totalitarianism_.md 5.2 KB
Totalitarianism - Mass Psychosis
Truth
Masses don't thirst for truth, turn from evidence and deify error if seduced by it. Their master supplies their illusions. Those who threaten the illusion are enemies.
Our inability to dea lwith the force sof our psyche -> our own worst animals A man is a wolf to man.
Woke-like tendencies come into play at those times if history when mental illness becomes the norm.
Man himself is his own greatest danger. No adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are the most devastating.
The most dangerous: The Mass Psychosis
epidemic of madness occurs when enough people lose touch with reality
Descend into delusions
20th century madness Scapegoats of societies gone mad
In some swiss villages killed all women witch hunting
Mass psychosis -> Jung studied this and said the infected individuals become morally and spiritually inferior. They sink intellectually and become unreasonable. Crimes not tolerated by individuals become performable by groups.
Triggers of madness exist, but those aren't conducive to mass psychosis
Psychogenic triggers -> most common culprits of mass psychosis
FLood of negative emotions -> fear and anxiety -> state of panic
Individuals seek relief in panic.
Escape through adaptive means -> facing to and defeating threat Other way -> psychotic break. Not descent into disorder, but a re-ordering of one's experential world (blend of fact and fiction -> for everyone, in fact).
Schizophrenia expert -> psychogenic states
- Panic: perceives thigns in a different way. frightening confusing etc how to explain it?
- Psychotic insight: puts things togheter by devising a pathological way of seeing reality which explains the abnormal exeperience. Based on delusion: Population of weak and vulnerabel individuals are driven into panic -> mass psychosis -> they buttress one another and reinforce one another's delusion
Totalitarianism Modern phenomenon of total centralized state power and obliteration of individual human rights. Those in power and the objectified masses.
Population in two groups: rulers and ruled. Both group undergo pathological transformation. Rulers are Gods -> diametrically opposed to us as imperfect beings corrupted by power. Masses are transformed into the dependent subjects of the rulers. Take on a regressive and child-like status.
Totalitarianism is an attempt to transform human nature itself. Turns sound minds into sick minds.
There is in fact mjuch that is comparable between the strange reactions of the citizens of totalitarianism and the culture as a whole on the one hand and the reactions of the sick schizophrenic on the other.
Social transformation -> built upon and sustained by delusions. Deluded men and women regress to child status, suibmissive subjects. Han dover control of their lives to another class.
The romance of power-hungry elites and a psychologically damaged population.
What triggers the psychosis of totalitarianism?
The mass psychosis of totalitarianism begins in the society's ruling class, who are prone to delusions which augment their power. Political ideology grants them the delusion that they can and should control. This biases them to be more accepting of proposed actions that make the masses more dependent.
Menticide begins with fear. Flood with negative emotions also anxiety -> susceptible to descent into delusion Threats can be fabricated and used to sow fear -> but very effective is to use waves of terror -> contrasting waves of fear and calm, with each wave of fear increasing in intensity
People are disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower with each wave, and the psychological effects become stronger. Reaches a public already softened up by the next iteration.
Propaganda to spread misinformation, rbeak down the mind of the masses. Government officials and media use contradictory reports, nonsensical information, blatant lies. Confuse and make population less capable of coping with crisis -> unable to use adaptive behaviour to counter their fear.
Descent into delusions of totalitarianism. Logic can be met with logic, but illogic cannot be met with logic. It confuses those who think straight. The big lie monotonously repeated nonsense have more of an emotional appeal than logic and reason. People still search for reasonable counter-argument for the first lie while the next one comes along.
Joost Merloo. rape of the mind.
Algorithms censor flow of unwanted information, this controls the availability of information, and the hierarchy of access to information.
Modern technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at. EH takes no time to retreat and reflect. Technology pulls him in. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation the senses are continually overloaded withs timuli. Man doesn't learn to question anything anymore.
Isolate the victims to disrupt normal social interactions. Alone, an individual becomes more susceptible to delusions for several reasons:
- Lose contact with corrective force of positive examples
- Human beings are more easily conditioned into new patterns of thought in isolation: pavlov made discovery -> conditioned reflex easier in laboratory setting. isolation and patient repetition of stimuli tames wild animals. 3.