Do the ruling classes engineer rapid social transformation, or do they just react to it?
Nobody denies other groups of human beings can and do conspire to exploit, rob, maim or otherwise harm other people to further their own selfish ends. However, when such groups are large corporations or states, the mainstream media will usually only expose their misdemeanours if they are either official enemies or convenient scapegoats.
We are somehow supposed to believe that any mishaps that affect the livelihoods of millions of ordinary citizens are the fault of a few bad apples, external enemies, natural disasters or our own misbehaviour. We can rest assured it’s never the fault of the world’s most powerful organisations, who presumably all have our best interests at heart. The abiding message that neurolinguistic programming practitioners and behavioural scientists have implanted in our brains is that we must not only trust the experts, but also distrust anyone who challenges them. But who are these experts? Who decides which functionaries may determine scientific truth and constrain public policy options? When media talking heads lectured us on foreign policy, many switched off or opted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Endless internecine and religious conflicts in far-flung corners of the world only concern a minority of Westerners. Most opted to believe that such military adventures, while often counterproductive, aimed to spread liberal democracy and that opponents of humanitarian interventions supported despotic regimes. While most people enjoyed comfortable living standards at home, dissent remained a minority sport. All that changed in early 2020. Well-paid propagandists did not just flood the airwaves to promote resource wars or raise awareness about mental health, they sought to shame anyone who failed to follow a new set of bizarre rules that fundamentally changed the way we interact with each other. All of a sudden, each physical encounter with another human being posed a potential bio-hazard, unless we adhered to a new bio-security protocol. TV experts could thus blame excess mortality not on medical malpractice, but on our failure to abide by their rules.
As the narrative began to crumble, some observers asked why so many people complied with absurd regulations that did more harm than good. For every elderly person who may not have caught a seasonal infection because of lack of physical proximity with other unmasked people, many more died of neglect and isolation. If you see an elderly lady struggling to cross a busy road with a walking frame, she runs a tiny risk of catching a nasty disease from you if you help her, but a much bigger risk of being run over or stumbling on a pothole. Common sense often goes out of the window when another perceived threat looms large. The question is who persuaded hundreds of millions of people in different countries to change their behaviour? Did the stealthy elites plan this operation years in advance or did people just succumb to the madness of crowds genuinely frightened by the prospect of painful early death due to a scary virus? Honestly, I’m quite happy to believe the events of the last two and half years could be a result of both.
Dr Peter Breggin first came to my attention in the early 2000s as I researched the relentless growth of the mental health industry and the concomitant rise in psychoactive drug prescriptions. My concern was then, as it still is today, not with modern medicine, which has helped save many lives, but with the steady drift towards technocratic control of every aspect of natural human behaviour. Technology should always serve us as human beings and not the other way around. Dr Breggin has long been an outspoken critic of antipsychotics and antidepressants. I read the first edition of Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why To Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications, which seemed very much in the same mould of other books that came out in the same era such as Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America. Yet I later learned Dr Breggin often appeared on the notorious Savage Nation radio show. Its host, Michael Savage, had gained a reputation as a rightwing shock jock who not only supported gun rights and opposed mass immigration, but also generally backed US military adventurism and, of course, Israeli exceptionalism. While I agreed with Dr Breggin on psychiatry, I grew suspicious of the company he kept. I came from a left-leaning libertarian perspective critical of any form of authoritarianism, embracing Rousseau’s idea of the fundamentally peace-loving nature of humanity once liberated from all forms of oppression. To my dismay, many on the cultural left welcomed the expansion of mental healthcare with pro-active screening of personality disorders rather than addressing the psycho-social causes of people’s emotional challenges. The authoritarian drift of what we once called the liberal left predates the covid era, but I hoped the tide would turn and the left would once again seek to empower natural humanity rather than re-educate the underclasses in a forlorn quest to engineer a perfect society. The pursuit of perfection, while advantageous in many technical tasks, almost always leads to tyranny when applied to the management of human behaviour.
Many emotive causes that once delineated rival camps posing on the left or right now seem mere side shows. Your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, abortion rights or smacking once served as litmus tests in the fictitious left-right divide. What matters much more is the contrast between greater concentration of power versus greater decentralisation or rather top-down versus bottom-up control structures. The current ethos that beseeches us to trust the experts is the hallmark of the top-down model.
In the Western World, radical critiques of psychiatry appealed most to the antiauthoritarian left. The liberal left opposed militarism and championed the emancipation of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups within society. The notorious Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1974. Early 21st century psychiatrists are much more concerned with symptoms of right-wing radicalisation that may include homophobia and transphobia. By rebranding psychiatry as mental health advocacy and extending its remit to a wide range of emotional problems, the corporate-state system has vastly expanded the behavioural surveillance industry with its armies of social workers, teachers and support workers liaising closely with the health and police services. The covid scare empowered the people management sector to apply the same behavioural insights techniques pioneered with vulnerable children and adults to the wider population. All of a sudden, everyone needed to heed official advice on how to go about their everyday activities. The mainstream media normalised an irrational fear of nanoscopic genetic sequences encouraging behaviours that would have until recently justified a clinical diagnosis of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). At the same time, restrictions on informal socialisation, dehumanising mask mandates in schools and an engineered fear of people outside your bubble promoted autistic behavioural patterns in normal children.
While other American intellectuals I had once admired such as Noam Chomsky failed to challenge the covid narrative, Dr Breggin reappeared on my radar as a brave dissident voice in a new era of worldwide groupthink. In a recent interview with the German Corona Investigative Committee (Corona-Ausschuss), Peter Breggin pointed out something I should have noticed about one of the superstars of the covid truth movement, for a want of a better term, Prof. Mattias Desmet. He did not question the criminality of a tiny clique, but rather sought to blame the madness of the crowds, something he likes to call mass formation. While his thesis has its superficial appeals, his recent book on The Psychology of Totalitarianism fails to identify a criminal cabal responsible for engendering collective compliance, but rather lays the blame on lazy thinking and our innate desire to fit in. It is almost as if the ruling classes did not want to roll out Draconian lockdowns and censor dissent, but only reacted to overwhelming public calls for urgent action to combat the virus. Indeed, unlike Robert F Kennedy Junior, Prof. Desmet fails to mention decades of pandemic planning and the inexorable drift to technocracy. It’s as if we acted in unison without any undue coercion by the same power-hungry elites who also happen to own the media and run most NGOs. While most wild conjecture about secret plots to control the whole of humanity may be wrong, much of verifiable modern history would have to be radically revised if we discounted all theories about corruption and crimes against humanity. High-profile gatekeepers serve an important role in providing ready-packaged explanations for obvious contradictions in the web of deceit emanating from the mainstream media. Yet they deny the criminality at the heart of our ruling classes, passing the buck onto rival ruling classes, incompetent middle managers or workers who followed orders unaware of their consequences. They are organised crime deniers.