Totalitarianism and the Covid Cult

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Over the next few instalments, I am publishing material on what C.J. Hopkins (2020) called the “Covidian cult.” This will eventually form a chapter in the book.

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Introduction

Why did 20th-century totalitarianism fail? One reason, judging by the experience of the Soviet Union, is that the citizenry did not adequately internalise the ideology.

From a totalitarian perspective, methods must be found for turning everyone into a True Believer in the sense defined by Zimbardo (2005, p. 141); there can be no room for inward dissent.

The distinctive proliferation of cults in the United States from the year that MKULTRA was launched (1953) suggests that many of those cults were experiments in cultivating True Believers. Indeed, some of the most famous of those cults are known to have ties to the CIA and military intelligence.

Experiments in indoctrination took place, not only at the micro level, through cults, but also at the global level. The “moon landings” established proof of concept that it was possible to fool the entire world about something, a principle that was then applied to other global narratives such as “climate change,” the “global War on Terror,” and “pandemics.”

For the first time in history, the “Covid-19” operation aimed at turning the whole of society, transnationally, into a giant cult. Going beyond the propaganda techniques conventionally used to indoctrinate populations, it met every single one of Steven Hassan’s (1990, pp. 60-7) famous “BITE” criteria for defining a cult, generating legions of True Believers in the process.