Regular, goal-oriented runners may be less susceptible to "mass formation" than fake, former, or sporadic runners
At least when it comes to covid
Over the past three years, millions of previously reasonable people worldwide have been transformed into anti-science witch-burners convinced of their own exalted epistemic righteousness. These catastrophically misinformed and disinformed drone-warriors ironically claim to be powered by facts and rationality; to them, “facts” are whatever Anthony Fauci’s fearmongering face-twat has most recently queefed out for media distribution, regardless of how these pungent fumes relate to Fauci’s previous cephalovaginal statements. We* all have such people in our lives who have been seduced by this Elmer Gantry of public health—in most cases, for good or for ill, fewer of them than we did pre-”pandemic.”
The defining characteristic of these zealots is not being dumb people who embrace dumb things; this has always described 84 to 97 percent of the U.S. adult population inclusive, depending on how generously the bar for “dumb” is placed. What sets these zealots apart is the hyper-religious, almost frightening vehemence with which they reject others’ efforts to correct their misapprehensions, as well as their burning hatred of those who refuse to ride along with demonstrably corrupt narratives.
Most of these people refuse to accept that they have been manipulated; others have gained an inkling, but have somehow come to enjoy being part of sick online communities of MSM slutbags, false healthcare workers, or bought-off scientists—at least more than they enjoy the prospect of mending relationships with those they wrongly marauded with cries of “Follow the Science!”, sadly unaware this imperative was and remains tantamount to “Follow the profiteers, scammers. and human exterminators!”
They are best viewed as victims of a digitally distributed form of Stockholm syndrome, stuck in a dangerous, self-reinforcing loops of receiving, masturbating to, and propagating CDC and FDA lies despite now understanding this is what they’re doing. MSNBCery loves company, and no one wants to admit they fucked up in this area.
The remain an unpleasant lot, with some deserving of beatings with the limbs of dismembered people of their of shithole, cross-eyed, bray-tard ilk. Their words and actions resonate into the present moment with frightening levels of myopia, dishonesty, and misplaced rage.
In one model, three intersecting conditions predispose certain individuals to embracing, and manically attempting to enforce, the kind of wrongthink known as mass formation psychosis or simply “mass formation,” and compel those afflicted to double down on underlying narratives even when chinks or holes have begin to appear in whatever credibility they have. The first is having few meaningful offline interpersonal relationships; the second is being generally adrift in life; and the third is bonding (again remotely) with others who have embraced divisive, authoritarian narratives as a means of sham self-empowerment, or imbuing a purposeless life with a veneer of purpose.
Therefore, know-it-alls with few real friends—insecure egomaniacs, in other words—and no realistic long-term goals are ideal candidates for being swept up in covidian lies. Real-life loners who place extreme importance on what online strangers think of them, and have no authority or standing in their on-the-ground lives, are ideally positioned to use the assumed authority of government mandates, updates, and dissembling to boss others around. Even if they only feedback this earns them from external observers in sane-world is derision, this fake authority serves as a tonic to the anxiety produced by the first two conditions (few real friends, no real goals).
Mattias Desmet is the author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the central thesis of which is that the “corona crisis” (in Desmet’s oddly charming terminology) represents “primarily a psycho-social phenomenon that marked the transition to a technocratic system, a system in which the government would attempt to claim decision-making rights over its citizens and, step by step, take control of all private space.”
He’s right. Leaving out billions of spiritually disengaged and defeated, geographically isolated, floridly brainwashed, and unknowingly “vaccine”-injured people worldwide, everyone has begun to comprehend that corona crisis was indeed nothing more than a massive upward transfer of wealth coupled to a Nazi-esque biomedical experiment disguised as a revolutionary public-health intervention and a sharp reduction of the effective level of personal freedoms.
No one is supposed to be reaching a wide audience with such robustly counter-narrative ideas, especially when willing to talk to figures portrayed as toxic (Tucker Carlson) or purely radioactive (Alex Jones). Consequently, in the Netherlands, Desmet is as much of a persona non grata as Jay Bhattacharya and Pierre Kory are in North America. He’s a thorn in the side of the sort of fascistic corruption that has now not-so-quietly gone global, and clearly isn’t discouraged by the kind of facile, inept smears leveled at people like himself, Joe Rogan, and Naomi Wolf.
Desmet has been on lot of non-mainstream podcasts, and recently outlined his ideas on The Jimmy Dore Show.
It is easy to apply the three main tenets, or preconditions, Desmet describes to someone with a solid distance-running habit. While plenty of runners are introspective and reticent by nature—and too often, it seems, the unusually thoughtful ones—it’s rare for someone who doesn’t run daily or almost daily to never interact socially with other runners. And critically, even those who were prone to self-isolation even before the corona crisis are usually powered at any time by a goal that means a great deal to them, independent of whether the world cares or even notices.
Such people are, I believe, more resistant than others to being sucked into “mass formation” ugliness—even those like me whose talents, if any, have been vocationally underutilized throughout covid and don’t have kids or other essential citizens to focus on.
My daily running is probably the most important thing I do for myself. Despite not having any solid racing goals, I look forward to getting out there to offer my dog experiences and generating random encounters for me. I like moving around, getting tired, and pretending I am less tired than I am. The payoffs are worth ten times the hassles I more often describe for cynico-comic effect, like prematurely globular children hammering around the local paths on motorized devices while well over the legal blood-glucose limit. And I spend more time around people—not masses of them, but a few critically important ones—than I perhaps let on.
Runners are a rule have proven less susceptible to covid nonsense than to the various other yarns spun in all directions in recent years by government and quasi-governmental operators. The ones populating the media and most podcasts have almost all bought into the trans-inclusion horseshit, and along with everyone else alive above a certain unearned personal-wealth level like to pretend they’ll start to really care someday about global warming. But few I know have been especially worried about covid; the ones not quietly incensed by all of the event cancellations in 2020 and 2021, when Wokish flablords and gender-cretins were enjoying massive surges in sponsorships and online support from companies blown apart by undisclosed or concealed infusions of ESG and DEI cash from Bill Gates et al.
I imagine this simply boils down to self-interest. When a bullshit narrative like “Trans women are women” comes along, women who are less attractive and successful than their egos demand will automatically side with the vandals, even if it won’t change who whom or what anyone wants to have sex with or who qualifies for national championships. But when a bullshit narrative interferes with innate desires or drives, many of the same flaccid thinkers magically become more discerning. Or simply react differently.
Without, I think, plunging too far into the stinky waters of selection bias, when I look back on the many pundits, writers, and podcasters who do very little running themselves—something they often signal by semi-regularly announcing having gotten out the door for the first time in weeks—I see this group of people as being generally more gullible than genuine runners. It could be the case that the less organically connected to the activity of running a given self-described runner is, the more likely he or she is to find solace in joining the ranks of the “mask forever, boosters work” types who treat their anxiety by becoming conduits of borrowed, asinine imperatives and precepts.