Claims of 'Mass Formation Psychosis' Set the Left's Hair on Fire

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

For much of the pandemic, the fact that millions of Americans have been driven into some level of mental instability regarding COVID-19 has been apparent. One only has to watch Joy Reid’s crackpot show to understand that the left’s fear-mongering is causing triple-vaxxed (or formerly double-vaxxed) and masked individuals to experience completely undue levels of hysteria.

A few weeks ago, after news of emergency rooms being clogged up with fully vaxxed individuals seeking COVID tests broke, I wrote a piece entitled “The Collective Chickens of the Collective Psychosis of COVID Hysteria Come Home to Roost.” A little over a week later, Dr. Robert Malone did his landmark interview with Joe Rogan, popularizing the phrase “mass formation psychosis” among those looking for a way to express the left’s inability to think rationally when it comes to the coronavirus.

Here was Malone’s description.

When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other, and has free-floating anxiety, and a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.

One of the aspects of [the] phenomenon is the people that they identify as their leaders — the ones typically that come in and say ‘You have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone. Then they will follow that person through hell — it doesn’t matter whether they lie to them or whatever.

That sounds pretty spot-on to me, and it’s so obvious that it’s happening right now that it seems silly to even dispute it. Yet, the Associated Press has decided to take up the mantle of obtuseness, claiming that it is false that COVID fanatics are suffering from mass formation psychosis.

The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.

But psychology experts say the concept described by Malone is not supported by evidence, and is similar to theories that have long been discredited. Here’s a look at the facts…

…Psychology experts say there is no support for the “psychosis” theory described by Malone.

“To my knowledge, there’s no evidence whatsoever for this concept,” said Jay Van Bavel, an assistant professor of psychology and neural science at New York University who recently co-authored a book on group identities. Van Bavel said he had never encountered the phrase “mass formation psychosis” in his years of research, nor could he find it in any peer-reviewed literature.

The AP couldn’t be missing the point harder if they tried. The idea behind mass formation psychosis is not that people are literally hypnotized, i.e., as you’d see in the movies where someone crows like a rooster and stops smoking. Rather, it’s a way to express the collective irrationality being shown by millions of people who will literally do anything to try to “stop the spread,” no matter how ineffective the measures being promoted are.

For example, despite all the data showing that the vaccines don’t work to stop the spread of COVID-19, people still push policies like vaccine passports and vaccine mandates as not only physically necessary but morally necessary as well. Those who hang on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s every word do so under the delusion that whatever the “experts” say must be abided by in order to avoid catastrophe. That’s how you end up with a Houston area teacher locking a child in the trunk of a car because he supposedly needed to be “quarantined.”

Those types of irrationalities are what drive the idea of a widespread psychosis formulated by the largely baseless fear-mongering of the expert class — and that’s what makes the AP’s “fact-check” so ironic.

They are claiming that there aren’t millions of Americans blindly accepting the dictates of a tiny class of over-credentialed figures, yet they try to prove that case by demanding you be dictated to by a tiny class of over-credentialed figures they cite. I couldn’t think of a better way to not prove their point than that.

In short, people can quibble over the semantics of clinical diagnoses. Yet, there is no doubt that a huge number of Americans (and people all over the world) are no longer able to make rational risk assessments because their leaders have refused to be honest with them. Instead, the thirst for power and a desire to avoid political responsibility for failure has overtaken all. So the AP can call that phenomenon whatever they’d like, but it’s absolutely a real problem, and it’s one that a nation like the United States is going to have to figure out a way to solve before our society dives off the cliff.