Mass Formation Psychosis: The Memory Hole, Misinformation and the Mandela Effect

My friend of over twenty years just recently decided to read George Orwell’s 1984. She read the book in less than a week and on several occasions, I’d pick up her calls on the phone to hear opening comments like “Oh, my God! This is happening right now! This guy’s job is to erase history. Like, that is what the media is trying to do.”

I chuckled as the book was required reading when I was in high school (although my friend is thirteen years younger). But neither of us missed the early warning signs in 2020 as we each noticed our respective vocational and social circles get far more problematic to manage. She had the benefit of a school of seriously hard knocks, and I had the benefit of Orwell’s tutelage and almost a decade in prison to prepare for this next chapter in that great experiment called humanity.

If you haven’t read 1984, you really should. Or else get the movie version they did in 1984. One of the more curious terms in the story is the “memory hole.” I have never cited Wikipedia before, but they have a pretty accurate summary of the story background:

“In 1984, civilization has been ravaged by world war, civil conflict, and revolution. Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain) is a province of Oceania, one of the three totalitarian super-states that rule the world. It is ruled by “The Party” under the ideology of “Ingsoc” (a Newspeak shortening of “English Socialism”) and the mysterious leader Big Brother, who has an intense cult of personality. The Party brutally purges out anyone who does not fully conform to their regime, using the Thought Police and constant surveillance through life screens (two-way televisions), cameras, and hidden microphones. Those who fall out of favor with the Party become “unpersons”, disappearing with all evidence of their existence destroyed.

In London, Winston Smith is a member of the Outer Party, working at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites historical records to conform to the state’s ever-changing version of history. Winston revises past editions of The Times, while the original documents are destroyed after being dropped into ducts known as memory holes which lead to an immense furnace.”

I first noticed the advent of the memory hole when they began changing the names of schools and arguing about taking down statues of confederate soldiers. Then the word on the vine was to drop Andrew Jackson from the twenty-dollar bill and replace his image with Harriet Tubman’s. While it seemed objectively fair to reevaluate who we honor on our monuments and public buildings, I wasn’t sure a statue of Robert E. Lee was quite the same animal as a statue of Saddam Hussein.

Then it happened, almost overnight. America panicked as CNN dumped fear porn on everybody 24/7 and the word “corona” became the Bubonic Plague instead of a beer on the beach with a lemon. As is always the case when major changes are suggested and imposed, at least in a free country, portions of the population express dissent. In such cases, those dissenting opinions are often published with data to support the alternative course of action or omission. But, for some strange reason, Twitter stopped being the Wild Wild West of social exchange and You Tube started regulating which content could be monetized based of the level of “misinformation” in the videos.

There was a new sheriff in Tombstone and his name was Politifact. I took no time at all for the lines to begin to be drawn, and Rumble, BitChute, Parlor and Telegram became household names for folks just trying to hear some doctor besides Tony Science. A whole cottage industry sprang up overnight in an attempt to maneuver around the censors, reposting banned videos YouTube and Facebook endeavored to send down the memory hole

Much like the celebrated “Mandela Effect,” the memory hole seems to be evolving, before our eyes, from a digital forum that used to allow a user to simply “unfriend” or block the dissident voice on Facebook to a full-blown censorship institution that seeks to make folks like Joe Rogan and Bill Maher unpersons simply for having a critical conversation over the wisdom of the new media norm constantly bent on rewriting reality. I mean, when in your life have you ever heard anyone in the media advocate kid gloves at press conferences because the questions were too hard on the poor guy at the podium?

If one recalls the French Revolution, things spun into total chaos after Queen Marie famously said, “let them eat cake,” and soon after her head was in a basket as one of the first of the nobility to become an unperson. Only, once the blood was in the water the sharks soon ran out of victims for public executions and many of those once cheering from the crowd caught a reservation with the guillotine themselves a year or two later.

While no one seems in danger of physical beheadings just yet, if the “mainstream” is the only narrative not being constantly taken off YouTube and Twitter, then even the most loyal Dr. Fauci follower has to ask how solid her assessment of current events truly is if her receptors need to be constantly protected from “misinformation” being spewed by those counterrevolutionary culprits that Twitter needs to keep taking off the feed. Of course, just like the French Revolution, what comes around goes around and you have to admit the irony when Dr. Fauci himself gets fact checked for “misinformation.”

First lesson I learned living in a communist country was everyone knew how to read between the lines of the People’s Daily. It is unfortunate that Americans have to go through this painful growing experience currently being imposed upon them. Sometimes it is humorous to watch grownups wrap themselves so proudly in the mantles of their hysteria and schizophrenia. But mostly it is just sad seeing otherwise sane individuals succumb to mass formation psychosis.

It is a pretty intense example of Stockholm Syndrome that seems to have at least a solid thirty percent of the population mesmerized. We all know them and arguing with them is pointless as they just talk in circles. You ain’t getting through to them at all, not until they hit some brick wall and have a real personal crisis that puts them in a teachable moment.

Another forty percent, to some degree, know that something is not adding up but are all too aware how complicated their lives will become if they open their mouths. Talk at the dinner table this Easter is reduced to the weather and what is streaming on Hulu or Netflix until Uncle Joe pulls his sister aside and whispers, “Did you get your five-year-old vaccinated?”

Then there is the remaining thirty percent. It remains to be seen if their fate is Room 101, like Winston’s at the end of the book, or just waiting for their turn to become unpersoned fuel for the memory hole.