Could there be a conspiracy so vast?

Someone posted Stella Morabito's essay, How To Escape The Age Of Mass Delusion, on Twitter -- I love her so of course I had to re-read, and it's just as fresh now as it was when she wrote it. Hard to believe, in fact, that it was more than 5 years ago. 

Reading it, I think we can see how the ruling class was initiating all sorts of dry runs, culminating in the astoundingly successful bid to do just what she warns, separate and isolate normal people; she (and we) could not have imagined that they would succeed as they have with Covid lockdowns and mandates.

People ask me if I really think there is a conspiracy that everyone would be a part of. Their own conclusion seems to be the height of common sense: if everyone is basically in agreement that we are in immense danger and desperately need to stay apart, cease normal activity, and muzzle ourselves, then it must be so. How could everyone be duped?

My interlocutors need to understand that it's not a conspiracy when it's in full view and that there is such a thing as mass delusion. They need to study history; a start would be to read Stella Morabito's essay:

One of the best books that cracks the code on what we are living through was written by Dutch psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo about 60 years ago. Mull over the first line of his book’s forward, and you will think he is writing about today: “This book attempts to depict the strange transformation of the free human mind into an automatically responding machine – a transformation which can be brought about by some of the cultural undercurrents in our present-day society as well as by deliberate experiments in the service of a political ideology.”

It's well established that Americans are vastly ignorant about even recent history; far from being the result of any conspiracy, it's due to the open invasion of our educational system by leftist ideologies; parents have been too busy working to notice, and each generation is busier and less aware that their fewer and fewer children are being mis-educated. Meanwhile, huge numbers of immigrants have entered the country, and they are also too busy making a go of it and having their children benefit from the training the system provides to question anything.

There is a remedy, but it requires that we be free to communicate. 

Of course, it’s really hard for control freaks to do their work on us if we are speaking freely with one another in friendship, and especially if we all understand what they are up to and can call them on it in one voice. So their first order of business is to separate us. A sense of enforced isolation is a cruel and effective tool for instilling loneliness and then delusion in people...

...  

They have engaged in psychological warfare against the private mind by inducing “collective belief formation.” There’s really nothing new here. Conditioning and nudging the masses into groupthink is a very old trick of all wannabe dictators. The bloody twentieth century is filled to the gills with examples."

Morabito is talking about virtual social pressure, known as political correctness, but this pressure has been made literal by physical isolation imposed by Covid measures and the restriction of the free flow of information by media aligned with the state, with the result that people are not able to be realistic about what is going on.

Meerloo testified to this feeling of disorientation: “Many victims of totalitarianism have told me in interviews that the most upsetting experience they faced in the concentration camps was the feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion in which they had been brought – the state in which nothing had any validity.” 

Morabito speaks of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech; if anything has developed in the ensuing 5 years since she wrote, I hope it is that we have begun to appreciate our Founding Fathers' inclusion of the right to assemble in that amendment. Without the right to gather with others, we are hampered in the other rights guaranteed, to religion and speech, are indeed at the mercy of those in power, as they foresaw. 

So, in the end, freedom truly depends upon breaking down the walls of separation that tyranny builds. It means cultivating the art of friendship, boldly exercising our rights to free association and to communicate our thoughts to others. It means cultivating knowledge instead of cultivating ignorance.

Do read the whole article to gain perspective on our situation.