Our society is behaving like a cult

The parallels are eerie

In June in England and Wales there were 5,600 more deaths than an average June, which is nearly 14% more.

It can't be overstated how astonishing these numbers are.

If the pandemic is over, excess death should be coming in below trend. All the vulnerable people should be dead. The surviving cohort should be healthier and more resistant to death, not less.

That’s the opposite of what we’re seeing.

As a comparison, in pre-pandemic June 2019, excess death was -2% lower than the average. This figure is consistent with a population who, slowly but surely, are making health gains.

Equally astonishing is that these deaths were officially classed as mysterious.

The leading cause of excess death in the UK in 2023, according to the Office of National Statistics, is “symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions.” This didn’t happen before 2020. I checked.

Before 2020, leading causes of excess deaths were things you could name – dementia, heart disease, cirrhosis, suicide.

What century are we living in? In the middle ages, where the mechanisms of most diseases were unknown, doctors would diagnose and name a disease according to its presentation. Tuberculosis was consumption, dysentery was the flux and encephalitis was dropsy.

If the leading cause of excess death across an entire population is officially a mystery, your society is regressing. Fast.

And to these astonishing facts, there is zero reaction. There is nothing.

If you didn’t read this newsletter or a handful of others outside the mass media, you simply wouldn’t know this is happening. What’s happening is that the unfettered transmission of a new virus that infects your blood vessels and can invade every organ in the body is killing people outside the acute phase.

But we shouldn’t look to the bulk of ordinary people for the lack of reaction. Because denial and re-adjustment behaviours are not organic social attitudes. They are manufactured.

This should be obvious to all of us who lived through 2020 when a correct amount of alarm and fear about a new virus – alarm communicated by media, the medical profession and governments – led to a rapid shift in social behaviours. For a few months in that first pandemic summer, very few people (relative to the size of populations) got covid.

It almost made you believe in society.

But today, three years later, many many more people are getting covid. Which is weird. Given the pandemic is over. If you think about it too much, you might think we’re being lied to. Or you might get a bit confused. The cognitive dissonance might be overwhelming. So most people aren’t thinking about it.

But while denial and minimisation of active threats are not organic behaviours, they appear to manifest organically as social attitudes and behaviours.

And this is crucial.

Any successful psychological operation on a large group of people has to look organic if it is to be successful.

It has to look as if the group has made an active choice to participate in the behaviour.

This is the essence of a cult.

In the most successful cults, no one is preventing from leaving. No one is forcibly coerced into any behaviour. As Margaret T. Singer, a professor of psychology who has studied hundreds of cults since the 70s says: “the pattern of manipulated cult conversions may not appear especially radical to outsiders, since no one is beaten or otherwise physically harmed.”

The attitudes and behaviour of cult members are products of persuasion, suggestion and psychological manipulation, many of which act to erase the cognitive dissonance people might initially feel at their indoctrination.

All of us prefer to feel a sense of calmness, or harmony. And often, to do this, we reduce the conflict between our thoughts, our emotions, our values and our behaviour. When these things are at odds with each other we experience dissonance.

We are wired to erase this sense of dissonance. Cults exploit this cognitive loophole.

“In a cult setting, the cognitive dissonance often keeps you trapped as each compromise makes it more painful to admit you’ve been deceived,” says Singer.

Or to put it another way: As you act further against your own values, it becomes harder to act in your own interests.

If we apply this to covid: taking steps to avoid catching and spreading a disease is probably a value most people hold.

But the longer you compromise your values to adjust to the normative behaviour (which is that no one takes steps to avoid catching or spreading the disease because we’ve been deceived into thinking it’s no big deal), the harder it is to change course.

If you’ve been angrily or airily dismissed when asking someone about covid precautions, this is why. You are reintroducing dissonance. It is psychologically painful.

Access to information is also central to the formation of cults, says Steve Hassan, author of Combatting Cult Mind Control.

No one is allowed access to information that might lead people to question their behaviour. Cults also stream into their subjects an overload of misinformation to ensure the correct behaviours.

Both of these have been visible to anyone paying attention over the last 18 months.

The disappearance of covid from the news schedules is preventing people from questioning whether they should feel any guilt or responsibility for the ongoing spread of covid.

And the overload of normalising misinformation around the declining health of populations, most notably in the selling of the lie that more people are getting sick because we ‘missed out’ on illness because of lockdowns actually makes people feel ok about getting sick.

We’re just catching up on the viruses we missed out on, the lie goes. It’s normal. Even beneficial. Never mind there is no such concept in epidemiology.

And it’s worked perfectly. Just look what these lies have produced: perfectly re-adjusted behaviour amid conditions most don’t see as changed.

So then the question becomes: are we living in a cult?

It’s a terrifying prospect to consider.

It even sounds a bit hysterical.

But yes, probably. I suppose all societies have cult-like features by necessity.

But when you’ve been convinced to ignore your long-term interests and set aside your values to perpetuate someone else's ideological project?

When that has been achieved by information control allied to psychological manipulation employed by group leaders?

That’s culty.

We can just as easily apply this to climate and ecological collapse as to the pandemic.

The pursuit of a certain set of behaviours is undermining the long-term viability of society, and in most cases these behaviours run counter to the interests of the majority.

What happens to cults?

Some disperse of their own accord as reality intrudes and the lies fall apart.

Some get broken up by the authorities.

And the most notorious collapse in mass suicides events.