Some have asked me what I think about the Desmet thesis of “Mass Formation” (Maßenbildung - a better translation would be “crowd formation”) with respect to Corona hysteria. Malone has popularised it again, and I’m not a great fan of it.
First, I’m very wary of social psychology as a discipline. I think fields like this tend at the edges into pseudoscience. I am doubly wary, when the concepts at issue have an antifascist or anti-NSDAP flavour about them.
This is not because I am a Nazi, OK? I am not. It is because I think people are responsible for their political opinions and that pathologising political opinions is a bad idea that will bite you in the ass sooner or later.
Secondly, while we are suffering under the tyranny of the hysterical, that is manifestly a small minority of actual people. Most people are just severely underinformed about what is going on. Go tour vaccinator Twitter. Check out lockdown Twitter (it still exists).
You will find people who think SARS-2 has a 10% fatality rate. You will find people who think testing positive condemns you to a life of fibromyalgia and brain fog. A lot of these people are sincere, and they’re just misinformed. They’re not crazy.
Thirdly, setting aside the misinformed, and returning to a prior point: A lot of people—a lot of ordinary people—have behaved reprehensibly in the last two years. I have had distant relatives lecture me about my vaccination choices, which are none of their business.
I have dealt with administrators who don’t want to work anymore, but want to collect outsized government salaries, and don’t me to work anymore either, lest somebody show them up.
I’ve been shouted at by crazy middle-aged women in three masks because they thought I passed them too closely on a trail, I’ve been confined to my house for months and subjected to insane disease surveillance by a lot of odious assholes, and I’m sorry, they are not hypnotised …
… They are just behaving terribly. They’re not going to wake up, but if their ludicrous behaviours and attitudes go out of fashion, they’ll stop.
End of thread.
End of thread.
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