In Don Siegels classical science-fiction movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956, extraterrestrials release large seed pods onto Earth that create perfect copies of anyone sleeping near them, after which the real humans die. The clones have the same memories and knowledge as the originals, but they all think exactly alike and they completely lack conscience. As soon as they discover someone who is not one of them, they point finger at the person and let out a horrifying scream, signaling the other clones to begin the hunt.
A few years ago, I watched an interesting documentary about how parasites can alter animal behavior. It described how the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, also known as the “zombie parasite,” can infect most warm-blooded organisms, including humans. One of the few places where it can reproduce is in the digestive system of cats. To get there, the parasite infects the brains of mice, causing them to lose their natural fear of cats and instead become attracted to their urine. As a result, the mice become easy prey for cats, allowing the parasite to end up in the cats’ digestive systems, where it can reproduce.¹
According to researchers, the zombie parasite may exist in at least one third—or perhaps even half—of the world’s human population, though how it affects us is not fully understood. It has been speculated that it may cause anxiety and that people with weakened immune systems may experience personality changes. A study conducted on 45,000 Danish women over a thirty-year period showed that those infected with the parasite had a 1.5 times higher risk of suicide than women who were not infected.²
“It’s not a huge increase, but it’s probably too large to be due to chance,”³ noted Teodor Postolache, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland and senior author of the study published in Archives of General Psychiatry. This is not the first time the parasite has been associated with behavioral changes in humans. Previous studies have shown links to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and even an increased risk of being involved in a car accident. Postolache does, however, downplay the overall significance.
As climate hysteria—and later pandemic and woke hysteria—began spreading like wildfire across the world, I started thinking about the zombie parasite phenomenon. Mostly as a joke, I used to tell some acquaintances that I was beginning to wonder whether someone had put something in the drinking water that was making people increasingly irrational.
Something that creates what I see as a kind of opinion ”allergy”, where people become almost incapable of listening to rational arguments, takes offense at the slightest thing, constantly look for scapegoats, and starts fighting over practically everything under the sun—causing society itself to corrode. Something we see in both the US and in Europe.
In any case, I thought the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii served as a rather apt analogy for the division and chaos in society caused by destructive ideas such as identity politics, postmodernism and woke ideology in the West. Not to mention islamic extremism.
Later, I discovered that Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor at Concordia University who studies evolutionary psychology, had arrived at similar conclusions and even written a book on the subject: The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.⁴ Concepts such as postmodernism, moral relativism, and social constructivism function like pathogens in our minds, Saad argues—damaging people’s ability to think rationally in much the same way that other dangerous ideologies have distorted the minds of the masses.
In recent years, rational thinking and facts have often been pushed aside in favor of emotion-based and poorly substantiated arguments. This was most evident during the so-called pandemic. Contrary to scientific practice, authorities around the world shut down entire societies from 2020 to 2022, despite the coronavirus being more or less harmless—or at least not deadly—for over 99 percent of the world’s population. This subsequently created enormous suffering, particularly among the world’s poor. Starvation, increased child mortality, rising domestic abuse, and millions of child brides were the price paid.⁵ The psychological suffering caused by the hysteria is almost immeasurable.
The lockdowns turned out to be one of the greatest betrayals of vulnerable people in world history. According to UNICEF, nearly a quarter of a million more children under the age of five died in 2020 than in 2019, three out of five of them newborns. Studies in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka showed that lockdown to an increased number of women and girls dying during childbirth and from unwanted pregnancies.⁶
When regions shut down, basic nutrition and preventive health programs designed to save lives also ceased. Eighty percent fewer children in Bangladesh and Nepal received treatment for severe malnutrition because of the lockdowns. As early as February 2021, the United Nations announced that 2.5 million people had died as a result of lockdowns.
Those who objected to inhumane lockdowns, vaccine passport requirements, or who did not want to take a vaccine that—unlike previous vaccines—had not been tested and analyzed over many years were labeled anti-vaxxers and socially dangerous extremists by the media. Dissenting views on vaccines or the pandemic were punished through public shaming or bans. Experienced researchers were removed from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms and smeared for not conforming to the consensus narrative.
At the same time, the power elite banned large gatherings for ordinary people while ignoring the directives themselves.⁷ The double-standard was obvious.
Even before the pandemic, UN, the mass media, Greta Thunberg, and a cadre of politically “correct” researchers had succeeded in frightening a large portion of the world’s population with claims that “the Earth is burning” and that the apocalypse is imminent unless we act.
In 2017, American journalist David Wallace-Wells published The Uninhabitable Earth, in which he warned that “it’s much worse” than we think. Wallace-Wells selected the most extreme climate interpretations and painted a terrifying scenario, even claiming that parts of the planet risk becoming so hot that people would be “boiled alive from the inside out.”⁸
Despite these exaggerations, and despite the book was based on an article with the same name that received substantial criticism from many scientists, it was praised by the media.
When the IPCC released its 2021 report and UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared a “code red for humanity,” new doomsday warnings spread, alarming children in particular. What was not communicated was that the IPCC report, despite its alarmist tone, actually showed that the extreme scenario known as RCP8.5—irreversible climate change, which in 2013 had been presented as the most likely outcome—is now considered unlikely.
One who has studied the phenomenon of mass psychosis in depth is Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. Desmet has long taught and lectured on mass formation, more commonly known as mass hypnosis. He was highly critical of the pandemic lockdowns and the often totalitarian measures introduced. According to Desmet, these measures were the consequence of a mass psychosis that arose after authorities subjected the world’s population to mass hypnosis.
He describes the phenomenon in detail in his very interesting 2022 book The Psychology of Totalitarianism.⁹ Some of the basic conditions for mass hypnosis are social isolation (lack of close friendships or social context), a sense of meaninglessness (for example, work perceived as soul-crushing), free-floating anxiety and dissatisfaction of unclear origin, and free-floating aggression and frustration of unclear origin.
When mass formation occurs, the individual disappears, Desmet explains. The collective takes over, and individual traits are erased. It matters little how intelligent a person was before mass hypnosis—everyone becomes dumbed down when swept up by the crowd and loses the capacity for critical thinking. This has been exploited by numerous totalitarian regimes throughout history (and still is) to create consensus and persecute dissidents.
Today, we see an almost reflexive aversion toward people who are unwilling to accept the power elite’s version of how we should relate to climate change, pandemics, or war. The same applies to views on gender and the postmodern and identity-political constructs that have gradually been imposed on people, creating increasing conceptual confusion.
Journalist Joanna Williams, formerly at the University of Kent, examines this in her book How Woke Won. She explores how woke ideology gained such dominant influence and the consequences it has brought about: “Woke has hijacked progressive rhetoric, but instead of helping fight discrimination, it lays the groundwork for new forms of discrimination,” she says. “Today, it is likely woke advocates who instruct us to judge people by skin color and inform us that women must step aside for men who identify as women.”¹⁰ There are many reasons, she argues, grounded in democracy, anti-racism and equality, to resist wokeideas:
“It is also urgent to do so if we want a genuinely progressive politics that puts ordinary people first. When it comes to how best to combat woke influence, I highlight the one thing its proponents cannot handle: democratic scrutiny. Time and again, woke ideas are rejected when people are allowed to express their views in surveys, referendums, or general elections.”¹¹
In The Strange Death of Europe,¹² British journalist Douglas Murray writes about how Europe appears to be committing collective suicide. Despite increasing segregation, extremism, honor-based violence, and clan and gang criminality that increasingly tear Europe apart and create conflict, policies continue that involve accepting millions of migrants—many of whom refuse to integrate.
Anyone who dares question migration policy risks being labeled a racist and equated with Nazis. As if that were not insane enough, hundreds of millions are handed out to schools and organizations whose values run counter to gender equality, democracy, and freedom of expression.
How are we to make sense of this?
In Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilization,¹³ Swedish-American author Benedict Beckeld writes about oikophobia—a contempt for one’s own culture. Beckeld studies oikophobia from both a cultural-historical and philosophical perspective. He describes how oikophobia in the West first arose in ancient Greece, which developed from an isolated culture who expanded outward & encountered older, more powerful civilizations.
After successfully defending themselves in wars with the Persian Empire, the Greeks grew confident and began to see themselves as superior to other peoples. As their power expanded, they eventually began to reflect on their culture in relation to others, and doubts about their own cultural superiority emerged. This evolved into a focus on the problems of one’s own culture, highlighting how other cultures were superior in various ways.
Thus, ideas of relativism and universalism also emerged. Beckeld describes how oikophobia later developed in France, Britain, and the United States, and has now taken root in almost all of the Western world—especially in Sweden, which, in strong competition with Great Britain, stands out as one of the worst examples of self-contempt and suicidal politics.
This leads us to romanticize other cultures while disparaging our own—such as when former Prime Minister Reinfeldt said, “What is uniquely Swedish is just barbarism. The rest of our development came from elsewhere,” or when foremer Social democratic leader Sahlin once exclaimed: “What do we have? Midsummer celebrations and other silly things.”
To ordinary people with common sense, the scenario that is playing out appears as sheer madness. Among politicians, the media, and academia, however, it is different. Philosopher Roger Scruton argued that oikophobia is particularly common among academics, who, in their zeal to defend enlightened universalism against narrow cultural and nationalist chauvinism, vilify their own culture and its customs and institutions. As a result, they often idealize other cultures, while disregaridng and explaining away their destructive aspects.
This is how we must understand why the academic world, despite Quran riots, clan rule, honor violence, and violent extremism that tears the West apart, refuses to see the truth.
If we emerge from this with our reason intact, the future will likely regard our time as an era in which mass psychoses arose on multiple levels—a time when national Stockholm syndromes, combined with what Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy for other cultures (but not one’s own), tore apart previously well-functioning societies. In the worst case, with consequences as devastating as those produced by nazism and communism, as well as by the sectarian and religious extremism that still ravages large parts of the world.
Michael Delavante, In the Age of Mass Psychosis: How the Western World Became Suicidal
Sources:
- Bisarr parasit förändrar möss för att föröka sig i katter Erik Hanson, natursidan, 19 september, 2013. https://www.natursidan.se/nyheter/bisarr-parasit-lurar-moss-for-att-foroka-sig-i-katter/
- Toxoplasmosis gondii Infection and Self-directed Violence in Mothers, Marianne G. Pedersen, MSc; Preben Bo Mortensen, DrMedSc; Bent Norgaard-Pedersen, DrMedSc; et al Teodor T. Postolache, MD Author Affiliations Article Information Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2012;69(11):1123-1130. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2012.668
- A Parasite Carried By Cats Could Increase Suicide Risk, Jon Hamilton, npr.org, July 2, 20125, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/07/02/156142214/a-parasite-carried-by-cats-could-hurt-humans-sanity/
4. Gad Saad, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common sense, Regenery Pub, Inc, 2020 https://www.ginza.se/product/saad-gad/the-parasitic-mind/854152/
- https://www.vaken.se/nedstangningar-drabbar-kvinnor-unga-och-minoriteter-brutalt/
- Direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 pandemic and response in South Asia, unicef.org, March 2021. https://www.unicef.org/rosa/media/13066/file/Main%20Report.pdf
7. https://www.vaken.se/hur-noga-foljer-makthavarna-sjalva-restriktionerna/
8.David Wallace-Wells , The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, 2019 , Random House books. (sidan 43)
- Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022 Se även: Interview 1730 – Breaking Free From Mass Formation with Mattias Desmet, corbettreport.com
- Så vann Woke, https://karnevalforlag.se/bocker/sa-vann-woke/
- Så vann Woke, https://karnevalforlag.se/bocker/sa-vann-woke/
- Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018, https://www.bokus.com/bok/9781472958006/the-strange-death-of-europe/
- Benedict Beckeld, Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilization, Northern Illinois University Press, 2022, https://www.bokus.com/bok/9781501763182/western-self-contempt/?srsltid=AfmBOooqnprD09LP6nhb3bBYq4LY2o0Z-H1axZzlF018SH1xHRy8RyS_
