I encountered this latest online phenomenon only yesterday, in the Associated Press. And there's an interesting, if somewhat bewildering, twist to it.
To wit, "it" is the concept of "mass formation psychosis," propagated by one Dr. Robert Malone, a Twitter-banned, vaccine-skeptical scientist who, reports PolitiFact, "has billed himself as the 'inventor' of mRNA vaccines" — a claim as valid as his vaccine skepticism. Malone credits his idea to a Belgian professor of something or other, a certain Mattias Desmet, who wisely declined any comment to the AP.
Integral to Malone's theory is that Americans are being "hypnotized" by sinister powers — hypnotized "into believing mainstream ideas about COVID-19, including steps to combat it such as testing and vaccination." The thrust of the AP story is that Malone's "mass formation psychosis" was but one of an anti-vax thousand floating around the internet until Dec. 31, when he appeared on a podcast by the name of "The Joe Rogan Experience."
(That name rang only a vague bell upon reading it. Then I recalled once asking in response to some harebrained Rogan tweet that had amassed enormous fealty, "Who the hell is Joe Rogan?" A Rogan fan quickly let me know that I was, sadly, out of step with internet profundity.)
Anyway, after Malone's appearance on Rogan's podcast, it seems millions of dupes have lined up online, eager to purchase a ticket to the mad scientist's singalong hootenanny. The AP notes that merely one follow-up tweet — "I’m not a scientist but I’m pretty sure healthy people spending hours in line to get a virus test is mass formation psychosis in action" — reaped more than 22,000 "likes."
No doubt adding to the sexiness of Malone's on-air message was that he compared today's sinister powers of national hypnosis and mass psychosis to those of Nazi Germany:
"When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it," said the, ahem, scientist, "and then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere." As in, to Hitlerism. Take note, President Biden — you fascist cad.
Yet here's the twist that leads to yet another twist, which, I confess, I'm struggling to comprehend.
The AP sought professional advice on Malone's "mass formation psychosis," and what the AP got is this. "To my knowledge, there’s no evidence whatsoever for this concept," said an assistant professor of psychology and neural science. Said a social psychologist, “The concept has no academic credibility."
Expounded another social psychologist: Malone's "mass formation psychosis" suggests that "when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control; they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate," adding that "no respectable psychologist agrees with these ideas now."
Summing it all up, the AP writes that "psychology experts say there is no support for the 'psychosis' theory described by Malone," with "psychosis" meaning, of course, a loss of touch with reality. More striking in the AP report is that also "discredited" are theories involving "mob mentality" and "group mind," say the experts.
Let us remind ourselves, however, that the "people" Malone was referring to are those who accept the science of vaccination; i.e., personally responsible, socially considerate persons. He's saying that they are the ones who have lost their identify and self-control and reverted to a "primitive instinct." Which, clearly, is bunk.
Yet the particular sociopsychological description in question would seem to perfectly fit the Trumpian element among the anti-vax crowd, a group as out of touch with reality as any group can be. And what of Hannah Arendt and her universally embraced emphasis on mass "gullibility"? What of Hoffer's still-essentially valid The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements? What of widely accepted theories centering on "the authoritarian personality" (which ultimately congeals into a "group mind"), first rather crudely yet fundamentally authentically promulgated in the postwar era? Are they all to be tossed?
To reject in toto the concept of "mass formation psychosis" would, then, be a mistake, would it not?
So it seems to this layman. Malone's concept of literal "hypnosis" is certainly nuts, but if you want a group doused neck-deep in reality-loss, look no farther than Big Lie Trumpers and their anti-vax contingent.
"Mass formation psychosis" indeed.