Mass Psychosis Formation: How Societies Descend into Collective Delusion

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Humans are wired for connection — but that same wiring can become a conduit for collective delusion. In this episode, George Monty examines the formation of mass psychosis, from historical panics to modern media-fueled hysteria. How do fear, conformity, and manipulation converge to reshape perception and behavior on a societal scale?

In this episode:

• Historical and modern examples of mass psychosis
• Psychological mechanisms behind collective delusion
• The role of media, propaganda, and social influence
• How fear and conformity amplify hysteria
• Strategies to maintain awareness and resist collective manipulation

Speaker 0 (0s): Welcome everybody to the TrueLife podcast. Happy new year to everybody. Hope you don't have a great day. I am flying solo today, my cohost. And can it be here? So you just get, you just get George today. Hope everybody's having a great new year. I wanted to talk about a few topics that I find relatively interesting, and I think you'll find them interesting as well. First and foremost is what do you guys know about grasshoppers? You know, a lot about grasshoppers.

I didn't know a lot about him either, but I've been reading up on him a little bit and I want to talk about how a grasshopper becomes a locust. I think you'll find this fascinating. I'm gonna have to look at my notes. So locus, like the ones that cause plagues and ravage the planet, they're actually a type of grasshopper and it's a type of grasshopper that undergoes a morphological change when it gets into large groups. So this transformation from a group of individual grasshoppers to a swarm of locusts, it results in plagues, famine, death, and just devastation.

I want you to focus on a little bit, think about it like a regular grasshopper. Like how does it, it physically changes its form and to a group of locusts. And the reason that's important is because I think it dovetails nicely with what we as humans do. So I want to read to you a little bit about how the grasshopper becomes a locust and becomes a swarm. And it's going to get into how individuals think about like a Think about a big giant group of people like a mob, right at the mob mentality is a lot like the locust mentality.

Let's figure out how a grasshopper becomes a locust, and then we can figure out how an individual person may succumb to kind of group think. So in specific climatic conditions, usually after heavy rains, causing a sudden flush of vegetation, followed in specific climatic conditions, when there's a heavy rain, all of a sudden there's plenty of vegetation out there and the grasshoppers are feeding, feeding, feeding, there's tons of vegetation and that particular condition, it leads to plentiful food.

Plentiful food leads to rapid breeding, rapid breeding leads to and involved in a evolution and an increase in still more reproduction. And that is the catalyst that leads to the transformation from the grasshopper to the locus. So let's talk about the transformation for a minute. The transformation happens when the boom turns to bust when there's tons of vegetation and then all of a sudden there's no vegetation. So the grass opera starts scrambling. There's a ton of them and now there's no more food, right?

And when those conditions caused the vegetation to die back, the food is, and then it restricts the feeding grounds. When this happens, the density of locusts increased further as they are forced into smaller and smaller areas of land. Once a critical mass is reached the grasshoppers begin to undergo a morphological change into that of the locus. It has been found that these changes are triggered by the individual grasshoppers. Having their back legs touched a certain number of times by other members of their species.

This is generally caused because each locust is nipping at its neighbor in an effort to get enough food. The physical changes begin with a release of serotonin and other neurotransmitters. So, okay. Think about that particular example. And now think about us as humans. What happens to us when we run out of food? What happens to us when we're Cajun with tons of people, we kind of start nipping at each other's heels and we begin to change as a society. We begin to think different.

We begin to see things different. You know, I had a friend that used to say, everything's, everything's fine until people stop making money. Right? Think about it in your neighborhood or where you grew up wet or what time you grew up. If you grew up in the eighties, like me in the nineties, when there's tons of money going around, you know, there's a lot more people that are willing to deal with problems, but when times get tough, people get pissed. And I think that that is kind of where we're at now. And the reason I bring that up is I really think that all the problems that we have in our life can be solved by looking at nature.

And that's why I bring up the idea of the grasshopper turning into the locus, because I think that we right now are in this transition, we are in the transition of moving from like individual people into like this giant group thing. Like we're so polarized right now. And there's two big groups and the more polarized we get, the more hardcore the groups get the, the more stringent the ideology gets. And it seems now like there's just these two groups that don't even really want to talk to each other.

Do they just want to reinforce one another's ideas about what's happening? And it brings up the point. I heard this new term called a mass formation psychosis. And if you just think about that for a minute, man, that's like a mouthful of words, right? Like mass formation, psychosis, like what the hell is that? Well, according to Dr. Malone on sub stack here, he looks at it like a crowd psychosis, the conditions to set up mass formation, psychosis include lack of social connectedness, which we are definitely feeling now a lack of social sense-making as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression.

Like that's all happening right now. Right? What, for me, I get stuck in because I want to, it seems to me like this is happening on purpose, but it matter if it's happening on purpose or if it's not happening on purpose, the fact is it's happening. We are in a position of a lack of social connectedness. We are being shown two different realities on TV. Or if you watch TV or wherever you consume your media at, there's two different sides of it. And whenever we set this up, you know, be it the locust or another example might be, if you look back at any of the world wars, there's usually two groups, globalism and nationalism, you know, no matter which example you want to look at, it seems like we're headed for some pretty tough times.

And if you just take a cursory glance at history, you can see that, you know, people begin to change when they're subjected to stresses. And that's what we are right now. We are so subjected to some real, some real stressors. Like what do you guys think? Like, what do you think are the long-term consequences of our kids wearing masks at school? I had a recent conversation with my kids' teachers and we were speaking about how much communication has happens right here.

You know, think about when you were in class and your teacher could just look at you and, and kind of gi...