How did this principle come to be unstitched and reversed in the past three months?
How did the people come to agree to its reversal?
The process at work is somewhat different to the use of hypnotic or “spell” phrases to herd individuals into a particular way of, for example, politically correct thinking.
As the late Roger Scruton described it, spell words like “racist” and “homophobe” are designed to invoke a set of pre-programed demonic tags with which to threaten the subject and dissuade him from truth and common sense. When these words are uttered, the object is as though stung by a cattle prod or electric fence, thus experiencing a kind of mortification which, in the vast majority of cases, is sufficient to cause an immediate falling into line.
The process used in the herding of individuals into the mass is correlated but subtly different. The method here is not to repel by a shock but to seduce by means of evocative or empathetic words.
Like any form of hypnosis, mass entrancement depends on the leveraging of several inter-related conditions in the subject: focused attention, including impaired or reduced peripheral awareness; an imaginative state—these contributing to vastly increased suggestibility. The COVID-19 scare and accompanying lockdowns enabled these criteria to be met almost everywhere. The attention of audience-members being focused on one topic, many unconsciously acquired a heightened capacity to absorb even the most unusual and presumptuous messages without blinking.
Imagination is a key tool of the hypnotist. With an appropriate script and slipping into mimicry of well-remembered charismatic leaders of the past—a touch of Kennedy, a soupcon of Churchill—even the most plank-like politician can affect a sufficiency of charisma or gravitas to seduce his audience into the zone where he can present them with word-pictures and teleport them to a place of collective imagining.
A mood of siege or crisis is sufficient to inveigle even citizens who yesterday saw the plank for what it was to succumb also to his spell.
By affecting empathy, rapport, a sense of common purpose, he guides his subjects towards the desired frame-of-mind. He seeks access to the unconscious, but not that of the individual person; rather, he wishes to remove each member of his audience to a common place: the herd mind in which he knows they can all come to share approximately the same outlooks, so that henceforth they can be summoned to that place by signs and triggers without leaving their armchairs....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...
