Like most Daily Sceptic readers I’m just an ordinary citizen outraged at the gratuitous suffering and absurdities of the last three years. We are all accidental activists. Yet it just so happens that for 12 years I worked with a plethora of Government departments including the Department of Health, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and the Department of Education (under its ever-changing names) and many others. I also have a PhD in philosophy and for 30 years I have been a psychotherapist, working with hypnosis and collaborating with Paul McKenna on a series of best-selling books. I found that I was uniquely well placed to comment on the Covid imbroglio.
I started a blog and in May 2020 the Lockdown Sceptics website, as it was then, picked up on my piece about how Covid catastrophists were behaving like members of the cult researched by social psychologist Leon Festinger in When Prophecy Fails. The more evidence accrued that they were wrong, the more fervently they asserted they were right. Later I offered an alternative to the cock-up versus conspiracy dichotomy, and several of my other posts have been flagged up in the News Round-Up section.
In the last year or so I have not blogged so much because I have been writing a book, The Bug in our Thinking, which addresses a critical question: how do so many decent, sensible people become entrapped in delusions?
The book is built on sound philosophy but it is far from an academic text. Led by stories, it explores the practice of hypnosis, the nature of our being, and the winding path towards clearer perception. The deep patterns that facilitated recent events long pre-date them and we face even bigger problems than the over-reactions to Covid, hideous and deadly though they are. The same technology that liberated us from grinding poverty has rendered us profoundly vulnerable to delusion and our efforts to educate our way out of ignorance often increase our vulnerability.
Readers sceptical of mainstream narratives will find the book gratifying and it will equip them to bypass the frustrating arguments that we have been having since March 2020. However, beyond ratifying the sceptical point of view, it has another, greater, purpose.
It is written to be welcoming to those mainstreamers identified by Mattias Desmet who have fallen into mass formation and been captured by orthodoxy. There is not one mention of Covid, nor vaccines, in the whole book. It is neither polemic nor confrontational, rather it is a gentle invitation to all comers to a more thoughtful understanding.
You can pre-order The Bug in our Thinking now via my website and this is way I prefer to sell it.
For those outside the U.K., or who prefer an ebook, it is available on Amazon on its many global sites and there will soon be an audiobook version as well, again via Audible and Amazon.
However absolutely the best way to get a copy of the book will be to come to the book launch on May 24th in London. It will be an opportunity for our community, born online, to meet face to face. There will be others there who may not be sceptical – but that is the point. We need to understand each other more, and those with a reasonably open mind will find in my book the means to do so. If you would like to be put on the guest list for the launch please email me here by May 20th.
It will be a great pleasure to see you there.
The Bug in our Thinking by Hugh Willbourn – Book Launch
Wednesday May 24th, 5.30pm to 7.30pm
Old Diorama Arts Centre, London, NW1 3FE
The building is less than five minutes walk from Warren Street Tube station. Here are the directions and access details.
You will be able to purchase a (signed!) copy of the book for £13.50 and save the cost of postage. Please bring cash.
What sort of a book is it? What a very good question. Here is an early, unedited review:
John Heron meets Roger Zelazny in this rollercoaster ride through some of the multi-layered intricacies of human consciousness and how we make sense of things. Written for grownups – such an immense relief to be spared the smug condescension to be commonly found in such writings. Willbourn is determined to meet us on his level, and if we’re not there already we find ourselves picked up by the scruff and ceremoniously brought along. Quite exhilarating. And very, very funny in many parts. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I loved reading it anyway. This is a robust, challenging, absorbing, lively and illuminating read. And utterly human and personal. Almost impossible to put down.
Catherine Llewellyn, YesYouNow.today
I had to google John Heron and Roger Zelazny, but having done so I am flattered to be put in their company. I hope to meet you on May 24th.
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This is what those the inadequate ppl we call socialists do. Since they are by definition incapable ignorant ppl following such a creed, they interfere and destroy everything they touch since they always know best. Is there one example of anything on earth where socialism has worked/improved things?
Let’s look at the history. First it destroyed France with it’s mad revolution. Then the rapist Marx refined the creed which Lenin picked up destroying Russia, Mao similar in China. Hitler scrubbed out a couple of bits of Marx ramblings regarding property theft called it National Socialism causing ww2. In the so called free west whilst we have avoided revolution and total take over yet we are being slowly drowned by global socialism. This mutation is led by the bureaucratic blob in Europe and angry man Brandon amongst others imposing collectivist green/lbgt/covid ideologies.
Sad times in ‘Honkers’, though it wasn’t always ‘Bottoms Up’ and sweetness and light. I first visited H-K in ’72 and continued to do so a half-dozen times a year throughout the 70s. An ex HM Forces chum was was an Inspector in the Royal H-K Police force, as it was then called. Corruption was rife in ‘Asia’s Finest’ as it was then named, with the standing joke that “H-K had the finest police force money could buy.”
China was never ever going to stay out of Hong Kong ! If you take this situation as an example the same thing is happening on the world stage , we are being consumed ! Please watch Bidens Nation address to see all the useless idiots clapping away at his every word 🤢
Kamala’s reaction was particularly egregious.
Strangely enough, when China does this sort of thing and the western world stands back, it’s never compared to Munich. The shrill voices claiming Hong Kong today, the whole of Asia tomorrow, we don’t hear that at all. Putin apparently is Hitler itching to invade all of Europe but Xi jingping isn’t dangerous and we’re not encouraging him by quietly letting China suck Hong Kong in Anchluss style.
I wonder why?
I visited Hong Kong as a tourist shortly before UK’s 99-year lease ended and there seemed to be a certain animosity towards Europeans, which is understandable since they were under colonial rule – and Chinese and British tastes in most things are quite different.
Margaret Thatcher had already agreed not to fight a war against China for Hong Kong – thank goodness – and I am sure nobody really believed the “One country, two systems” promise would be kept very long.
There was an interview of a Chinese girl some time ago where she said everybody knows the rules in China: if you stick with them you will have no problems, if you fight them then you will.
I understand that half the Taiwanese are also in favour of joining China, so perhaps they will go the way of Hong Kong – if USA does not intervene.
China is certainly doing very well economically and its population is climbing up the steep ladder to prosperity.
It is interesting to compare the systems of government between the so-called democratic west and China in the east, whereby the differences appear to be diminishing!
The Chinese being forcibly locked inside their own homes during the famous ‘pandemic’ was absolutely extreme and doubtlessly caused many deaths, not only when the one block of flats caught fire, but the western world was not much better, even partly imposing mandatory vaccination. Was there also mandatory vaccination in China? I do not know.
And anyone commenting here will be aware of how careful Daily Sceptics must be with what may be published and what may not be published. Even “free speech” in the west is constantly under attack.
And who voted in the west for net zero, to abolish travel by car in 2035, for war with Russia, for transgenderism indoctrination and so forth?
Same here. I went to H-K in late summer 1996, and also did a day trip to Macau. The route in to H-K was from Heathrow to the old Kai Tak airport in H-K, then travelled back by train with a few days in Beijing, then via Mongolia, Irkutsk, Yekaterinburg, & Moscow ( with breaks at those places). Then it was a through sleeping car from Moscow to Brussels Midi, and my first trip via Eurotunnel (to Waterloo International then). It was organised by an agent based in Bristol. The train route through China was on the old line via Wuhan from Guangzhou, which I think a lot has been superseded by a new high speed line.
Should we not also call out the betrayal of HK by Chris Patten.