On 4 January 2022, in an edition of the Joe Rogan show that has now been deleted from YouTube, Dr Robert W Malone attempted to explain how the Covid narrative ‘hypnotised’ the world, in terms taken from Professor Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation psychosis:
When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety and a sense that things don’t make sense… and then their attention gets focussed by a leader or a series of events on one small point—just like hypnosis—they literally become hypnotised and can be led anywhere. And one of the aspects of that phenomenon is that the people they identify as their leaders—the ones typically that come in and say, ‘You have this pain and I can solve it for you; I and I alone can fix this problem for you…’ Then they will follow that person—it doesn’t matter whether they lie to them, whatever—the data are irrelevant. And furthermore, anybody who questions that narrative is to be immediately attacked—they are the ‘other’. This is central to mass formation psychosis, and this is what has happened…
I want to go back to the end of the eleventh century, to the People’s Crusade that accompanied the official First Crusade, and see if that can help clarify the concept of mass formation psychosis, as described by Malone and subsequently derided in the mainstream media.
On November 27, 1095, at Clermont (now Clermont-Ferrand) in central France, Pope Urban II preached the first Crusade. He seems to have had two principal aims: to save Christians in the east from the Turks; and to divert the warlike energies of the West to this task, and thus put en end to what had become a state of virtually endemic civil war in Europe.
He may also have envisaged some sort of exercise in collective self-sacrifice, for there was an apocalyptic element to his speech, which anticipated the Last Judgement and the eternal Kingdom of God. Neither of these events could come to pass until the Antichrist had appeared to persecute Christians. He would come soon, to Jerusalem; it followed logically that there must be Christians in Jerusalem to suffer at his hands.
What Urban anticipated was an organised expedition, led by nobles like Count Raymond IV of Toulouse, whom he had consulted in advance. But such a large-scale military effort required coordination and preparation; so he set a launch date nine months later: the Feast of the Assumption on August 15, 1096.
However, there were a lot of people not prepared to wait that long.
The Crusade was a a new, vague concept on to which any individual could project their own desires, preconceptions and fantasies. Urban counted upon unleashing frustrated martial energies and land hunger, simple piety, obedience to Rome, fraternal feelings for fellow Christians, the desire for adventure, and so forth. But the response to his call went far beyond that.
The precipitating factor that turned Urban’s organised expedition into a chaotic apocalyptic movement of the poor was the appearance of a number of popular itinerant preachers—notably Peter the Hermit—who seized upon Urban’s message and spread it among the general population. Peter went on a recruitment drive through France, and by Easter 1096, when he reached Cologne, he had gathered some 15,000 followers. These included some lesser nobility; but consisted mostly of an ill-assorted collection of the poor of both sexes, having no idea of the dangers ahead, or of the geographical distances involved. In their ox-carts they carried their possessions and children, who, according to the chronicler Guibert of Nogent, ‘when they came to any castle or town, asked if this was the city of Jerusalem to which they were travelling’.
Under their various leaders, the poor crusaders made their way across Germany and down to Constantinople, losing many of their number in skirmishes on the way. In August 1096, the Byzantine authorities ferried them over the Bosphorus into Asia Minor. On 21 October some 20,000 armed men left the aged, women and children in their camp, and marched out to face a Turkish army. The subsequent massacre, of both combatants and non-combatants, left only some 3,000 survivors and marked the end of the People’s Crusade.
So how did all this happen? What sent thousands of ordinary people scuttling after Peter the Hermit?
The People’s Crusade centred on Northern France, Flanders and the Rhine Valley, areas where overpopulation and rapid economic and social change were beginning to have their effect. The settled agricultural life which had been the norm for generations had never been easy. Life was lived on a bare subsistence level, where a bad harvest could lead to famine; and, apart from the weather, there had been the invasions of the Norsemen and Magyars and the chaos of private feudal wars. Even when there was no such disruption by weather or warfare, the peasantry lived in a degrading condition of dependence and servitude, subject to various feudal dues and services.
But despite the hardship, poverty and dependence of agricultural life, the individual peasant was ultimately secure. The purpose of social institutions—of all forms and at all levels of society—has always been to relieve human beings of the almost unsupportable responsibility for their own existences. The peasantry of the 11th century were relieved of this responsibility by custom, communal routine, ties of kinship and the Church. Village life centred around an agricultural routine which was collective and based on long custom—as, too, were social relationships. Relations with the lord were likewise customary and also mutual, since the lord was equally subject to custom and, in an age when population was still sparse, dependent on his peasants for their labour. The peasantry were further sustained by ties of kinship, and the whole edifice, along with any deeper questions, was shored up by the presence of the village priest.
Living from day to day, upheld by this web of custom and mutual obligation, with its metaphysical sanctions, the peasant was protected from anything which might threaten his ontological security. He need never ask a question penetrating to the core of his self, since that self seemed to lie outside, finding its existence and expression in material things, other persons and the complex web of interdependence that bound them all together.
The network of social relationships into which a peasant was born was so strong and was taken so much for granted that it precluded any very radical disorientation. So long as that network remained intact peasants enjoyed not only a certain material security but also—which is even more relevant—a certain sense of security, a basic assurance which neither constant poverty nor occasional peril could destroy. (Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p.56)
But this state of affairs changed when, during the 11th century, areas of Europe became sufficiently peaceful for the population to increase and for commerce to develop. By the time of the First Crusade, the agricultural system of north-eastern France, the Low Countries and the Rhinelands could no longer support the population. Much of the surplus drifted into the towns—especially the ruthless, ambitious and imaginative, chafing under the restrictions of life under the manorial system.
Life in the towns opened out undreamt of possibilities, and for those who ‘made good’ new forms of security replaced those left behind in the villages. But those who did not make a success of their new lives felt their poverty and failure all the more keenly in the urban context. Their feelings of disorientation were far greater than under the manorial regime, for they now lacked that body of custom and that network of social relationships which had sustained them. There was no longer anything to protect them from the harsh winds of reality; the responsibility for their own existences could no longer be laid on other people and material things: it rested with the individual alone.
This was a burden which the urban poor could not bear, and it was the absolute necessity for something on to which it could be off-loaded that projected them along the road to Jerusalem. The situation in which they found themselves at the end of the eleventh century was not necessarily worse than anything they might have suffered previously; it was simply that they found it more intolerable. They needed a supportive belief system to relieve some of the responsibility for their own existences, and it was this that the Crusade, considered as an apocalyptic movement, supplied.
The Crusade acquired apocalyptic attributes because it was a religious, collective movement, involving a physical journey towards a promise of salvation. Jerusalem’s eschatological associations—together with the intoxicating widening of geographical horizons which the mere mention of its name must have produced—completed the process whereby the Crusade became an apocalyptic movement for those who had need of one.
Few participants survived the People’s Crusade. They would have stood a far better chance of survival if they had stayed home. But the belief that personal security can be found outside oneself—by following the unlikely figure of Peter the Hermit—sent them scurrying like lemmings towards the mirage of the Heavenly Jerusalem, far beyond the eastern horizon.
The people who assailed us with the threat of Covid also offered us a palliative. If we did as we were told—if we wore the masks, stayed in our homes and avoided physical proximity to our friends, family and neighbours—we would be saved.
The mask, in particular, became a sign of election. In the context of the Crusade, this was a physical mark: on several occasions, crosses were found imprinted upon the bodies of crusaders killed by the Turks: a reassurance that, despite this apparent disconfirmation, the recipient was with God. The mask, we now know, had no prophylactic function. It was simply a badge—a sign that the wearer had accepted Dr Anthony Fauchi as their Lord and Saviour.
Two years on, we have been prodded a step further. The mask being no longer efficacious—no longer guaranteeing salvation—we need a more powerful sign. Just as, in some accounts of the Last Judgment, the saved will be distinguished by a physical mark, so the vaccinated—the Covid faithful—will bear on their smartphones the QR code that marks them out as the righteous: those worthy to enter the New Medicalised Jerusalem to which, like Guibert’s desperate peasants, we are travelling.
References:
Donald Hounam, Early Crusading Apocalyptic, PhD thesis, Westfield College, London, 1977
Guibert of Nogent, Historia quae dicitur Gesta Dei per Francos in Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Historiens Occidentaux, Paris, 1844-95, vol 4.
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchist of the Middle Ages, 3rd edition, London, 1970.
The featured image is from an illuminated manuscript of the Roman du Chevalier du Cygne, c.1270, in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris.
Donald Hounam 