Triggering Mass Psychosis
A Covert Weapon for Conquest
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As of February 2021, it is a medical fact that fear-inducing information repetitively spread through mass media can and does adversely affect the general public’s mental health in the form of nocebo effects and mass hysteria.
In this article, we will explore the realities of mass psychosis, what ingredients are needed to trigger it, and discuss how to combat it as individuals and groups.
Media, Normalization, and Mass Psychosis
Three scientists, Philipp Bagus, José Antonio Peña-Ramos and Antonio Sánchez-Bayón authored a study last year where they argued that mass and digital media, in connection with the state, may have had adverse consequences during the COVID-19 crisis. The scientists claimed that the resulting collective hysteria may have contributed to policy errors by governments not in line with health recommendations, despite the insistence of the corporate press and private institutions such as the WHO and CDC (who many still believe to be actual governing entities, and not the privately funded institutions that they are).
While mass hysteria can occur in societies with a minimal state (a state with the least possible amount of power over the people,) the study shows that there exist certain self-corrective mechanisms and limits to the harm inflicted, such as sacrosanct private property rights.
That’s a fancy way of saying, in a society with limited government—the conservative ideal—information that causes mass hysteria can still flow, but the harm it causes is reduced due to more respect for the rights of others. If a society holds sacred property rights (respect for inalienable rights, a pillar of a true rule of law society,) then the respect limits mob mentality associated with rioting, property destruction and mass social violence against others.
For instance, the death of George Floyd in May 2020 and the resulting media-fueled public rage and hysteria did not produce a lot of harm (riots) in smaller towns and rural areas. During the BLM riots of 2020, the areas of the country that arguably have the least respect for individual rights (and the most socialist ideology), also saw the most damage and problems due to rioting, such as New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles. In small towns where everyone tends to know everyone else, and as such, respect for one’s neighbor is often more present, there was significantly less property damage; it almost all happened in large cities where social conditions make the social cost of harming others less of a deterrent.
One of the key ingredients that trigger mass hysteria is when self-reinforcing negative information comes from a presumably authoritative source. Here, self-reinforcing negative information is, for instance, the opinion that George Floyd died due to systemic racism, and you continue to reinforce that belief by consuming social media that agrees with it. Combined with the echo chamber of mass propaganda media (CNN, NBC, and NYT all echoing the same narrative), the systemic racism component of George Floyd’s death all but guaranteed public outrage. The authoritative sourcing acts as if the authority has rendered permission for violence, normalizing and even encouraging citizens to participate in the hysteria.
Generally speaking, whatever order exists in a social group, such as a city or nation, remains unless the social order is degraded through the media, using what we now refer to as fifth-generational warfare tactics or color revolution methodologies.
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917, China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, and Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity were all fueled and supported by mass media and the spread of self-reinforcing negative information. The movements capitalized on public discontent with the existing order, using populist ideologues that encouraged dissent against the establishment. And as a sidebar, most if not all color-style revolutions involved government- or internationally-sponsored intelligence agency support.
When the media are politicized as a tool for psychological warfare, as we saw in 2020, and when social networks make negative information and propaganda omnipresent, hysteria becomes far more likely.
Mass Formation Psychosis Defined
The French polymath Gustav Le Bon said in his seminal work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind that:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduces them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”
Additionally, psychologist Carl Jung said in his The Symbolic Life:
“the greatest threat to mankind lies not with the forces of nature nor with any physical disease, but our inability to deal with forces of our own psyche.”
Though the situation played itself out in a much more overtly barbarous way, one cannot help drawing parallels between our current societal schism and the mass psychoses of the American and European witch hunts that took place during the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century. We often look back on these dark times and wonder how so many people could have gone along with such unjustified and obvious cruelty. During the witch hunts, thousands of individuals (mostly women) were killed; not because of any actual crimes that they’d committed, but because they were the scapegoats of societies gone mad.
“Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions — the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury.”
~ Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth
Mass psychosis or mass formation psychosis is not a standard term used in psychology, sociology or other areas of official research.
While the term has been historically used to refer to the collective insanity that happened during World War II or the Cold War, after Dr. Robert Malone’s appearance on Joe Rogan in February of 2022, the mainstream media propaganda machine worked tirelessly to discredit the idea.
And for good reason.
The phrase accurately describes the effect the globalist propagandists had on the unwitting masses, who were swiftly recruited into acting as pawns for the COVID policy machine.
Let’s define Mass Psychosis.
Psychosis is defined as conditions that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality. Mass Formation Psychosis—again not an official term—might be defined as a group disconnected from reality, triggered by some event.
Usually, the term mass formation psychosis is used to refer to a group of people, like the Nazis, that collectively believed in something that caused them to lose touch with reality and in doing so, justify committing horrific acts and crimes against humanity.
Dr. Malone’s use of mass formation psychosis on the Joe Rogan Podcast implies the people have been weaponized and those who caused it are as bad as the Nazis—which is accurate, and therefore, a huge threat to the pandemic industrial complex. He also suggests that the people are effectively hypnotized by propaganda, also highlighting the hypnotist as the perpetrator.
The term implies that when one is connected to reality—not psychotic—then they are less likely to a) experience mental illness and b) commit harmful acts of violence. This implies that being connected to reality—the truth—acts as a deterrent to immoral behavior. It’s an idea usually found in religion. The founding fathers of the US believed in this idea of truth and morality.
Mass formation psychosis also suggests that social reinforcement plays a role in justifying harm that would otherwise be considered taboo. So-called mob mentality can lead people to commit some of the most horrific acts of cruelty (see Japan's Infamous Unit 731: Firsthand Accounts of Japan's Wartime Human Experimentation Program and Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; also see this post I wrote for the Knowledge Based substack).
When it happens, people in the group hysteria act as if they are drunk or intoxicated—numb to the fact they are engaging in criminally harmful behavior.
Considering the above-mentioned ideas associated with mass formation psychosis, Dr. Malone’s comparison was a damning indictment against the media, government, COVID policy, and all those who supported it. Like the Nazis, the COVID and BLM hysteria was fostered by authorities and the media encouraging a certain level of group participation in a harmful social trend.
For COVID, people were asked to isolate themselves, put their lives on hold, cripple their businesses, blindly accept the decrees of medical authorities that a vaccine is safe and effective without testing, and to consider themselves virtuous for doing so. On top of that, the media and COVID policy pushers argued that anyone who didn’t do these things was a threat to public safety, or worse, that they were to blame for the death and suffering of those afflicted by COVID. All of this contributed to a perfect storm of mass formation psychosis, where legions of people felt justified in lashing out at anyone who dared to go against the COVID in-group.
Karens (aggressively antagonistic people that feel justified in acting as hall monitors for some seemingly justified cause) poured into public spaces, yelling at those who refused to wear masks, resisted COVID jabs, or spoke out against the unproven and speculative COVID health guidelines. In the end, a formerly peaceful population was pitted against each other.
When a mass psychosis occurs the results are typically devastating.
Prolific Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who studied this phenomenon, wrote that the individuals who make up the infected society become “morally and spiritually inferior” and that they “sink unconsciously to a lower intellectual level.” Jung claimed that these individuals become “more unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable… Crimes the individual alone could never stand are freely committed by a group smitten by madness.”
Psychogenesis
What creates mass psychosis in a population?
To answer this, let’s consider what makes an individual descend into madness.
While there are many potential triggers to madness, such as excessive use of drugs and alcohol, brain injuries and other illnesses, these causes are not applicable because they affect individuals not groups of people. What we must look at is the psychological, or what is called “psychogenic” triggers, as these are the mechanisms that typically trigger mass psychosis.
The most prevalent psychogenic cause is a flood of negative emotions that affect the mind’s ability to logically process its reality—feelings such as fear and anxiety that drive a person into a state of panic.
Think: Trauma and the resulting desire to escape that trauma at nearly any cost.
Due to the fact human beings are social creatures, emotions are easily shared and magnified in group settings, making group emotion a likely candidate for triggering a mass formation psychosis. If we look at past events of mass psychosis, like 9/11, a false flag event can be used to trigger a grand trauma spectacle for the masses along with a plea to authorities to “solve the problem.”
While it is possible and recommended that one escape this hyper-emotional state through adaptive means, such as facing up to and defeating the fear-generating threat, another way to escape is to go through a psychotic break. A psychotic break is not always a descent into a state of greater mental disorder like many tend to believe; it is a reordering of one’s experiential world that blends fact and fiction in a way that helps to end the feelings of panic. It’s a replacement of one frame of interpretation or way of organizing information in your experience for another—one that is more in alignment with reality’s anti-psychosis power.
The truth sets us free.
Silvano Arieti, one of the 20th century’s foremost authorities on schizophrenia, explains the psychogenic steps that lead one into madness.
The first step, Arieti claims, is the stage of panic. This is the point when the individual begins to perceive things differently, is frightened on account of this change in perception, and lacks the knowledge necessary to understand or explain what is going on.
The last element is critical. Without understanding, the psyche naturally recoils, it triggers a flight or freeze response instead of the fight—the bravery response. This creates an opening for psychological manipulation; the panicked mind is searching for an easy explanation that will create a way out of the situation causing the panic. There is no shortage of manipulative forces (e.g. globalists) who are all too willing to provide this perceived “way out,” and the panicked person is willing to deny objective reality and even commit atrocities, fully believing they are justified in doing so.
For instance, the collective rage felt toward “the system” and police by those who believed the BLM version of the George Floyd events was “relieved” by protests and rioting. This response was promoted in the media and by social media influencers.
Think of how easily the masses were shepherded into a heightened state of fear at the outset of the pandemic, disproportional to the actual danger of the situation—there was and is no real threat from COVID-19. Despite many of the youth posturing as if they loved science, the reality was that in most cases they didn’t even possess a modicum of scientific knowledge regarding viruses and their transmission outside of what was carefully promoted in the media. Blind belief was the standard response. A virus is significantly smaller than bacteria and masks are effectively useless at preventing the spread, which was supported by scientific studies in the past and present.
Not only were those who lacked the proper knowledge to make educated personal decisions about the pandemic being inundated with misleading information, but all of the detractors who were actually operating from a place of knowledge were swiftly silenced, humiliated, and in many cases lost their ability to practice medicine (in the case of MD’s) or their scientific grants (in the case of scientists).
The next step is what Arieti calls a phase of “psychotic insight,” whereby an individual succeeds in putting things together via a pathological way of interpreting reality, allowing them to explain away what they are experiencing regardless of their explanation’s validity.
In other words, when Nazis dehumanized the Jews and blamed them for all their woes, adding to this narrative the idea of being the chosen people via the superior race doctrine, they opened the door for self-justified inhumanity. The “insight” is psychotic because it is based on delusions and not on adaptive and life-promoting ways relating to whatever threats originally precipitated the panic. It’s not in alignment with ultimate truths, which in religion are termed the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, or in secular terms, the fact of one world and one humanity, and universally recognizable harms and rights—the tenets of secular humanism.
The delusion is that harmful behavior is a solution or method of dealing with the problem that triggered the panic. These delusions provide the one in panic an escape from the flood of negative emotions, but they do so at the cost of losing touch with reality.
Is this starting to sound familiar to anyone?
The Destruction of Morality and the Psychosis of a Ruling Elite
If a panic-triggering flood of negative emotions in a disempowered and vulnerable person can trigger psychosis, then mass psychosis can result when a population of disempowered and vulnerable individuals is driven into a state of panic from all angles by threats real, imagined, or partly fabricated.
(Consider the exaggeration of COVID deaths by Pharma-funded news organizations as just one of many examples.)
As delusions can take many forms, and madness can manifest in countless ways, the specific manner in which a mass psychosis unfolds will differ based on the historical and cultural context of the affected society. In our modern era, it is the mass psychosis of totalitarianism that appears to be the greatest threat.
Professor Arthur Versluis lays out exactly what the totalitarian mass psychosis looks like in his work The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism:
“Totalitarianism is the modern phenomenon of total centralized state power coupled with the complete obliteration of basic, individual human rights. In a totalized state. There are those in power, and there are the objectified masses … the masses are transformed into dependent subjects of these pathological rulers, and take on a psychologically regressed and child-like status.”
Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s preeminent scholars, called totalitarianism “an attempted transformation of human nature itself.” This matches the type of cult-like features we see in totalitarian regimes (e.g. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the radical left groups of BLM, LGBTQ+, and the like). Once the disconnect has occurred, once an individual and their in-group have no clear and effective moral compass, the soil is ripe for triggering a mass psychosis.
It looks something like this:
A trigger event occurs, like COVID or a tragedy of some kind. The general population hands control of their own lives over to a priest class, ideologues, politicians or bureaucrats who themselves suffer from a form of delusion. Only a deluded ruling class would believe that they alone possess the knowledge, wisdom and acumen to completely control society in a top-down manner (a like megalomaniac); and only under the spell of these delusions would anyone believe that a society composed of power-hungry rulers and a psychologically regressed population could lead to anything besides mass suffering and social ruin.
What exactly triggers the psychosis of totalitarianism? It almost always begins within the society’s ruling class.
Oftentimes the bankers, CEOs, politicians and old-money patriarchs who make up the ruling class are prone to delusions, and no delusion is more attractive to the power-hungry than the idea that they can, and should, control and dominate an entire society. For example, the Papal Bull Unam Sanctum declared: “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff,” which helped inaugurate the conquest of foreign lands under the Doctrine of Discovery.
When a ruling elite becomes possessed of a political ideology of this sort, whether it be religion, communism, fascism or technocracy, the next step is to induce a population into willingly accepting their rule by infecting it with the mass psychosis of authoritarianism, although it isn’t branded this way to the masses.
Authoritarianism says, “We who are in power have the authority, and therefore, we must know what the problem is and how best to solve it. Anyone who gets in the way is the enemy of the party and a threat to our utopia.”
For COVID, it was the authoritarianism of the WHO, NIH, and CDC, populated by their devote priesthood: Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
This deadly game of domination and control, of subjugation of free thought, free speech, and free enterprise is hardly new. It’s been going on for as long as people have organized themselves into social groups for mutual protection.
In the next installment in this two-part series on mass psychosis, we’ll show that the psychosis used by the elite requires a break from objective morality to be effective.
We’ll also talk about why the founding fathers anchored their ideas of inalienable rights to a Creator, which was a major problem for the power-hungry elite at the time. We’ll break down how the globalists used menticide—the rape of the mind—to affect their insidious plans, closing with steps we can take to end this mental imprisonment system.
***Ryan DeLarme contributed to this article.
Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.
If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of my work for free on Substack.
Psychogenic triggers are the cause of the disease; truth and morality are the cure - well said.
People are fallible, God is not...
Thank you for a very well thought-out and written article.
Excellent and thought provoking article!!!!! Thank you Justin as this explained so much to me as it truly breaks down how diabolical people with an agenda can effect the masses.
I look forward to your part 2.