MFP and we!

Stacy McCain, the invaluable blogger known as the Other McCain, called upon Thursday, January 27, 2022, to be "Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day," and I said I would. 

Here's some crazy now!

In the unlikely event that you see this post and not the one at McCain's much more popular blog, I thought we ought to go through the basics for my own benefit as well as everyone else's. 

What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? 

MFP is a supposed mental illness that is said to affect crowds--thus the mass part. Dr. Robert Malone says this is a kind of induced psychosis caused in the population by a lack of social cohesion on one side and a large fear stimulus on the other: 

The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible "object of anxiety" and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.

As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view.  Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong. 

 

Both of these conditions were present at the outbreak of the Chinese Death Virus known as COVID-19, so if the theory is correct, it was an ideal time for mass formation psychosis to take hold.

Is MFP Real?

Well, it isn't recognized by the American Psychological Association, which got its collective knickers in a twist when Dr. Malone described it on Joe Rogan's show and listeners attacked a psychologist who disputed (or as they like to say, "fact-checked") a claim that "millions of Americans have been 'hypnotized' into accepting mainstream messages about COVID-19, including the importance of vaccination, through 'mass formation psychosis.'" It certainly seems like some of the attackers were very personal and rude, and even threatening, and I will not excuse that. Anyway, that's not the question; the question is, is there such a thing as Mass Formation Psychosis?

I have reason to think so. There have been so many crazy stories in the past year on all sides, like the mom who locked her kid in the trunk of the car when he tested positive for COVID-19. Who does that?

On a personal note, I know a perfectly respectable woman in the healthcare industry who in 2020 thought Trump was going to send troops into the streets to enforce quarantine, but now is cutting off friends who won't toe the line on masking in all times and places. She cut me off cold, and I was being nice about it. 

So yeah, I think a lot of people have gone nuts over this virus, but the insanity was probably bubbling right under the surface anyway.  Which sounds like "lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression" to me.

Why Is This Being Treated as a Conspiracy Theory?

Why shouldn't it? 

I know some very nice and intelligent people who are suspicious of the vaccines for COVID, but some people are close to the microchip-implanting theory level, that Bill Gates has personally put a microchip in each vaccine. I gotta say, if so, it is really small, because that was the thinnest needle I ever got stuck with. 

The problem, as I see it:

1) Despite the angry APA objections (in part, I think, to the idea of "mass hypnosis," which sounds like a supervillain plot), the MFP conforms with previous theories of mass delusion. Long before Eric Hoffer wrote True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Charles Mackay wrote Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds (1841). And Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism trod this ground mightily, although a lot of leftists hate its conflation of Communism and Fascism despite both being a form of totalitarianism (Mussolini's famous dictum of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” applies to both). So what's the problem with writing about it? Do psychologists resent taking sociology and philosophy seriously?

2) Yes, maybe these days, because it goes against the desired zeitgeist. The problem is, there really have been conspiracies around, which no one wants to acknowledge even as the truth comes out. The Russia collusion that should have been a massive political scandal on the perpetrators, the strange billionaire who funds district attorneys who will not uphold the law, the complicity of our National Institutes of Health in the origin of the Chinese Death Virus and the refusal to stop funding said research in 2020 despite a presidential order, the code of silence and outright lies over Hunter Biden's laptop and exposed shenanigans prior to the 2020 election, the "fortification" of the election, the failure to report the weakness of the vaccines and even their risks (which was not the media's position in 1976 when there was mass vaccination but a Republican president), the criminal attacks on parents by school boards, the failure of lockdowns to stop anything but prosperity, the elite class's refusal to abide by the rules it wishes to impose on the rest of us for everything from policing and disease spread to global warming, the non-punishment of most upper echelon types for any malfeasance, the support by the same for rioters while our cities burned, and on and on.   

3) Which leads us to the fact the elites in our society have been failing us for a long time, and COVID exposed them not only as failures, not only as hypocrites, but also as thieves, cowards, and bastards, who do not care about the poor and actively hate the middle class that feeds them.

My advice to those in charge of stuff: If you want the people to stop believing in conspiracies, stop conspiring. As Jacques Abbadie once wrote, "One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages." What do you expect us to think when you've been so very bad?