People are vulnerable to mob psychology when society is in a state of atomization, something observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Gabrielle Bauer, a longtime health and medical writer and author of “Blindsight Is 2020: Reflections on Covid Policies From Dissident Scientists, Philosophers, Artists, and More.”
When the lockdowns started, Ms. Bauer said she had a deep, visceral feeling of disgust for them and her soul was “not onboard” with what was happening, so she felt the need to connect with like-minded people.
At the same time, she observed an unprecedented fanaticism in people, where insults were lightly thrown to someone with a different point of view.
“Sociopath, eugenicist, those are the memes that they threw at you, if you dared to question in even the most polite ways what was going on, and those are thought-stopping words designed to put people in their place,” Ms. Bauer said.
Finding Others in Resistance
The rationale behind this was also lacking, according to Ms. Bauer, as “the level of fear didn’t seem commensurate or proportionate with what was going on.”
Ms. Bauer said she even sought therapy with a psychologist to understand why people had quickly turned so fanatical.
“People called me a sociopath, a mouth-breathing Trumptard, a village idiot, a neckbeard, all the insults you can imagine. In all my then 63 years of life, no one had ever called me these things before.
“Suddenly, these people who I don’t know are calling me these things. It was completely surreal. It was actually genuinely troubling on a very deep level.”
She said that through time, she did a lot of reading and connected with many people around the world who had similar ideas of defending freedom.
As for the people insulting her for her opinions, Ms. Bauer said that they weren’t open to discussion.
“They had a thought-stopping response to anything. If you tried to push back, they would say, ‘You want people to die.’ No, I don’t want people to die. I want to have a nuanced discussion about this, but that’s the kind of thought-stopping cliches that would be thrown at you. That’s always a sign of an unhealthy dynamic in society, when dissent is not tolerated.”
Searching for a different viewpoint online, Ms. Bauer found some “giants in the resistance,” as she called them, like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Dr. Vinay Prasad.
While writing her book, she also talked to philosophers, artists, and economists and realized that there are many aspects to be considered before one can decide on a lockdown.
She said she thought it was crazy that the pandemic was handled by the government as just a “scientific puzzle” to solve.
“It’s a human problem to manage. How do we steer the human family through this, while preserving dignity, preserving people’s abilities to earn a living, to have the kind of communion they need.”
Regarding giving up freedom during the pandemic, Ms. Bauer said that “people died for our freedoms. It was so disconcerting to see how most people were completely willing to give it up in the name of some hypothetically greater safety.”
Similarly, protection of speech is for the hard times, and not for things everyone agrees on, she added.
Seeking Understanding
Ms. Bauer said she needed to understand the people around her, and that was the reason she sought out therapy, with the only available means at the time being online meetings.The people in her environment belonged mostly to the middle class and a “so-called progressive circle,” she said, and she needed to understand why all of this was troubling her so much, but not them.
She said she was prone to doubt herself, wondering if something was wrong with her.
“That’s very primal, the fear of being shunned. And that was really the tactic that the mainstream enforcers of the narrative did use. Shunning. Again, you were called the vilest names, like sociopath.”
A chapter of Ms. Bauer’s book is devoted to groupthink and mob psychology. In this chapter she interviewed Matthias Desmet, who talked about “mass formation,” which is “another way to say crazy mob psychology,” she said.
Regarding Canada’s trucker convoy, Ms. Bauer said that her friends and relatives were shocked that she supported the convoy, because they thought the convoy was “some kind of Nazi group.”
Ms. Bauer, who also interviewed her son in the book because he participated in the Ottawa protests, said that there was an atmosphere of jubilation there, and nothing like what her friends were thinking. Her son told her there might be one or two people holding crazy flags, but they were not representative of the overall atmosphere.
There was a lot of anti-Trudeau sentiment, but the atmosphere was very celebratory, she said.
She supported them because they “were corrective to the insanity, then went beyond vax mandates.”
