From Jim Kunstler at Clusterfuck Blog:
The thesis called mass formation psychosis put forward lately by the Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet — a good digest here in text, not video —
goes a long way to explaining the disgraceful mindfuckery that Western
Civ has fallen for in our time, promulgated by a thinking class that
descended into abject madness. It’s well worth reviewing.
The descent was provoked by the existential anxiety over the collapse of techno-industrial economies and the end of progress
as-we’ve-known-it. (Have you noticed: it was the self-styled
“progressives” who went the craziest?) As Dr. Desmet lays it out, the
disconnectedness of contemporary life, its lack of meaning or purpose
for many, leads to unendurable anxiety. All that inchoate fear seeks
desperately to attach itself to some real object, some thing or some
force that can be comprehended, fought, and triumphantly overcome.
Finding such a target produces an intoxicating sense of communal
connection, purpose, and meaning, driving actions that are often crazy
and also absolutely impervious to rational debate.
The angst in America was well established by 2016. A beaten-down
middle-class suspected that left-of-center politicians did not have
their interests at heart after years of off-shoring their jobs, and they
managed to elect their avatar, Donald Trump, over the obviously
unsympathetic globalist, Hillary Clinton — who snootily tagged her
opposition “the deplorables.” Even so, the polls had her ahead by a
mile. Then, by some weird twist of fate, she lost a few crucial counties
in midwestern states she hadn’t bothered to visit, and was reportedly
too plastered after midnight on election night to come down and console
the troops at campaign headquarters. The shocking election outcome
instantly deranged the nation’s entire managerial class and its
thinking-out-loud interlocutors in the news media and on campus.
The Golden Golem of Greatness, as I liked to call Mr. Trump,
was the perfect target for their animus. Threatening to “drain the
swamp,” he would shatter their hard-won power privileges and deprive
them of their well-worn grifts — such as the various revolving doors
between big money and its regulators. Plus, his rough personality
offended their own pretense of decorum (in pursuit of that power and
grift). They decided that he had to go, and fast, and the whole
managerial class and their allies closed ranks to get it done, not least
the vicious agents of the Intel “Community,” which force-fed all the
federal legal machinery — the official instruments of punishment.
If they could only knock Mr. Trump off the game-board, America’s
troubles would be over. We could get back on track to becoming a utopia
of inclusion, diversity, equity, and self-driving electric cars. For
four years the FBI, the DOJ, and other distributed players (such as the
CIA mole Eric Ciaramella and his NSA co-seditionist Lt. Col. Alexander
Vindman, and such ignoble rogues in Congress as Rep. Adam Schiff and
Senator Mark Warner) beat President Trump like a piñata, casually
breaking the very law that they supposedly represented in the process.
This punishment was accompanied by a growing repertoire of cult-like
rituals — especially around race-and-gender hustles — with rich
opportunities for the new behavior called virtue signaling,
which was essentially a game of collecting brownie points for
status-seeking purposes in the new moral hierarchy of the “Woke.” The
social networks, Facebook and Twitter, amplified every insane strand in
the Woke messaging. As Dr. Desmet says, “The more absurd the rituals,
the more they buy into it.”
This demonic opposition to Mr. Trump, and all the games issuing from
it, produced the characteristic intoxication of mass formation
psychosis. That is, the Left became a big cozy community of people
initiated into a catechism of sacred truths. The important part is that
they felt united in their struggle. Folks in the grip of this belonged
to something at last, a solidarity of certitude, a social organism one
could lose one’s anxious, fretful self in. No more loneliness and ennui.
They were imbued with a sense of purpose: the ritual killing of the
monster called Trump — millions of heroic Captain Willards stealing
up-river to behead the renegade Colonel Kurtz. The news media’s role was
to reinforce all that, with as much bad faith and dishonesty as they
could get away with, in the service of fashioning a consensus that was
eventually named “the narrative” — a self-reinforcing catalog of
approved thought. The anti-Trump news posse garnered brownie points
galore, including Pulitzer Prizes for their completely mendacious
reporting.
The trouble was, for all their epic exertions, they weren’t exactly
winning. The whole RussiaGate extravaganza fizzled — and may even
eventuate in some criminal convictions if independent counsel John
Durham turns out to be for-real. The Mueller Report came up plumb empty,
to thundering disappointment, embodied in Rachel Maddow’s frantically
bobulating Adam’s apple. The UkraineGate impeachment flopped. It was
nice to have a sense of purpose and feel like a member of an exclusive
club, but the Wokesters were unable to “nail that ol’ coonskin to wall”
(as Lyndon B. Johnson once put it about winning the Vietnam War, which
we lost). By January of 2020, it looked like Mr. Trump might even win
re-election — the horror indeed! — considering the Democratic Party
primary candidates were the most forlorn pack of has-beens, nobodies,
kooks, and damaged goods ever assembled for such a contest. But whaddaya
know? Along came Covid-19.
What a lifesaver the ‘Rona was for wobbling Wokedom, a cornucopia of
boons, the gift that kept on giving! It provided an opportunity for
perhaps the most craven public-private cartel in all the land, the CDC /
FDA / NIH / NIAID / Big Pharma gang, to work some amazing hoodoo on the
Golden Golem of Greatness and eventually all the nations of Western
Civ. It put the perfidious, money-grubbing, and medically incompetent
Dr. Anthony Fauci at the elbow of Mr. Trump as, in effect, the National
Covid-19 Coordinator. He played the President like a Flugelhorn through
most of 2020 — and, as the year ground on, Mr. Trump looked like he
painfully suspected as much in all those ghastly televised daily
briefings.
We will not go into the appalling mRNA vaccine boondoggle in detail
here, except to say it reaped zillions for those with a stake in the
patents, including Dr. Fauci. But Covid-19 also provided an excuse to
relax the election regulations and pave the way to colossal ballot fraud
in November, with Marc Elias of the Lawfare gang (and also a partner in
the DNC’s pet law firm, Perkins Coie) scurrying from state to state
tuning the electoral machinery in key swing precincts for a “Joe Biden”
victory — and with hundreds of millions of dollars in help from
Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg. Till then, nothing in all the weaponized
legal machinery across the land had succeeded in expelling the hated
object of the managerial class’s loathing, but the election would git’er
done.
Remember: the Progressive-Woke-Marxist-Jacobins liked nothing better
than inflicting punishment. In fact, when you swept away all their
ideological bullshit and the associated hustles, the movement was
strictly about coercion, about pushing other people around, making them
do as the Woke commissars willed. And there was a clearly
sado-masochistic edge to all that. They relished cancelling people,
wrecking careers, destroying reputations, livelihoods, marriages,
families. Their political leaders had no qualms about exterminating
hundreds of thousands of small businesses in Covid-19 lockdowns
orchestrated by Woke heroes like Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City
and Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Jay Inslee of Washington
State. And, of course, their darlings of the streets, BLM and Antifa,
bashed-in shopfronts, looted all the merch, and burned down the
buildings with mad glee.
But, most importantly, Covid-19 gave the political Left something
else to focus its angst on once Mr. Trump was finally swept off the
scene in the janky election. And until just the last few weeks of 2021,
the virus has furnished endless opportunity for ever greater enactments
of coercion and tyranny. Except now, suddenly, it’s all falling apart.
In America, the claque behind the phantom president “Joe Biden” pulled
the trigger on mandating vaccinations — complete with harsh punishments
for the vaxx-averse — but then two things happened: 1) Federal Judge
Terry Douglas in Louisiana issued an injunction against the mandate that
applies in all fifty states; and 2) the news finally started leaking
out — despite every effort of the US public health officialdom to hide
it — that the vaccines carried an unprecedented risk of harm for
medicines enlisted so casually into emergency use among so many millions
of people, in addition to their negligible efficacy in preventing
illness and contagion.
The Europeans, on the other hand, slid ever-deeper into despotic
measures not seen since the Gestapo terrorized the continent. The
Europeans face the same primal source of anxiety that the Americans do:
the running down of their techno-industrial economies, except their
predicament is arguably a little bit keener than ours is, since they
have hardly any oil and natural gas of their own to run things on, and
suffer terrible uncertainty about who will furnish it for them. If they
had not gone out of their minds over what has turned out to be a pretty
punk-ass virus — when treated early with a menu of cheaply available
drugs — and hadn’t deified the false savior vaccines, they
might be a whole lot more concerned about how they are going to heat
their homes, fertilize their crops, and produce things of value — in
short, remain civilized.
The catch is, they’ve given themselves until February to enforce
their foolish vaccine mandates. The Omicron variant may help, too, since
it is proving so far to be a grossly over-hyped development,
discrediting the paranoia ginned up in the media. Can their courts act
as ours have and put a stop to the madness? Between now and then we’re
likely to see the defeat of the mass formation psychosis in America, at
least, as the country is forced to face the truth of what it has done to
itself.
Or, at least it will be the end of this chapter of that story.
Perhaps the Europeans will snap out of it, too, as they see the
narrative collapse in America. Or are they just too far gone? Standing
by on developments.
