Victimhood v. Responsibility

Do you have what it takes to resist brainwashing?

Last night I posted my reflections on Professor Mattias Desmet’s invitation to Dr. Peter Breggin to join him in conversation about their disagreement about who bears responsibility for the pathologies we witnessed during the pandemic.

I always know when a post starts an interesting conversation when the number of reader comments approximates the number of likes. I spent the last hour reading and reflecting on the reader comments, for which I am always very grateful.

It’s a notable feature of the human mind that it seems to favor Either/Or propositions. With age I’ve become more inclined to consider the possibility that in many complex affairs, the truth is composed of elements from both conceptions.

On the one hand, it’s true that propaganda works. As Edward Bernays—a great theorist and writer about propaganda—wrote in his 1928 book Propaganda:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

These observations support Dr. Breggin’s view that the pathologies of the last four years are largely the result of predatory propagandists serving their own interests. However, it seems to me that Bernays’s observations are not necessarily true.

We humans are highly susceptible to conditioning, but we are NOT the equivalent of Pavlov’s dogs. As I remarked in my original post, it is possible to learn to recognize propaganda and to resist it. Indeed, I’m struck by how much of the PSYOP that has been perpetrated against us is crude and childish.

When Dr. Peter McCullough and I formulated the Mission of the McCullough Foundation, we both intuitively recognized that the COVID-19 Pandemic response was a gigantic challenge to the concept of a prudent and rational citizenry—a citizenry that does not need a Paternalistic State telling us what to do.

As Dr. McCullough put it in his January 23, 2022 speech from the Lincoln Memorial:

We have three critical circles that all of you are in today. We have a circle of medical freedom. You have the freedom. You and you alone have the autonomy over your body. You have the freedom to determine what happens to your body. This is solely your possession. In many ways it’s the only thing you really have. That circle of medical freedom is inextricably linked to the circle of social freedom, and that social freedom includes your family, your employment, your faith, and your citizenry in any country. And that is inextricably linked to your circle of economic freedom. Medical freedom is linked to social and economic freedom. If we allow the circle of medical freedom to be touched, let alone broken, all of the circles fracture.

I found it fitting that he gave this speech with the sculpture of Lincoln looming behind him, as I’d often thought that the federal pandemic response was testing our Constitutional Republic in the same way the Civil War did in Lincoln’s time. As he remarked in his Gettysburg Address:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

As our Founding Fathers understood, every polity in history has periodically been tested by tyrants who invoke emergency power with the purported objective of “protecting the people” or “keeping us safe” to use the precious contemporary formulation. It’s our responsibility as free citizens to recognize and resist this recurring ambition of predatory men.

All of us can assume personal responsibility for resisting tyranny. In the 19th and 20th centuries, great writers such as Dostoevsky, Jung, Milosz, Solzhenitsyn, Popper, Kolakowski, Koestler, Bonhoeffer, and many others pointed out that the individual can and should always strive to resist the twin spells of propaganda and ideology.