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Mass Psychosis Formation: How Societies Descend into Collective Delusion
Episode 148
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Humans are wired for connection — but that same wiring can become a conduit for collective delusion. In this episode, George Monty examines the formation of mass psychosis, from historical panics to modern media-fueled hysteria. How do fear, conformity, and manipulation converge to reshape perception and behavior on a societal scale?
In this episode:
- Historical and modern examples of mass psychosis
- Psychological mechanisms behind collective delusion
- The role of media, propaganda, and social influence
- How fear and conformity amplify hysteria
- Strategies to maintain awareness and resist collective manipulation
Speaker 0 (0s): Welcome everybody to the TrueLife podcast. Happy new year to everybody. Hope you don't have a great day. I am flying solo today, my cohost. And can it be here? So you just get, you just get George today. Hope everybody's having a great new year. I wanted to talk about a few topics that I find relatively interesting, and I think you'll find them interesting as well. First and foremost is what do you guys know about grasshoppers? You know, a lot about grasshoppers.
I didn't know a lot about him either, but I've been reading up on him a little bit and I want to talk about how a grasshopper becomes a locust. I think you'll find this fascinating. I'm gonna have to look at my notes. So locus, like the ones that cause plagues and ravage the planet, they're actually a type of grasshopper and it's a type of grasshopper that undergoes a morphological change when it gets into large groups. So this transformation from a group of individual grasshoppers to a swarm of locusts, it results in plagues, famine, death, and just devastation.
I want you to focus on a little bit, think about it like a regular grasshopper. Like how does it, it physically changes its form and to a group of locusts. And the reason that's important is because I think it dovetails nicely with what we as humans do. So I want to read to you a little bit about how the grasshopper becomes a locust and becomes a swarm. And it's going to get into how individuals think about like a Think about a big giant group of people like a mob, right at the mob mentality is a lot like the locust mentality.
Let's figure out how a grasshopper becomes a locust, and then we can figure out how an individual person may succumb to kind of group think. So in specific climatic conditions, usually after heavy rains, causing a sudden flush of vegetation, followed in specific climatic conditions, when there's a heavy rain, all of a sudden there's plenty of vegetation out there and the grasshoppers are feeding, feeding, feeding, there's tons of vegetation and that particular condition, it leads to plentiful food.
Plentiful food leads to rapid breeding, rapid breeding leads to and involved in a evolution and an increase in still more reproduction. And that is the catalyst that leads to the transformation from the grasshopper to the locus. So let's talk about the transformation for a minute. The transformation happens when the boom turns to bust when there's tons of vegetation and then all of a sudden there's no vegetation. So the grass opera starts scrambling. There's a ton of them and now there's no more food, right?
And when those conditions caused the vegetation to die back, the food is, and then it restricts the feeding grounds. When this happens, the density of locusts increased further as they are forced into smaller and smaller areas of land. Once a critical mass is reached the grasshoppers begin to under
Published on 3 years, 11 months ago