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Very much enjoying your summary!

I was hesitant about Desmet when he first came on the scene as I didn't find a lot in his published papers that indicated he was an expert in this area. But from your summaries it sounds like he's got a good handle on the topic and maybe even advanced it (as I think you intimated last time).

So I'll have to get his book and put it in the reading schedule.

Thanks again Harrison.

Love to know where you think the gaps are (or where he's missed the mark) at the end of your survey.

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Aug 15, 2022·edited Aug 15, 2022Liked by Harrison Koehli

Excellent suite of articles. This information has helped me immensely as I've battled several situations in recent years with close friends and relatives who have fallen victim to this psychoses. I've attempted unsuccessfully to make sense of their perspectives, which has been quite a painful and confusing process for me. However, the information you're laying out is spot on from what I've experienced and concisely reconciles so many of my questions. Thank you so much for expending the time and energy in creating these articles and placing them into the public sphere!

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"There’s a scientific consensus, after all." The trouble is that most of what is purported to be science is junk science, especially in the "social sciences" which have attained an entirely undeserved respectability. A lot of the "numbers" come from those fields, in which cases the conclusions are often assumed and then "numbers" are cooked up to back those conclusions. Thus you get critical race theory and wokeism - go back in time and you get the Frankfort School and "scientific socialism", all of them games to demonstrate the desirability of one totalitarian system or another. The conclusion that individual freedom must be subsumed to the "needs of the collective" - usually determined by a very small group, an oligarchy or "leadership vanguard" - is the driving force behind the creation of these "numbers", and the "research" is paid for by the beneficiaries. And people are trained to accept and back this by systems of public education - government schooling - the basis for mass formation in every society in which this has occurred since the 1880s:

"Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers." http://wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

People coming out of such a system are ripe targets for mass formation. In the US, forty and fifty years ago, they were targets for authoritarian cults, many of which used the same Thought Reform techniques as seen today. I don't recall seeing references to Singer, Lifton, or Gatto in Desmet's work, and their work in explaining this phenomenon and the propensity for people to get caught up in it would be of great explanatory use.

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This is all a very good explanation of how mass formation operates. But Desmet is keen to say that mass formation during Covid occurred because of our prior dehumanization (he implies) that only needed a little propaganda to get it going. The truth, however, is that we were basically normal people in terms of social connections and even spirituality prior to Covid (even if Christianity itself had fallen off, other spiritual beliefs replaced much of it) and it was massive propaganda and censorship that induced mass formation during Covid: the "steering," as Desmet puts it, was indeed intentional and not more-or-less spontaneously arising, like a Sierpinski triangle.

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