Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > The coming epidemic? Mass Psychosis

I'm pretty confident that history is going to judge Fox news to be evidence of a mass psychosis in it's entirety.

Anybody who knows how to keep score has to notice that two entire years of programming on that channel have been disproved by the Iraq war.

My dad, an Orreilly fan, now admits that the war is a huge mess, but he won't admit anything that might damage his imagined version of himself too much. Like, his son saw it coming and warned him about it in clear terms, but he chose to believe his friends on his news channel.

Now there is clearly no solution, and he wants to blame it anybody but Bush, as if Rumsfeld or congress did it. Then he wants to say that you can't argue with crazy people, like that's the reason we have to fight al qaeda until they are just all gone.

It seems to me that both the christians in the u.s. and the muslims in asia have masses of people at their core who can't be reasoned with, who have built their internal world to protect them from even the possibility of intellectual dissonance. The evidence doesn't exist that would change my dad's mind so he would somehow admit that voting for Bush in 2000 was a moral fault. And there is no evidence that could possibly end the war on terror. Or convince Al Qaeda that the jihad could end now.

We aren't the first to encounter these eternal war types or mass psychosis. Imagine the hundred years war or the human sacrificing under the rule of the aztecs. Entire civilizations have lived and died in a full on psychosis.

I wish I knew some way I could influence them besides dosing him with LSD against his will. And even if I did, if my dad saw how stupid he has been over the course of his life, if the flashbacks of him destroying his kids legos with a hammer or telling his teenage son that he doesn't need a computer because it is just a trend that will pass.....he would kill himself.

Ultiimately, as in the 2006 elections, it is not the core of the psycosis that you can hope to alter, these people are too far gone. It is the people who are on the fringe, who are kindof wishy washy, but who could change their mind without dissolution of their ID who we are talking to.

It's the kindof people who would still vote for Bush in 2004 but not in 2006 that we are looking for, and by directing our efforts towards them, we can mitigate the damage of living in a country with people who exhibit pathological group mania.

I do just long for that silver bullet that would make it so Fox would just crumble, that no person would ever believe them again. I would think, the idealist in me, that Iraq should do it, but I know now that delusional people can always create more delusions to maintain the buzz of their artificial reality.