The deeper you look, the more profound becomes the spiritual harm that comes into view by the members of the media and government that promote lockdowns. In Part 1, Lockdown Resistance exposed these institutions for committing many acts against the public that have been previously identified as torture. Part 2 examined the definitions, indicators, and impacts of torture and found that they all described lockdowns and related public relations to a T. One little-understood effect of torture identified in Part 2 that deserves elaboration is change in personality or identity. Many scholars, in fact, consider the destruction or alteration of one’s identity to be the primary goal of torture.
Personality Destruction as the Goal of Torture
The infliction of pain is not the goal of torture. It is a primary means of torture, but not the goal. Prisoners of war are not kept in detention camps and badly mistreated for the mere fun of it. Researchers on torture have discovered that, besides the obtainment of information, the objectives of torture center around the destruction of the very self of the detainee: his personality, values, place in society, worldview, and self-image.
All forms of torture (be it punitive, interrogational, terroristic, or judicial) – has one aim: the breaking of the agent. This conception of torture as destructive of agency, and as aiming at the ‘breaking’ of the subject of torture, has achieved near- universal recognition in the literature surrounding treatment of torture victims, and a growing recognition in other disciplines that aim to understand torture. Consider: “The objective of torture is to break down a person’s integrity and personality”.3 Torture has a singular goal: “to destroy the integrity of the human being in front of them, to isolate him from society, by using different methods of torture that deprive him of his fundamental trust in humanity and make him look crazy in the eyes of society. These people come to us with issues like mistrust, betrayal, rape, humiliation, ostracism, anxiety, and self- rejection”.4
“Torture is intended to destroy and wipe out the victim’s personality”.5 Likewise, torture has a particular trajectory, where the end result is a destruction of the self. “It is as if the downward slope from power to powerlessness experienced in relation to the perpetrator has ripped apart the victim’s ego into two or more pieces.”6 Again: “The aim of torture is to destroy the individual’s will, to break the individual down and obliterate a sense of autonomy and agency, thus turning that individual into a shell of a person who lacks the will to resist, or even to be human in the sense that being human requires personal agency”.7
The growing consensus around what torture aims to accomplish has been forged through intense work with those who have suffered it: “The victims describe the mental reactions after torture as the most disabling by giving them a feeling of having changed their personality . . . the feeling of having a changed identity is one of the most characteristic effects of torture”.8
J. Wisnewski, Understanding Torture*
Great summary of mass delusion/menticide. If embedded video won’t play, watch here.
Methods of Personality Destruction
Destruction of identity and personality is a central goal of torture in general. However, certain elements of torture have been recognized as being especially important in this respect. Torture scholar Pau Perez-Sales has identified the following 16 categories of elements that are typically present in situations of discerned modification of identity. The process occurs through two main pathways, which may be simultaneous: isolation and group pressure.
Isolation (1)
Preventing contact with others. Convincing detainee that the world is evil or unsafe and should be avoided.
Fully-controlled environment (2)
Determine when and what the detainee will do with his time.
Disorientation — being stunned (3)
Detainee may be blindfolded, handcuffed, or put in a noise-proof cell to cause disorientation.
Fear/terror (4)
May include beatings, watching others being tortured, or threats of being killed. May induce detainee to become submissive and attempt to please captor.
Power imbalance (5)
Captor has total control over detainee. May include arbitrary demands to show power or punishing any attempt of detainee to regain control.
Interpersonal manipulation (6)
Providing misleading information. Forcing detainee to betray others.
Manipulation of affective bonds. Fostering emotional dependence. (7)
Captor establishes himself as a caring figure. Detainee sees torturer as both a source of pain and a source of protection and emotional support amidst intense emotions.
Group pressure (8)
Detainee seeks approval from group to get him through the intense situation. Conformity is encouraged. Deviation from group norms are punished.
Breaking with the past (9)
Everything from the detainee’s past is questioned and leaving behind the people and ideas about the world from before his detainment is encouraged.
Breaking assumptions and beliefs (10)
Perception of human beings and their trustworthiness is irreversibly changed. Values and worldviews are challenged. Detainee must distance himself from the people in his life and mistrust them.
Questions basic values (11)
Concepts of ethics and ideologies are shattered. Being forced to engage in wrongdoing leads to shame and guilt.
Self-conscious emotions — guilt and shame (12)
Subject may be humiliated in front of others. He may be forced to cooperate with captor and hurt others against his will.
Installing an identity (13)
Detainee undergoes a course of re-education. New values and allegiances are instilled. New behaviors are taught and monitored for compliance.
New self-serving adaptive worldviews (14)
Previous worldview is replaced with one in which the world is an evil and unsafe place. If forced to maintain a change for a long period of time, this hyper-negative worldview may become permanent.
New adaptive emotions (15)
Emotions are seen as futile and kept at a distance.
Normalizing the abnormal (16)
No matter how strange or objectionable new routines or environments may seem, the subject adjusts to them and accepts them as normal and desirable. When concentration camps were dissolved at the end of World War II, some people who had resided in them for over 2 years were reported to be afraid of their own liberation, having come to see concentration camp life as normal.
It would appear that almost all of these elements apply to lockdowns and their public relations. Isolation is obviously the very definition of a lockdown (1). The media and government relently terrify the public over coronavirus, grossly exaggerating the risk (3,4,6). Politicians demonstrate their total control over citizens by enforcing social distancing and mask-wearing (5). Politicians and public-facing media personnel act like they are trying to save the world from the deadly coronavirus and portray themselves as heroes, while ignoring the harms caused by the restrictions (7).
Due to politicians’ influence, strict adherence to social distancing and mask-wearing is socially enforced. Anyone who doesn’t engage in these counterproductive behaviors, or even criticizes them, is punished in many ways — shaming, job termination, bullying, false accusations, and more (8,13). Lockdown victims are inundated by persuasive messages challenging all of their previous values, such as personal freedom, questioning authority, independent thought, and the importance of human contact (9,10,11). Avoiding all your previous acquaintances is ordered, as is suspecting everyone of being dangerous (9,10,14).
The public is constantly told that they don’t matter and should not want to live free, instilling in people deep guilt and shame (11,12). We realize that it is wrong for us to enforce distancing in ourselves and others, furthering our shame (11,12). Brave souls that kindly keep their church or business open to provide a much-needed service are hunted down and publicly humiliated on TV (12). Chinese Communist Party-style citizen re-programming has been implemented. Unconditional obedience to state authorities is ordered. Programming centers on rejection of one’s own reasoning, previous social norms, personal values (13). Severe condemnation of anyone not conforming to the new state religion is incited.
The narrative of the government and media that the world is so deadly that it isn’t safe to leave home has lasted many months (so far). The narrative of don’t trust the community, only trust your masters in government and the media has already lasted so long that it has the potential to become permanently ingrained in people’s minds even after the pandemic passes (14). Finally, the torturous non-life that government has forced upon people is being marketed as “the new normal” (16). We are told that this is what life will look like for the next few years, or even for the rest of our lives, so there is no point in resisting their tyrannical laws.
Effects of Personality Destruction Methods
Every one of the personality-destroying methods attempted by elites during the pandemic has been successfully implemented. People continue to stay away from others even if social distancing is not enforced by the police. Phobia-mongering has resulted in panic-level fear of the SARS-CoV-2 cold virus being the norm.
It is common to see people being expelled from a building for not wearing a mask or yelled at for getting within 2 meters of another person. Our entire society is plagued by shame and guilt just for wanting to satisfy their most basic human needs, such as earning money to pay their bills or to hang out with their own friends.
Have the successfully implemented identity-destruction methods caused actual personality change throughout the population? I believe that it has. Ask yourself if you are the same person today that you were before the lockdown. Ask yourself if the people around you seem like they have changed during that time. I believe that most people will respond in the affirmative to both these questions.
In order to tame people into the desired pattern, victims must be brought to a point where they have lost their alert consciousness and mental awareness. Freedom of discussion and free intellectual exchange hinder conditioning. Feelings of terror, feelings of fear and hopelessness, of being alone, of standing with one’s back to the wall, must be instilled.
When the sensory stimuli of everyday life are removed, man’s entire personality may change. Social intercourse, our continual contact with our colleagues, our work, the newspapers, voices, traffic, our loved ones and even those we don’t like — all are daily nourishment for our senses and minds.
Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind, 1956
Besides the poor mental health that has reached epidemic proportions in this age of social distancing, people seem different on a deep level. They have abandoned their previous values and beliefs. To begin with, people now act as if the world is a dangerous or miserable place that should be avoided. Their fear of coronavirus causes them to avoid other people and common spaces as much as possible. But that is only the beginning.
Today, leaving the house means to deal with patronizing and bullying by pro-distancers or the discomfort of wearing a mask. The richness of in-person communication is much lower due to facial coverings and unnatural physical distances between people. Even when hanging out with others, we may not be able to hear them properly due to the 2 meter distance or we can’t see them well due to masks. If the person with whom you are talking is wearing sunglasses as well, you might as well be speaking over the phone!
Bullying about the restrictions is so out of control that even outspoken individuals are now too afraid to say anything against the official line to their own family. Freedom of thought and speech is taboo. Cult-like conformity is now the norm in Western countries.
The most striking and disturbing change in individuals since lockdowns began can be seen in their relationship to figures of authority. Pro-lockdown politicians in all levels of government, ‘experts,’ and journalists have become exalted to religious levels. Independent thought is now considered a treasonous activity. People have been so completely broken down by strict social distancing and related PR that they have regressed into the state of young children who are totally dependent on their parents (political rulers) to direct them, think for them, and to provide for their material needs. People have adopted the perspectives of the lockdown elite even though they intellectually know that those perspectives are wrong. The Western independent mindset is gone. The entire world has become North Korea.
Motivations for Personality Destruction
Before speculating over motivations, it may be instructive to first look at who has used the above methods of identity obliteration in the past. Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, and ISIS have used and developed these methods extensively. What generalizations could be made of this group?
To try to answer the question of Why destroy identity? objectively, we should look at what the outcome has been for the perpetrators of lockdown propaganda. Politicians, doctors, experts, and media personalities that spout social distancing and engage in the aforementioned acts have seen an explosion in attention and positive recognition. People are glued to their television sets to get the day’s updates on coronavirus from news anchors and government press conferences.
Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which a powerful dictator can imprint his own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those he plans to use and destroy. The terrorized victims finally find themselves compelled to express complete conformity to the tyrant’s wishes.
Fear and catastrophe fortify the need to identify with a strong leader. They lead to herding together of people, who shy away from wanting to be individual cells any longer; they prefer to be part of a huge mystic social organization that protects against threat and distress, in oneness with the leader. This protection-seeking instinctual reaction is also directed against dissent and individualism, against the individual ego. We see in this a regression toward a more primitive state of mass participation.
Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind, 1956
There has never been a topic that has been as much discussed privately, either. Coronavirus is all you hear people talking about in 2020. One frequently hears people discussing what they heard about coronavirus on TV, including relaying the panic and fear that their political and journalistic masters have signaled. There is no independent thinking about the issue, only an echo of the perspectives and emotions from the media.
The politicians and public health officers that extol life suspension as the only appropriate response to the pandemic have enjoyed notable social rewards. The public, believing their propaganda, revere these perpetrators of crimes against humanity as heroes and saviors. These characters have reached a level of reverence previously only seen among religious leaders. Tell your coworker that you don’t think the latest public health orders are a good idea and you will likely be accused of heresy for questioning her almighty savior! Any independent thinking or deviation from the official COVID-19 recommendations is sharply punished.
Having looked at the historical perpetrators of identity destruction and the effects of their use during the coronavirus pandemic, the motivation for them becomes abundantly clear. The elites currently extolling social distancing have used destruction of the personality to acquire awesome power. They have successfully sought to make themselves out to be on people’s televisions and minds as much as possible and to be lifted up to a guru-like supra-human status.
On a political level, they have in many cases permanently expanded their powers and created an environment which values giving the government total control over everyone’s lives. News and social media corporations have vigilantly censored free speech and practiced strategic emotional signaling, giving themselves control over what people think and feel. What our ruling class will do with these astonishing new powers, we will have to wait and see.