Epic Mass Madness

A Brief History Were you forwarded this email? [Sign-up to The Daily Reckoning here.]( [Unsubscribe]( [Daily Reckoning] Epic Mass Madness - Mass formation psychosis… - A country bitterly divided along ideological grounds… - Then James Howard Kunstler shows you how he believes elites have created a mass national psychosis, but also how the Omicron variant may finally break the spell… Recommended Link [Attention! Before You Read Any Further…]( Before you read any further in today’s issue, an urgent situation needs your immediate attention. If you don’t plan on claiming this new upgrade to your Strategic Intelligence subscription, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Right now is your chance to grab one of the biggest (and most valuable) upgrades our company has ever made to a newsletter. I’m taking Strategic Intelligence to an entirely new level and I’d hate to see you left behind. [Click Here To Claim Your Subscription Upgrade]( Saratoga Springs, New York December 11, 2021 Editor’s note: Today, James Howard Kunstler shows you how he believes elites have driven the nation into a mass formation psychosis in recent years, but also why it might be ending. As usual, James pulls no punches and takes no prisoners. [James Howard Kunstler]Dear Reader, The thesis called mass formation psychosis put forward lately by the Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet goes a long way to explaining the disgraceful myths that Western civ has fallen for in our time, created by a thinking class that descended into abject madness. The descent was provoked by the existential anxiety over the collapse of techno-industrial economies and the end of progress as we’ve known it. As Dr. Desmet lays it out, the disconnectedness of contemporary life, its lack of meaning or purpose for many, leads to unendurable anxiety. All that generalized fear seeks desperately to attach itself to some real object, some thing or some force that can be comprehended, fought and triumphantly overcome. Finding such a target produces an intoxicating sense of communal connection, purpose and meaning, driving actions that are often crazy and also absolutely impervious to rational debate. The angst in America was well established by 2016. A beaten-down middle-class suspected that most politicians of the Uniparty did not have their interests at heart after years of offshoring their jobs, and they managed to elect their avatar, Donald Trump, over the obviously unsympathetic globalist, Hillary Clinton — who snootily tagged her opposition the “deplorables.” Even so, the polls had her ahead by a mile. Then, by some weird twist of fate, she lost a few crucial counties in Midwestern states she hadn’t bothered to visit, and was reportedly too plastered after midnight on election night to come down and console the troops at campaign headquarters. The shocking election outcome instantly deranged the nation’s entire managerial class and its thinking-out-loud interlocutors in the news media and on campus. The Golden Golem of Greatness, as I liked to call Mr. Trump, was the perfect target for their animus. Threatening to “drain the swamp,” he would shatter their hard-won power privileges and deprive them of their well-worn grifts — such as the various revolving doors between big money and its regulators. At least that’s what most people thought he would do. Plus, his rough personality offended their own pretense of decorum (in pursuit of that power and grift). They decided that he had to go, and fast. The whole managerial class and their allies closed ranks to get it done, not least the Intel “Community,” which force-fed all the federal legal machinery — the official instruments of punishment. If they could only knock Mr. Trump off the game board, America’s troubles would be over. We could get back on track to becoming a utopia of inclusion, diversity, equity and self-driving electric cars. But more than a year after the election, it hasn’t quite turned out that way, has it? The nation remains as deeply divided as it was under Trump. Build Back Better, vaccine mandates, social issues like abortion and more, it’s like there are two Americas living in two different universes. Is there a way out of this morass? Read on. Regards, James Howard Kunstler for The Daily Reckoning Editor’s note: The elites’ [Global War on Carbon]( has started. World leaders and elites recently met at the Global Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. It was called COP26, and it’s the place where all the temperature targets and carbon targets were made. It’s all about the drive to [“Net Zero.”]( Multinational corporations and the world’s governments are all supporting Net Zero. It might be a bunch of nonsense, but it’s happening anyway. And if you can’t fight it, you might as well profit from it. [Jim Rickards’ colleague has actually uncovered a way you can take advantage of this lunacy to make a small fortune on the growing worldwide trend of “Net Zero clean energy.”]( This is a proven business model with the best economics of any sector. Please understand, this will be the BEST and ONLY way to play a specific type of “green energy” megatrend. [Click here]( to learn more about this explosive new sector, and how you can play it for potentially massive, once-in-a-generation gains… even if you don’t believe a word the elites say on climate. 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This punishment was accompanied by a growing repertoire of cult-like rituals — especially around race and gender hustles — with rich opportunities for the new behavior called virtue signaling, which was essentially a game of collecting brownie points for status-seeking purposes in the new moral hierarchy of the “Woke.” The social networks Facebook and Twitter amplified every insane strand in the Woke messaging. As Dr. Desmet says, “The more absurd the rituals, the more they buy into it.” This intense opposition to Mr. Trump, and all the games issuing from it, produced the characteristic intoxication of mass formation psychosis. That is, it brought together a big cozy community of people initiated into a catechism of sacred truths. The important part is that they felt united in their struggle. Folks in the grip of this belonged to something at last, a solidarity of certitude, a social organism one could lose one’s anxious, fretful self in. No more loneliness and lack of direction. They were imbued with a sense of purpose: the ritual killing of the monster called Trump. The news media’s role was to reinforce all that, with as much bad faith and dishonesty as they could get away with, in the service of fashioning a consensus that was eventually named “the narrative” — a self-reinforcing catalog of approved thought. The anti-Trump news posse garnered brownie points galore, including Pulitzer Prizes for their completely mendacious reporting. The trouble was, for all their epic exertions, they weren’t exactly winning. The whole Russiagate extravaganza fizzled — and may even eventuate in some criminal convictions if independent counsel John Durham turns out to be for real. The Mueller report came up plumb empty, to thundering disappointment. The Ukrainegate impeachment flopped. It was nice to have a sense of purpose and feel like a member of an exclusive club, but the Wokesters were unable to “nail that ol’ coonskin to wall” (as Lyndon B. Johnson once put it about winning the Vietnam War, which we lost). By January of 2020, it looked like Mr. Trump might even win re-election — the horror indeed! — considering the Democratic Party primary candidates were the most forlorn pack of has-beens, nobodies, kooks and damaged goods ever assembled for such a contest. But whaddaya know? Along came COVID-19. What a lifesaver the ’rona was for wobbling Wokedom, the gift that kept on giving! It provided an opportunity for perhaps the most craven public-private cartel in all the land, the CDC/FDA/NIH/NIAID/Big Pharma gang, to work some amazing hoodoo on the Golden Golem of Greatness and eventually all the nations of Western civ. It put the perfidious, money-grubbing and medically incompetent Dr. Anthony Fauci at the elbow of Mr. Trump as, in effect, the national COVID-19 coordinator. He played the president like a flugelhorn through most of 2020 — and as the year ground on, Mr. Trump looked like he painfully suspected as much in all those ghastly televised daily briefings. I will not go into the appalling mRNA vaccine boondoggle in detail here except to say it reaped zillions for those with a stake in the patents, including Dr. Fauci. But COVID-19 also provided an excuse to relax the election regulations and pave the way to colossal electoral shenanigans in November, with Marc Elias of the Lawfare gang (and also a partner in the DNC’s pet law firm, Perkins Coie) scurrying from state to state tuning the electoral machinery in key swing precincts for a “Joe Biden” victory. Who needs to make sure people are legally registered to vote in the state? Who needs signature verification? Who needs to prove chain of custody? And we can’t forget about the hundreds of millions of dollars in help from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. 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In fact, when you swept away all their ideological nonsense and the associated hustles, the movement was strictly about coercion, about pushing other people around, making them do as the Woke commissars willed. And there was a clearly sadomasochistic edge to all that. They relished cancelling people, wrecking careers, destroying reputations, livelihoods, marriages, families. Their political leaders had no qualms about exterminating hundreds of thousands of small businesses in COVID-19 lockdowns orchestrated by Woke heroes like Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City and Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Jay Inslee of Washington state. But most importantly, COVID-19 gave them something else to focus their angst on once Mr. Trump was finally swept off the scene in the janky election. And until just the last few weeks of 2021, the virus has furnished endless opportunity for ever greater enactments of coercion and tyranny. Except now, suddenly, it’s all falling apart. In America, the claque behind the phantom president “Joe Biden” pulled the trigger on mandating vaccinations — complete with harsh punishments for the vax-averse — but then two things happened: 1) Federal Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana issued an injunction against the mandate that applies in all 50 states; and: 2) The news finally started leaking out — despite every effort of the U.S. public health officialdom to hide it — that the vaccines carried an unprecedented risk of harm for medicines enlisted so casually into emergency use among so many millions of people, in addition to their negligible efficacy in preventing illness and contagion. The Europeans, on the other hand, slid ever deeper into despotic measures not seen since the Gestapo terrorized the continent. The Europeans face the same primal source of anxiety that the Americans do: the running down of their techno-industrial economies, except their predicament is arguably a little bit keener than ours is, since they have hardly any oil and natural gas of their own to run things on and suffer terrible uncertainty about who will furnish it for them. If they had not gone out of their minds over what has turned out to be a pretty punk virus — when treated early with a menu of cheaply available drugs — and hadn’t deified the false savior vaccines, they might be a whole lot more concerned about how they are going to heat their homes, fertilize their crops and produce things of value — in short, remain civilized. The catch is they’ve given themselves until February to enforce their foolish vaccine mandates. The Omicron variant may help, too, since it is proving so far to be a grossly overhyped development, discrediting the paranoia ginned up in the media. Can their courts act as ours have and put a stop to the madness? Between now and then we’re likely to see the defeat of the mass formation psychosis in America, at least, as the country is forced to face the truth of what it has done to itself. Or at least it will be the end of this chapter of that story. Perhaps the Europeans will snap out of it too as they see the narrative collapse in America. Or are they just too far gone? Standing by on developments… Regards, James Howard Kunstler for The Daily Reckoning Ed. note: The elites’ [Global War on Carbon]( has started. World leaders and elites recently met at the Global Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. It was called COP26, and it’s the place where all the temperature targets and carbon targets were made. It’s all about the drive to [“Net Zero.”]( Multinational corporations and the world’s governments are all supporting Net Zero. It might be a bunch of nonsense, but it’s happening anyway. And if you can’t fight it, you might as well profit from it. [Jim Rickards’ colleague has actually uncovered a way you can take advantage of this lunacy to make a small fortune on the growing worldwide trend of “Net Zero clean energy.”]( This is a proven business model with the best economics of any sector. Please understand, this will be the BEST and ONLY way to play a specific type of “green energy” megatrend. [Click here]( to learn more about this explosive new sector, and how you can play it for potentially massive, once-in-a-generation gains… even if you don’t believe a word the elites say on climate. --------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for reading The Daily Reckoning! We greatly value your questions and comments. Please send all feedback to [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:dr@dailyreckoning.com) [James Howard Kunstler][James Howard Kunstler]( is perhaps best known for his 2005 book [The Long Emergency]( which predicted the financial meltdown and the implications of the peak oil problem. His 1993 book, [The Geography of Nowhere]( about the fiasco of suburbia, is a campus cult classic among the architecture and urban planning students. Add feedback@dailyreckoning.com to your address book: [Whitelist us]( Additional Articles & Commentary: [Daily Reckoning Website]( Join the conversation! Follow us on social media: [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter]( [RSS Feed]( [YouTube]( The Daily Reckoning is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. By submitting your email address, you consent to Paradigm Press delivering daily email issues and advertisements. 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