Are we in Mass Psychosis? Or a Great Awakening?

The answer may be both. Which means the world is about to get really interesting...

The awakened and the enthralled

I usually can’t stand it when someone begins a statement with: “There are basically two types of people…”

But sometimes it’s infuriatingly true.

When it comes to our ongoing state of pandemia, it seems to hold: there are those who blindly accept what they hear, and those who question it.

Right versus left, vaxed and unvaxxed, class, race… all those divisions, I think it is now beyond obvious, are deliberate misdirection.

The real divide (or maybe “gulf of understanding” is a better way to think of it) is between the enthralled and the critical thinkers.

“Fear is the mind-killer” said a pretty good book I read when I was a kid. In certain circumstances, this is a good thing. When the axe-wielding maniac emerges from the woods into our campsite, it’s not really the time to question and debate and pontificate on the most optimal self-defense techniques. We act first, and, assuming we aren’t brutally chopped into human kindling, we talk about it later.

Fear is the mind-killer for a good reason. Sometimes thinking gets us killed.

I was as scared as anyone else at the beginning of the pandemic, because fear is a rational response to the unknown. For a few weeks, we all became preppers. (Though I question whether toilet paper was really the most vital post-apocalyptic supply… but I digress.)

The next rational response, however, is to assess. To start looking into things, to gather information, to ask pertinent questions. Slowly, some of us came out of the fear fog, switched our mental awareness back on, and did some research. And this, in turn, made us question what we were hearing in the news media and out of the mouths of our officials. Some of it contradicted everything else we knew to be true, or contradicted what doctors and others researchers were saying, or wasn’t supported by data, or seemed to be inciting needless panic, or seemed to be serving someone’s agenda, or seemed unconstitutional, or was just patent nonsense.

This was awakening.

But when the herd is still bolting (and, in this case, being forced to bolt) you pay a price for defying it. To the fear-addled, the questions we raised were unacceptable. We were labelled as suicidal, stupid, mentally ill, “conspiracy theorists”, purveyors of “misinformation”.

This too, is a more-or-less predictable response. If you and everyone you know are running in abject terror from some threat, real or imagined, and you see someone stop, it seems like they are insanely, stupidly, committing suicide. So the mass psychosis perpetuates.

Most of our friends and families stayed in the chronic fear state.

But eventually all herds must stop running. Blindly fleeing forever (or cowering in one’s house) is not a survival strategy. A permanent state of fear is not possible, or desirable, or healthy. Once you’ve secured your immediate safety, you must, must, must start to think, gather information, and decide what happens next.

And this is vital: we must talk to one another.

And wasn’t this exactly what the powers-that-be tried to stop us doing?

“Stay isolated! Fear your neighbor! He is a source of disease and a purveyor of misinformation!”

If you think that sounds like a desperate attempt to keep the fear narrative going, to keep the herd terrified, to weaponize people against one another, you’re not alone.

The fearmongers could not allow a general awakening.

If the herd stopped bolting and turned on them, they were finished.

So “purveyor of misinformation” became the new: “Heretic! Unbeliever! Witch!” and the unthinking picked up the chant, as they were meant to do.

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The criminalization of dissent

Think about the concept “misinformation” for a moment. It does not actually tell us about the veracity or falsity of a given claim. All it tells us is that the claim is “not approved”.

Not approved by whom, you ask? Good question. (And clearly, you are a heretic for asking it.)

The concept “misinformation” is inherently tied to power. It means that someone has an interest in you accepting their information, and not that information. It amounts to the claim: “Don’t hear that! It is forbidden. Only hear this instead!”

(Hint: These days, when I hear “misinformation” I immediately think “wrongthink.” If it’s something someone doesn’t want me to hear, I want to hear it. This ironically tells me exactly what to pay attention to.)

And this too, makes sense. The powerful always try to capture, regulate, and control the most valuable commodity. If this were the age of the spice trade, they would try to control the flow of spice. If it were gold, they would control the flow of gold. What do you think the powerful would attempt to control the flow of in the supposed “Information Age”?

If only the powerful get to decide what is true and “approved” knowing, that is the same thing as saying “might makes right.” In such a world, things are not true or false based on their veracity or falsity, but whether they serve the interests of those in power or not.

We’ve been through periods in history before where the only truths were “approved truths” and dissenters were made into villains and criminals and scapegoats. Maybe you’ve heard of a little time called the Dark Ages.

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The need for critical thinkers

If you haven’t figured this out by now, information is not just information. It is currency.

It is used to buy minds.

Information can be misrepresented, mismeasured, misinterpreted, overemphasized, downplayed, misunderstood, manipulated, mischaracterized (often using emotionalized language, e.g., “an explosion of cases!”), suppressed, censored, lied about, repeated endlessly until “true”, propagandized, politicized…

You get the idea.

The way that information is conveyed matters.

And so does the why. If conveying certain information (and suppressing other information) serves someone’s interests, we need to be aware of it.

This is the justification for critical thinking. One need not dig deeper.

There’s a quote (probably misattributed, but who cares) from the Buddha which says:

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

That’s as good a motto for a critical thinker as I can think of. (And why it appears on my social media banners).

There are no sacred truths. Every knowledge claim gets the light of reason shined upon it. Every one. Nothing gets a pass. Not based on anyone’s authority. Not based on their so-called “expertise” or credentials. Not based on whether it is “approved” or “disapproved”. It still must pass the truth or falsity test in your own mind.

Above all, it must not set off your bullshit detectors.

If you watch mainstream news and think you’re watching the conveyance of “facts” that don’t serve someone’s interests, God help you. I’m sorry, you might not even possess the capacity for bullshit detection. If you did, some time within ten seconds or so of the opening credits, it would be pealing like a fire alarm.

But “science”, you say. “That, surely, is incontrovertible truth.”

Nope, sorry. It isn’t. And no honest scientist would say so.

“Follow the science” is a particularly egregious assault on the very concept of science. My major in school was the History and Philosophy of Science. I must have missed the day where they taught us that every scientific claim is automatically to be accepted as the incontrovertible truth. On the contrary, they taught us that “scientific truth” is a highly contestable, shifting, nebulous, revolutionary, and sometimes dubious state. “Science” is not a reason to shut off our minds and blindly accept--just the opposite. Scientific knowledge claims are meant to be debated, argued over, challenged, defended, and overturned.

Science is not the end of an argument. It’s the invitation to one.

Science, unlike other forms of knowing, says: “Make your case. Show us your facts. Show us your reasoning. And then we get to have a go at it. And if we find a flaw then it falls; back to drawing board. If we can’t find a flaw, then it stands, for the time being, until it falls or we find a better explanation.” Science never arrogantly presumes it has a hold of “the Truth”, whatever that might be. It says “this is the best model we have, for now.”

And often our models are wrong. For one, they are made by humans, which means they are just as subject to biased, misleading, misunderstood, wrong-headed, politicized, socio-cultural, corporate, interest-serving influences as any other human endeavor. Scientists are also sometimes just plain mistaken. Many, many published scientific papers are later retracted. (Also sometimes good papers are retracted for bad--i.e., socio-political or corporate-serving--reasons.) How could this be if scientists are always right?

Scientists also disagree about things. (Anyone who doesn’t think so has never been in a room full of scientists.) But how can this be if every single scientist is automatically correct?

The reason we value science as highly as we do is not because “science always gets it right.” It is because it is modifiable based on new understanding, or data, subject to error-checking by one’s peers, and by the public, and by basic logic.

Scientific knowledge claims are subject to criticism, reinterpretation, and overturning, by anyone, forever. The truths that science uncovers are understood to be “current best explanations until falsified,” and that’s it. This is why we value science as an enterprise as highly as we do: because, ideally, it continually tries to prove itself wrong and do better.

(By the way, we already have a name for certain, true, sacred  knowledge, set in stone for all time so it  can never be questioned or challenged and can only be pronounced so by a qualified authority: it’s called religion.)

Ultimately, science and critical thinking are synonymous. When critical thinking is equated with “denying the science” we have slipped a fucking rail somewhere.

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Is a Great Awakening even possible in a time of mass psychosis?

In this atmosphere of “forbidden thinking” and “accept only the approved thoughts” does the critical thinker stand a chance?

So often during this pandemic, I’ve been reminded of this Michael Ondaatje quote: “I felt like the only sane man on a ship full of demons.” (Anil’s Ghost)

I think a lot of us feel this way. Especially when surrounded by the mass psychosis of family, friends, coworkers, and nearly every single person in a grocery store walking around with a symbol of sickness and death on their faces, despite being perfectly healthy.

But we’re not alone.

And realizing it is step one in catalyzing the Great Awakening.

My inbox daily probably has somewhere between fifteen to thirty emails from doctors, scientists, clinicians, data analysts, and just ordinary people who think deeply about things. And these emails are filled with charts, data, scientific papers, and analyses. I have accumulated thousands and thousands of points of evidence from hundreds of sane and courageous people, all of them pointing toward one thing: how badly wrong our most powerful institutions have been in this time called “pandemic”. Catastrophically so.

And not just wrong, but dishonest.

The awakening is being driven by immense numbers of hard-working, courageous, evidence-centered people who refuse to let the truth be buried over by the ongoing fear narrative.

Of course, it is hard to bring this to the attention of your fear-addled peers. They resist. They sneer. They lash out, finding and repeating ad hominem attacks against your sources, without ever examining their evidence or thinking about matters for themselves. They seek the warm embrace of their trusted institutions (government, media, and corporations) and the letter agencies (WHO, NIH, NIAID, FDA, CDC, etc.) they believe are protecting them and keeping them safe from external threat.

It is hard for them to entertain the idea that those very institutions and agencies are the threat.

Or that they have been captured.

After all, isn’t it part of the mission of those letter agencies to stand as a line of defense against a rapacious pharmaceutical industry who might unethically profit off of our fear of disease?

But what if they are the pharmaceutical industry? What if they have become the very apparatus through which that industry enacts its agenda? (This can be readily seen, if by nothing else, than by the revolving door of personnel that floats amongst these industries corporations and agencies… they are all one and the same).

And what of it? Captured or not, perhaps the pharmaceutical industry is wonderful and beneficent and have you and your loved ones’ best interests at heart, and care whether you live or die, and don’t care a lickspittle for profit, right?

Ahem. Maybe you’re starting to see what I mean by “enthralled”.

These are the most criminally fined corporations in history. Until recently, they were also the least trusted. On a survey of the least 25 least-trusted institutions guess who took the top four spots?

22. Advertising and public relations.

23. The healthcare industry.

24. The federal government.

And the least trusted… (drum roll)…

25. The pharmaceutical industry.

Kind of makes you wonder what might happen if those four institutions put their untrustworthy heads together to form a unified front with a singular agenda? Boy, that would sure be scary, wouldn’t it?

I give you exhibit A: the world as we now know it.

How quickly we’ve forgotten. In the span of a few short weeks in 2020 almost the entire world was made to forget that they didn’t trust these institutions and instead flocked to them.

Fear, in addition to being the mind-killer, was also the memory-killer.

We forgot that these same actors tried the same plot back in 2009 with H1N1, and were roundly thrashed by the media for creating false panic for financial gain. (The difference being, in the subsequent eleven years, they bought the media).

We forgot that our only real line of defense against these institutions is our ability to share information, to question them, to hold them accountable for their actions.

We forgot that these institutions require more, not less scrutiny.

Not surprisingly, the institutions have made it their specific mission to quash information, and criminalize the scrutinizers, and the enthralled have taken up the cause and proudly wave the “misinformation” flag wherever they see signs of dissent.

But the awakened aren’t falling for it.

There are some things that a critical mind cannot accept. The FDA wanting to hide Pfizer’s raw trial data from the public for 75 years, for example. Or agencies refusing to publish data on hospitalizations and deaths based on vaccination status. Or the emails showing how the CDC directed Facebook to censor information on its platform.

If this were really about putting out “true information” to the public, wouldn’t they happily share these things?

But of course, an informed populace is the last thing they want. They want compliant minds. And those two things are oil and water.

FEE @feeonline

Remember this the next time someone calls for censorship

Censorship is the last refuge of those who fear the truth.

The powers-that-be were counting on the absolute victory and mindless compliance. All the apparatuses of power and media they have at their disposal, but they didn't count on one thing: people. Ordinary people and our distaste for accepting a lie, and for our refusal to accept bullshit when we hear it.

Anti-government protests in Canada, US, Israel, France, Germany, Australia, Italy…

Worldwide trucker convoys. Ordinary, working people, who know they’ve been lied to. And they’ve had it.

It’s all unravelling now. The fearful are coming out of their fog. Finally, we are in an awakening.

Times are about to get interesting, indeed.

I just wonder if the powers-that-be are watching in dull horror as it all crumbles and they are coming to a dizzy, painful, ball-kicking realization: all their power and money and influence and technology and propaganda didn’t prevent an awakening at all.

It caused it.