Tomorrow is Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis day. I blog on Wednesday so mine’s coming early. In fact, I had a very important post scheduled for today but I’ve pushed it off because this is a fascinating time to live through. Long ago I did a lot of personal research on the witch crazes of the 14th through the 16th centuries, and what we’re living through now looks a lot like the rise of the burning years.

Obviously it would be a lot less fascinating and more stressful if my livelihood depended on people who bought into our latest witch craze. If yours does, you have my sympathy.

Every once in a while there’s a theory about how some kind of hallucinogen in rye or other foodstuffs causes people to see things that could be mistaken for witchcraft. The witch-burners, according to this theory, were just victims of rye ergot or some other hallucinogen. Sometimes, the theory even goes so far as to say that the witches themselves were relating experiences they had hallucinated. It wasn’t the torture that explained their confessions, they truly believed they were witches. This whitewashes the evil done by those who bought into the craze. It denies the well-established ability of humans to panic and respond completely inappropriately to difficult-to-understand—sometimes even manufactured—crises.

In another hundred years, we’ll probably hear about how rye ergot induces hallucinations of the angel of death, and that this explains the vaccination passports, the concentration camps, and the mass firings of critically-needed medical workers.

Psychosis doesn’t mean that what triggered the unhealthy response isn’t real. World War II was real. But it was insanity for FDR’s administration to put Americans into camps as a response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It was insanity for the Supreme Court to allow it. And it was insanity for Roosevelt to conspire with Republicans to deliberately sideline Republican politicians like Governor Carr of Colorado who questioned the insanity.¹

What we’ve been seeing in our response to COVID is nothing new to anyone who has studied history. From the war against witches to the drug war to the war against satanism in daycare facilities, societies tend to go crazy at regular intervals. And governments are happy to use that craziness to their advantage.

Many of the tactics we use in the drug war, especially asset forfeiture, were used first in the war against witches.

Many of the arguments in the war against COVID were used first in the war against witches. The most obvious is, anyone who says that the war is overkill is why the war is needed. We wouldn’t have to force people to take vaccinations if you’d just take the vaccination. We wouldn’t have to force people to wear masks if you’d just wear your mask everywhere. We wouldn’t have to fire you if you’d just stay home.

That people who have taken every vaccine regularly given, and then choose not to take a vaccine that is less than two years old, are labeled “anti-vaxxers” is just another manifestation of Martin Antoine Del Rio’s dictum that anyone who questions the witch craze must be a witch.

In normal discourse, disagreement does not mean evil. In a mass psychosis, disagreement doesn’t just mean evil, it means actively murdering the good people who go along with the psychosis. During the witch trials, disagreement meant you were a witch. Today, it means you’re a grandma-murderer. There are no tradeoffs when a community goes mad. There is no weighing of competing risks.

When communities start believing hysterical children who claim bewitchery, that’s a mass psychosis. When communities start believing in manufactured memories about vast satanic conspiracies with huge, nearly impossible substrata beneath daycare facilities, that’s mass psychosis.

When a nation decides to shut everything down, even the systems that save us from disease to combat a disease, that’s mass psychosis. When medical doctors who warn against shutting it all down are dismissed as conspiracy theorists, that’s mass psychosis.

Mass psychosis often starts with some very simplistic solution that rapidly becomes more complex as facts align against it and must be incorporated into the psychosis. People aren’t dying? They aren’t even exhibiting symptoms? They must be witches: only a witch could hide being a witch. We must have tests for everything and everyone. You want to travel? Test. Go to work? Test. See your family? Test. COVID, like witchery, is so insidious that lack of symptoms is a symptom.

Medicines that have been known safe for hundreds of years are suddenly killers, because they might be effective among the unvaccinated. The hundreds of years of data on their safety are now conspiracy theories.

When a craze starts, safety becomes part of the craze, and nothing is allowed to be safe if it detracts from the fear. Tradeoffs no longer exist. People will die and endanger others in the name of safety as they incorporate more and more craziness into their psychosis.

There was a minor craze about solar eclipses back in the seventies, that I describe in Journalistic Delusions and the Madness of Politicians. In order to keep children from accidentally blinding themselves during an eclipse, they had to be kept inside and the windows covered in black curtains.

But what if there were a fire alarm during the eclipse?

When the alarm sounds the classes will remain in their locations or rooms and await further instructions.

The craze went from don’t look at the sun, to stay inside, to mask the windows, to lock down the children, to it’s better to risk death in a fire than risk seeing an eclipse.

It’s better to risk death by intubation than to take hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. It’s better to risk isolation, suicides, undiagnosed diseases, than to see your family, say goodbye to dying relatives, see your doctor, have critical elective health care. There are no tradeoffs. There is no sense of scale. It’s COVID or death.

When vaccinations can be defeated by the evil intentions of the unvaccinated, it’s no longer science. Nothing about this is scientific. Science is about questioning dogma, it is about the assumption of ignorance. There is nothing scientific about the dogma of COVID rules and the hatred of those who question those rules. There is everything psychotic about it.

When half of Democrats want camps for the unvaccinated; when a third of Democrats want the children of the unvaccinated taken away… we are well into a new witch craze. It’s utter insanity. It’s as bad or worse than when progressives used castration to improve the race, as bad or worse than when they used lobotomies to cure misbehavior and unruliness.

This isn’t the first time medicine has been weaponized against disagreements by progressives, and it won’t be the last. I do hope it’s the worst, that we learn its lessons about what to expect and what to resist immediately when a new craze starts.

Ironically, much like the sudden dangers of commonly effective and safe medicines, those within the psychosis have suddenly decided that extraordinary delusions no longer exist. In various forms it’s been called the madness of crowds, mass hysteria, and moral panic. That someone has come up with a more clinical name for this madness is incorporated into the psychosis itself. Mass formation psychosis is a bizarre conspiracy theory! It spreads COVID!

If you deny that witches exist, you must be a witch.