The Mental Harvest

After 21 months of fear, it's time to push the Covid reset button

Image by Monika Ullmann

Are we having fun yet? Weren’t the vaccines supposed to usher in a time of freedom and a return to something we used to call ‘normal life’? Nope.

Instead, we’re heading towards Thanksgiving, the time of year when humanity gives thanks for the harvest, when we reflect on the past year and prepare for nature’s own lockdown: winter. The trouble is, many of us are finding it hard to process what’s become our ‘new normal’ and as for giving thanks, no thanks.

No matter where you sit on the Covid-narrative spectrum—the forty percent who go along to get along, the thirty percent who are deep believers in whatever the government tells them and the remaining thirty percent who are fighting to retain their social and mental independence and critical faculties—for most, thanksgiving this year is a fraught, futile process. The Pandemic is still top of mind. And our minds are troubled, tired, and in a permanent state of apprehension.

The results cannot be wished away; from the fraying bonds of friendship to the loss of freedoms we used to take for granted, to soaring rates of depression, suicide, and overdoses, not to mention the deaths with or by Covid, our anguish is pervasive. We’re all looking for a way out of this dystopian nightmare.

It’s time to press the reset button. It’s time to come to our senses and to recognize what’s actually at stake. There is more going on here than fighting a virus. We’re fighting for our very survival as a free and democratic society. A society that allows more than one official narrative, that is open to dissenting voices, that respects facts and recognizes propaganda as the evil that it is. A society where debate and trust is valued, and invasive, top down government measures are viewed with the proper disdain.

Fortunately, and just at the right time, a kind of mass psychologist has appeared in the person of one Mattias Desmet, Professor of Psychology at the University of Ghent. He is well known for Mass Formation, a theory of mass indoctrination offering a clear explanation of what has happened to us, nested in an historical framework. Just when it felt like our society is having a massive nervous breakdown, Desmet comes along, puts us on the couch and all of a sudden, reality seems a lot more positive. <https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/ocwxs6/mattias_desmet_we_must_persevere_in_the_virtue_of/>

<https://dailysceptic.org/interview-with-mattias-desmet-professor-of-clinical-psychology/>

Desmet’s theory is supported by his expertise in statistics, which is useful when one is bombarded on a daily basis with dubious numbers and stats on infections, cases and death rates. Among his notable insights is that when a society has high levels of free floating anxiety, it is vulnerable to becoming a totalitarian state.

What I have said is that the coronavirus has redrawn the fear landscape that already existed. So there was already a lot of fear and unease in society before the corona outbreak.

It is good to put a few things here in a broader historical perspective. There has always been fear, but in recent centuries fear has become more and more disconnected from representations. For example, in the Middle Ages, fear was linked to certain fear objects such as the feudal ruler, hell, eternal damnation and so on.

Modern societies in the west had no easily identifiable ‘fear objects’, even before the pandemic, but we were already plagued by high levels of free floating anxiety, which under the conditions of a pandemic can, in Desmet’s words ‘redraw the fear landscape’, by offering a new ‘fear object’, around which a Mass Formation then develops. This is a reaction formation with religious or cult like characteristics that draws people together in a common ‘fight’, brooking little dissent.

A kind of heroic, joint struggle is then waged against the object of fear. In this way a new social bond and meaning is also created, and one can take out frustration and aggression on those who do not participate in the common struggle. A strongly unpleasant situation is thus turned into a kind of symptomatic intoxication of solidarity and heroism by the formation of masses. This state is perfectly comparable to a state of hypnosis. That is how I described the social reaction at the beginning of the corona crisis.

He adds that from the beginning, he was never afraid of the virus but highly concerned about the signs of an encroaching totalitarianism, which Hannah Arendt defined and warned about. She said that the end of Hitler’s Fascism and Russian Stalinism would not be the end of the totalitarian virus. On the contrary, she warned that it was likely to return, not in the traditional guise of strongmen but rather, in the form of technocrats and bureaucrats. Check.

The result of this Mass Formation is the ferocious certainty typical of many of the true believers in the Official Covid Narrative:

It is precisely when we think we are absolutely certain, and there is no longer any doubt in us, that we stop changing and tend to dehumanize others. When we think we know for sure what it is to be a good person, we have a persistent tendency to impose our vision on others.

Indeed. That is exactly what has happened and is continuing to happen. So what is to be done? Professor Desmet has the answer: speak up boldly! Do not go silently into that Covid night. Resisting the creeping social controls exemplified by ‘vaccine passports’ is how we save our democracy, our freedom and our sanity.

Desmet also counsels moderation, forgiveness, and taking the long view. And he believes that in the end, there are too many people in the west who will not tolerate the Chinese model of social control that looks tempting to some leaders including our very own Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau. He has gone on record praising the ‘control’ of the Chinese Communist Party and wishing that he had some of that. Well, now he has it, but there is resistance. Here is Desmet on the Chinese system:

Totalitarianism is characterized by the government's enormous grip on public space and private space. The Chinese system, in which citizens are awarded points or not based on their behaviour, is moving in that direction. Citizens with too few points can no longer travel freely, see educational grants pass by and risk being denied access to the nightlife.

A policy with such characteristics can certainly spill over here. A digital corona passport can be a major step in that direction.

Desmet also includes a warning: this fight won’t be easy. No kidding. But thank you for putting our predicament into sharp focus. And thank you, Trudeau, for being so clear on the subject of freedom and government control. But no thanks. We’re Canadian, and many of us still recall what freedom is, we remember what it feels like, and we’re willing to stand up and fight for it. We will not allow this damn virus to bring our old, sort-of-functioning democracy to its knees. Not this time.