themselves and hand over the responsibility for their choices and lives to someone else.
My applied experience with hundreds of professional athletes and other clients who work in demanding performance environments convinces me that we have an epidemic of anxiety. I believe this has been deliberately manufactured by bodies like SPI-B with the complicity of most of the mainstream media. In trying to understand what has been happening to them during these past three years, some of the people I work with are questioning whether there are reasons beyond Covid to account for this prolonged anxiety attack on our culture. Some believe that the aim has been about health, protection from Covid, and to protect the NHS. An increasing number feel that something much bigger is at stake, and that the attack on individual and community freedoms is part of a drive to change the way we live in order to satisfy the climate change agenda. Others seem confused and quite naturally want to resist any thoughts about the possibility of manipulation from governments, supra-national organisations or other forces. This lack of clarity and certainty about what is going on, about the source of their overriding anxiety, of course has the effect of elevating feelings of anxiety.
One of the features of anxiety is that it is related to uncertainty about future actions and events. Anxiety described in this way is perfectly normal and healthy, in that it goes hand in hand with our human condition of freedom. However, when great confusion exists, most especially if this is sustained and maintained over a prolonged period of time, feelings of anxiety can become unbearable. Exhausted and perplexed, some people are tempted, and may in fact be prepared, to hand over their freedom and capacity to choose to experts and those who promise easy answers. This seems to be happening increasingly.
I believe this anxiety crisis is most seriously damaging in that segment of the population who by definition have the least resources to deal with this psychological condition. Of course, I am referring here to young people. It is well known from common sense and developmental psychology research that adolescence is, amongst other things, a period of considerable personal change. For most of us during this phase of our lives, we experience the normal anxieties associated with growth and change. Adolescence is a time during which we become more consciously aware that we have an important role to play in who and what we become. We all remember how this period is fraught with insecurities about our desire to be part of the group, but nevertheless still develop as a unique individual. These and many other issues faced by young people are the uncomfortable yet very often exciting stages we must pass through. It is partly because of this type of adolescent psychology that lockdowns, face masks, social distancing and warnings not to ‘kill granny’ have generated a collapse in the mental health of our young people. Given this situation, it is deeply immoral and unethical for Government, departments of education, health bodies and others to promote what can only be called superficial, quick fix, technique-focused approaches to a problem they have largely created. The first part of recovering mental health should be about returning to normal life, to our conditions and freedoms pre-Covid. Only then should we be looking at specific individual support where this is really needed. And then most of this help must not be of the quick fix variety, but be more in-depth and prolonged input.
In many ways I believe that the authorities are guilty of doing something which is prevalent in so many other parts of Western culture: addressing symptoms and ignoring underlying causes. Not only will this waste huge financial and human resources, but the vast majority of young people especially will not be helped by these actions. My own applied experience during 35 years of practice is that techniques to address symptoms very often fail, certainly beyond any initial benefit, and this leaves the client or patient in an even more hopeless and despairing place.
It also seems incredibly irresponsible for some bodies to be promoting the use of apps and technological devices to manage this anxiety crisis. There is extensive research from a wide range of academic disciplines which confirms that the overuse of mobile phones and the internet is contributing to alienation, social dislocation and a breakdown in community cohesion. Rather than reducing anxiety and increasing the acceptance of our innate freedoms, it very often appears that technology is being used inappropriately to make matters far worse.
I would like to take the opportunity here to plead with teachers, medical professionals, psychologists, the media and parents to speak out in any way they can, and to challenge the poison being offered, especially to our young people, as an antidote to a poison largely created by the policies of governments and their hand-picked experts.
Dr. Mark Stephen Nesti is a Consultant Psychologist and former Associate Professor of Psychology in Sport. His PhD in psychology was on the meaning of anxiety. He is author of Meaning and Spirituality in Sport and Exercise – Psychological Perspectives.
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Does anyone disagree? If it’s difficult to get vowels and syllables out of your mouth, is that anxiety? What if people you nodded at in the street are shambling around like zombies, muttering “social distancing”?
If psychology is a science, it is very young. In the scale of things, it is like taking seriously the babbling of an infant.
‘..the SPI-B unit within SAGE…..using…. techniques to shape behavioural responses’
Socialist fascism at work.
Until we recognise that we have drifted from a capitalist democracy into a ‘democratic’ socialist fascist state, we cannot reform this appalling institution, best illustrated by the socialist fascist NHS state within a state, doctors, nurses terrified into silence…..
All we can do is rock the worlds of our politicians at every single election until they get the message.
The single task they now have is to reduce the size of the bloated and incompetent public sector and enshrine individual freedoms in a written bill of rights, written constitution.
Nothing less will do.
We have been let down, continue to be let down very badly by politicians of all parties in this country, most particularly the ‘leaders’.
This is the modus operandi of the left.
First, insist on imposing a solution to a problem that is either non existent or improving already by itself. Do this under the pretext of kindness, fairness or helping people.
Then when the “solution” makes things worse insist on more of the solution under the pretext that not enough has been done.
Attack anyone who opposes the “solution” as heartless or selfish or wicked.
I take no credit for this observation of the left. It’s entirely Thomas Sowell’s brilliant insight.
For many of us the notion that the whole Lockdown was Psy-ops from the start is hardly novel. At the meeting on Clapham Common on (IIRC) 23rd May 2020 this was a common topic of discussion. This was in the early days, long before vaccinations, and when the mood of people was highly polarised, with some hiding behind the sofa signing up to Netflix and the rest us hammering away on the keyboard or assembling in Clapham Common or Hyde Park. In those days, it was all fairly light-hearted, with “two weeks to flatten the curve, no honestly really this time we mean it”. Even the police were not taking it seriously, and were largely all mouth and no trousers (Derbyshire being an exception),though they did practise their testudo formations and using portable television recording equipment apparently more to inspire fear than for any other purpose. However, they drew the line when people tried to address the crowd with megaphones, and when Piers Corbyn pointed out the PsyOps and other features of the operation (probably at the same meeting) but was promptly bundled away by the police to the depths of the Northern Line. This was the early pre-echoes of the cancel culture that took hold of social media and the MSM to suppress dissent.
“Given a short time with a psycho-politician you can alter forever the loyalty of a soldier in our hands or a statesman or a leader in his own country, or you can destroy his mind.” – L. Beria
“By psychopolitics create chaos. Leave a nation leaderless. Kill our enemies. And bring to Earth, through Communism, the greatest peace Man has ever known ” – L. Beria
“To produce a maximum of chaos in the culture of the enemy is our first most important step. Our fruits are grown in chaos, distrust, economic depression and scientific turmoil. At least a weary populace can seek peace only in our offered Communist State, at last only Communism can resolve the problems of the masses.” – L. Beria
“It is acceptable to suffocate democracy for the sake of socioeconomic equality” – Lenin
“To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit, a luxury of worry-free and aimless people. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie’s aim” – Lenin
What do you call it when you do the same thing over and over and expect different results? “Five Year Plan, comrade!”
Most of those quotes seem to come from L Ron Hubbard’s Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics. (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria ). Ron Hubbard Jr., estranged son of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, stated: “Dad wrote every word of it. Barbara, Bryan, and my wife typed the manuscript off his dictation.” The same book claims scientology is the greatest threat to communism, so I’d take that lot with a pinch of salt.
Meaning that Beria and Lenin were actually nice guys and Marxism has been portrayed poorly and never put into practice properly? I’m not interested in L. Ron Hubbard but it doesn’t mean that if he quotes someone else then nothing is true. Beria was responsible for organizing purges such as the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials, but this was a side show compared to all his other ‘accomplishments’. Yuri Bezmenov has recounted that 80% of the KGB’s work was destabilising and subverting sovereign countries. They did a really ‘good’ job in Africa, South and Central America and South East Asia. The modern Indian Hindu Nationalism spouts anti imperial rhetoric that sounds as though it’s been lifted from either the Morning Star and China Daily.
“It’s official: according the latest news, young people in particular, and the population in general, are experiencing levels of anxiety never seen before. The data suggest that this is largely a phenomenon across countries in the wealthy West, and especially where extreme Covid policies have been enacted.”
Note how the Lancet study in the link basically tries to spin it as “look what you made us do!” when explaining away how countries that pursued an “elimination” strategy were on average LESS stringent than those who pursued a “mitigation” strategy.
“It also seems incredibly irresponsible for some bodies to be promoting the use of apps and technological devices to manage this anxiety crisis. There is extensive research from a wide range of academic disciplines which confirms that the overuse of mobile phones and the internet is contributing to alienation, social dislocation and a breakdown in community cohesion. Rather than reducing anxiety and increasing the acceptance of our innate freedoms, it very often appears that technology is being used inappropriately to make matters far worse.”
What are your thoughts about this recent hypothetical idea of mine? Declare a state of emergency, on the grounds that Big Tech and their antisocial media is an existential threat to civilization itself. Impose a “quarantine” on them for “just two weeks” (right!) wherein all antisocial media are frozen and archived during that time, so they cannot be used, and everyone is logged out simultaneously and cannot log back in during that time. During that time, We the People can then re-evaluate our often unexamined and unquestioned relationship to Big Tech, and in conjunction with our elected representatives in government, decide what the next steps (if any) will be.
I guarantee you, that would have saved FAR more lives than the Covid lockdowns, as the latter saved statistically zilch in the long run in terms of all-cause deaths.
And a (voluntary) smartphone buyback for all ages would save FAR more lives than a gun buyback as well. Something to think about.
(I am only half-joking and being quasi-facetious about that.)
Another idea: Nationalize as public utilities all tech companies larger than a certain size, while banning any ones that are already nationalized (in theory or in practice) by hostile nations (TikTok and the CCP, I’m looking at you!). Just like we should do with the “too big to fail (or jail) banks.
I posted these exact things on the UsForThem substack in the comments section on two of their articles about this issue.
Again, I am only half-joking about this.
‘Our own governments’ terrorised us with the manufactured Covid crisis.
In the UK:
Wow! What do you call that? Treachery?
This is the most serious political situation of all time, with Covid being used as the excuse to enslave the people, making them:
We need to walk this back now and see how this manufactured crisis took off.
For instance, I want to know, what was the evaluation and approval process for the Covid ‘vaccine solution’, against a disease it was known from the beginning wasn’t a serious threat to most people?
It was already up and running in the UK with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in January 2020 – why?
On what basis was what turned into a global mass population vaccine response approved – e.g. where’s the minutes of the meetings for this unprecedented global medical intervention?
Mass formation psychosis?
When I was a young un, in the 60s/70s nuclear war terrified me, it was a real threat, still is! It was everywhere, it was palpable!
Compared to that, climate change is a construct, an unknown, but it still has the power to paralyse children with fear if we push it hard enough!
What have we become?