Waking up to Mass Formation Psychosis

The term mass formation psychosis has been used by some commentators as a way to explain their perception that an inevitable march towards totalitarianism is being accelerated by adherence to the mitigations that public health requires during a global pandemic. Linking measures to control the spread and consequences of viral infection to violations of protected rights and freedoms. Claiming those who can’t see this “truth” are manipulated by mass media into irrational sheep, playing their part as compliant masses, for  looming draconian governmental oppression. And public health measures create the necessary conditions required by our corporate overlords to extract the last measure of our individual autonomy, as their mercenary greed dictates.


There is no doubt that the measures deemed necessary to thwart the now less than novel virus and its unpredictable consequences has led to a social dilemma. Generally people don’t react well to enforced isolation, or mandates. And too many don’t understand that as time passes ongoing research modifies the details of expert opinion. Mental health already at risk in the dysfunctional social economy that many find themselves living in,  has now become even more tenuous. Anxiety, frustration, fear and aggression have become common as economies are disrupted, activities are curtailed and the relative quality of lifestyles are questioned. It is also generally true that personalities that practice political power and corporate greed have colluded in history to the detriment of people and morality. Despite this, just as with the often cited Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, correlation still does not imply causation.


Mass formation psychosis is a theory of crowd behavior that seeks to explain the occurrence of irrational beliefs and actions adopted by a mass of people, it’s not a blueprint for oppression. The phenomena is often described as the equivalent of hypnosis, perhaps there is no understanding that a necessary element of successful hypnosis is the consent of the subject. Your subconsciousness can not be programed against your will.


Perhaps those using the term, warning of the consequences of an engineered crisis, fail to understand that the same theory could easily be used to explain their own paranoia and rejection of public health measures. There are reasons to refuse vaccination, it is still a personal choice, albeit, one that now carries the consequence of limited access or participation, and increased risk of serious illness. But some take their personal choice and its consequences further, desperately pleading with others to “wake up” and resist the nefarious machinations behind  all public health measures. Advocating their concern with unruly protest and easily debunked data, When their opinion leaders are disallowed from social media, for spreading this misinformation, that censorship reinforces paranoia, providing further “proof” of the existence of an overarching agenda of manipulation, and control. Placing trust in their hunches, and anecdotal personal experience over any authoritative consensus, they feel empowered. 

Four psychological precursors of Mass formation psychosis have been identified as:

Lack of social bond and isolation. 
Experiencing life as meaningless or senseless. 
Free-floating anxiety. 
Free-floating frustration and aggression


The theory is when the above four conditions are fulfilled, a narrative distributed through the mass media identifying an object of the anxiety and providing a strategy to deal with that object can lead to mass psychosis. Providing "the masses" a sudden connection to a heroic struggle  can give them a new social bond and meaning that has been lacking. Their psychological discontent can then  be released by participating in a strategy, one that may not make sense to each individual if they were psychologically healthy and were thinking critically without the mass influence of the group or media. 

In order to preserve the social bond created by fighting together to defeat the object of their collective anxiety and frustration, people will cling to irrationality, confirmed with information provided from any source that confirms their belief. This confirmation bias makes it easy to become argumentative, dismissive and illogical in support of that concept, and the strategies it demands. Participation in the strategy has nothing to do with facts or logic. People absorbed in mass formation are not aware of what’s happening outside the small focus of attention that their narrative provides. This theory has been used to examine how the dominate narrative of covid danger was embraced by “the masses,” and has become a tool to explain the narrative of resistance as a way to reclaim personal agency, even if it denies the efficacy and safety of a vaccine, already administered to half the worlds population, as the best way to prevent dire consequences of a still spreading and mutating viral infection that continues to cause widely unpredictable acute illness, potentially long term consequences, or death.
 
Mass psychosis can equally describes other aspects of our society, where central overarching delusional controllers engineering a program of propaganda and fear is suspected. This psychosis can emerge organically with irrational fear formed by a lack of information about the nature of reality, or the propaganda of common narcissists. Then there is the common psychosis that is the base-line of society. Though people speak of freedom as an aspirational ideal, they will begrudgingly resign themselves to the need to spend the majority of their days in the service of an economy that then enables them to deposit their earnings in institutions that allow the fortunate to survive with minimal suffering. Those who embrace this psychosis are allowed some measure of leisure- supported by toys marketed to them through the propaganda of advertising. The world we face, requires self-delusion as a coping mechanism with many shades in an increasingly dangerous landscape of social media. Remember at all times, think clearly, question authority, and be kind, no one knows all the answers, the reasons, or the hidden secrets that make sense of it all-
 

 if they tell you that they do, that is a warning sign of delusion moving beyond self.