Fear of covid has caused a lot of people to abandon critical thinking in exchange for blind obedience. Dr. Robert Malone called this phenomenon “mass formation psychosis” and now, he’s been attacked by the media.

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Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Brittany: Hi, Emma.

Emma: Hi, Brittany.

Brittany: So, today I wanna talk about a term that sounds pretty complicated if you just read it, but I think it’s honestly so important to talk about and there are so many adults talking about it, right? I wanna make sure that our listeners understand it too. So it’s called mass formation Psychosis. So, oh my goodness, does that even mean, So, I like to break words down. So let’s do that first. So means something that is big or covers a lot of ground, right? If people, you know, get tumors, heaven forbid, they’re, they call it like a mass or mass spread, like widespread. So it covers a lot of ground. It’s far-reaching. So think of massive or big in this term. So, or impacting a lot of people. The next part of the word is formation. And when we put that together with mass, so mass formation, it means a big group. Think of like a formation of people. So the next part of the word is psychosis or the last part of the word. And that is a psych, like a psychology term. And what psychology means is that’s like a study of the mind. The way the mind works. So not your brain, it is your brain, but it’s a little bit different than that cuz it’s more of like the human condition behaviors, which still are impacted by the brain, but it’s a little bit more complex than that. So, for people who might feel sad or depressed, or anxious, that would be a psychological issue. That’s something of the mind. So psychosis is when someone has a hard time determining what is real or not. So, that’s obviously going to be a problem with the mind. Maybe it’s, you know, paranoia. They don’t know, how to tell truth from something that may not be real. So that sounds pretty serious. It is. Okay. So mass formation psychosis is basically when something bad or scary happens like a pandemic. And the people are so scared because this is like an unprecedented thing that they look to someone for answers. And unfortunately, the first people a lot of people look to our government or the quote-unquote experts, right? The people that tell us that they know better than us. So the general public believes whatever they are told a lot of times, cuz they’re scared, it makes sense, right? They don’t know who to look to. When the pandemic happened, nothing like that had ever happened in our lifetime before. And a lot of people didn’t know what to do, they were terrified. And so who did they look to quote-unquote experts, the government? So, that’s what they did, and they did whatever they were told. You know, we’ve talked about this, Emma, where it was crazy to me how quickly people were wearing masks. Yeah. It was quickly to me how people were taking vaccines that had not even gone through a whole lot of approvals yet. Now you, know, are free to think whatever you want. Everyone should be able to either get a vaccine or not get a vaccine. But it was just crazy how quickly everybody complied, right? Yeah. And so the public was basically believing whatever they were told and the individual, because the public is, you know, made, made of individuals, they were also getting scared, right? And so if you as a person were looking to what to do, you were scared of what to do, you probably would just follow the mob, right? Follow the group of people. Yeah. Because at the time, you can’t really tell what it’s truth and what’s not truth anymore. Right? There was so much information going around that you think, all right, how do I do what’s right? How do I keep my family safe? You know what, I’ll just do what everybody else is doing. I’m not gonna do my own research to figure it out. I’m just gonna follow the mob. Now this seems pretty collectivist, I think in general, and Oh yes, we can kind of, look at I think it also discourages critical thinking. But Emma, can you tell us how we saw this mass formation psychosis Yes. Come about during the pandemic.

Emma: I mean, the first one that comes to mind is just this stupid phrase, follow the science or trust the science. If you actually believe the words that you’re saying would be awesome, but a lot of people are cherry-picking what science they want to follow. And they are not thinking critically about what sort of science they’re listening to or the motives behind, you know, the voices that have these different opinions. And it’s very interesting to me. So follow the science was a big one. you know, not listening to anyone with different views on vaccines, calling people anti-vaxxers, if they just ask questions about the safety of a vaccine, which is a very reasonable thing to do if you’re gonna take a newly invented technology in your body, it’s a pretty big deal. The big one for me was you know if you don’t wear a mask, you’re a killer. You’re, you want people to die.

Brittany: Yeah. You’re killing my grandma. Like.

Emma: Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, we all need to get vaccinated because public safety’s more important than your freedoms. And there’s just so many that I’ve seen, and I even these silly yard signs, I don’t know if you guys have seen these, but it’s like, you know, iHeart science, and then it has like a little vaccine thing on it, or like a mask or something. And it’s just so absurd to me. The amount of, it’s like everyone’s just kind of drinking the Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean, there. It’s like, there’s just no critical thinking going on among so so many people right now in America, but also around the world.

Brittany: It’s, it honestly, it terrifies me. And it’s not just COVID, right? So the War on terror, I remember there was this belief that any, you know if you are not with us, you’re against us. Oh yes. If you don’t believe that these people hate us for our freedoms, which is so absurd, you know, you are literally, you’re part of the problem. You are basically a terrorist. And you know, we hear that now with COVID. You’re a domestic terrorist if you don’t believe all these things, right? So here’s the really crazy part, this phenomenon, is you’ve seen it all throughout history. This is not a pandemic-specific thing, you know, but the way that it’s called this mass formation psychosis, that’s like a new wording of it. Like a name is just something that represents something, right? Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that the thing you’re representing does not exist in, by other terms, by other things. right? So this new name, mass formation psychosis is kind of a new thing coined by Dr. Robert Malone, who we talked about in another episode. He invented the MRNA, I can’t say that vaccine. And he has a lot of concerns now he’s a very prestigious doctor and he’s very concerned with the way we’re proceeding with this pandemic. So he was on Joe Rogan’s podcast who Emma and I love, we’ve talked about him a lot. Oh, yes. And he was talking about his skepticism and he brought up this term mass formation, psychosis. And now a ton of people are saying like, this doesn’t exist. And it’s, I Googled it this morning before we started just to see what came up. And it was all these articles that were like, psychology today, this isn’t a real thing, it isn’t a real thing. You know, Forbes, this isn’t a real thing, but if you click on it was like, there have been other similar terms, but no one’s called it like this before. So it’s him just coining a new term of something that exists forever. Yeah. But the other funny thing is, if you go on a private surge engine and type it in, you get much different results. Oh, yeah. but of course, Google is gonna show us what they want to show us. So, the point here is that this man is not crazy. In fact, he’s quite brilliant and, and quite a, his resume is quite, you know, impressive. But this is something that we have seen all throughout history, which he pointed out on this episode. So Connor and I have talked a lot about propaganda. That’s actually something I studied during the brief time I was in college. I was very big, specifically a Nazi propaganda because I couldn’t understand how an entire country could be turned against. Yeah. A group of people over things that weren’t true. Like, that baffled me and it was so evil. So I studied a lot of it. So we’ve talked about Edward Bernays before, who was called the father of propaganda. Also. He was Sigmund Freud’s, who’s a psychologist, a nephew, which is a whole conversation. Interest. Yeah. My fascinating. Oh my gosh. I know, right? So that’s an interesting thing. Yeah. So he was father of propaganda, used psychology against people, brilliant man, but evil man. So if he believed that if you wanted to unite a nation of people to believe something, to follow what you want them to do, you need them to rally against a common enemy. And that could be any government or any enemy the government chooses. That doesn’t even have to be an enemy. It could be a thing like Yeah, we don’t want them to do this. So, you know, we don’t want them to eat potatoes, so we’re gonna, you know, it could be something so silly. Yeah. We don’t want you to die of COVID. Yeah. You don’t want you to die of COVID. So then you need to create a big lie basically and convince people that anyone who doesn’t believe in this is a threat to someone’s safety. So in Nazi Germany, for example, Joseph Gerbes, who was a big benets follower, and he was the Nazi propagandist, he had to convince an entire country to hate Jewish people simply because that was, you know, Hitler’s per like agenda. And that’s not an easy task. So he helped tell all these Germans that, Jewish people were responsible for the ger, you know, Germany struggling economy for there the non prosperous, you know, society they were living on. And anyone who tried to say this wasn’t true was clearly united with the Jewish people and trying to ruin Germany, right? But people believed it, you know, you and I talk about this, I mean, it sounds absolutely absurd, but people believed it. And if you didn’t believe it, you were just as bad as the bad guys, right? And so we think about this with COVID today, and I know people are gonna say like, how dare you compare COVID to the Holocaust? But it’s not that we’re comparing, it’s these psychological tools and manipulation government uses. So let’s think about this with COVID. If you don’t agree with what the government says about it, with this narrative, which is ever-changing by the way, then you are a threat to people. Like you said, Emma, you literally want people to die. And this has baffled me. Yeah. So it sounds ridiculous, but again, like people are saying that Joe Rogan is harming people because he had these people on the show, it doesn’t even mean Rogan agrees with these people. But yeah, the thing that makes Joe Rogan so profound in our current day is that he lets anybody come on a show and they just talk. Yeah. There’s no agenda. They just talk. And sometimes that these are people with views, maybe people have not heard before. Yeah. And now Neil Young, who’s like an old musician and Joni Mitchell, who’s, and also an old musician, or mu, I can’t even speak musician and these were both people that used to be anti-war, they used to be anti-establishment, right? Yeah. Now they are calling for Joe Rogan’s censorship because they think he’s literally killing people. By having alternate, viewpoints on his show. And it’s funny, it honestly just speaks to the power of the free market because both these artists said like, if you don’t take Joe Rogan off Spotify, then we’re removing our music from Spotify. And Spotify was like, boy, bye. As they say, like, they were like, you know, we’re taking off because Joe Rogan’s so popular that he’s bringing them in so much money. Yeah. But now you see, there’s like doctors, and I say doctors loosely, that could be like scholars. There’s all these people calling for Joe Rogan to be taken off Spotify because they think he’s harming people. They think he’s killing people all because he’s giving you another point of view. Yeah. So this mass formation, psychosis, these people just want to believe whatever the mob is gonna tell them to believe. And they don’t know what is true anymore. They don’t know what is right. And here you have Joe Rogan trying to break through that Yeah. By saying, here’s another view to consider. And people are freaking out, right? It’s this cognitive dissonance of, no, no, we can’t believe this. No. Let you know , it’s, it’s not what we are told. So, Emma, do you have any, any final thoughts on this?

Emma: Yeah, it’s, to me, it’s just kind of a symptom of a sickness in our society where we cannot tolerate other people having viewpoints that we disagree with. And, you know, I, think we used to be a country that respected dialogue and respected being able to disagree with people in a friendly way. And we are so far past that, at least on certain things like COVID, like maybe people can agree to disagree on like their favorite football teams or something. But it’s hard to find a serious issue that is relevant that people can respectfully disagree on. And that’s what concerns me so much is that, you know, it does seem like these authoritarian, you know, big government sort of leftist types are the ones that have the most control over the flow of information and what the quote-unquote science says and all of that. And it’s very concerning to me,  that so many people are not asking questions about like people’s motives or about what is behind this information, or who is telling me that this is the truth. And I think if we can just get back to maybe thinking a little more critically, we could sort of break through this, mass formation psychosis. So I’m glad we talked about this today cuz it’s something that I think goes beyond even COVID, like you said, the war on terror and war in general. I think there’s so many ways that this affects us. So I’m glad that we have a term for it now, even though people are getting, canceled for saying it. So yeah, that’s kind of my last two sense. I think we’re gonna wrap it up here, Brittany, unless you have something else to add.

Brittany: No, I mean, I, think to look up this term and just we’ve said this alive fill in the last few episodes is question everything.

Emma: Yes, Question everything. Ask questions and think for yourself. Don’t just believe what everyone else tells you to believe. And you will be in a better spot than most. So we will wrap it up here guys. Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you all again soon.

Brittany: Talk to you soon.