The tranche of emails for the period February to April, 2021, has been posted (the password is unchanged).
Here is the Introduction:
These emails hark back to the spring of 2021. The dreadful days of 2020 were over and the full horror of The Global Plague had been revealed. Except that it hadn’t ! By then, even those most devoted to the Covid Cause must surely have realized that the response had been a grotesque over-reaction. And I’m afraid I’m bound to say I told you so (it’s alright, I won’t say it too often). We looked back in 2021 to the year of lockdowns and masks and concluded we had been living in cloud cuckoo land – a state described by the psychologist and psychotherapist Mattias Desmet as a kind of “mass hypnosis”.
Desmet is certainly correct in pointing to the abuse of the discipline of psychology in seeking to control and manipulate behavior, but I am skeptical of his “hypnosis” idea for two reasons. First, I dispute the claim that loneliness and lack of social bonding led to our experiencing life as meaningless. In particular, I am suspicious of his appeal to social bonding as a necessary good. We too easily forget the near-forcible imposition of a shallow communitarianism on a manifestly unwilling population. We too easily forget all those appeals to the “common good” which somehow turned out to be much less common and much less good. Desmet sees the breakdown in social bonding as the root cause of all our ills: the sense that others control our actions; the near-universal anomie; the epidemic of anxiety; the palpable frustration; the overt displays of aggression. I am unpersuaded - you must surely be an extraordinarily sociable person to find the proposition even plausible. Either that, or committed to “socialism”, which is, I assume, sociability with its political hat on.
My second objection to Desmet’s proposition is more psychological. I dispute the claim that human behavior is largely “thoughtless”: that what makes us ripe for “hypnotic control” in the first place is the fact that our behavior results from processes beyond the reach of our (rarely deployed) reflective rational mind. Freud was certainly not the first to endorse this proposition, which can trace its roots back to Plato. It is false, but it continues to resonate, even with some psychologists, for the rather unworthy reason that it recruits its adherents into a kind of priesthood. These are the people (you’ve surely met them by now) who can claim – with a perfectly straight face – that all this applies to you, but not to me, because I, alone, see behind the curtain. I refer in particular, of course, to the most recent re-brand of “social psychology” (that is, psychology without its mind) as Behavioural Science and its practitioners as Nudge Theorists. Now, nudging people to act against their own best interests is not particularly novel, neither is it particularly ethical. Tyrants seemed to know it in their cradles; prostitutes and second-hand car dealers grew into it. It’s not at all hard to frighten people, albeit you’re not supposed to do it.
Some in France (where I live) find the whole Nudge business outrageous:
Comment (writes the author of a rather grand piece in France Soir): c’est-à-dire, il est possible que la vie humaine se soit réduite à être enchaînée et asservie par un QR Code, avec la liberté accordée par les gouvernants à l’échéance des différentes piqûres vaccinales. Comment il a été possible d’échanger sa liberté contre un spritz au bar et de diviser la société entre si-vax et no-vax. Comment notre vie s’est réduite à être scannée par une application, comme si c’était un aliment acheté au comptoir du supermarché. Comment a-t-il été possible de justifier cette dérive au nom d’une urgence permanente, avec un État chantage qui, tout en se protégeant de toute responsabilité pénale et civile, nous dit quoi faire de notre corps au nom de prétendues exigences collectives et de la protection de la santé. Comment il a été possible d’ériger la science en religion et le totem vaccinal en panacée de tous les maux de l’humanité. Comment, tout cela a été possible, entre autres, dans une nation comme la France, au mépris de sa splendide Constitution, de son passé des Lumières et de ses saints principes de Liberté, d’Égalité, de Fraternité.
[It would be fruitless to offer a translation, because this kind of splendid stuff can only be written in French.]
Well I have news for the author: there is a (psychological) answer, and it is one that is unequivocal and surprisingly optimistic. It is equally surprising that it fell to a superannuated psychologist like myself to make the case, but there you are, I assume my brothers and sisters in academe were occupied with other things.
You will find the reference in the email dated 12 March 2021. Here is the article. If you don't have time to read the lot, here's a summary of its message:
"Can we put to bed once and for all the notion that there is a mysteriously effective battery of psychological techniques, uniquely available to a new breed of psychological rulers? The grisly truth is more mundane: public compliance was secured with that same mixture of terror and virtue that Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety would have found familiar. Lies, misinformation, intimidation and (in extremis) physical violence have served tyrants for as long as history – they have no more legitimate relationship with the discipline of psychology than physical torture has with the practice of surgery. No special justification for evil acts is purchased by defining them as ‘psychological’ with or without an appeal to elaborate ethical codes and the alleged mysteries of unconscious persuasion. "