The Reality of the Pandemic "Crowd"

Interesting essay here about how "Mass Formation Psychosis" actually works.  In particular, note that 'leaders' actually became 'followers'.  The essay also points out that there is no 'evil genius' here who plotted this all out; not Red China, not the WEF.  But the essay falls off the highway later, endorsing 'evolution'--the fancy word for 'progress'--as the remedy for Mass Formation Psychosis.

Read the essay; these excerpts should give you a flavor, but not the whole enchilada.

...One key implication of the crowd dynamic is that there is no single culprit, no head of the snake, no enemy that planned the covid saga ages ago. In crowds, both the population and its leaders get caught in the maelstrom of the adopted narrative, dragging them all into a wild ride that, unlike a ride in an amusement park, has no predictable pathway or ending. Yes, the elites take on the roles of jailers and autocrats, but these are roles demanded of them by their own populations. Should they refuse to play as requested, they would quickly be cast aside and replaced by others who are prepared to do the business. As Desmet points out, removing any part of the elites would have made no difference, as it would make no difference now.

A telling example of this dynamic played out in London in March 2020. Rishi Sunak, the then UK Treasurer (now Prime Minister), recently reminded us of what happened in those days: the medical establishment and the politicians did in fact try to follow the received wisdom of 100 years of medical science and resisted locking down, but such was the uproar in the British population that the government caved in and instigated lockdowns anyway. 

One of us was in London then and can verify from personal experience that this is exactly how it was. The UK government’s feeble resistance crumbled under a tidal wave of fear. After the politicians had succumbed to public pressure, the institutional medics fell in line, pushing to the forefront media hounds like Neil Ferguson, who had a special penchant for playing up apocalyptic scenarios that lent themselves to totalitarian solutions. ...

Ferguson was the British version of Fauci/Birx.  You'll note that since the 'crisis' has abated, Fauci does not give up on his totalitarian nature.

Here's the part that will irritate the bejabbers out of Bannon, Posobiec, et.al.:

...We completely agree with Desmet’s thinking on all of this, although the implication of no ‘grand conspiracy’ is irritating for many in Team Sanity who like the simplicity of a culprit on which everything can be blamed. It’s the easy way out. Yet, is it really likely that the many US judges across the country who were reluctant to enforce the US Constitution were somehow all directed by nefarious Chinese?

 Is it useful to think that the decisions by individual EU countries to mask and inject young children to within an inch of their lives is really all part of a WEF plot hatched 20 years ago? No. One should blame those US judges and EU legislators themselves for what they decided to do, both because the ‘grand conspiracy’ alternative is extraordinarily unlikely and because assigning individual blame for individual actions is a pillar of Western judicial thinking. Holding people accountable for what they did is much more confronting and politically difficult than externalising blame, but it is what needs to be done in order for justice to be restored. ...

Does the Mass Formation hypothesis have weaknesses?  Yes.  Not all countries succumbed to it, which negates Desmet's theory's predicate that:

...alienation was rising and mechanistic, and ‘rational’ thinking had created a belief that complex social problems could be controlled and remedied with technology. Further pre-2020 trends in consumerism and the gradual replacement of many social relations by direct interactions with the state in health, education, and other domains can well be said to have catalysed the emergence of an atomised and lonely population, desperate for common threats to bind them. ...

That turned out to be inaccurate; there were several countries around the world which did not show the psychosis; those countries were in the West and in the Third World, too.

Instead, these authors postulate that 'mass media' (both traditional and social) were the catalyst.

...The key thing explaining how the covid fear swept across the world is then (social) media. New information systems allowed for a self-enforcing wave of anxiety to be transmitted person-to-person at scale across the mediums of information sharing, in an extended and deadly worldwide super-spreader event. 

Yes, that wave was manipulated and amplified for all sorts of reasons, but the existence of shared social media across the world was the real enabler of the emergence of the covid crowds. Mass media is the tinder for global crowd formation...

Well....mass media (social or otherwise) combined with utterly non-critical thinking.  After the 'leaders follow the crowd' postulate above, Trump's social mass-media fixation is most likely what influenced him, along with his "advisers" such as Fauci, who were happy as pigs in mud to exercise their Inner Dictator.

Unfortunately, the authors wander in to an unhelpful defense of the Enlightenment which they connect with their equally unhelpful dismissal of moral strictures; this despite their admiration of Edmund Burke.  Instead of reliance on What Is and Always Has Been, they bring out the brass band of "Progress" and "societal Evolution", the tinkling cymbals of which St Paul wrote a couple thousand years ago.

 ...In the long run, then, the name of the game is not moral appeals but institutional evolution. Even the French revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks, who both used brutal methods to overhaul their societies, in reality kept the vast majority of the existing institutions in place. The French revolutionaries did not destroy the existing bureaucracy or army structures they inherited from the royal court of the Bourbons, but expanded and modernised them. ...

Seeking perfect governance--or the perfect society--here on Earth?

Good luck with that!