Many Covid Skeptics Need to Remember the Moral of the Holocaust
The baddest of the bad are those within the mass delusion
I recently did a Science Moment about why we remember the Holocaust. It was aimed at those within the Covid Mass Hysteria, hoping to get them to see that, No, they’re not Nazis, but, Yes, they’ve been swept up in a similar kind of moral panic.
But, to my continuing surprise, many of those on my team, Team Skeptics, also don’t have a handle on the moral of the Holocaust.
The moral of the Holocaust is all about moral panic, mass hysteria, and mass delusion — or mass formation.
Yet, there’s something about the human mind that just does not find that a satisfying explanation of societal upheaval. We naturally and instinctively want to explain the current Covid societal disruption in terms of a shrewd and organized enemy that purposely caused the mass hysteria. And they caused it in order to gain wealth or power.
That last bit seems to be key in the minds of many: The explanation for why this is happening has to point to rational, not-in-the-hysteria actors who are gaining in wealth or power. Only then can we have the culpable villains we really really want.
But, as I have tried to elucidate through many of my Science Moment videos, that’s not how societal-level evil usually occurs.
Rather than discussing why that is — which is the topic of my research at FreeX.group, the topic of many of my newsletters here and at FreeX, and my Moment videos — let’s remind ourselves of some of the most horrible people of the last century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, etc. Although the details differ, and the causal origins of each is distinct, in each case we’re clear on who is culpable. I just named them. (Along with all those in their network working with them, of course.)
And these leaders (and those in their network aiding them) were within the mass delusion that had taken hold of their country. They drank the Kool-Aid. Sure, they also made and served Kool-Aid. But they drank it too. They believed in what they said. They were part of the groupthink-riddled social networks that had slid sideways. They did what they did because they were implementing the righteous good. If they lied, it wan’t for money or power, but for furthering the cause.
Does the fact that these monsters were in a mass delusion excuse them? Do we say, “Ahhh. So it’s not Hitler’s fault.”
No! I discuss this in this Moment video below.
If you’re the conspiracy-theorist sort on Team Skeptic, you might now be saying to yourself, “How does this apply to me? I agree that Hitler is to blame. Of course!”
But are you sure? If Hitler was part of the mass delusion at the time, then he’s not a rational, not-in-the-hysteria actor motivated by wealth or power. He’s not the kind of villain that can fit that intuitive model I claim you have for evil villains.
If Hitler’s not fitting your model of an evil villain, then you have a bad model of evil villains.
No, given your interest in identifying the real villains — who must be outside of the mass hysteria, must have caused the mass hysteria, must be superbly intelligent and organized, and must be motivated by wealth and power — it seems you should be asking who put poor little old Hitler into a mass delusion.
Among conspiracy theorists there’s never a shortage of theories, but if you were to feel compelled to go down that line, perhaps one could argue that, really, the whole Nazi mass delusion was carefully crafted by the German military industrial complex, who benefited greatly by the eventual military contracts. Or, instead, it was the bankers who figured out a decade earlier that if they could just sway the populace into treating Jews as unclean and send them to camps, then all their wealth could be appropriated, and blah blah.
No. We don’t need any such stories for the Nazis.
Hitler and his Nazi network were responsible. They mostly said what they actually believed, and they did it not for wealth, and not because some shady cabal tricked them.
And the same goes for the Covid debacle. The culprits are those in the Covid hysteria. Most of all your political leaders. They’re responsible, and should be held to account. Other culprits include Big Tech, Big Pharma, the WHO, the Great Reset, many journalists, an academic cabal of public health policy folks, and so on. But most of all our elected leaders. Those are the “little Hitlers” in this analogy, and we have no shortage of them.
They’re all in the mass hysteria. But that doesn’t excuse them any more than mass hysteria excuses the Nazis.
If one fails to appreciate this, and instead searches in vain for the true villain who initiated the mass hysteria, you’re at risk of not holding your own local politicians to account. It was their job to get independent advice from a wide variety of viewpoints. It was their job to look into the data themselves. It was their job to appreciate that emergency powers are supposed to not be abused. It was their job to realize that a populace can get spooked, and that they have to somehow avoid being part of the panic. It was their job to try to calm a panic, not baton-twirl it. It was their job to appreciate that civil rights are crucial in a free society, and especially so when people are panicked.
Instead, our leaders doubled and tripled and quadrupled down, violating the basic tenets of a free society: civil rights, free expression and informed consent were dispensed with.
Hold them to account. Because there is no monster outside the hysteria that did all this.
Here are a bunch of related Moments on the topic…
Very good Mark thanks. I've started to take this tack of holding my local public leaders to account. To my non-surprise most people here in Ni aren't even aware that currently the health minister has emergency powers until March to shut down sectors society as he sees fit without even investigating impacts, much less presenting them for democratic process. His twitter includes #StopCovidNI in his name! Something which can never actually be achieved, thus providing evidence that he is indeed hysterically detached from the reality of respiratory pathogens and his own responsibility.
Remember that two things can simultaneously be true. That there are bad actors with superior knowledge of human psychology and control of mass media, AND that people are also caught up in a mass hysteria and follow their orders, are both likely true.