Category: Culture

Here’s a story for you.  University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley refuses to admit that she was mistaken in recently cancelling her team’s basketball games with BYU.  In a statement to a reporter, she said, “I continue to stand by my position.”

Why cancel games with BYU?  Staley was reacting to a charge by a Duke University volleyball player, Rachel Richardson, who claimed some BYU fans heckled her with racial slurs.  An exhaustive review by BYU of all available video and audio recordings and interviews with over 50 nearby spectators uncovered no evidence of the insults.  Still, Staley refuses to back down.  Why cling to an unfounded decision in spite of the evidence?  She isn’t the only one.  Lately, over at least a decade, and more incidents recently, we’ve gone through mass derangements over climate change, systemic racism, and COVID.  Facts don’t matter.  Despite, or maybe because of, trillions spent on education and the most intense networks of information ever devised, we seem not to be particularly inoculated from mass psychosis.

Investors should be aware of this thing called mass psychosis, typically referred to as mass formation psychosis.  It happens in markets and occurs anywhere a large group of interconnected people exists.  One source defined it in the following way:

“Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality.  Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue.  Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise.  A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data.  Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.” (Source: see below)

Evidence, proof, and real scientific inquiry are abandoned.  Take the long-running issue of climate change with the adjective “apocalyptic” added for good measure.  Beyond the reasonable assertion on the contribution of CO2 and fossil fuels, much else strays into the realm of speculation or mysticism.  So many other questions on the subject – other contributing factors, their interplay, and impacts – cannot be answered with reasonable certainty, unless pure ideological bias qualifies for seasoned judgment.  How’s that any different from the Heaven’s Gate cult?  Besides, flagellating the most fuel efficient and clean society on the planet – ours – is pointless as over 2.8 billion people in China and India discover the joys of rising incomes, air conditioning, and affordable transportation.  All made possible from the majesty of fossil fuels.

John Kerry is paid by us to jet around the world to cajole foreign rulers whose interests do not align with his fellow comfortable elites in their super-zip estates.  He must be seen by them as a clown to be tolerated, maybe indulged a bit for photo-ops, but otherwise ignored.

John Kerry’s model is California.  The cliché has it that California leads the way to the future.  Maybe so, if that future is characterized by a mass psychosis in the mysticism of climate change.  The rest of the country gets a bird’s-eye view of that fate.  The state’s grid has been turned into a health hazard as the landscape dries out from the dry-summer climate’s periodic droughts.  The state has made it difficult for anyone to clean out the surface debris in its wildlands, and 100 million dead trees await a spark.  And eventually one will be provided by nature or from one of the state’s many urchins from its urban chaos.

The same psychosis that has turned the state into a fire trap is utterly destroying any concept of reliable, affordable energy.  The altar of wind and solar isn’t a sensible means to appease Gaia.  They are intermittent by nature, which strains the grid.  Power lines are made for steady streams of electricity, not the boom and bust that is endemic in sunlight and bursts of air movement.  Any grid under this steady strain breaks down if not assiduously maintained, which it isn’t.  It just so happens, though, that California experiences an annual 5-month dry spell, alongside its endemic droughts, for the ruptures to send thousands fleeing the attendant flames hoping that they have enough charge in their EV to escape death-by-firestorm.

But don’t let the facts get in the way.

California is a self-made disaster.  Their infatuation with air movement and sunlight energy has unknowingly made them dependent on steady-stream sources – fossil fuel, co-gen, hydro, nuclear – to buck up the losses from the night and calm days.  But the state is busy torpedoing most of this backbone.  Co-gen is mostly irrelevant.  For the state’s ruling class, natural gas and coal are the devil’s brew.  Hydro is undermined by eco-mandates for steady stream flows that has helped to turn the state’s reservoirs into puddles.  Don’t only blame the drought.  Every year is not a drought year, and no effort is made to store during the wetter times.  Riparian habitats and dreams of the return of ancient salmon runs checkmate any other use.

The state’s dams have become the equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids.  They are monumental but, as opposed to the pyramids, aren’t likely to attract many visitors three-quarters empty.  The same fate has befallen the state’s two nuclear power plants: San Onofre and Diablo Canyon.  Delayed maintenance while the state bullied the utilities into greenie fantasies put the kibosh to San Onofre, which cost the state 2.2 gigawatts of power.  Diablo Canyon was scheduled for death in 2025.  Blackouts have forced the state’s ruling party to back down on that one.  How long?  Well, it’ll probably remain open until the next spate of wet years gin up hydro for awhile, waiting for the next dry spell to once again reasserts itself to overtax the seas of solar panels and vast windmill forests that mar a once beautiful state.  It’s a cycle of futility buttressed by a mass psychosis: a mystical belief in horrors that fact, reason, and science cannot dispel.

None of this matters one twit to the zealots who run the state.  Evidence be damned.  Electoral majorities in the state are in the grip of a mass mania that jettisons all reason and fact.  All that remains is blackouts, skyrocketing electricity rates, hillsides aflame, and no effect on climate change.

Would it be better to simply enjoy the extended growing season and build more nuclear and low-emission power plants to enjoy the glories of air conditioning?  Regardless, India and China will see to it that CO2 emissions continue to glut the atmosphere with or without the ministrations of John Kerry or the ladies on The View.

Climate change isn’t the only opportunity to go crazy.  We have another one in “systemic racism”.  What is systemic racism?  Does it exist?  Hard to say since “systemic” means that it is hidden and therefore not directly observable.  Thus, we have to rely on others to simply announce its existence as they make an affluent living on their soothsaying.

The racism “experts” are actually grifters.  Racial disparities occur in all sorts of areas such as incarceration rates, educational outcomes, birth rates, marriage, incomes, and social status.  Thus, they insist that racism persists, but not in the Jim Crow way: obvious, in-your-face, and therefore open to rational inquiry.  It’s easier for them to proclaim that the disparities are the proof of racism, even though they haven’t proven it, because they can’t, because the imprecision of the thing makes it immune to empirical testing (falsifiability).  The “ghost in the machine” kind of thing.  Instead, they claim to possess the special gnosis to expose it and how to remediate it as they go to the bank with thousands, if not millions, in book sales, consultant fees, and speeches.  A new industry of charlatans is born.  It’s as if astrology and the four humors in medicine are making a comeback.

The parallels with medieval medicine are glaring.  People in earlier times noticed that fevers were reduced by bleeding a patient.  The ancient Greek philosopher Galen and his four-humors paradigm was proven correct, or so they thought.  It was, however, the classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy at work: two events occur sequentially with the first one assumed to be the cause.  For our current race hustlers – Kimberle Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, et al – systemic racism is proven by unequal outcomes by race.  Poor educational outcomes on assessment tests by race, for instance, must mean that the test and its providers are “systemically” racist.  It’s tantamount to saying, “Fever fell after bleeding, and patient is cured.”  It’s nonsense.

Still, two full seasons after the death of George Floyd, “End Racism” dons the helmets of some NFL players.  Viewers and our kids are barraged by the effort to ferret out something mysteriously within them and lurking in everything that surrounds them.  It’s tantamount to the 17th century Salem witch trials in the modern form of a bogeyman in a Klan outfit.

The whole campaign rides on the inequalities in academic measures by race.  The cause is presumed – racism – but only because “family structure” is excluded.  Kids swim around in social circumstances that have greater impact on academic performance than melanin count or more money in the bank accounts of the NEA membership.  Commissioned by the US Office of Education in 1966, the Coleman Report levelled a blow at the ego of the education industry’s special interests when it concluded, “. . . the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.”  Yep, chaotic home life and slums have greater bearing on admission to MIT than school funding, teacher salaries, and the racism bogeyman.  But you won’t find outcomes by family structure anywhere in the various measures.  Strange.  You’ll see math, reading, and science scores by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, etc., but nary a word about the home.

The missing link between the social measures and their cause is never filled with anything resembling empirical proof.  Unequal stats by race are said to automatically point to racism.  That’s it, and we’re off to the races to follow the “experts” in the secret gnosis.  COVID gave to us another example of the same phenomena: trust the “experts” to fill the gap between a development and its treatment.

Filling the shoes of Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the overpaid founders of CRT, is Dr. Fauci and his peers in government, the NGO’s, many in BIG Pharma, Democratic Party potentates, et al.  The lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking, social distancing, the vaccine decrees, the overall suffocation of a society, were persistently avowed without a real scientific basis.  Other approaches to maintain the functioning of civilization and protect the vulnerable were treated to covert and tacit censorship.  Therapeutics, targeting safeguards on those with certain health conditions, natural immunity, the costs to children, the canceled or forgone medical appointments, the strain on a population quarantined in the four walls of their home (many more walls if you live in the super-zips), and the huge economic losses from the waterboarding of work and production were shunted aside in a mad rush to stamp out the virus, the very opposite of “follow the science”.

Once the “experts” had their foot on the pedal, they never let up, in spite of the growing evidence that they were prescribing a suicide pill.  By summer 2020, it was widely established that the young ran little risk.  So, forcing kids into filthy masks and into isolation behind plexiglass in schools that opened their doors was more than pointless.  It was harmful.  The schools most beholden to the blinkered “experts” were in Democrat strongholds, the inner cities, and they closed the longest.  The academic performance gap morphed into a Grand Canyon.  To no great surprise, the principal victims of this enthusiastic pursuit of school lockdowns and other tortures were minorities, putting a lie to “black lives matter”, especially for young ones.

Data began to stumble out that the states who were the most religious in following Fauci and CDC mysticism fared no better than those who were more agnostic about what Florida’s Gov. DeSantis called “Fauciism” (see below).  Claims were made by our health elites in power that the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, school closures, mandatory vaccines, et al, would “stop the spread” or “bend the curve” when one of the tiniest things in biology and profusely evolving – a virus – will in all likelihood evade the best laid plans of mice and men.  Their interventions were heralded as the holy grail and natural immunity was ridiculed.  Two years after the pandemic’s onset, we’re still grappling with a shape-shifting virus and infections persist.

Who’s to blame for this disorder by mass psychosis?  Certainly, trillions spent annually on schools from K to grad school have monumentally failed at truly and broadly educating the population.  Education is enlightenment.  Are we enlightened?  Evidence to date says “no”.  Conversely, it may be the source of much of this mass psychosis.

What then is the value of our enormous communication network on the net and through satellites, cables, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and the infinite variety of radio signals?  What are they communicating?  Much that is spewed spikes mass psychosis.  We seem to be great at inventing things but no so good at using them.

All our inventions haven’t altered the crooked timber of humanity.  They have only magnified its prese nce.  Immanuel Kant’s famous line from the 18th century remains true: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Credentials are certainly no guarantor.  Civilizations over millennia have created civil society to grapple with our fundamental pretzel character.  You know, faith, family, morals, and neighborly affiliations in local self-help organizations came into being.  People like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Robert Nisbet wrote of the virtues of these “little platoons”. Well, the centralized welfare state carpet-bombed their importance.

We just created more bullhorns for mass psychosis.

RogerG

Sources:

* “What is Mass Formation Psychosis?”, SWFI, 1/2/22, at https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/90470/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis

* Ivan Rowe at the American Enterprise Institute wrote of the missing ingredient of family structure in most reports of our social condition. One column on this subject can be read at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/students-family-background-matters/.

* Skepticism is always warranted when people go beyond what the science gives. Climate change ideology is a classic example of the phenomena. Those in the field of science who have managed to keep their wits exist. Princeton’s Freeman Dyson outlined his critique in the NYT Magazine at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?sq=Freeman. Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg is another. Kevin Shapiro’s review of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, can be found in Commentary Magazine at https://www.commentary.org/articles/kevin-shapiro-2/the-skeptical-environmentalist-by-bjorn-lomborg/. Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh argues for more complexity in the dynamics of the atmosphere than John Kerry would admit. An account of his views can be found in the Orange County Register at https://www.ocregister.com/2008/06/18/japanese-ipcc-scientists-says-global-warming-worst-scientific-scandal/. The Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, and Nobel Prize winner, equates the climate change crusade with a religion. A talk by him on the subject is available through Foreign Policy Journal at https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/01/nobel-laureate-ivar-giaever-on-climate-change/. There are many others out there.

* The Federal Bureau of Economic Research in spring 2022 issued a report on how states fared in their response to COVID-19. Biases marred the analysis of the report. Some with blue-state leanings say that the BER paper proved the wisdom of aggressive COVID measures, while others of a red-state tint say the opposite. Blue-state biases downplayed or ignored the secondary damages of children’s developmental and education losses, the harms from delayed or absent medical treatment, the increase in suicides and depression, the massive disruption to the economic life of the country, etc. One analysis from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity appears more accurate than most. It can be read at https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/final-report-card-on-state-responses-to-covid-19/.

* A report on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on student achievement was made by the Brookings Institute in March 2022 and can be read at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/03/03/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/.