The scapegoat mechanism is a speculative device to explain how some of the human systems, in a fairly broad sense of the phrase, establish and keep their order. The most fundamental tenet is that order is attained and sustained through the cyclic sacrifice of an entity that is internally excluded.
The people who orchestrated isolation in nursing homes in 2020, who enforced malnutrition on hundreds of millions, who condemned millions of girls to servitude, are not doing so with ‘right’ or ‘wrong‘ in mind. They don’t accept that such fixed concepts exist. If there is nothing beyond the physical, then their actions are rational and cannot be wrong.
There needs to be a to-be-abolished list and any federal government institution with the word agency, department, or bureau needs to be on it. The last few years have shown us the power of these institutions and the devastation they can cause. The only sure way of preventing it from happening again is to put a hard stop on all the bureaucracies that caused our suffering. Society itself, which is smarter than bureaucracy, can manage the rest.
Steve Templeton talks with sociologist Dr. Frank Furedi, author of How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century, about the continuity of the culture of fear in the COVID-19 pandemic response.
I’d like to send a special note of thanks to all those friends and family members who, after sniggering behind my back that I had gone off my rocker, or had suddenly become an unthinking and selfish Trumpite, sent their sincere apologies for what they said about me, and how I had fallen into mindlessly and obsessively repeating Q-Anon memes.
My Gratitude For the Apologies and Sincere Expressions of Regret Read More
If you’re an artist and you’re trying to grow your Instagram following and you start posting anything that calls into doubt like ‘The Science,’ you’re going to be shadowbanned. You’re not going to be in front of those eyeballs. Art that aligns with the mainstream narrative, however, is rewarded.
During the Covid era, we see the same schema writ large in the responses taken by governments across the globe. For the first time in human history, the availability of mass-testing allowed us to convince ourselves that we could measure the health of the population, holistically, in real time, and to generate precise statistics permitting us to do so – right down to the last ‘case’ or ‘death’.
Janis’ insights into the process of groupthink in the context of dysfunctional public policy decision making profoundly foreshadowed the behaviors observed within the HHS COVID leadership team.
Anyone who is alert to our past should have noticed the ire with which the stronger have striven to silence and extinguish the weaker. It should remind us of those historical conflicts in which the party that was more powerful in number, status, and force and thus passed as righteous would later turn out to be tremendously disastrous.
Humanity as Homo Ideologicus: On Hitoshi Imamura’s Theory of General Ideology Read More
We think uncertainty will expose us, put us into a distressing freefall, but in reality it does the opposite. It expands our minds by creating spaces that don’t need to be filled by anything. It lays the groundwork for innovation and progress, and opens us up to meaningful connection with others.
The elites’ ability to flood our consciousness with fragmentary and undigested information has increased exponentially. And they are well aware of, and quite satisfied by, the sense of disorientation this information overload causes in the majority of citizens. Why? Because they know that a disoriented or overwhelmed person is much more likely to grasp at simplistic “solutions” when they are directed this way.
Proxy “Evidence” and the Manipulation of Human Perceptions Read More
Day after day, week after week, month after month for 28 months, I heard people invoke the shibboleth, and parrot the mantra: “Pandemic!” Uttering this magic word was intended to justify any disruption of normal life, to excuse the failure to fulfill a wide range of personal responsibilities and to foreclose any reasonable discussion/dissent that might support the conclusion that the orchestrated, opportunistic overreaction to a respiratory virus was a complete, avoidable, government and media-made meltdown.
