Jeffrey A. Tucker – The American Institute for Economic Research July 10, 2020
I was sitting in the green room in a Manhattan television studio on the day that the storm seemed to hit. It was Thursday, March 12, 2020, and I was waiting anxiously for a TV appearance, hoping that the trains wouldn’t shut down before I could leave the city. The trains never did shut but half of everything else did.
On this day, everyone knew what was coming. There was disease panic in the air, fomented mostly by the media and political figures. A month earlier, the idea of lockdown was unthinkable, but now it seemed like it could happen, at any moment.
A thin, wise-looking bearded man with Freud-style glasses sat down across from me, having just left the studio. He was there to catch his breath following his interview but he looked deeply troubled.
“There is fear in the air,” I said, breaking the silence.
“Madness is all around us. The public is adopting a personality disorder I’ve been treating my whole career.”
“What is it that you do?” I asked.
“I’m a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety disorders, paranoid delusions, and irrational fear. I’ve been treating this in individuals as a specialist. It’s hard enough to contain these problems in normal times. What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population. It can happen with anything but here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic. It seems almost deliberate. It is tragic. Once this starts, it could take years to repair the psychological damage.”
I sat there a bit stunned, partially because speaking in such apocalyptic terms was new in those days, and because of the certitude of his opinion. Underlying his brief comments were a presumption that there was nothing particularly unusual about this virus. We’ve evolved with them, and learned to treat them with calm and professionalism. What distinguished the current moment, he was suggesting, was not the virus but the unleashing of a kind of public madness.
I was an early skeptic of the we-are-all-going-to-die narrative. But even I was unsure if he was correct that the real problem was not physical but mental. In those days, even I was cautious about shaking hands and carrying around sanitizer. I learned later, of course, that plenty of medical professionals had been trying to calm people down for weeks, urging the normal functioning of society rather than panic. It took weeks however even for me to realize that he was right: the main threat society faced was a psychological condition.
I should have immediately turned to a book that captivated me in high school. It is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841). I liked reading it because, while it highlighted human folly, it also seemed to indicate that we as a civilization are over that period in history.
It allowed me to laugh at how ridiculous people were in the past, with sudden panics over long hair and beards, jewelry, witches, the devil, prophecies and sorcery, disease and cures, land speculation, tulips, just about anything. In a surprising number of cases he details, disease plays a role, usually as evidence of a malicious force operating in the world. Once fear reaches a certain threshold, normalcy, rationality, morality, and decency fade and are replaced by shocking stupidity and cruelty.
He writes:
In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity…. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
After 2005 when the Internet developed into a serious repository for human knowledge, and it became accessible via smartphones and near-universal access, I too was tempted by the idea that we would enter into a new age of enlightenment in which mass frenzies would be quickly stopped by dawning wisdom.
You can see evidence of my naivete with my April 5, 2020 article: With Knowledge Comes Calm, Rationality, and, Possibly, Openness. My thought then was that the evidence of the extremely discriminatory impact of the virus on plus-70 people with underlying conditions would cause a sudden realization that this virus was behaving like a normal virus. We were not all going to die. We would use rationality and reopen. I recall writing that with a sense of confidence that the media would report the new study and the panic would end.
I was preposterously wrong, along with my four-month-old feeling that all of this stuff would stop on Monday. The psychiatrist I met in New York was correct: the drug of fear had already invaded the public mind. Once there, it takes a very long time to recover. This is made far worse by politics, which has only fed the beast of fear. This is the most politicized disease in history, and doing so has done nothing to help manage it and much to make it all vastly worse.
We’ve learned throughout this ordeal that despite our technology, our knowledge, our history of building prosperity and peace, we are no smarter than our ancestors and, by some measures, not as smart as our parents and grandparents. The experience with COVID has caused a mass reversion to the superstitions and panics that sporadically defined the human experience of ages past.
Eventually, people have and do come to their senses, but it is as Mackay said: people “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email. Tw | FB | LinkedIn
I’m now convinced the germ theory of disease is wrong.
Well done
Military Psyops 101.
It was deliberate. The Great Resets call for a winding down not just of the economy but a switch in all of our work-a-day aims and aspirations to their totalitarian goals of a promised “greener, smarter, and fairer” utopia. They have had to scare us with the mother of all debt bubbles, the sky-is-falling-man-made global warming scam, and now the Black Death of the Covid virus, all of which is fake, but all of which they have deemed necessary to usher in their totalitarian New World Order. Not only will their corrupt methods have long-lasting adverse psychological effects, but they also serve to destroy any possible faith honest common-sense people can in any government, main-stream media, or institutional authority. The authorities recognizing this problem as undermining their authority have resorted to blacking out and censoring anything which exposes their stealth. This in turn only compounds the psychological disorder with a feeling of more fear, oppression, and hopelessness.
Perhaps the biggest scam in all of this is the debt scam, where even in the absence of the Coivd shutdowns, we apparently were in a recession since 2008 and the economy really started going belly up last summer with the collapse of the repo market. At least that is what most investors were led to believe. But how is it the US Fed can create so many trillions out of nothing whenever they want and absolve debt so easily? The experts answer that the trillions will likely cause hyperinflation.
However, then you hear of the shadow banking system which since the inception of the US Fed has been creating trillions unaccounted for and injecting it around the world without any real care about inflation. Yesterday I listened to Rich Dad Poor Dad again, and it was amazing. I had never heard of “swap lines” before. The link is entitled “The Most SHOCKING Interview You’ll Hear In 2020! – Robert Kiyosaki, Kim Kiyosaki, and Marin Katusa”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJGUhWq7Efk
The 15 favored nations of the US Fed have been “given” trillions made out of nothing, not just in this man-made scamdemic, but since 1913. It is the essence of the shadow economy and likely Western power where what is on top of the pyramid of power is not an all-seeing eye but rather a thoroughly corrupt little body of men, who have the power to make money out of nothing and to direct it to whomever and to whatever they want.
It is inconceivable that any US President or leader of any nation in the world would not know about the swap lines and how the money is really dolled out. From another recent and reliable source I have learned that after WWII the shadow banking system actually sent printing plates, and plane loads of ink and paper, into East Germany, for the Soviets to make as much US currency as they needed, and none of the newly created Soviet block nations were even designated a swap-line “favored” nations.
All this creation of trillions in swap lines likely only partially explains the missing tens of trillions from the books of the US Fed and Treasury. All of our Western currencies are pegged on this fantastic sham, to which we attach the all the value of our work and sweat.
So what if Canada spends 80 billion in handouts in the scamdemic or the US some 500 billion. It is only of pittance of what is shoveled out in swap lines. Let’s all just stop working and let the dole roll in. Let us all eat vagan, drink prune juice, and be merry automatons.
Knowing about swap lines and the fiat money system which is completely depended on the demand for the dollar, totally explains any lack of panic or real concern in all of our leaders in the face of radically decreased tax revenue because of their deliberate stalling of the economy in dutifully playing their roles. It also serves as further evidence that the central banking cartel because it oversees the supply of US currency to the world, can be the only authority with enough juice to command the unwavering obedience of all of our governments to fully participate in and promote the scamdemic performance, and to implement the proposed reset changes.
The “germ theory” is not only wrong, but fraudulent.
If “germs” really did exist, and if they really were as tiny as we’re told, Louis Pasteur could NOT have seen his “animalcules” through even the most powerful optical microscope.
The only possible conclusion is that he was consciously LYING.
I had an interesting experience this afternoon.
I went for longish walk with the idea of making notes on a book I’m reading. I’d hadn’t been that route for a few months, and so was not surprised certain areas of a municipally owned golf clubhouse were taped off allowing only access to car park, golf course, and the WCs. The cafe was shut, and the benches outside were taped over in that red and white “thou must not stick your arse here” form.
I sat down on one of the benches and started reading. The club manager walked past and told me it was verboten. I blanked him, and carried on reading. He came back and this time he was red faced and more forceful.
I said something like “It’s all nonsense you know”. And he said “What about all the people who are dying with it?”
I said “With it or because of it?”
He had no concept of causation. He was evidently fearful of the mainstream propaganda. So, yes, this is a new religion of fear. We exchanged insults. He called me an “ejit” under his breathe. I called him a “fool” to his face, and eventually I got up and left since my equanimity had been disturbed and study was now useless.
On reflection, I might as well have tried to persuade him of the unreality of the Immaculate Conception as much as the unreality of COVID-1984 scam. Those of us guided by reason – we hope – just have to face that MOST people, are people of faith. I regret provoking him. But those who are guided by the faith of this new religion are dragging the rest of us down with them.