Severed Conscience: The New Authoritarians

Tyrants and dictators have had many means to achieve mass control, resulting in the deaths of millions.  From the dark history of the Soviet Union we see how the brutality lead what some call a mass formation psychosis.  But this required violence, death and blood millions to achieve.  Severed Conscience is a state of mind where a person’s mental capacities have been impaired by over stimulation of dopamine release from social media and prolonged exposure to blue screen light.  Held in a concentrated state of fight or flight and distracted by constant novelty, a person is no longer capable of rational thought.  Severed Conscience achieved far more with far less effort.

Collectivism enforced by totalitarianism, is formed from trauma of violence and threats and instituted through purges, executions and proceedings of secret police.  It took years for a psychosis of an entire population to settle into the fabric of societies such as the Soviet Union.  Population control only came at the expense of Soviet blood from the murders of millions.  The Red Terror, launched in 1918 by Lenin, unleashed violence unseen even under the notorious Czars was the trauma that enabled the Bolsheviks’ iron fist to maintain control of all facets of society.  The Soviets did not seize control of Russia from Czar Nikolas through the use of mass hysteria.  They used mass hysteria, trauma, fear and death to maintain the reins of power they had seized. 

The Cheka was an essential instrument not just for suppressing counterrevolution or providing intelligence, but for making the shattered economy function. From the start, Lenin and Trotsky secretly planned the totalitarian organization of labor, with mobile labor armies and cooperatives of peasants on state land. In summer 1918 Trotsky organized the first concentration camps in the southeast of the country.

Contrast this with the United States and COVID lockdowns.  The trauma was COVID, but no violence was used to coerce behavior; instead, panic from a unseen virus with a 99% survival rate was the key to induce public panic.  Control was maintained easily through social media.  The fact that information contrary to the COVID narrative was readily available did not assist the population by measurably effective means.  We were ordered to wear masks and end our freedom of movement.  No shots were fired, no one disappeared in the middle of the night to be imprisoned.  The difference is the degree of manipulation that has been accomplished with technology. Which was the easier task, the overthrow of the Czars and formation of secrete police to kidnap and imprison, or issue a slogan of “15 days to slow the spread”, “mask up” and “shots in arms”?

Technology made up the difference.  The trauma from the fear of the COVID virus should have been soothed once more details regarding the inaccurate rates of death and rates of infection came to light.  However social media and content fed by AI to users of social media kept the panic at alarming high level.  No shots fired, just more doubt.  The recommendations of washing hands became a cleansing ritual, that absolved you of the sin of containing the infection.  But only temporarily, as your very breath was identified as a potential vector of transmittal.  Therefore you needed to wear a mask indefinitely.  Severed Conscience kept the US population compliant and open to further manipulation.  While people’s freedom of movement was taken away, the power of accusing others of not doing their part soon replaced that loss of freedom.  Rationality was kept in abeyance.

Social Media platforms also replace the need to secret police to observer whether you were a bad or good citizen of the COVID Amerika.  Many reported their mask wearing habits, and posses soon formed to report those who did not comply, both online and in real is.   Banning for pointing discrepancies in public data and public health practice were enabled, and those health professionals who offered alternative treatments were kicked off social media and lost their medical licenses.  No need for a knock on the door at night from thuggish Cheka secret police, as people readily poured their information about their habits into Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

Let’s draw our comparisons with distinct categories that are applicable to both societies.  These will make the contrasts stand out clearly.  The categories are Isolation, fear, paranoia of the “other”, atonement, technology, and education. The chart below lays these categorizations out for us.