by C.J. Hopkins
2020-2021

from ConsentFactory Website

Part 1

October 13, 2020

Spanish version

Photo (original):

Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha

One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is mass conformity to a psychotic official narrative.

Not a regular official narrative, like the "Cold War" or the "War on Terror" narratives.

A totally delusional official narrative that has little or no connection to reality and that is contradicted by a preponderance of facts...

Nazism and Stalinism are the classic examples, but the phenomenon is better observed in cults and other sub-cultural societal groups.

Numerous examples will spring to mind:

the Manson family, Jim Jones' People's Temple, the Church of Scientology, Heavens Gate, etc., each with its own psychotic official narrative:

Helter Skelter, Christian Communism, Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy, and so on...

Looking in from the dominant culture (or back through time in the case of the Nazis), the delusional nature of these official narratives is glaringly obvious to most rational people.

What many people fail to understand is that to those who fall prey to them (whether individual cult members or entire totalitarian societies) such narratives do not register as psychotic.

On the contrary, they feel entirely "normal"...

Everything in their social "reality" reifies and reaffirms the narrative, and anything that challenges or contradicts it is perceived as an existential threat.

These narratives are invariably paranoid, portraying the cult as threatened or persecuted by an evil enemy or antagonistic force which only unquestioning conformity to the cult's ideology can save its members from.

It makes little difference whether this antagonist is mainstream culture, body thetans, counter-revolutionaries, Jews, or a virus.

The point is not the identity of the enemy.

 

The point is the atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria the official narrative generates, which keeps the cult members (or the society) compliant.

In addition to being paranoid, these narratives are often internally inconsistent, illogical, and... well, just completely ridiculous...

This does not weaken them, as one might suspect.

Actually, it increases their power, as it forces their adherents to attempt to reconcile their inconsistency and irrationality, and in many cases utter absurdity, in order to remain in good standing with the cult...

Such reconciliation is of course impossible, and causes the cult members' minds to short circuit and abandon any semblance of critical thinking, which is precisely what the cult leader wants.

Moreover, cult leaders will often radically change these narratives for no apparent reason, forcing their cult members to abruptly forswear (and often even denounce as "heresy") the beliefs they had previously been forced to profess, and behave as if they had never believed them, which causes their minds to further short circuit, until they eventually give up even trying to think rationally, and just mindlessly parrot whatever nonsensical gibberish the cult leader fills their heads with.

Also, the cult leader's nonsensical gibberish is not as nonsensical as it may seem at first.

Most of us, upon encountering such gibberish, assume that the cult leader is trying to communicate, and that something is very wrong with his brain.

The cult leader isn't trying to communicate.

 

He is trying to disorient and control the listener's mind.

Listen to Charlie Manson "rapping."

Not just to what he says, but how he says it...

Note how he sprinkles bits of truth into his stream of free-associated nonsense, and his repetitive use of thought-terminating clichés, described by Robert J. Lifton as follows:

"The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché.

 

The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.

 

They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis."

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism - A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, 1961

If all this sounds familiar, good.

Because the same techniques that most cult leaders use to control the minds of the members of their cults are used by totalitarian systems to control the minds of entire societies:

Milieu Control, Loaded Language, Sacred Science, Demand for Purity, and other standard mind-control techniques.

It can happen to pretty much any society, just as anyone can fall prey to a cult, given the right set of circumstances.

It is happening to most of our societies right now.

An official narrative is being implemented.

 

A totalitarian official narrative.

 

A totally psychotic official narrative, no less delusional than that of the Nazis, or the Manson family, or any other cult.

Most people cannot see that it is happening, for the simple reason that it is happening to them.

They are literally unable to recognize it...

The human mind is extremely resilient and inventive when it is pushed past its limits. Ask anyone who has struggled with psychosis or has taken too much LSD. We do not recognize when we are going insane.

When reality falls apart completely, the mind will create a delusional narrative, which appears just as "real" as our normal reality, because even a delusion is better than the stark raving terror of utter chaos.

This is what totalitarians and cult leaders count on, and exploit to implant their narratives in our minds, and why actual initiation rituals (as opposed to purely symbolic rituals) begin by attacking the subject's mind with,

terror, pain, physical exhaustion, psychedelic drugs, or some other means of obliterating the subject's perception of reality...

Once that is achieved, and the subject's mind starts desperately trying to construct a new narrative to make sense out of the cognitive chaos and psychological trauma it is undergoing, it is relatively easy to "guide" that process and implant whatever narrative you want, assuming you have done your homework.

And this is why so many people - people who are able to easily recognize totalitarianism in cults and foreign countries - cannot perceive the totalitarianism that is taking shape now, right in front of their faces (or, rather, right inside their minds).

Nor can they perceive the delusional nature of the official "Covid-19" narrative, no more than those in Nazi Germany were able to perceive how completely delusional their official "master race" narrative was.

Such people are neither ignorant nor stupid.

They have been successfully initiated into a cult, which is essentially what totalitarianism is, albeit on a societal scale...

Their initiation into the Covidian Cult began in January (2020), when the medical authorities and corporate media turned on The Fear with projections of hundreds of millions of deaths and fake photos of people dropping dead in the streets.

The psychological conditioning has continued for months.

The global masses have been subjected to a constant stream of propaganda, manufactured hysteria, wild speculation, conflicting directives, exaggerations, lies, and tawdry theatrical effects.

Lockdowns.

 

Emergency field hospitals and morgues.

 

The singing-dancing NHS staff.

 

Death trucks.

 

Overflowing ICUs.

 

Dead Covid babies.

 

Manipulated statistics.

 

Goon squads.

 

Masks,

...and all the rest of it.

Eight months later, here we are. The Head of the Health Emergencies Program at the WHO has basically confirmed an IFR of 0.14%, approximately the same as the seasonal flu.

And here are the latest survival rate estimates from the Center for Disease Control:

• Age 0-19... 99.997%

• Age 20-49... 99.98%

• Age 50-69... 99.5%

• Age 70+... 94.6%

The "science" argument is officially over...

An increasing number of doctors and medical experts are breaking ranks and explaining how the current mass hysteria over "cases" (which now includes perfectly healthy people) is essentially meaningless propaganda, for example, in this segment on ARD, one of the big mainstream German TV channels.

And then there is the existence of Sweden, and other countries which are not playing ball with the official Covid-19 narrative, which makes a mockery of the ongoing hysteria.

I'm not going to go on debunking the narrative.

The point is, the facts are all available. Not from "conspiracy theorist" websites. From mainstream outlets and medical experts. From the Center for Fucking Disease Control.

Which does not matter in the least, not to the members of the Covidian Cult. Facts do not matter to totalitarians and cult members. What matters is loyalty to the cult or the party.

Which means we have a serious problem, those of us to whom facts still matter, and who have been trying to use them to convince the Covidian cultists that they are wrong about the virus... for going on eight months at this point.

While it is crucial to continue reporting the facts and sharing them with as many people as possible - which is becoming increasingly difficult due to the censorship of alternative and social media - it is important to accept what we are up against.

What we are up against is not a misunderstanding or a rational argument over scientific facts. It is a fanatical ideological movement. A global totalitarian movement... the first of its kind in human history.

It isn't national totalitarianism, because we're living in a global capitalist empire, which isn't ruled by nation-states, but rather, by supranational entities and the global capitalist system itself.

And thus, the cult/culture paradigm has been inverted. Instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it.

I wish I could be more optimistic, and maybe offer some sort of plan of action, but the only historical parallel I can think of is how Christianity "converted" the pagan world... which doesn't really bode so well for us.

While you're sitting at home during the "second wave" lockdowns, you might want to brush up on that history...



 

Part II

April 21, 2021

Photo:

Cheri Scudder-Thomas

Twitter

Back in October of 2020, I wrote an essay called The Covidian Cult (above Part 1), in which I described the so-called "New Normal" as a global totalitarian ideological movement. Developments over the last six months have borne out the accuracy of that analogy.

A full year after the initial roll-out of the utterly horrifying and completely fictional photos of people dropping dead in the streets, the projected 3.4% death rate, and all the rest of the official propaganda, despite the absence of any actual scientific evidence of an apocalyptic plague (and the abundance of evidence to the contrary),

millions of people continue to behave like members of an enormous death cult, walking around in public with medical-looking masks, robotically repeating vacuous platitudes, torturing children, the elderly, the disabled, demanding that everyone submit to being injected with dangerous experimental "vaccines," and just generally acting delusional and psychotic...

How did we ever get to this point... to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult,

"instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it?"

To understand this, one needs to understand how cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal scale.

There is a wealth of research and knowledge on this subject (I mentioned Robert J. Lifton in my earlier above essay), but, to keep things simple, I'll just use Margaret Singer's "Six Conditions of Mind Control" from her 1995 book, Cults in Our Midst, as a lens to view the Covidian Cult through.
 

Six Conditions of Mind Control

The italics are Singer. The commentary is mine:

1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time.

    

   Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group.
   
   Looking back, it is easy to see how people were conditioned, step by step, to accept the "New Normal" ideology.

    

   They were bombarded with terrifying propaganda, locked down, stripped of their civil rights, forced to wear medical-looking masks in public, to act out absurd "social-distancing" rituals, submit to constant "testing," and all the rest of it.

    

   Anyone not complying with this behavioral-change program or challenging the veracity and rationality of the new ideology was demonized as a "conspiracy theorist," a "Covid denier," an "anti-vaxxer," in essence, an enemy of the cult, like a "suppressive person" in the Church of Scientology.
   
    

2. Control the person's social and/or physical environment; especially control the person's time.
   
   For over a year now, the "New Normal" authorities have controlled the social/physical environment, and how New Normals spend their time, with lockdowns, social-distancing rituals, closure of "non-essential" businesses, omnipresent propaganda, isolation of the elderly, travel restrictions, mandatory mask-rules, protest bans, and now the segregation of the "Unvaccinated."

    

   Basically, society has been transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an enormous hospital from which there is no escape.

    

   You've seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their "normal" lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields.

    

   What you're looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.
   
    

3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.
   
   What kind of person could feel more powerless than an obedient New Normal sitting at home, obsessively logging the "Covid death" count, sharing photos of his medical-looking mask and post-"vaccination" bandage on Facebook, as he waits for permission from the authorities to go outdoors, visit his family, kiss his lover, or shake hands with a colleague?

    

   The fact that in the Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a state approaching infancy.

    

   This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated.

    

   Thus the mantra-like repetition of the "New Normal" platitude "Trust the Science!" by people who, if you try to show them the science, melt down completely and start jabbering aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.
   
    

4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person's former social identity.
   
   The point here is the transformation of the formerly basically rational person into an entirely different cult-approved person, in our case, an obedient "New Normal" person.

    

   Singer gets into this in greater detail, but her discussion applies mostly to subcultural cults, not to large-scale totalitarian movements. For our purposes, we can fold this into Condition 5.
   
    

5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group's ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors.

    

   Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group's beliefs, and compliance are rewarded, while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection.

    

   If one expresses a question, they are made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning.
   
   OK, I'm going to tell you a little story. It's a story about a personal experience, which I'm pretty sure you've also experienced. It's a story about a certain New Normal who has been harassing me for several months.

    

   I'll call him Brian Parks, because, well, that's his name, and I no longer feel any compunction about sharing it.
   
   Brian is a former friend/colleague from the theater world who has gone full "New Normal" and is absolutely furious that I have not.

    

   So outraged is Brian that I have not joined the cult that he has been going around on the Internet referring to me as a "conspiracy theorist" and suggesting that I've had some kind of nervous breakdown and require immediate psychiatric treatment because I do not believe the official "New Normal" narrative.

    

   Now, this would not be a very big deal, except that Brian is impugning my character and attempting to damage my reputation on the Facebook pages of other theater colleagues, which Brian feels entitled to do, given that I am a "Covid denier," a "conspiracy theorist," and an "anti-vaxxer," or whatever, and given the fact that he has the power of the state, the media, etc., on his side.

This is how it works in cults, and in larger totalitarian societies...

 

It isn't usually the Gestapo that comes for you. It's usually your friends and colleagues.

 

What Brian is doing is working that system of rewards and punishments to enforce his ideology, because he knows that most of my other colleagues in the theater world have also gone full "New Normal," or at least are looking the other way and staying silent while it is being implemented.

This tactic, obviously, has backfired on Brian, primarily because I do not give a fuck what any New Normals think of me, whether they work in the theater world or anywhere else, but I am in a rather privileged position, because I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in the theater, and would rather stick my hand in a blender than submit my novels to corporate publishers for review by "sensitivity readers," so there isn't much to threaten me with.

 

That, and I have no children to support, or administrations to answer to (unlike, for example, Mark Crispin Miller, who is currently being persecuted by the "New Normal" administration at NYU).

The point is, this kind of ideological conditioning is happening everywhere, every day, on the job, among friends, even among families.

 

The pressure to conform is intense, because nothing is more threatening to devoted cultists, or members of totalitarian ideological movements, than those who challenge their fundamental beliefs, confront them with facts, or otherwise demonstrate that their "reality" isn't reality at all, but, rather, a delusional, paranoid fiction.

The key difference between how this works in cults and totalitarian ideological movements is that, usually, a cult is a subcultural group, and thus non-cult-members have the power of the ideology of the dominant society to draw on when resisting the mind-control tactics of the cult, and attempting to deprogram its members... whereas, in our case, this balance of power is inverted.

 

Totalitarian ideological movements have the power of governments, the media, the police, the culture industry, academia, and the compliant masses on their side.

 

And, thus, they do not need to persuade anyone.

 

They have the power to dictate "reality." Only cults operating in total isolation, like Jim Jones' People's Temple in Guyana, enjoy this level of control over their members.

This pressure to conform, this ideological conditioning, must be fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences, both publicly and in our private lives, or the "New Normal" will certainly become our "reality."

 

Despite the fact that we "Covid deniers" are currently outnumbered by the Covidian cultists, we need to behave as if we are not, and hold to reality, facts, and real science, and treat the New Normals as exactly what they are, members of a new totalitarian movement, delusional cultists run amok. If we do not, we will get to Singer's Condition 6...
 

6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order.

    

   The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing.
   
   We're not there yet, but that is where we're headed... global pathologized totalitarianism. So, please, speak up. Call things what they are. Confront the Brians in your life.

    

   Despite the fact that they tell themselves that they're trying to help you "come to your senses" or "see the truth," or "trust the Science," they are not.

    

   They are cultists, desperately trying to get you to conform to their paranoid beliefs, pressuring you, manipulating you, bullying you, threatening you.

    

   Do not engage them on their terms, or let them goad you into accepting their premises. (Once they've sucked you into their narrative, they've won.)

    

   Expose them, confront them with their tactics and their motives.

    

   You will probably not change their minds in the least, but your example might help other New Normals whose faith is slipping to begin to recognize what has been done to their minds and break with the cult.