In Part I of Menticide 101 and the Brainwashing of a World, I discussed how fearful expectation is deliberately programmed into people (via propaganda, news, et cetera), not just to make people fearful in order to control them, but in order to change their psyche, for the worse. The aim is to harm people. This programming not only causes psychological harm, but can—and often does—result in physical harm. Much of the critique of the “psy-op” during the Covid era has focussed on the ethics (or lack thereof) of making people frightened, or faulty thinking as a result of fear (including faulty cognitive processes and groupthink). However, menticide—the murder of the mind—is far more sinister than that, and its effects are deliberately and subtly far-reaching in the existential situation we find ourselves in today.
We come to the heart of the menticide machine in the work of the famous Russian physiologist Dr Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936). In The White Nights: Pages from a Russian doctor’s notebook (1956), Pavlov's biographer, Dr Boris Sokoloff, describes an incredible account of his visit to his laboratory. Pavlov is known for his work on classical conditioning, which has informed much thinking around behaviourism in psychology. Sokoloff describes his visit thus:
“What is wrong with these poor creatures?” [Sokoloff] asked. “What have you given them to make them so nervous?”
Zelëniy laughed. “This is our prize project. Ivan Petrovitch [Pavlov] attributes great importance to it. As you know, he has proved that the central nervous system directs and controls all functions of the body, in man and animals alike. But now he wants us to establish, through a series of experiments, that such diseases as cancer are also influenced by the central nervous system. Or that neurotic persons, whose nervous system is overstrained, are much more predisposed to cancer than persons with a well-balanced, normal nervous system.”
“An ambitious project,” [Sokoloff] remarked.
“Quite…But we hope to prove that the etiology of cancer is in the alterations of the central nervous system…Well, this is the first step in that direction. I rendered these dogs neurotic.”
“How?” I was fascinated.
“By using the technique of conditioned reflexes. First, by forming them with a bell or a light, and then inhibiting them. This technique can induce a state of extreme neurosis in normal dogs. You can see yourself that they are neurotic.”
And they were, indeed.
“Now,” Zelëniy continued, “we shall see if a malignant tumour develops in these dogs. We might know in a year or two.”
It was to take more than twenty years, however, to complete the investigation. Not until after the death of Pavlov and Zelëniy were the results published by Dr Maria Petrova and other Pavlov students, partially confirming their master’s theory.
It is common knowledge in the psychological “industry” that induced stress is linked to a myriad of physical and psychological disorders, including depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorders, substance misuse and psychotic-type disturbances.
Not just the Soviets
From a public health perspective, it is surprising and highly concerning that the UK Government and devolved administrations have deliberately, on the advice of psychologists from the SPI-B behavioural committee of the Government's scientific advisory body SAGE and from the Behavioural Insights Team at the Cabinet Office, used—and are still using—methods derived from Pavlov in their response to Covid-19, the supposed climate emergency and the Ukraine war; methods which are making us all psychologically and physically unwell.
For Laura Dodsworth’s book A State of Fear: How the UK Government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic, the author interviewed psychologist members of SPI-B. Some were prepared to admit that their tactics may have been ethically dubious, some felt uncomfortable, and some said they thought the tactics necessary. Unfortunately, the interviews with the psychologists are just not credible. Knowing psychologists as I do (I trained as one), I am aware that they pride themselves, to the point of arrogance, on being able to decipher data and being able to conduct themselves in their actions to the highest possible ethical standards.
The members of SPI-B interviewed by Dodsworth never seemed to query the actual risk of Covid-19, but take the hype around Covid-19 as a given. More importantly, it is just not credible that the psychologists did not know that they were breaking the ethical and practice guidelines of the British Psychological Society; see my earlier article Psychological Attack on the UK in the Mind section of the UK Column website.
Why am I so sure that the psychologists interviewed for State of Fear are dissembling?
Firstly, they would be well aware of the ethical duties contained within their code of conduct and of how tactics that deliberately make people fearful were completely against the code of ethics.
Secondly, and more importantly, the Head of Policy of the British Psychological Society, Kathryn Scott, is a member of SPI-B of SAGE; it is just not possible that the group of psychologists on SPI-B did not realise that they had torn up the ethical rule book of their very own profession. It must be noted that both the British Psychological Society (BPS) and its regulator, the Health and Care Professions Council, have been eerily silent over—or have flatly denied—the unethical nature of the work of psychologists in SPI-B. Indeed, the British Psychological Society supported and praised the work of Professor Susan Michie after she was “attacked” on social media for her role in the fearmongering by SPI-B.
Besides the incredibly poor ethical knowledge purportedly displayed by the psychologists in Dodsworth’s book, another clue which certainly points to the deliberate nature of their tactics is from a webinar, Covid-19: Towards the New Normal, and Beyond, actually hosted by the British Psychological Society, which was recorded on 5 May 2020. The panel featured Susan Michie and Kathryn Scott. The discussion clearly shows that the British public was being deceived and lied to by the UK Government about what was taking place in early 2020; it was never intended to be “three weeks to flatten the curve” when that phrase was intoned on 23 March 2020. The psychologists in the webinar discussed how immunity passports were already being discussed prior to May 2020, and that the public was being manipulated (unawares, without informed consent) for behaviour change to a “new normal”. I must conclude that there was no intention, even then, that old freedoms were going to be returned.
This indicates that the psychologists in Dodsworth’s book were not being truthful about the extent of what they knew and the plans which the UK Government had in store for us. In the video of the May 2020 BPS webinar, at the 24-minute mark (this timestamp), Professor Susan Michie mentions that the issue of immunity passports was discussed by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on 28 April 2020.
It was never “three weeks to flatten the curve”, to “save the NHS”. That was a blatant lie.
Menticide, the precursor to schizogenesis
The deliberate intentions of SPI-B, and the UK Government it serves, to produce a more fearful population; the less-than-honest revelations by the psychologists from SPI-B; and the clear aim to strive for a “new normal” lasting decades, not weeks, bear all the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime, hell-bent on menticide. This finding ominously echoes the warnings of Hannah Arendt, who described totalitarianism as the attempted transformation of human nature itself.
However, such attempted transformation only results in turning sound minds into sick minds. This idea was discussed in great detail by the Dutch psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Joost Meerloo, who studied the mental effects of living under totalitarianism in his classic book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, published in 1956:
[T]here is in fact much that is comparable between the strange reactions of the citizens of [totalitarianism] and their culture as a whole on the one hand and the reactions of the […] sick schizophrenic on the other.
The book describes how scientific brainwashing is conducted. Meerloo argues that most people find it difficult to resist such techniques. Putting people into a state of fear—only the first process in a longer-term goal—is known to create a menticidal hypnosis. This involves the conscious part of the personality no longer being fully alert to or aware of the victim's actions and behaviours. The brainwashed person lives in a trance, repeating the mantras of the dictator.
Like totalitarian states, democratic states are also subject to the insidious influences of menticide on a political and a non-political level. This hidden influence becomes, in supposedly democratic states, just as pernicious to the liberties of life as it is in overtly totalitarian states. Meerloo argues that inhabitants of supposed democratic countries, no less than those living in outright totalitarian countries, must guard against the creeping intrusion into their minds by technology, bureaucracy, prejudice and mass delusion.
Priming a population for the crime of menticide begins with the sowing of fear. People then are very susceptible to progressing to delusions of madness. Meerloo describes how threats—real, imagined, or fabricated—can be used to disseminate and create fear. Moreover, a particularly effective technique of menticide is to use waves of terror. This technique involves the sowing of fear interspersed with periods of calm, but each of these periods of calm is followed by the creation or invention of an even more intense dissemination of fear, which can be repeated indefinably—or, as Meerloo writes:
Each wave of terrorizing […] creates its effects more easily—after a breathing spell—than the one that preceded it, because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effects of each new propaganda campaign become stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.
What Meerloo describes is exactly what happened with the psy-op waged under the psychologists of SPI-B and the UK Government with regard to the threat of Covid-19 and “variants of concern”. No doubt the nudging mavens and behavioural change agents are even now applying the same refined tactics to the supposed climate emergency, the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine and the rest of the news, which is flooded with talk of impending food and fuel shortages for a mixture of all these alleged reasons.
The use of fearmongering propaganda to spread misinformation and to promote confusion with respect to the threats of pestilence, famine, climate failure and war; the economic gloom; and the constantly-moving goalposts regarding the very nature of all these crises help to break down the minds of the masses. The dissemination of contradictory reports by scientists, politicians and legacy news outlets in the messaging is a key tactic. This was, and is, also evident in the British governmental and mainstream media psy-op tactics:
- Three weeks to flatten the curve
- The vaccine is our route to freedom
- Masks are not needed
- Masks are needed
- The “cancelling” of Christmas and Easter at the last minute
- Variants of concern (which may or may not, depending on which scientific advisor, government official or day of the week it is, signal an impending danger to the human race or necessitate another lockdown)
Then, we have had the on/off issue of vaccine passports, “no jab, no job” threats for care workers, and the Marburg/monkeypox virus threats by the World Health Organisation. Of course, we cannot forget the “climate emergency”, “fuel shortages”, the “energy price crises”, and now the war in Ukraine.
These fear-waves and threats (negative stimuli; conditioning à la Pavlov) are designed deliberately to grind people down, to make them submit, to induce breakdown, to coerce them to give up, to induce madness and to make people lose themselves.
The next stage, schizogeny
What we are experiencing with all these crises—and with the associated stimuli we are subjected to, not least propaganda—resembles the schizogenic relationship, as described by the radical Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst R.D. Laing.
Laing sets out how contradictory messaging from a child’s mother can drive a child into a psychotic episode or full-blown schizophrenic breakdown. An example of a schizogenic relationship is when a mother says to her child, “I love you; please come to your mother for a hug”, but when the child goes in for the hug and the mother is cold and unresponsive and the child pulls away, the mother asks, “What’s wrong; don’t you love me?”.
If the mother subsequently chastises the child for pulling away—“What a bad boy you are. Of course I love you”—this confusing and contradictory messaging can produce a psychotic or schizophrenic breach in the psychic world of the child, if such a schizogenic pattern is repeated often enough.
Logic, reason and language is destroyed in the victim. In this scenario, logic can be met with logic (for instance, by the mother in response to the son), while the illogic cannot—it confuses and misleads. The illogic remains in the “in-between” within the interpersonal situation, unrecoverable and haunting the interpersonal dynamic. Questioning the logic results in rebuke, in the questioner being gaslit and his sanity or logic undermined. This same dynamic exists domestic abuse relationships. The psy-op of our day has all the hallmarks of this dynamic.
Irrational
The idea of menticide and schizogenesis in relation to the Covid-19 and the other current crises is important for people to recognise, because the fear narratives proffered are often couched in reason (on both sides of the debate), with an appeal to logic, as though reason and logic will save us.
We see such reason and logic brought to the fore in how Giorgio Agamben describes the pandemic, from his leftist-atheist perspective (see Part I of this article), as an assault on democracy by fascists, or equally—as considered by Laura Dodsworth in her State of Fear—in the narrative of how the jab rollout is a “happy ending” to this saga, that we must have an inquiry to discuss how we want to be governed, and why we need to have a debate on how psychological and nudge tactics could or should be used in the future.
Unfortunately, appealing to reason—we need our freedoms back because XYZ—and logic—the facts show otherwise—will have no effect on the totalitarians pushing technocracy or charting a course toward the “new normal”.
We have to realise that we are not dealing with particularly rational or logical people; they speak with forked tongues. The psychologists in SPI-B know very well how the menticide-inducing propaganda works, as does the UK Government—it is planned. Any feigning of partial innocence or ignorance is no better than the schizogenic mother in R.D. Laing's example.
Just as Hannah Arendt argues (see Part I of this article), the totalitarians are attempting to transform our human nature; this horror is exemplified by queer theory ideology (e.g. the destruction of the family, trans ideology, contra-reproductive futurism), by transhumanism (e.g. merging artificial intelligence with biology), and by the vaunting of medicine, technology and science as the new god (e.g. zero-carbon utopia, smart cities, digital world, mRNA “vaccines” with constant upgrades needed). All are part of this drive for the dark transformation to the biosecurity state, a scientific dictatorship and the “new normal”.
Deliberate
It is no accident that our government, and governments around the world, are using the tactics of isolating people with the likes of lockdowns and are constantly disrupting normal social interactions by means such as face masks, social distancing, and travel disruption and restrictions. When people are made to isolate themselves, and their normal interactions with friends, family and colleagues are taken away, they become far more susceptible to menticide. In isolation, or through the disruption of ordinary social interaction and practices, people lose the corrective force of the positive example.
The totalitarian knows that not everyone is seduced by the fear propaganda, and that the still-sane can help free others from the menticidal attack. If, however, isolation is enforced—lockdown, prohibitions on mixing, social distancing rules, climate restrictions, obstacles to travel—then that positive example of ordinary human flourishing and psychic health is greatly diminished.
The psychologists of SPI-B are well aware (or should be, as psychologists), as is the UK Government, that isolation increases the efficacy of menticide, since people are especially easily conditioned into new patterns of thought and behaviour when isolated. As Meerloo describes with regards to the physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s work on behavioural conditioning:
Pavlov made another significant discovery: the conditioned reflex could be developed most easily in a quiet laboratory with a minimum of disturbing stimuli. Every trainer of animals knows this from his own experience; isolation and the patient repetition of stimuli are required to tame wild animals […] The totalitarians have followed this rule. They know that they can condition their political victims most quickly if they are kept in isolation.
The game plan goes beyond a simple state of fear
It cannot be said enough that we are being subjected to a menticidal assault and are being forced to adapt to a schizogenic state.
We are being nudged by the behavioural scientists towards a totalitarian transformation of human life, where our psyches—and bodies—are split and alienated (including from reason and from ordinary human flourishing and personal interactions). This transformation is aptly described by Philip and David Collins, in The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship: an examination of epistemic autocracy from the 19th to the 21st century, as the push towards a technocratic globalist state, where bodies and psyches are controlled to the nth degree and where democracy is non-existent.
One only has to browse the literature on the World Economic Forum, the WHO Treaty, or the content of the United Nations' Agenda 2030, as well as on the unaccountable movers and shakers pushing the technocratic global state (e.g. the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other Big Tech platforms), for it to become quite clear that this transformation is planned and its shapers are firmly on the side of abuse and evil. In a domestic abuse context, an abuser very rarely ever admits to committing any wrong.
Just look at the reactions from the pandemic pushers when people exercise their God-given sovereignty (such as by not wearing a mask, going to the beach or going on holiday): they throw the toys out of the pram and cry “Lockdown!”, but are pertinently silent when the overlords flaunt the rules, as discussed in Part I. This is all part of the promotion of confusion, menticide and schizogenesis. Freedom and democracy depend on both mental and physical freedom. Both are under attack from menticide. Menticide is a crime against humanity.
Those who are complicit in this menticide need to be held to account, not indulged with reason, appeals to logic, or let off the hook with “lesson-learning” inquiries to ascertain how best to use nudges or unethical psychological tactics in the future. It has to be remembered that these people pushing the menticide are complacent in their celebration of the rollout of an experimental mRNA “vaccine” for children whose long-term effects are unknown; and that they are more generally insistent on the establishment and normalisation of a scientific-technocratic dictatorship. The narrative of reason and logic only serves the interests of those pushing the menticide and promotes the formation of the state of menticide and schizogenesis. As Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rainbow describe:
The advance of bio-power is contemporary with the appearance and proliferation of the very categories of anomalies-the delinquent, the pervert, and so on-that technologies of power and knowledge were supposedly designed to eliminate. The spread of normalization operates through the creation of abnormalities which it must treat and reform. By identifying anomalies scientifically, the technologies of bio-power are in a perfect position to supervise and administer them.
Under the double-pronged attack of menticide and the normalisation of anomalies of human life under the auspices of a scientific dictatorship—one impervious to cries of reason—we as individuals, as a collective in society, as a civilisation must reflect on how we live in response to this assault. It is plain that we are living in a time of increased menticidal pressure. As a result, individual psychic and group conflicts are becoming ever more apparent, such as in the forms of mental ill health and fascistic behaviours from those ushering in a biosecurity tyranny.
In Part III of Menticide 101 and the Brainwashing of a World, I will discuss some ideas as to resistance, courage and mental fortitude. It is imperative that in spirit, we can foresee a way to live. Courage—old courage—has either been forgotten, or is being (and has steadily been for many years) cultured out. We must forge a way to resurrect the old courage, to obtain a new boldness to fit these menticidal times.
The author is interviewed here about his understanding of menticide.
