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"Mass Formation Psychosis" just seems like a buzzword.
There's definitely something self-sustaining to lockdownism that makes it uniquely powerful as a variant of totalitarianism. Most ideologies have some sort of engine that, whether by design or by accident, sustains them, by bringing in new people and stopping them from leaving. Dawkins would have described it as a meme by his original intent: a self-replicating bit of culture, some of which are far better at self-replicating than others and of which lockdownism might just be the best ever at spreading.
But I don't think there's anything spooky like "Psychosis" explaining this. I think it's rather simple, actually. The core tenants of lockdownism are self-sustaining. That is to say, if you actually believe in these restrictions and carry them out, then the process of doing this will sustain your own belief in lockdowns:
They control behaviour by robbing people of everyday life. They destroy bonds of friends, family and work, and replace these bonds with bonds to distant figures like Fauci. They make people financially reliant on leadership (i.e the government) for survival. They isolate people from dissenting information by keeping people locked up in their houses, unable to hear or even see those who disagree - all outside sources are dismissed as not merely wrong, but actively dangerous. Any contact with people who don't agree with lockdowns is frowned upon above and beyond that of contact in general - they disagree, therefore they are more likely to be infected, and are more likely to kill you. Through masking, your empathy towards others is decreased. At a broader scale, political pluralism and serious disagreement are de facto outlawed via a combination of bans on public meetings and censorship of alternatives to public meetings...
The weakness is in the long-term. Once everyone is entrenched in this system, the economic wellbeing of society inevitably tanks to the point where it becomes unsustainable. These systems of control don't function once you have rolling blackouts knocking out information control infrastructure, seized up supply networks blocking deliveries, and people emerge from their isolation in desperate search fulfilling basic needs. They also don't function once people notice that the prophesies are failing, and the sinners aren't all dead - Bill down the road is one of those disgusting anti-vaxxers, and you've not spoken to him in months, but somehow his car keeps coming and going. In this regard, vaccine mandates could be seen as a way to resolve this discomfort - a way to make manifest in the real world the sufferings that are meant to befall the prophesized enemies, after they fail to emerge as a result of their sins.
It really shares quite a lot in common with the strategies that cults use to manipulate members. It's just that in this case, the policy prescription of lockdowns is inherently manipulative, rather than (or alongside) being intentionally so. Unlike a cult, it never replaces comradery with the outside world with comradery with the cult itself, instead just leaving a miserable void. Perhaps it's long-term instability is similar to Nazism and Communism, rather than religious cults - it feels good while you're killing Jews/Kulaks/whatever, but inevitably the reality that you can't sustain a society based on killing imaginary enemies sets in.
I don't know if this is a steelman of Mass Formation Psychosis, however. Maybe this is what those people are really getting at, beneath the layers of buzzwords.
This is a really good comment, and I'd like to add to it: part of the effectiveness of lockdownism as a meme is that it fills a screaming gap. The populace at the moment of lockdown had a deep desire for a rational, moral explanation of why thousands of people were dying. People want there to be a reason why some are felled by the disease and others are not, they want a sense of control, they don't want their or their loved-ones' fates controlled by seemingly random variables or by variables set by choices many years ago. Lockdownism offers that: stay inside, wear a mask, do what Fauci says and you'll be safe. Do it not, and you will die.
At the start of lockdowns in my state, the nation was seeing a 9/11 a week in Covid deaths. People are going to want a Just-World explanation that allows them to get out of it. Of course, there is no just world, some small portion of young healthy people die after triple masking and triple vaxxing, some people survive despite being fat and unvaxxed. It's life, no ideology survives contact with reality.
This is a misleading unit of measuring death tolls. 9/11's significance was mainly not in the number of dead victims, but the symbolism and terror instilled in a nation, a felling of invincibility evaporating. Imagine the alternative history where they fly into the statue of liberty instead or the WTC but at night and only 300 people die. It would still be a pretty similarly big deal.
I don't think that's true. Part of Osama's point was to inflict a wound on the US like it had never seen, and the US had seen 300 deaths before. If they'd hit the statue of liberty or waited until night it would have sent a similar message, but only to the people in charge - by killing so many civilians he said "you can't protect your people" in a way that everyone understood. Or to put it another way, we could have been cavalierly using 9/11 as a unit of measurement a few years later, instead of 20.
If you referred to something as a 9/11 in mainstream circles in 2010 you would be a pariah, it was considered outrageously bad form. I speak from experience here - my best friend at the time was too online, and in places like 4chan and poe it was regularly joked about (because edge), and he used it like that at the birthday party we were at. He didn't make a joke, he just used it too nonchalantly. Instantly I was told I was too drunk and needed to take my friend home (which just made me laugh, which just made everyone more upset, so it's partly my fault) and for about two years after that any invitation I got came with a request not to invite him. The human toll was necessary for the impact.
Ok but the point is still that the fuss was about the "you can't protect your people" part and that this might happen again and the symbolism of destroying the tallest towers, which also symbolize the US leading the western world or even the globe regarding economic matters etc.
It wasn't particularly about just those 3000 people individually. The smuggled implication in saying "a 9/11 a week" is that somehow there should have been somewhat similar levels of concern each week as there was due to the OG 9/11, and that clearly doesn't follow.
Oh, you mean 9/11 was terrorism, and that's what made it different? If so I agree entirely. Mentally I put "a 9/11 a week" in the same category as the people who liken covid deaths to car accidents and wonder why we still drive cars - usually missing the point.
Sorry, I had a conversation with a youngster last week who actually thought the main point of 9/11 was flying a symbol of modernity into another symbol of modernity and the deaths were incidental, and that's why it upset everyone and covid deaths don't.
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