Cognitive Bias: Part 2

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological disorder in which a victim of abuse or wrongful detention develops strong positive feelings towards his abuser because of the abuse itself. It happens sometimes in cases of hostage-taking. Hostages are dependent on their captor for everything — food, permission to use the washroom, etc. Because of their baby-like dependence on their captor, they develop baby-like feelings. They look upon their captors as a baby looks upon her parents and they become full of love for the captors. The photo above is of the 1973 Norrmalmstorg bank robbery and hostage situation in Stockholm, Sweden that gave rise to the term, Stockholm syndrome.

The syndrome is most common in abusive relationships. Victims of domestic abuse can be severely financially or emotionally dependent on their abuser, sparking infantile feelings of warmth towards the abuser. In cases of severe abuse, victims often look upon their abuser as a God because the abuser holds in her hands the ability to control the victim’s reality to an astonishing degree. No experience is more ‘real’ than severe pain. Once the victim sees the abuser as a God, he starts to revere her accordingly.

Besides loving, positive feelings towards one’s abuser, the Stockholm syndrome causes victims to identify with the abuser and share his views and goals. The victim turns into the victimizer. It also causes victims to resent and oppose anyone who criticizes his abuser. The abuser’s enemies become the victim’s enemies.

Stockholm syndrome is extremely common under lockdowns. Our president or governor has become our captor to whom we are dependent for rent money, food, and permission to engage in any activity. Lockdowners don’t look upon their politicians as politicians. They look upon them as Gods. They revere them and happily follow their arbitrary, ever-changing advice without skepticism. They harshly denounce anyone who criticizes their ruler or his policies.

After fervently supporting something, it can be quite difficult to admit to oneself that it was a big mistake the entire time you supported it. No one wants to be in the wrong. The initial March 2020 lockdown was very popular in the public opinion of many countries. The realization that it was a terrible mistake to shut down society can be a major stab to a person’s self-esteem. To protect their self-esteem, people often deny that they made an error. Many people on some level know that they were wrong to support lockdowns but continue to support them because they don’t want to admit their mistake to themselves.

There is also a bias that makes it hard for someone to admit a mistake and change directions because she has already put a lot into something. A structural engineer may realize that he made a mistake in designing a building but not want to destroy and rebuild because then his prior work was for nothing. This is the sunk cost bias. People don’t want to change course if they have put considerable investment into the present course of action.

Regarding lockdowns and public opinion, the sunk cost bias may arise in different ways. Someone may have suffered financially a great deal from a lockdown and feel that it was all for nothing if lockdowns were wrong in the first place. He could also have put in a big emotional investment. Perhaps he had astute depression while isolated at home during the first lockdown but told himself that it was all for a good cause. If he admits to himself now that the lockdown was a mistake, all the suffering he experienced because of it was for naught. That is a stinging realization. It can be easier to tell oneself that lockdowns are justified to avoid the feeling of having suffered in vain.

Society is always changing. The prevailing attitude towards the ever-changing nature of modern society is that the changes are always for the better. Self-proclaimed “progressives” applaud any change in society as “progress” and social evolution. It is not rational to think that society only gets better. A change in society may be a positive development, a negative development, or a combination of the two. Liberals are especially prone to the bias of hailing any change in society as good simply because it is a change. 

Many dubious social developments have thus been praised as positive. For instance, the proportion of Americans with a university degree has been on a study incline for generations. In 1940, 5% of Americans had a bachelor degree. That percentage has steadily increased and in 2019 reached 35%. 

This trend towards more “higher education” is almost universally hailed as positive. I disagree. I think that the negatives of a university degree — years of hard work with no direct social benefit, inability to work full-time, large student debt, indoctrination by the establishment, shortage of people entering skilled trades — vastly outweigh the benefits. Yet this societal trend, like most others, receives no criticism or skepticism. The bias that social change is always good is so prevalent that people don’t even bother scrutinizing change, chalking it all up as ‘progress.’

This cognitive bias relates to lockdowns because the sweeping changes society has undergone have not been recognized as destructive and negative. People are watching the corona-show unfold in front of them and assuming that it must be positive simply because it is different. Rather than recognizing politicians discarding human rights and committing horrific acts against their own citizens, people actually tell themselves that government’s extreme control of society is part of social progress. “They are keeping us safer than ever before! Now that I think of it, freedom has always endangered our safety. Freedom is the new slavery!”

One reason why people convince themselves that societal change is always good is that they know that they will be punished for not championing the new change. In the twenty-first century, social change is always accompanied by (not to mention, caused by) the bullying of anyone resisting the change. For instance, a man can now declare himself to be a woman. Anyone who continues to refer to him as a man is bullied, shamed, and fired. In Canada, you can add imprisoned to that list! Knowing that punishment is meted out to everyone resisting any social change, people ‘learn to love’ the change.

The “new normal” of social isolation and masking is welcomed by many because of the bias that anything new must be positive “progress.” In this case, the country is now safer from SARS-CoV-2 and any future pandemics. How could we have ever been so un-woke as to interact with other people in a world full of microorganisms? Thank God for progress!

People have very limited ability to think for themselves. Whether they realize it or not, they want others to think for them. This childlike desire often manifests in an attitude that their government is in charge of them and has a duty to tell them what to do. Liberals are particularly susceptible to this cognitive weakness.

Thinking that their government is the rightful boss of their lives and they are essentially the property of their government, people with this bias are prone to accepting everything their government does. Like all cognitive biases, the government-is-boss bias results from a disinterest in thinking for oneself. Let your government do the thinking for you and you won’t have to think yourself.

The government is a multi-service provider. It’s like there was a merger between ADT Security, Prudential Insurance, Kaiser Permanente Healthcare, and Edelman Communications. Government provides services such as policing, employment insurance, healthcare, and acts as the public’s agent when dealing with other states. Why would anyone think that the government is their boss and should tell them what to do? Before coronavirus, democratic governments never portrayed themselves in such a way. This bias is more in line with authoritian states like China and North Korea. The principle of government-as-rightful-master is an inherent human bias in that it is mostly self-generated.

People tend to acknowledge that the world is unfair on one hand while claiming that only bad deeds are punished on the other. It is common to hear people present subsequent hardship as evidence of wrongdoing: “Sure he exposed corruption, but look at him now — he’s unemployed.” “The company shouldn’t have given their employees a raise. Now they’re in the red.” 

The ‘He shouldn’t have tried to do the right thing because it blew up in his face’ argument is more than just pointing out that doing a good deed involved a sacrifice. People frequently argue that the fact that someone paid a price for doing a good deed is proof that it was not really a good deed. “How could it have been the right thing for her to make a complaint? Look at her now!” People genuinely believe that if an action is truly moral, it is always followed by reward or recognition. Despite what they say, a large portion of people believe that the world is actually just.

This bias is often subconscious. People may very well think that the world is unfair on the surface, but on a deeper level feel otherwise. For instance, you may regret helping someone out financially if you later find yourself low on money yourself. “If that was the right thing to do, things would have worked out better for me,” you tell yourself, not realizing that this conviction is based on the belief of a just and fair world.

The ‘fair world’ bias also manifests in the other direction. People notice that the least ethical and most selfish individuals are also the most successful and deduce that they should become that way themselves. ‘It’s good to be bad’ is a lesson many people take away from life. 

The ‘fair world’ bias is pertinent to lockdowns because of the perverseness of the conspiracy. Sadistic psychopaths trying to make the world as miserable as possible, like Eric Feigl-Ding or Anthony Fauci, are exalted as heroes while saints like Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill or Chris Sky are mercilessly harassed by their own corrupt government. 

The upside-down examples that people see made of the good guys and bad guys in this COVID world have a major impact on people’s attitudes and behavior. In order to appease the innate desire for a just world, people have come to see the villainized heroes as actual villains and the hyper-cruel monsters who promote lockdowns, as saints and saviors. Since people come to hold convictions based on associations rather than logic, that means that they come to view lockdowns as benevolent and freedom as immoral.

Upon coming across this website or other sources of credible information on the pandemic response, many people experience disbelief. “This is bullshit. My government would not use a COVID test that doesn’t work or reduce healthcare access unless it was a genuine medical emergency.” 

A major barrier people have in coming to terms with the current extreme level of corruption in their own government is the belief that their government has not acted this way in the past. “My government has no history of intentionally acting in sharp contrast to the public’s interest,” they think, “so it cannot be that they are knowingly harming us now.” This reaction is semi-logical. The past behavior of an individual or institution is a good predictor of future behavior. Before the pandemic, therefore, it would be reasonable to conclude that the Covidist conspiracy was very unlikely.

While past behavior is relevant to predicting future behavior, it is not rational to believe that past behavior will always continue. People change. Institutions change. Government administrations change. New stuff happens. A politician or government with a clean past can become outright villainous if the circumstances are right. It is sad to see good people and institutions turn pure evil on a dime, but it has happened in the past and it is happening now. The fact that you are unaware of past atrocities committed by your government does not mean that your government cannot start committing serious crimes against its own population at any time.

Marketers know that you will not buy their product after seeing just one ad for it. It takes viewing multiple ads before people decide that the product being advertised is suitable for them. Public messaging works similarly. Upon hearing that staying away from others is good for our health, most of us were not convinced. However, simply by hearing the message countless times, we have been conditioned to believe it. The more a message is repeated, the more it is believed.

Availability bias refers to the tendency to think that events are more common than they are if they come to mind easier (ie. they are more mentally “available.”) For instance, people often estimate the odds of dying from a mass shooting as many times greater than the actual odds because it comes to mind easily due to media attention. Conversely, people vastly underestimate the odds of women committing domestic violence because the media does not cover female violence. 

Things come to mind more readily if they are heard more often or if they are associated with considerable emotion or a memorable experience. The chances of a person under 60 dying from COVID-19 are extremely low. However, due to the abundant media coverage of COVID deaths among the middle-aged and the intense emotion with which it is reported, there is widespread misunderstanding of the age-stratified effects of coronavirus. 

There is also a major misunderstanding of how many people die from COVID relative to overall deaths. The media only covers deaths from COVID, and seldom talks about anything else, so it is common to believe that COVID comprises a major portion of overall deaths. In reality, COVID-19 takes very few lives. For example, in India in March 2021, under 200 of the 25,000 deaths per day in the country are from COVID-19. That is in an overcrowded country without masks or social distancing. 

Availability bias is the reason why people are so focused upon COVID to the detriment of all other health and social problems (including the ones caused by COVID restrictions). For instance, healthcare denial in the name of COVID is presently a major cause of morbidity and mortality. But few people care about the issue because it is seldom discussed in the media. Caring about COVID and COVID only is a profoundly destructive bias of people today.

In 2020, a new world spawned which is all but unrecognizable. Our own governments initiated a war against us which in many places shows no sign of abating. We now live in a reality as disturbing and dystopian as any found on The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. If I wasn’t living it myself, I wouldn’t think today’s world would have been possible.

Denial is a common initial response to a tragic development. The world has changed so dramatically and terribly from the CCP’s lockdown scam that people cannot bring themselves to admit all that has transpired. An evil totalitarian cult has taken over most of the world. Many countries have become gigantic prisons. Those things really happened. In many regions, there is no end in sight, even with mass vaccination.

Denial is a coward’s way out of dealing with a situation. COVID restrictions are not “public policy,” they are crimes against humanity. And frankly, your life stinks. Staying home all the time isn’t fun. It fucking sucks. The magnitude of the personal and collective tragedy of lockdowns is so great that people cannot bring themselves to acknowledge it. The world won’t be free again until more people get their heads out of the sand and stop lying to themselves about their country becoming a humanitarian disaster.

Above: camp for refugees fleeing the Rwandan genocide, 1994

Tangential to the denial over the totalitarian cult of lockdowns is the disbelief that there could be enough bad people to make the cult possible. I have come across a number of anti-lockdown activists on Twitter expressing this sentiment. They feel deep sorrow at the evil they see all around them, as do I. They can’t understand how quickly everyone gave up every value they have had for their entire lives and supported sadistic public policies.

For many people, the possibility that the majority of people are capable of evil is impossible for them to accept. They therefore support lockdowns, even going against their own reasoning, because the alternative realization is unbearable for them. The line of reasoning goes: most people have basic decency; most people support lockdowns; thus, lockdowns can’t be that immoral — misguided perhaps, but not completely evil. I believe that a major barrier for people to come to terms with this very real crime against humanity is this psychological resistance. ‘If the COVID response is evil, then most people must be evil and that just cannot be.’

The present situation is certainly overwhelming to get one’s head around, but I believe that an honest examination — both of the situation and of oneself — will reveal that most people are indeed evil, or can quickly be turned evil. The enigma of popular support for horrific acts by government has received intense study. Most genocide scholars believe that people can easily be persuaded by their governments to go along with horrific crimes against humanity. 

Steven Bartlett is one such scholar. He has researched the nature of evil for decades and has written on the willingness of most people to support a ruler in committing atrocities. In The Pathology of Man, Bartlett describes these views. He posits that the public doesn’t require coercion to support crimes against humanity. They are all too willing to support whatever horrible acts their leaders suggest. Chillingly, he estimates that only about one in two hundred people oppose their government when it commits genocidal acts. Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen is another celebrated book in this space. In the book, Goldhagen portrays Germans under Hitler as happy and eager to carry out the Fuhrer’s plans.

Evil and sadism are ever-present in human nature. In the right conditions, they are quick to surface. In 2020, the conditions became right for billions of people.

This bias is grounded in an inherent desire for parental authority. People of all ages have an unspoken desire to be an eternal child. They want to have information about the world pre-selected for them and their opinions dictated to them. This requires moral authority. Fortunately, for these eternal babies, institutions such as the government, news media, and universities have taken up this challenge! They’ll tell you just what they want you to know and what they want you to think. All you have to do is surrender to them.

All of the validity of government, news media, and university research rests upon trustworthiness. People turn to these institutions for knowledge and guidance. If someone discovers that her government is thoroughly corrupt, she will cease backing the political party in power. If she finds out that her favorite news show regularly tells lies, she will stop watching it. Thus, these paternal institutions have had to present themselves as being supremely transparent and honest to keep their patrons and supporters.

The successful efforts of governments, news media, and research institutions to brand themselves as honest coupled with the innate need of adult-babies (ie. liberals) to be mentally directed, there exists a strong tendency to believe in these institutions in the face of evidence that they are untrustworthy. Many people will automatically dismiss any information that contradicts what they have previously learnt through these paternal institutions. “If this is true, why did the BBC run that article?!” you may hear your friend say.

An important factor in people’s faith in the news media is its consistency. Most of the press present an identical narrative of the world. Buy the day’s newspaper and you’ll find the same stories with the same opinions as in all the other newspapers. There is little difference among news agencies. People take that as proof of the media’s credibility, however, the validity of popular narratives is itself a bias. The media knows what sells and what angers their readers. They stick to the same talking points out of commercial interest, not because they are all portraying an issue honestly.

Government Always Acts in the Public’s Interest

As heartbreaking as this is, I have to let you in on some bad news — your government is not your friend. Politicians do not pass bills based on what is best for the people. Public policy, contrary to the popular view, does not attempt to offer the greatest benefit to society. Many policies do not even attempt to offer a net benefit to society. If you think that your government passed social distancing laws because they thought that they were good for you, you are mistaken.

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Government Should Always Do More to Make Progress on Social Problems

The view that government must always pursue a higher level of intervention on anything that one deems wrong with the world is very common. It is human nature to react to a problem with the world with a call for government to do more about that problem. Of course no one wants to see the problems of society continue. And who better suited to fix social problems than the government, with all its power?

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Ever told your friend a hair-raising experience of yours only to be told that you’re exaggerating? People inherently want to believe that the world is good, people are good, and everything is going to be alright. This ‘optimism bias’ is well-established in the field of psychology. We have an innate need for ‘everything to be okay,’ so we consistently ignore information which suggests an outcome could be not just bad, but terribly bad. 

The desire to view the world as happy is not limited to future personal outcomes. It extends to virtually everything. For instance, if you related a terrible experience of yours to someone, such as being stalked, you would likely meet a response such as “You and your stories!” or “No one stalks others. That’s just in the movies!” Information of a deeply sad nature upsets us. To protect ourselves from emotional pain, we develop a habit of summarily dismissing the upsetting information as false.

“The restrictions couldn’t continue over the long-term.” “Our governments couldn’t really be withholding medications which lower COVID deaths by 85%.” “There’s absolutely no way that hundreds of millions of people will die early as a result of lockdowns or COVID vaccines. That is just crazy!”

Have you said any of these to yourself or heard someone else express them? Despite overwhelming evidence of catastrophic outcomes coming from government action allegedly in response to a pandemic, most people dismiss the serious risks without a thought. COVID vaccines, for instance. They are the most serious risk to humanity in history. Many eminent scientists have stated that they carry heavy risks for serious health outcomes, including death, and presented extensive scientific theory to support their claims. 

There is no reason to reject these dire warnings from the COVID vaccines. There is extensive evidence that they present risks to health far greater than their potential benefits, and that they could kill billions of people. So why are Robert Malone, Sucharit Bhakdi, Geert vanden Bossche, and numerous other leading immunologists dismissed as crazy for broaching the risks of the vaccines? There is no logical reason. The only reason is that the thought of hundreds of millions of people dying or becoming injured from the injections scares people so much that they dismiss the troubling information. 

Our optimism bias prevents us from acknowledging the dire health risks of the pseudo-vaccines, lockdowns, and vaccine passports. These weapons have so much potential for destruction that acknowledging them could put us into acute mental duress. As a subconscious protective measure, we therefore tell ourselves that the scientists and human rights activists speaking up about their catastrophic potential must either be crazy or looking for attention. It is circular reasoning. We dismiss the serious risks as hype and we think they are hype only because they are serious risks. 

People even deny the horrors they see with their own eyes. The Terror has been a nightmare for most people and yet they have trouble admitting to themselves that the world is in a state of intense suffering, not from coronavirus, but from the completely unnecessary so-called public health orders. The “It can’t be that bad” bias even applies to one’s own experience and direct observations. Who wants to deal with reality when you have the ability to convince yourself that people are more good and happy than the evidence demonstrates?

Before you disregard some ‘crazy,’ ‘alarmist’ assessment of risk, ask yourself if you are rejecting it because it is weakly supported by science or because the consequences entailed are simply too uncomfortable for you to face.