Notes on Mass Psychology

Dear Friend and Reader:

Things went well at the taco stand a moment ago — I have a few minutes before my first client.

I nearly drove my research team nuts this week, as I changed topics for the Friday edition abut three times. The initial idea, in honor of Neptune in Aquarius, was to look at several news of the most important news stories of the decade that got dunked under the surface of reality, barely to be heard from again — the Valerie Plame scandal associated with the fraudulent march to the Iraq war; the stolen election of 2000; and several others. The question is, why do we believe lies, or fall for blatant omissions of the truth, and what do we think we deserve in karmic retribution?

Still from the Asch Conformity Experiments.

Somewhere in there, I began looking at psychological studies that demonstrate that humans think for themselves about as much as ants do; they laugh when other people think something is funny, they see something that everyone else “sees” even though it’s not there; they kowtow to power. They? Oh, I meant we, but not if you don’t fall for it. Here is one of those studies we found. This was another glimpse into Neptune in Aquarius, which is now reaching its peak energy. We live in the middle of a mind control machine that we call cable television. The most accurate news comes from comedy shows.

Then while I was out buying cucumbers on Wednesday, John McCain “suspended” his campaign, beginning this week’s follies, so the topic switched to Mercury retrograde, the debates and the crazy economic bailout. So I stuck with that, going over three major aspects that occur in late ’08 into ’09: Pluto into Capricorn, Saturn opposite Uranus and the Chiron-Jupiter-Neptune conjunction of May 2009.

Here were a couple of other bits the came up in the research, just for fun.

From William Sapphire’s On Language essay on Groupthink:

”Why do so many of us assume groupthink to be Orwellian? The answer is in its analogy to doublethink, coined by George Orwell in his 1949 novel, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ He defined ‘ the labyrinthine world of doublethink’ as ‘ to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.’ ”

George Orwell’s description of doublethink in his novel, 1984:

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

I.e., the fundamentals of our economy are sound, but it’s about to crater.