Totalitarianism and the Covid Cult

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This is the fourth and final part of a chapter on cult indoctrination techniques deployed as part of the “Covid-19” operation. Click here for Part 1, here for Part 2, and here for Part 3.

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Introduction

The first three parts of this chapter argued that the “Covid-19” operation aimed at turning entire societies into a single, giant cult; that the Covid cult imposed a false reality on true believers; and that it functioned as an ersatz religion intended to supplant Christianity.

This final part explores further the means by which people were indoctrinated into the Covid cult.

Deindividuation and Creating False Identities

Totalitarian societies function as giant cults with their own cult leaders, viz. Goebbels’ creation of the “Führer cult” around Adolf Hitler (Gunderman, 2015), or the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union (Gill, 2021). In such societies, the identity of individual citizens is expected to reflect that of the Great Leader.

Joost Meerloo, a medical doctor and psychoanalyst who fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, wrote that the citizen in a totalitarian society “has no individual ego any longer, no personality, no self” and “no longer knows the real core of [their] mind” (Meerloo, 1956, pp. 112, 117). Instead, they are “the object of official barrage and mental coercion,” which strips from them individual conscience, personal morality, and the capacity to think clearly and honestly. The citizenry is thereby “tamed into personal and political somnambulism” or “mindless robotism” (Meerloo, 1956, pp. 117, 106).

Erich Fromm, a sociologist and psychoanalyst who fled Nazi Germany, likewise found that “the despair of the human automaton is fertile soil for the political purposes of Fascism” (1960, p. 221).

To mid-20th century observers, there appeared to be something in the nature of capitalist society itself that aids the process of deindividuation. Aldous Huxley (1958, p. 20), for example, observed:

These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized.

Is the capitalist worker-automaton, who has internalized dehumanizing patterns of behaviour, more susceptible to deindividuation and indoctrination?

The Tavistock Institute realized that individuals could, through various shock techniques, be induced into a state of “war neurosis,” whereby “the individual’s developed sense of identity is in effect ‘turned off,’ and a pseudo-identity is formed” (Marcus, 1974, p. 33). In a controlled environment, whilst individuals may not appear brainwashed, “The victim’s sense of reality is turned inside-out. ‘He’ or ‘she’ (the pseudo-personality) becomes ‘I’ [...]” (Marcus, 1974, pp. 24-5).

In groups, Tavistock discovered, the same effect can be achieved without the need for individual brainwashing, because the behavioural responses among the group will become “mutually reinforcing” (Marcus, 1974, p. 33). For example, the more people who profess a particular belief, the more likely it becomes that others will adopt that belief.

The Monarch mind control programme (allegedly the unofficial continuation of MKULTRA [Hughes, 2024, p. 80]) is said to have been named after the monarch butterfly, which “begins its life as a worm (representing undeveloped potential) and, after a period of cocooning (programming) is reborn as a beautiful butterfly (the Monarch slave)” (Vigilant Citizen, 2012). Its aim is to reprogramme the victim with a slave identity: “The person’s sense of identity is lost. The Monarch slave loses his/her sense of self to the cult and to the person’s master” (Wheeler & Springmeier, 2008, p. 85). The old self is eclipsed by a new one that lacks personal autonomy.

Cults seek to “impos[e] a new personal identity — a new set of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions — to fill the void left by the breakdown of the old one” (Hassan, 1990, p. 69). It is well known that individuals who become involved in cults “lose their sense of self identity and take on the identity of the cult leader” (Karlstrom, 2025).

Victims of cults would typically have rejected the new identity if asked for informed consent to the change, which is why Hassan and Shah (2019) prefers the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) term “undue influence” to “mind control.” Cults involve an outrage against individual sovereignty, not total control of the mind.

Let us begin, then, to apply some of these insights to understanding the Covid cult.