PSY-OP COVID-19: Under House Arrest!
Analysis of the COVID-19 crisis from a psychological point of view, Part I
Are we lab rats? Milgram-Asch-Laborit
In this article, I refer to the experience of countries that are confined in an authoritarian and arbitrary manner, with more than 3 billion human beings under the authority of a few people and under house arrest [1] :
The virologists would confine us for a year, if it were up to them [“If it were up to the virologists, it would be simple: everyone in confinement for a year“]!
In my case, it would be those virologists that I would confine for a year, without hesitation. Nothing personal!
Do your children know Stanley Milgram, Solomon Asch and Henri Laborit?
I don’t think so. Do you?
I don’t know. I think these are the people and their experiences that should be taught in schools.
I’ve interviewed mine, 14, 16, 17 and 19… No. They don’t know, or barely know. Milgram, they look familiar.
You can be sure that these people who want to govern us are familiar with these subjects, and they exploit them.
If we don’t take control of our minds, others do it for us.
Let’s go back to that unflattering comparison.
I have tried to understand how billions of people have been so easily caged.
Fear, of course [COVID-19 – Media Choice: Fear!].
Guilt. No one wants to make their loved ones sick.
But once the untruths started coming out:
1. Raoult, professor published in all the major infectious disease journals and author of several books on the subject – Raoult – Fear versus Data
Divergent opinions of multiple experts, including several in virology, infectiology, epidemiology, statistics 2. … [2-3-4-5]: “Stop the confinement! »
3. Dissenting reports from field doctors… [6]
Once it became obvious that something was wrong with the statistics exaggerated by the media (contaminations, deaths, hospitalizations), with the official discourse, with the interest of the measures advocated by our rulers [Facts about Coronavirus], why did the majority of people continue to obey?
Some are ready to let themselves be stalked, to let their children be masked, to let people put an ankle bracelet on them! [In a nursery school in Varese, Italy, electronic bracelets for the social distancing of children] – original Italian version [7].
How can it come to this?
Stanley Milgram – Submission to Authority
Stanley Milgram is an American social psychologist. He conducts a famous experiment in the early sixties.
Excerpt from the film I comme Icare (1979), with Yves Montand playing the lead role…
- 20 minutes, on Stanley Milgram’s real-life experiment, carried out in the USA between 1960 and 1963 at Yale University.Using the pretext of a study on memory, he puts a “master” (the real subject of the experiment) in contact with a “pupil” who has to memorize words and repeat them.The “students” are actually actors. They are in the game with the experimenter in the white coat who plays the role of the authority.The subject being tested is the teacher, who has to punish the pupil with an increasingly powerful electric shock in the event of a wrong answer or no answer.In fact, the student actors receive nothing and simulate the pain by shouting, crying or contorting.Under verbal pressure from the experimenter who embodies authority, most masters will inflict very high electric discharges, 450 volts for the most intense.
However, teachers are well aware of the suffering inflicted and the risk of death among students.
For Milgram, these shocking actions can be explained by the notion of the “agentia state:
The individual sees himself as the executive agent of an alien (his) will, as opposed to the “autonomous state” in which he feels responsible for his actions. The individual, in this perspective of submission, considers himself to be committed to authority and therefore does not feel responsible for the orders given by it.This experience demonstrates the extraordinary degree of subjection of individuals to authority.Despite the contradictory decisions of our governments, their amateurism or, on the contrary, their authoritarianism, despite the fact that general practitioners have been prevented from prescribing certain drugs, despite the scandals about masks, tests, the isolation of the elderly, the brutal police supervision of a population under house arrest, despite the absence of disaster in countries that have not resorted to confinement, despite all these aberrations, the majority of confined populations continue to obey.
To go further: In the name of science, obey me!
Solomon Asch – the weight of conformism
Solomon Asch is a psychology researcher at Swarthmore College, USA.
In the early 1950s, he too conducted a very interesting social experiment: how an individual can go so far as to renounce his own judgment, and lie to conform to the decisions of the group.
© image taken from the site: Surprising tendency to conformism: the Asch experience
The experience is presented as an experience of visual perception.
On an image, a first vertical line is represented.
In a second image, three vertical lines designated by A, B and C are represented. Only one of the strokes (C) is the same length as the one represented in the first image.
The correct answer is obvious.
In Asch’s experiment, 8 people are evaluated. 7 of them are accomplices of the experimenter.
The subject studied is always questioned last. The 7 accomplices, questioned first, give their answer out loud and specify, on the second image, the line which has the same length as that of the first image.
When the 7 accomplices start to give a false answer, the subject studied, in spite of his intimate conviction, gives in his turn a wrong answer.
This was observed in 3 out of 4 subjects.
This means that the majority of people prefer to conform to the rest of the group, even if it means making a mistake or lying.
An interesting point is that at the end of the test, the real purpose of the experiment was finally revealed to the test subjects.
Asch then collected three types of responses from those who had followed the group’s erroneous advice:
1. Denial. Some subjects continued to believe they had given the correct answer.
2. Influence: Some subjects admitted that they had been misled by the group.
3. Acceptance: some subjects had the right answer but did not dare to denote in relation to the general opinion.
The conclusion of this experiment is that we are much more vulnerable than we would like to believe!
The experiment has been replicated many times.
Henri Laborit – The inhibition of action
What happens when you can neither run away nor fight in the face of a conflict situation?
Professor Henri Laborit, a French surgeon and neurobiologist born in 1914, conducted these experiments on laboratory rats.
Framework of the experiment:
Laborit uses a wire cage with an electrified floor. The cage has two compartments separated by a partition with a door. The floors of each compartment are subjected to alternating electrical discharges.
Four seconds after a flash of light and a sound signal, an electric current is sent to the floor of one of the compartments of the cage.
Laborit first conducts two experiments.
Photo source: huffingtonpost.fr
In the first experiment, it allows the rat to leave the electrified compartment by leaving the door open.
The rat very quickly associates the luminous flash, the sound signal and the occurrence of the electric shock. Thus, as soon as it perceives the flash and hears the sound, it moves to the other compartment, and so on each time it hears the sound and perceives the flash, thus avoiding electric discharges.
In the second experiment, he places two rats in the compartment and the door is closed. The two rats cannot leave this compartment. They are subjected to electric shocks without being able to escape. So they fight, bite and scratch each other.
In both experiments, this electrical stress is applied for 10 minutes a day, for 10 days.
At the end of both experiments, when you look at the rats, even the ones that fought (except for their scratches), they are all healthy.
Laborit then conducts a third and decisive experiment.
A rat is placed in the compartment with the door closed. It is alone and cannot escape. After a while, Laborit observes that the rat doesn’t even try to move anymore. It remains prostrate, covered with electric shocks. At the end of the experiment, he experiences significant weight loss, prolonged high blood pressure (several weeks) and multiple stomach ulcers.
This experiment shows that a living being confronted with stress, if he cannot act on it, flee or fight, freezes, prostrates himself and develops diseases.
This is the inhibition of action.
Among the billions of confined human beings, many have submitted themselves to authority, some ready to follow all the orders given, even absurd ones, and to make them be respected in turn.
Others have preferred to believe a lie or to act as if it were true, for fear of facing pressure from their group.
The majority, finally, frozen, prostrate, under the combined effect of fear and confinement, inhibited all action, reflection, subject to the order to stay at home, to respect an aggressive isolation without being able to move or fight.
I filled this gap and told my children about Milgram, Asch and Laborit.
There is hope.
Stanley Milgram relativized the significance of his experience by recalling all the historical situations in which resistance to a malevolent authority was able to develop through collective action.
Similarly, Solomon Asch pointed out that as soon as the subject studied was no longer alone, but another resisted the false pressure of the group, then the subject studied in turn resisted much more and the rate of conformity dropped considerably. It only takes several to resist.
Finally, Henri Laborit demonstrated that it is not the stress that happens to us or that is inflicted on us that counts, but our reaction to it! The important thing is to react to it and not to endure it without doing anything.
Take action.
Together, as here in Switzerland, protesters demonstrated this Saturday in several cities in German-speaking Switzerland against the measures imposed by the government during the coronavirus pandemic.
Only collective, concerted, intelligent and determined action will overcome the intrusive powers that VIDOC-19 has unleashed on us.
Dr. Pascal Sacré
Anesthesist-Intensivist
Featured Photo: The Emperor’s new clothes
Note to readers: please click on the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your mailing lists. Publish this article on your blog site, web forums, etc.
Notes
[1] Coronavirus : quels sont les pays confinés ? Plus de trois milliards de personnes sont confinées, soit la moitié de la population mondiale.
[2] 12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic, 12 experts s’interrogent sur la panique du coronavirus
[3] 10 MORE Experts Criticising the Coronavirus Panic, 10 autres experts critiquent la panique du coronavirus
[4] 8 MORE Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic, 8 experts de plus s’interrogent sur la panique du coronavirus
[5] Covid19 et confinement aveugle, combien de morts évitables ?, par le docteur N. Délépine, pédiatre et oncologue
[7] In un asilo di Varese il braccialetto per il distanziamento a 150 bimbi, 6 mai 2020
