Back on September 22, 2022 my first article on America Out Loud, delving into the non-conversation of Dr. Peter Breggin and Prof. Mattias Desmet. Recently, they are back at it, and it feels like a stalemate, where they continue to talk past each other. I am not clear if there is anything useful to say about it, but I want to give it a try. To begin with, I want to introduce a series of brilliant articles by Barry Brownstein, about the work of Victor Frankl. I will also highlight that his work was obligatory reading in the house I grew up in, for my father, as a psychiatrist was very actively involved in getting recognition for what was then called post-KZ syndrome, and was generalized after Vietnam to be called PTSD. Obviously, Frankl’s very nuanced observations about the very nature of humanity and of evil, coupled with his own experience that our humanity is ultimately unextinguishable were a ray of hope in a dark chapter.
I tend to use different terminology for some of these phenomena, based on some of my own reading and what makes sense to me, and I will explain the terms first as they are relevant for the discussion. I use the following terms:
“Herd” is society at large, and its “prevailing opinions” are what defines it in our current experience the Herd bought the virus story, and went along with the counter measures. But in a dualistic world, every force creates resistance:
“Mass,” is the counter movement, of people who begin to doubt the prevailing narrative, and in our current context those were the people who began to question the counter measures, lock downs, face diapers, vaccines, and some treatment protocols.
Spiritual “Awakening” is an individual experience, generally born from the realization that the dichotomy is false, is in effect an argumentum ad lapidem, as in Boswell’s Johnson, in the dialog with Bishop Berkeley. This is the moment when we realize that both the virus and the vaccine (and other counter measures), are delusional, and truth lies elsewhere. In the case of Boswell’s Johnson it would be to realize that, contrary to Boswell’s narrative, Johnson was wrong and Bishop Berkeley was right to insist on the primacy of spirit, because the eyes are part of the same physical reality, which cannot testify to it’s own reality.
“False Dichotomy,” is the technical term for any false binary choice, in which either answer reaffirm an underlying statement: either side of the coin of necessity implies the reality of the coin.
In the World War 2 experience of German occupied Holland, the dominant strain under occupation was the fascist dictatorship, and the resistance was the formation of a small mass of resistance, but truth was the third path that Victor Frankl represents, the realization that at some level humanity is not extinguishable. Another example was the work of the sisters Ten Boom, who had their prayer groups in the camps and later ran a home for displaced persons, in which they welcomed both camp survivors and German soldiers who were racked by guilt, and having a profoundly disorienting experience of their world being shattered. The movie A Beautiful Life is yet another example of a way out, even if fictional, in this case of a father protecting his young son from the terror. Our children are always our symbolically our “self of tomorrow,” the physical manifestation of our hope for the future. The father is saving his son from the horrors that are everywhere.
Another important issue is the repetition compulsion of the butchers in the camps who must keep on killing because with every killing the guilt mounts and with it the psychotic fear that if you do not exterminate absolutely all the vermin, they will bounce back and come to get you. It is never enough, which is a leading theme of the ego, or as Tom Lehrer put it “more, more, I’m still not satisfied.” Killing became an addiction, but also a demonstration of utter weakness. The camp-butchers could not afford to stop killing, and in our current story the vaccinators have to keep vaccinating, for it is a psychotic behavior: “nobody is safe until everybody is safe.” What safety? you ask and that marks the beginning of a mass that forms in resistance to the prevailing narrative, which in our current case was about 25% of the population.
Back to Desmet and his mass formation
Aside from the fact that he uses the word mass differently from what I do, he makes the whole concept too convoluted, for at any time there is a dominant strain of thinking and acting and social norms. The transitions are always painful to one degree or another, and the way out is always an individual choice first. Desmet makes the herd narrative, the generally accepted view into something very special, but it is not. The dominant narrative is never truth in any absolute sense, it is at best a working hypothesis, a modus vivendi. The virus narrative has now been with us for a hundred years, in spite of the fact that even Pasteur at the end admitted that Antoine Béchamp’s terrain theory was the better model for what goes on. There are numerous choice posts about this particular delusion on substack, including this one:
The germ and contagion model has become the default assumption, but that does not make them true; they are merely what the herd believes. However, the ego, individual identity, that considers itself separate from the whole always seeks to validated itself, à la Johnson’s argumentum ad lapidem, by imagining attacks, for it is a paranoid schizophrenic system. And, there are always new Don Quijote and Sancho Panza’s to fight the windmills, and exterminate evil from the world.
As Brownstein points out, both Frankl and Solzhenitsyn in their own way that good and evil runs through every heart, and thus there is never not a way to awakening. The little pilot light of truth cannot be exterminated.
Truth is always the silent third, that is left out, and it is the path out of the wheel of Samsara, leaving the carnival alone. Until the revelers are tired, they are not yet ready to go home. I certainly thought that Desmet’s book explored a few interesting angles, but he clearly misses the whole point on how the world works. Here is his latest Breggin rebuttal:
The Breggins, Book & Desmet
Dr. Peter Breggin is undoubtedly a hero of mine for all his work as “the conscience of psychiatry,” which has now become expanded since Covid mania swept the country. I have always admired his work, which I was aware of for a long time, as my own father was a psychiatrist who practiced talk therapy only, because already in the mid 50’s, he was very clear that the pharmaceutical psychiatry was a complete corruption of medicine, and an attack on public health. His criticism might have convinced me never to entertain the notion of a medical career.
The Breggin book (COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey) is solid, however. Clearly Dr. Breggin and his wife are experienced hands at this type of research, and the book should be on your top shelf for Covid-mania, but that does not mean he is right about Desmet. He should not fall for the line of argument that makes him seem concerned about Desmet and Malone in the first place. Again, this is an area of public discourse that I am fairly familiar with because my father did a lot of work for the Dutch criminal justice system, which was more oriented to rehabilitation than punishment, let alone revenge. This argument has been going on for a long time; would you exonerate Hitler, just because he clearly felt victimized, and he was psychologically damaged goods? No. We remain responsible for our actions, unless we are completely unfit to stand trial. As individuals we are part of a society, and we need to be able to function in it, and but for cases of total inability to function, we are responsible for our actions.
This issue of personal responsibility is a difficult topic however, there is an seemingly never ending confusion about the role of psychology here. And yes, there is an understandable worry that a judge or jury might be moved by pity and excuse the inexcusable, but by that time we are deeply into the fact that human beings are fallible, and there are no complete safeguards for that. The concepts I stated above should be the guidelines: i.e. as long as the person is compos mentis, and otherwise capable of standing trial, they are responsible for their actions. Desmet’s dubious logic could not be used to create an exemption. Just because his title is Professor, does not make his analysis credible.
What we should recognize is that from the moment of the tiny mad idea, as A Course in Miracles calls the idea of the separation, we subconsciously accuse ourselves of murdering God (remember Freud’s explorations of parricidal mythologies and fantasies). We repress that thought of murder, and project it onto murderers outside of ourselves, from that point on we experience often wild horror movies, in which we alternate the roles of victims and victimizers. The upshot of that role play is that it makes the world and our individual identity real, and we see ourselves more easily as the victim of the world than as the maker of it. I will never forget a workshop with an NYC detective, who related how in hot pursuit of a certain criminal, he found himself so tuned in to the mind of the person he was chasing, that he could almost flawlessly anticipate his every move. At some point he then had a flashback in which he saw that in another life he had been the criminal. Those are insights that can be personally very helpful, but they do not alter the fact that a dangerous criminal is better off in jail where they cannot do more damage.
Family Squabbles
Any good family therapist understands that everyone always knows everything. So teenagers act up when they sense disagreement between their parents, even if they are not consciously aware of it. They pick that up, so again a good therapist will immediately expect to find a dysfunctional home environment if a teenager acts out, but that teenager is still responsible for their actions, as an important part of growing up into a responsible adult who can function in society.
The same is true of the family of man, we function in a shared reality, and the same themes are acted out over and over again in different forms. When the slave trade stopped, slavery did not stop, and the warrior kings like the Ashanti, would kill the men, who they could no longer ship overseas, but keep the women and children who were less likely to rebel, or so they thought. The sonship is one, the creation is one, in spirit, behind the scenes of our physical realities where we are all different.
Covid mania was not a sudden onset suicidal ideation. The very idea of an independent individuality, separated from the Whole of which we are inevitably a part, even if we are mostly unconscious of it, but it still is a temporary delusion that spans the space between birth and death. Part of the delusion is an innate tendency to blame people, places and things (including ‘viruses’) outside of ourselves for our misery, and thus we repress the crime we accuse ourselves of, namely splitting of from the Whole, the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Sonship as One, and play instead the role of the prodigal son for a while. Thus Covid mania was but one of many expressions of our existential fears that are an innate feature of our false identity, our individual, personal self (note that “persona,” means mask, and I do not mean a face diaper, but a full-face theatrical mask).
What is to be hoped for is that this particular episode does not end up with a lynch mob, as with the Romanovs, or with the guillotines in the French Revolution, or Nuremberg (although it is now widely discussed how phony that was, given Operation Paperclip). Killing has never solved a single problem, for it can never undo the past, even though it seems ever so justified. Our main concern here should be healing from the delusions and misinformation which made Covid mania possible, and seeking to prevent a repeat performance. That will be a tall order, but it lies more in the direction of Desmond Tutu’s idea of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, rather than public lynchings. Guantanamo Bay would be too small to hold all the promoters of the “safe and effective,” “vaccines,” which were neither, let alone all the healthcare workers at all levels from doctors and nurses on down who let go of common sense and vaccinated away. It is not an easy thing to imagine a solution, but certainly individually we have the opportunity to let go of the popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
Robert Malone as the backup singer in the Desmet band cut an awkward figure, in that he would have us believe that he invented the underlying mRNA technology and understood how unsafe it was, and nevertheless took the vaccine also, at least initially. His dubious expansion of Desmet’s mass formation into '“mass psychosis,” has no legs, as Breggin correctly argues. It got even worse when he began suing people instead of sensibly engaging in dialog. Sasha Latypova dispensed with his aspirations to credibility recently:
Clearing the Covid debris
This whole nonsense about mass formation is no help in clearing up the existential delusion that is the belief in pandemics of respiratory viruses.
Clearly, the research of Denis Rancourt has finished the job that John Ioannidis started with his initial insights into the Diamond Princess. The pattern of the spread is not consistent with the natural spread of a respiratory virus. QED. That is where the story dies.
Mike Yeadon just adds in the biological dimension (see below) that not only was there no novel virus, but this type of a pandemic of respiratory viruses is a Dick Tracy fantasy, and not a biological possibility.
Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi has been pointing out from early on that if indeed there were a respiratory virus, an intramuscular injection could not possibly provide the mucosal immunity that would be needed.
Nick Hudson and Pandata, parallelling the insights of Rancourt, have provided clear guidance for a long time, that the pattern of spread contradicts the spread of a respiratory virus, but rather the implementation of a novel testing method, being the PCR-test, which is known to be unfit for purpose and produce mostly false positives.
Conclusion
Much brilliant work has been done on all of this, and I can only conclude with a fervent prayer that some of these precious insights are turned to good use going forward, so we do not have to fight these same battles again. I knew as an eight-year old that my vaccinated classmates were sick more often than my sister and I. It has now been borne out by the work of Turtles All The Way Down, as well as Andrew Wakefield, Dr. Paul Thomas and others.
As an old Dutch saying goes: Man suffers most from the suffering he fears. In this case, there was a delusion of an attack from an invisible enemy (truth is stranger than fiction), and then equally delusional counter measures which invariably catapulted the madness into overdrive and produced adverse reactions that made the whole thing worse. The rest is bickering in the margin. Once you see these things, you cannot unsee them.
Now you are being shown you can escape. ²All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up. ³How could there be another way to solve a problem that is very simple, but has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication, which were made to keep the problem unresolved? ⁴Without the clouds the problem will emerge in all its primitive simplicity. ⁵The choice will not be difficult, because the problem is absurd when clearly seen. ⁶No one has difficulty making up his mind to let a simple problem be resolved if it is seen as hurting him, and also very easily removed. (ACIM, T-27.VII.2:1-6)