By David Hughes, Valerie Kyrie and Daniel Broudy
Exclusive to Unlimited Hangout.
With the declaration of the pandemic that changed the world in March 2020, an army of thought police descended upon populations worldwide. Overnight, the public face of science was transformed from a civil and civilian endeavor into a matter of law and order. In place of what had formerly emanated from research communities came edicts from government officials, bolstered by celebrity bureaucrats, enforced by censorship, smearing, and coercion, and backed up by riot squads (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). In the process, science as previously known, a careful product of time, hypothesis-testing, collective critique, and pertinent subject matter expertise, gave way to The Science™, a kaleidoscopic, ever-changing and capricious set of pseudo-medical justifications for government overreach and violations of citizens’ rights, riding on rolling waves of public messaging and manufactured fear, in keeping with a totalitarian model.
From the earliest days, there were those who could see these developments as dangerous, and those who could not. There were those who saw that the sharp turn away from democracy, due process, and human rights had nothing to do with empirical science whatsoever. And those who did not. The former have been mystified by the latter, and increasingly so as time has passed. Why can’t they see what’s going on?
See full story here.
@Dawn Hoagland: Thank YOU for calling out salient points. Much Appreciated.
While wable to recognize Desmet’s construction as psychobabble, I did not glean the really dangerous quality of diversion it possessed. Thanks for directing attention to this review.
These three authors have done an incredibly thorough job of analyzing Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, and debunking his theory of Mass Formation. It is a long, well documented article which slams Desmet’s attempt to whitewash the atrocities that have been committed under medical martial law by ignoring them, and exonerate the perpetrators by justifying their behavior. Excerpts from the article:
“Such an extraordinary phenomenon, which runs contrary to human nature and self-interest, does not happen by accident. In the Covid-19 context, we are almost certainly looking at an extremely well-planned psychological warfare operation, modeled on techniques developed in Nazi Germany, intended to destroy liberal democracy by rendering the bulk of the population unwilling or unable to fight to defend freedom (Hughes 2022a). Yet in Desmet’s depoliticized world, the reason why people were willing to put up with so much pain and suffering is that a “hypnotic story” focused their attention on a “small aspect of reality to such a degree that everything outside it, including one’s own pain and to a broader extent, one’s own interests, passes unnoticed” (p. 102). There is no consideration of who was telling that “hypnotic story,” to what end, or what perception management techniques were used to sell it.”
“In his book about the psychology of totalitarianism, Desmet has remarkably little to say about the criminal mindset of totalitarian regimes. The “criminal immunity enjoyed by banks,” for Titus (2021), proves that the United States is no longer a constitutional republic under the rule of law.”
“The slide towards lawlessness has also been evident in Britain….It permits criminal acts by the following agencies of the state: any police force, the National Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office, any of the intelligence services, any of Her Majesty’s forces, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Environment Agency, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Food Standards Agency, and the Gambling Commission. In other words, the British state can now commit criminal acts with impunity, provided it does so in the name of covert human intelligence gathering, which by definition is beyond public scrutiny. Meanwhile, the population at large is expected to obey the law and pay its taxes.”
Desmet seeks to normalize totalitarianism and fails to pin the blame for its rise on the obvious offending individuals and organizations. The article concludes with this:
“It is entirely unclear why violence is the “inevitable” outcome of a line of reasoning that pins blame for Covid mass atrocity, not on the victimized and abused masses, but rather on a proportionately tiny ruling class responsible for worldwide crimes against humanity. The numerical odds are overwhelmingly in favor of humanity. Violence is not a prerequisite for emancipation: it simply takes a critical mass to see what is happening and to refuse to comply with its own enslavement.”
I agree.