Keywords

Ever since it became clear that victims of shell shock in World War I displayed increased psychological malleability, social engineers have sought to exploit the application of shock and stress for social control purposes. Experiments on POWs and other test subjects in the 1950s showed that it was possible to “depattern” the human mind and to reprogramme behaviour. The Tavistock Institute, which took control of the mental health profession after 1945, weaponised psychiatry and found ways of applying shock and stress techniques to entire societies, facilitating what Klein (2007) calls the “shock doctrine,” i.e. systematic exploitation of public disorientation following a moment of collective shock. The “lockdowns” in 2020 were a shock and awe operation, and other techniques associated with “depatterning” the mind were additionally deployed, including disruption of behavioural patterns, isolation, and defamiliarisation. The moment of shock was used to implant trigger words and images for purposes of trauma-based mind control.

Shocking the Mind

The Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology (usually referred to as the Tavistock Clinic) was founded in 1920 by Hugh Crichton-Miller, who worked with shell-shocked soldiers during and after World War I. One of its practitioners, John Rawlings Rees, had studied war neuroses in France during World War I; he came to believe that, “under controlled conditions, neurotic behaviour could be induced, and, through these methods, individual behaviour could be absolutely controlled” (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 25). After ousting Crichton-Miller in 1933/34, Rees, with immediate Rockefeller funding, oversaw work at the Clinic using electroconvulsive shock, barbiturates, and hypnosis in brainwashing experiments (Minnicino, 1974, p. 39). In 1940, he recruited Eric Trist, who had also been researching drug and hypnosis-induced abreaction as a Rockefeller Foundation Medical Fellow at an English hospital. Rees’ primary interest was never in therapy in a positive, health-restoring sense. Rather, it was in psychiatry as a means of social control.

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, physiologist/psychologist Ivan Pavlov was making similar discoveries. 30 days of modern warfare, Pavlov found, pushed most men beyond the limits of psychological endurance, and similar, breakdown-inducing stress could be artificially produced through other means (as cited in Huxley, 1958, pp. 59–61). As in dogs, a political prisoner subjected to just the “right” of amount of stress (i.e., just before breaking point) becomes unusually suggestible, and at that point, new behaviour patterns can be installed.

Thus, the lesson of World War I, for both Rees and Pavlov, was that shell shock/combat fatigue/continuous high-level stress is enough to break down an individual to the point where their behaviour can be reliably controlled/reprogrammed.

Orwell writes in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984, p. 389): “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” One of the key principles established in psychological warfare research of the 1950s is that the mind must first be “depatterned” before it can be reprogrammed. In Pavlovian conditioning, for example, “First the old patterns have to be broken down in order to build up new conditioned reflexes” (Meerloo, 1956, p. 45). In Chinese “thought reform” techniques, there was, according to CIA Director Allen Dulles (1953, p. 20), “a ‘brain washing’ which ‘cleansed the mind of the old and evil thoughts spawned by imperialists of the West,’ [followed by] a ‘brain changing’ which implanted the ‘new and glorious thoughts of the Communist Revolution.’”

Dulles himself, however, was presiding over experiments to achieve a very similar result. Tavistock’s Ewen Cameron, the Scottish-born U.S. citizen who had risen to become the president of the American Psychiatric Association, president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and president of the World Psychiatric Association, performed mind control experiments for the CIA in the 1950s, which involved the use of electroshock and drugs to “depattern” victims and put them into an “almost vegetative state” in which they could do nothing but listen to pre-recorded messages “for sixteen to twenty hours a day for weeks; in one case, Cameron played a message continuously for 101 days” (Klein, 2007, pp. 30–32). Cameron called this “psychic driving.”

In a variation on Machiavelli’s advice that injuries should be inflicted “all at once,” Klein describes depatterning as “attacking the brain with everything known to interfere with its normal functioning—all at once,” the aim being to make prisoners “so regressed and afraid that they can no longer think rationally or protect their own interests” (Klein, 2007, pp. 7, 31, 16). In such a state of shock, prisoners will typically give their interrogators whatever they want.

MKULTRA and other CIA mind control programmes in the 1950s and 1960s yielded the KUBARK [CIA] Manual (1963), intended as a guide to “interrogation” (torture). In order to break down a prisoner, the Manual claims, it is necessary to apply “a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world” (CIA, 1963, p. 66).

Tavistock Influence

Psychiatry as a Means of Social Control

Psychiatry as a means of social control was the ethos of the Tavistock Institute, whose methods after World War II would become “the means of class war” (Minnicino, 1974, p. 52), i.e. “a weapon of the ruling class” (Marcus, 1974, p. 22), intended to “guide the population into accepting the policy designs of […] a small Anglo-American international financial establishment, centered in London and its extension, Wall Street” (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 28).

Lamenting that it would be difficult in peacetime to arrange the kind of psychological experiments that Tavistock psychiatrists had carried out on service personnel during World War II, Rees (1945, pp. 52, 120) proposes “legislation that will make it possible for people of every social group to have treatment when they need it, even though they do not wish it, without the necessity to invoke the law”—in other words, an extralegal means of coercing psychiatric “treatment”/experimentation. This, presumably, will be targeted along eugenics lines at the “constitutionally inferior group, the psychopathic tenth of the community,” the “dullards” that form a “social problem group,” reproducing “defective children” (Rees, 1945, pp. 43–45). In order to implement this, Rees (1945, pp. 133–134) calls for “shock troops,” i.e. “mobile teams of well-selected, well-trained psychiatrists, who are free to move around and make contacts with the local situation in their particular area,” but whose loyalty lies with the network and not local institutions. Achieving this would require support both from the “great foundations” and the state.

The Rockefeller Memorandum of 1946 led to the formation of a new institution, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, which, though initially constituted as a division of the Tavistock Clinic, was spun off in 1947. In return for offering up his network, now several hundred strong (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 24), to the Rockefeller family, Rees was rewarded with a new appointment in 1948. Stepping down from the Tavistock Institute, he became President of the UN World Federation of Mental Health, founded by former Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman and resurrected from a previous Rockefeller front organisation, the International Committee for Mental Hygiene (Minnicino, 1974, p. 43). Also in 1948, Rees’ ally, Brock Chisholm, was appointed as the first Director-General of the World Health Organization, confirming the founding connection between the WHO and the Rockefeller-Rees axis. From his dominant position, Rees was able to plant his protégés in key positions (Marcus, 1974, p. 23), grow a transnational network of influential practitioners and research labs—over three dozen affiliated organisations—and thereby dominate the postwar mental health profession (Minnicino, 1974, p. 42; Wolfe, 1996a, p. 25). In the United States, Rees’ influence expanded into the National Institute of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health, complementing Rockefeller control over the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association (Marcus, 1974, p. 23).

These institutional origins of the mental health profession, rooted in the Reesian idea of psychiatry as a means of social control, raise serious questions about that profession. For example, to what extent is the routine prescription of antidepressants really intended to treat depression, and to what extent is it about facilitating social control via biochemical means? Is mental illness deliberately inculcated within the population, so that such “treatments” can be prescribed? It has been suggested that psychiatry could be used to “neutralise” dissidents: “The ‘brainwashed’ dissident is mentally murdered in fact; [and] provided the Rockefeller forces control the majority of the psychiatric profession, especially the state-controlled psychiatric institutions, a fairly efficient form of murder can be perpetrated […]” (Marcus, 1974, p. 18). This is not so very different from the Soviet abuse of psychiatry for political purposes (see Chap. 5).

Tavistock Methods of Counterinsurgency

Winston Churchill claimed in 1943: “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind” (cited in Alkon, 2006, p. 93). The battlefield would, thus, shift “away from control of territory, to control of the minds, not merely of the colonial peoples, but of the United States and the rest of the Western world” (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 24).

In terms of counterinsurgency, Tavistock’s three “primary weapons against the working class” were food control, resettlement, and counter-gangs (Minnicino, 1974, p. 50). The first two make people more susceptible to behaviour modification, while the latter is used to infiltrate and subvert resistance movements. From the resultant psychological wreckage, new leaders based on “weak ego” types can be “selected out” and controlled by Western intelligence (Minnicino, 1974, p. 42).

In Malaya, for example, where a pro-communist labour movement swept the peninsula after 1945, threatening to hand control of the strategically vital Straits of Malacca to the Soviet Union, British intelligence not only infiltrated the communist armed guerrillas, but also destroyed the rice crop and punctured food cans, sending the population into near starvation. This false flag operation was blamed on the guerrillas, and the population was told it could obtain food by resettling to “New Villages” set up by the government. More than half a million Malayans (a tenth of the population) were resettled, by force if necessary (Minnicino, 1974, p. 48). In the “psychologically manipulated environment of the camps,” it was possible to “profile the population, and select out the future Malaysian Government and Civil Service,” passing political control of the country to Western intelligence (Minnicino, 1974, pp. 49, 52).

In Kenya, the Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960) was met with similar tactics, i.e. food control and resettlement, in a process called ‘villagization.” The insurgency was infiltrated using what Brigadier Frank Kitson referred to as “counter-gangs,” i.e. British intelligence-controlled units, comprised of brainwashed prisoners from POW camps, used to penetrate national liberation movements so that their leaders could be murdered, ostensibly by rival factions (Wolfe, 1996a, p. 26). The British experience in Malaya and Kenya confirmed the viability of such tactics to the CIA (Minnicino, 1974, p. 46).

When the CIA brought in Sir Robert Thompson, who had served in the Malayan operation, to help with the Vietnam War, Thompson renamed the resettlement camps “strategic hamlets.” The Taylor-Staley strategic hamlet programme in South Vietnam, as it became known, resulted in 13 million farmers and workers being forcibly relocated to 12,000 “fortified villages, surrounded by barbed wire fences and ditches fortified with bamboo spikes” (Schlesinger Jr., 1965, p. 549). Food control was applied to the camps in an attempt to “psychologically smash” their inhabitants, with a view to selecting out future leaders to replace the ineffectual Diem regime (Minnicino, 1974, p. 50).

Counterinsurgency against the Domestic Population

As years of mounting social tensions in the West reached a climax in 1967/68, counterinsurgency methods started to be deployed at home as well as abroad, as recommended by the American Institute of Research, a CIA think tank, in 1967 (Minnicino, 1974, p. 51). This was most evident in the treatment of the African-American population, “by far the one group that throughout the twentieth century kept alive a spirit of resistance and rebelliousness” (Wolin, 2008, p. 58).

The purpose of Operation Phoenix was to “neutralize” civilian members of the revolutionary underground in South Vietnam (Valentine, 2017, p. 24). The same “neutralisation” tactic was deployed against effective black organisers in the United States. An FBI memo dated March 4, 1968, states: “Through counterintelligence, it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them […]” (Glick, 1989, p. 78). On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. On December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered in a “gestapo-style attack set up by the FBI” (Chomsky, 2015).

The difference between Vietnam and the United States, Marcus (1974, p. 18) notes, is that the political climate in the latter does not “yet permit open deployment of Special Forces-type assassination teams against civilian populations generally.” But, he argues, CIA infiltration of courts, prosecutor’s offices and police forces can be used for frame-up purposes, which are no less effective in eliminating political opponents—and the corporate media can be expected to cover it up. Provoking violence that can be prosecuted then becomes a domestic counterinsurgency tactic: “Much of the violence in which U.S. radicals have become involved turns out to have been the responsibility of the FBI or police,” with infiltrators and covert operations being used (Glick, 1989, p. 66). Kitson’s “counter-gang” concept, deploying mind-controlled operatives to infiltrate and subvert foreign resistance movements, here enters the domestic arena.

Tavistock was also the “driving force” behind the drugs counterculture of the late 1960s (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 28), aimed at neutering youth resistance. This grew naturally out of the role of Tavistock’s Ewen Cameron and William Sargant in MKULTRA experiments involving psychotropic drugs and mind control. The function of drugs, according to the KUBARK Manual, “is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation” (CIA, 1963, p. 99). In Huxley’s Brave New World, first published in 1932, the use of the drug soma provides a “holiday from reality” without side effects (Huxley, 1956, p. 65). Huxley promotes mescaline in Doors of Perception (1954), and in Brave New World Revisited (1958, pp. 70, 73) discusses adrenochrome, serotonin, and LSD-25. The U.S. college students who had engaged in various forms of direct action against the system in the 1960s were, by the end of the decade, “a collection of doped-up zombies, ‘change agents,’ and shock-troops for Tavistock’s Brave New World” (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 28).

The concept of “medication into submission,” so as to “prepare the pattern of mental submission so beloved by the totalitarian brainwasher” (Meerloo, 1956, pp. 55, 60), also goes some way to explaining the CIA’s notorious history of bringing narcotics into the United States (Scott & Marshall, 1991; Scott 2003) and releasing them particularly in black communities. It is also worth asking critical questions about the escalating use of prescription medications since the early 1960s, given that “vast swaths of the [population] have been rendered docile and comfortably numb, silenced, sedated and marginalised over decades of ‘massive over-prescription’” (Broudy & Arakaki, 2020).

The Quest for Mass Suggestibility.

The ultimate goal for Tavistock operatives was finding ways of applying the mind control techniques inflicted on individuals in CIA and similar experiments to societies at large. Shock and stress were the key factors. After 1945, the Tavistock Institute routinely sent flying squads to war-torn areas and disaster zones, with a view to learning more about the potential for manipulating shocked and stressed populations (Minnicino, 1974, p. 44).

Kurt Lewin, building on Rees’ work on controlling neurotic individuals, sought to “develop methods for inducing controlled, irrational behavior by groups of people” (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 25). The idea was to induce the “breakdown of moral and social capacity,” not by totalitarian terror (involving the threat of direct violence), but via large group manipulation (Wolfe, 1996a, p. 23). Lewin’s Research Centre for Group Dynamics (MIT), which moved to the University of Michigan as the Institute for Social Research following his death in 1947 (where the journal Human Relations was founded), as well as the spin-off National Training Laboratories, were all established in the second half of the 1940s, with funding coming from “royal family-sponsored charitable trusts, as well as from the Rockefellers, the Mellons, and the Morgans” (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 25)—further evidence of the Establishment’s investment in psychological means of social control.

Tavistock psychiatrist William Sargant writes in Battle for the Mind that the same principles of mind control applicable to individuals can also be applied to groups. Fear, anger, and excitement can be used to impair judgement and heighten suggestibility, allowing “various types of belief” to be “implemented in many people.” The resulting group manifestations are witnessed “most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger” (Sargant, 1997, p. 151). The mass fear principle was already operative in the 1950s via apocalyptic propaganda about nuclear war (see Chapter 4), and the references to wars and epidemics (Sargant was writing at the time of the so-called “Asian flu pandemic”) anticipate the “War on Terror” and “Covid-19” decades later.

Tavistock’s Fred Emery and Eric Trist (editor of Human Relations) gave a paper to a select Tavistock audience in 1963 outlining a new paradigm of “permanent social turbulence,” whereby “a series of sharp and universal, cathartic shocks would destabilise a targeted population, plunging a whole society into a form of managed psychosis” (Wolfe, 1996a, p. 24). Shocks repeated over the course of years would cause the population to adopt “more infantile forms of reasoning” (cf. Chapter 3) and to accept as normal what was once considered abnormal. With the widespread acquiescence to deprivation of civil liberties after “9/11” and the draconian “new normal” in 2020, accepting “the unthinkable” (a term deliberately propagated both times) was witnessed in spectacular style.

In May 1967, the Conference on Transatlantic Technological Imbalance and Collaboration, held in DeauvilIe, France, brought together Tavistock representatives Fred Emery and Harland Cleveland, Willis Harm of the Tavistock-connected Stanford Research Institute, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the British Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Solly Zuckerman, and future sustainability champions Aurelio Peccei and Sir Alexander King (Wolfe, 1996a, 5–24). Here we see a convergence of Tavistock, technocracy, and sustainability. Emery (1977, p. 18) would later reflect that the 1967–1969 period “marked the undenied significance of ‘turbulence’ in Western societies,” though he neglects to add: in response to the class struggle.

The “Tavistock brainwashers,” as Wolfe (1996b, p. 28) refers to them, envisaged a “period of successive social, economic, political, and cultural shocks” that would lead to “maladaptive responses” that are “present in the society at the same time, interacting with each other, to produce neurotic behaviors on a grand scale.” By such means, Wolfe (1996b, pp. 26–28) argues, could populations be manipulated into accepting the transition to a “post-industrial” model that would prevent industrialising non-Western societies from “catching up” with their Western counterparts.

Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970, pp. 2, 15) describes the transition from industrial to “super-industrial” society in terms of “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” Wood (2018, p. 123) paraphrases Toffler by writing that “excessively rapid change induces a state of shock that interferes with normal mental and emotional processes.” Digital Citizen (2003), referencing the work of Trist and Emery, notes that society can be shocked by energy shortages, economic and financial crises, and terrorist attacks, and that a series of shocks delivered with increasing intensity can drive society into a state of mass psychosis. A “turbulent environment,” according to Emery and Emery (1976, p. 64), creates a “dissociative mode within individuals and societies,” rendering social interactions unpredictable and undesirable. Thus, society becomes atomised, with the television playing an important role in conditioning maladaptation to stress (Emery & Emery, 1976, Chapter 8).

Energy shortages, economic and financial instability, and terrorist attacks were indeed the means by which Western societies were shocked into accepting the “post-industrial” transition in the 1970s. The decoupling of the U.S. dollar from gold in 1971, for instance, ushered in a “new era of instability in the global economy” (Ravenhill, 2020, p. 18) and “the most turbulent period in international finance since the 1930s” (Strange, 1997, p. vii), characterised by decades of escalating financial crises worldwide. The 1973 oil price shock, which saw the price of oil quadruple within a matter of days, led to a major drop in industrial activity throughout the world in 1974/75 (not unlike the impact of “Covid-19” in 2020), plus steep increases in bankruptcies and unemployment, while consolidating the power of Wall Street, the City of London, and the Seven Sisters (Engdahl, 2004, pp. 139–140).

As Strange (1997, pp. 2–71) recognises, the 1973 oil price shock should not be lazily attributed to “exogenous” factors. According to Engdahl (2004, pp. 130, 135), the May 1973 Bilderberg meeting—five months before the oil price shock—planned for “how to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars” arising from the petrodollar arrangements to be put in place following the Yom Kippur war, which was “secretly orchestrated by Washington and London.” The oil price shocks and consequent oil shortages were, in Marcus’ (1974, p. 7) view, “artificially created” and the result of “Rockefeller rigging of the October Arab–Israeli war.” Their purpose was to undermine industrial growth in the “Third World” and to “tilt the balance of power back to the advantage of Anglo-American financial interests” (Engdahl, 2004, p. 135). In keeping with Hitler’s (1939, p. 183) concept of the “grossly impudent lie” (see Chapter 6), the Anglo-American financial establishment used its clout “in a manner no one could imagine possible. The very outrageousness of their scheme was to their advantage, they clearly reckoned” (Engdahl, 2004, p. 135).

Terrorism added to the “social turbulence.” In 1969/70, Kitson’s “counter-gang” concept spawned a raft of militant organisations willing to kill civilians in pursuit of their objectives, e.g. the Provisional IRA which Kitson helped to set up (Wolfe, 1996b, p. 26), the Weather Underground, the Black September Organisation, the Red Brigades, and the Red Army Faction. In Minnicino’s (1974, p. 51) judgement, “every ‘underground’ terrorist group in the world is either a counter-gang or so infiltrated by operatives and psychologically manipulated victims that it is, except in the case of individual members, impossible to make the distinction.” One key purpose of these counter-gangs was to syphon off vulnerable workers into violent, myopic, self-destructive forms of “radicalism” that undermine the class struggle.

In the case of the clandestine NATO networks spread across Europe, referred to in shorthand as Operation Gladio after the Italian network that was exposed in the 1990s, the purpose was to implement the “Strategy of Tension.” As one of the perpetrators, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, testified in 1984, this involved attacking innocent civilians, including women and children, in order to make the public think that a state of emergency could be declared at any time, thus making people willing to “trade part of their freedom” for greater security (cited in Davis, 2018). Here, “social turbulence” is created by the shocks of terrorist attacks that leave society feeling insecure and willing to accept a more authoritarian political climate. The fact that many of the attacks were deceptively blamed on “far left” groups was another effective tactic for undermining the class struggle. The “Strategy of Tension” was later globalised through the “War on Terror” (Hughes, 2022).

Emery and Trist both seek to camouflage the artificially induced nature of “social turbulence.” Emery (1977, p. 67), for instance, claims that “Massive unpredictable changes appear to arise out of the causal texture of the environment itself and not just as planned, controlled actions, not even those of the superstates or the multinational corporations.” Trist (1997, p. 519), in an article first published in 1979, reflects: “All of these events, and there are many others, came as surprises. They were not predicted. They are not understood. For this reason they create bewilderment, raising levels of anxiety and suspicion. Such is the experience of turbulence and loss of the stable state.” In reality, “social turbulence” is designed to create bewilderment and anxiety.

The Shock Doctrine

Klein (2017, p. 2) uses the term “shock doctrine” to describe “the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, or natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called ‘shock therapy.’” Here, the use of shock tactics against the public enters the era of neoliberalism and goes hand in hand with what Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” i.e. “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (2007, p. 22). Milton Friedman’s “free market” capitalism has, Klein argues, always relied on disasters to progress—the facilitating disasters “getting bigger and more shocking” over time (2007, p. 9). The key principle is that “only a great rupture—a flood, a war, a terrorist attack—can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases” that social engineers require to “begin their work of remaking the world,” i.e. “malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted” (Klein, 2007, p. 21).

Klein (2007, p. 10) identifies three categories of shock prior to 9/11. The first involves acts aimed at “terrorizing the public.” Terror, for instance, was integral to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile following the CIA coup in 1973 that laid the foundation for the first experiment in neoliberal economics. Similarly in Argentina during Operation Condor, the forced disappearance of 30,000 mostly left activists went hand in hand with the imposition of Chicago School policies. The Tiananmen Square massacre, followed by the arrest of tens of thousands of activists in 1989, enabled the CCP to “convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights.” In Russia in 1993, the fire-sale privatisation that saw most of the country’s wealth transferred into the hands of a few dozen “oligarchs” (so-called “shock therapy”) followed Boris Yeltsin’s decision to use tanks to fire on the parliament building and lock up opposition leaders. The second category of shock involves war. The Falklands War, for instance, enabled Margaret Thatcher, riding a wave of nationalist sentiment, to crush the UK miners’ strike and “launch the first privatisation frenzy in a Western democracy.” The Kosovo War of 1999 created the conditions for rapid privatisation (“shock therapy”) in the former Yugoslavia. The third category of shock is financial. In the 1980s, Latin American and African debt crises and hyperinflation were leveraged to force privatisation. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–8 forced open the markets of the “Asian Tigers.”

Klein posits “9/11” as the traumatic moment when the shock doctrine “finally had its chance to come home” to the United States, allowing the Bush administration to “wage privatized wars abroad and build a corporate security complex at home” (2007, pp. 12, 16). Even though Klein (2007, pp. 11–16) places the origins of the shock doctrine with CIA torture experiments in the 1950s and later the CIA coup in Chile; claims that “For three decades, Friedman and his followers had methodically exploited moments of shock in other countries,” calling these “foreign equivalents of 9/11”; notes that neoconservatives were “calling for a shock therapy-style economic revolution in the U.S.” in the mid-1990s; observes that “When the September 11 attacks hit, the White House was packed with Friedman’s disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld [and] veterans of earlier disaster capitalism experiments in Latin America and Eastern Europe”; and presents “the shock of 9/11” as “the clearest example” of “attempting [implying intent] to achieve on a mass scale what torture does one on one in the interrogation cell,” she avoids any suggestion that 9/11 may have been deliberately orchestrated by deep state actors. Instead, 9/11 appears almost as an act of God in Klein’s book, the answer to the prayers of key figures in the administration who prayed for crisis “the way Christian-Zionist end-timers pray for the Rapture.” To underscore the point, Klein titles a later section of her book “No Conspiracies Required.”

Although Klein does not say so explicitly (and includes a section titled “The Big Lie” that has nothing to do with Hitler), the shock doctrine has a Nazi heritage. It always requires a “major collective trauma that either temporarily suspend[s] democratic practices or block[s] them entirely,” allowing for “iron-fisted leadership” (Klein, 2007, p. 11). The Schmittian overtones of a state of exception allowing the dictator to rule by decree are palpable here. The line which Klein refuses to cross is that such means of bypassing democracy have been artificially manufactured through mass trauma events.

Klein (2007, p. 17) highlights the way in which the shock doctrine can be exploited to strip back civil liberties: “Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.” In a state of shock, she notes, “a great many people become vulnerable to authority figures telling us to fear one another and relinquish our rights for the greater good” (2017, p. 7)—words which resonate in the context of the “Covid-19” operation.

The Shock of “Covid-19”

“Lockdown” as Shock and Awe Operation

“Shock and Awe,” write Ullman et al., (1996, p. 110) “are actions that create fears, dangers, and destruction that are incomprehensible to the people at large.” Their objective is to “control the adversary’s will, perceptions, and understanding and literally make an adversary impotent to act or react” (Ullman et al., 1996, p. xxviii). Similarly, in “shock and awe” terrorism, “the more instantly shocking and disgraceful the action, the more completely defeated is the will of the opposition and thus the more effective is the action” (de Lint, 2021, p. 60).

In 1999, Joseph Cyrulik of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a CIA partner think tank, contemplated the possibility of a “decisive attack against the political will of an entire populace,” which would involve “killing and wounding people, damaging and destroying their homes and communities, disrupting their jobs and economic livelihoods, and undermining their confidence and sense of security” (1999, pp. 3, 6). Such an attack could “destroy the people’s faith in their government, in their military and in themselves,” and would thus be an effective precursor to regime change. The methods described by Cyrulik sound like a fitting description of the “Covid-19 lockdowns” and are consistent with the attempted transnational regime change from liberal democracy to technocracy.

The “lockdowns” were a “shock and awe” deployment by governments, which are controlled by a transnational capitalist oligarchy, against their own citizens, and were aimed at crippling public resistance to the intended transition to technocracy. In that respect, they were hugely successful in the short term: the social response to “Covid-19” countermeasures was marked by an astonishing level of obedience and conformity. Agamben (2021, p. 17) observes that people accepted the new “lockdown” arrangement “as if it were obvious, being “ready to sacrifice practically everything—their life conditions, their social relationships, their work, even their friendships, as well as their religious and political convictions.” This is reminiscent of the “millions in [Nazi] Germany [who] were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it” (Fromm, 1960, p. 2). In most countries, van der Pijl (2022, p. 26) observes, “the bulk of the population so far has remained largely passive in this upheaval and submits to the revolution from above,” notwithstanding the millions of protestors worldwide who marched against the “Covid-19 countermeasures.”

The WEF’s “Great Reset” agenda is consistent with Klein’s (2007, p. 21) notion of a “great rupture” allowing social engineers to remake the world while the population is “psychologically unmoored.” For example, the logic of the shock doctrine is evident in Schwab and Malleret’s advice to decision-makers to “take advantage of the shock inflicted by the pandemic” to implement radical, long-lasting, systemic change (2020, pp. 58–59, 102). “The shock that the pandemic has inflicted on the global economy,” they write, “has been more severe and has occurred much faster than anything else in recorded economic history” (2020, p. 23). They frame the “extreme shock” of the “pandemic” in terms of a line from Camus’ The Plague (1947): “Yet all these changes were, in one sense, so fantastic and had been made so precipitately that it wasn’t easy to regard them as likely to have any permanence” (2020, p. 10). They neglect to mention that Camus’ novel is an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France.

According to the CIA, “rapid exploitation at the moment of shock” is required to achieve objectives (1983, § J-2). This is one reason, for instance, why the UK Coronavirus Act, like the USA PATRIOT Act after “9/11,” was rushed through a disoriented legislature answerable to a shocked and terrified public before it could be properly read or debated.

Consistent with the “shock doctrine,” the “Covid-19” operation hit the public with the gamut of psychological warfare techniques—all at once. The scale, intensity, and coordination of the operation are testament to the transnational deep state behind it (Hughes, 2022). Though many techniques will be unravelled over the course of subsequent chapters, for now it suffices to highlight four which were deployed in the early stages of the operation, namely: disruption of behavioural patterns, isolation, defamiliarisation, and implantation of triggers.

Disruption of Behavioural Patterns

The shock to the prisoner’s mind begins with the moment of arrest. Preferably, according to the KUBARK Manual, the arrest should be carried out to achieve “surprise, and the maximum amount of mental discomfort in order to catch the suspect off balance and to deprive him of the initiative,” hence the rationale for dawn raids (1963, p. 85).

It is fair to say that no one, other than those responsible for them, saw the global “lockdowns” of March 2020 coming. Healthy people had never been quarantined en masse, nor was there any recognised scientific reason for doing so (WHO, 2019, p. 16). In Britain, the government had insisted upon a “policy” of natural herd immunity right up until the “lockdown” announcement on March 23. For example, Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, claimed on March 13, 2020: “because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, [our aim is] to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it” (cited in Stewart & Busby, 2020). Not even Neil Ferguson’s infamous “Report 9” of March 16, for all its fear-mongering usage of statistics, advocates for full “lockdown” measures including the closing of businesses (Ferguson et al., 2020). The Prime Minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, publicly called for letting pubs carry on business as usual on March 17 (Child, 2020). The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was then effectively “closed” for the March 19–22 period, whereupon followed “the single most important science-followed decision since the Manhattan Project,” i.e. to “lock down,” which SAGE minutes from March 23 do not even record (Chaplin, 2020). Out of the blue, on March 23, the United Kingdom was told to suspend its normal operations at a moment’s notice, for no discernible or good reason.

The implications of this are worth reflecting on. If neither the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, nor a “lead” modeller, nor SAGE recommended full “lockdown,” then who exactly decreed it, and on what basis? This is a classic example of the transnational deep state exercising veto power over normal democratic/parliamentary processes (Tunander, 2016, pp. 171, 186). The transnationally coordinated decision to “lock down” was evidently taken at a higher level than national governments. This fact alone is enough to sound the death knell of liberal democracy and ideas about national sovereignty.

In their new environment, according to the torture manuals, prisoners “should not be provided with any routine to which [they] can adapt […] Constantly disrupting patterns will cause [the prisoner] to become disoriented and to experience feelings of fear and helplessness” (CIA, 1983, § K-5). Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 150) seem strangely familiar with this principle in the “Covid-19” context: “Psychologically, the most important consequence of the pandemic is to generate a phenomenal amount of uncertainty that often becomes a source of angst. We do not know what tomorrow will bring […] and such a lack of surety makes us uneasy and troubled” (2020, p. 150). Multiple passages in their book, published within just three months of the WHO “pandemic” declaration, read like a blueprint for how to use a “pandemic” for psychological warfare purposes, rather than as an authentic commentary on events, and their use of “we” and “our” seems stilted and disingenuous given that human beings are often presented in detached, anthropological terms.

One of the key ways in which prisoners’ routines are disrupted is through changes to their temporal rhythms. Ellul (1965, p. 311) for example, references windowless incarceration with “irregular hours for meals, sleep, interrogations, and so on,” which work to destroy the prisoner’s sense of time and habitual patterns. Techniques documented by the CIA (1983, § K-2, E-3, H-6) similarly include disrupting sleep and mealtimes and blocking out natural light to disrupt the prisoner’s sense of night and day, to “reduce his capacity for resistance.” Correspondingly, Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 167) draw on the experience of “prisoners who face the harshest and most radical form of confinement” to describe the “Covid-19 lockdowns,” which, they claim, “altered our sense of time,” which became “amorphous and undifferentiated, with all the markers and normal divisions gone.” No evidence is presented to support this claim, which reads more like a planned outcome, with the jarring use of the past tense to describe ongoing events recalling “pandemic preparedness” scenario planning documents (cf. Rockefeller Foundation & Global Business Network, 2010). WEF agenda contributor Ruth Ogden (2020) nevertheless concurs that “there was widespread distortion [of] time during lockdown.”

Isolation

Pavlovian conditioning teaches that “isolation and the patient repetition of stimuli are required to tame wild animals,” and the same is true of humans: “the totalitarians have followed this rule. They know that they can condition their political victims most quickly if they are kept in isolation” (Meerloo, 1956, p. 43). Arendt (1962, pp. 123–124) writes that the loyalty required from totalitarian subjects can only come from “the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”

CIA researchers found in the 1950s that “the subject’s susceptibility to propaganda” increases markedly in isolation (cited in McCoy, 2007, p. 41). McGill University’s Donald O. Hebb discovered that “the effect of isolation on the brain function of the prisoner is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved, or deprived of sleep” (cited in McCoy, 2007, p. 42). Cornell’s Lawrence Hinkle, also working for the CIA, drew on Hebb’s findings to describe isolation as “the ideal way of ‘breaking down’ a prisoner” and increasing their “malleability” (cited in McCoy, 2007, p. 33). The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (adapted from the KUBARK Manual) recommends that “Isolation, both physical and psychological, must be maintained from the moment of apprehension” (CIA, 1983, § F-2). Isolation is also the first step on Biderman’s 1957 “Chart of Coercion,” with variants ranging from “complete solitary confinement” and “complete isolation” to “semi-isolation” and “group isolation” (Amnesty International, 1973, p. 49).

Isolation robs the prisoner of their usual support structures. According to Biderman, isolation “deprives [the] victim of all social support of his ability to resist” (Amnesty, 1973, p. 49). The idea is to throw the prisoner back onto their “own unaided internal resources” (CIA, 1983, § K-5). This is why guards tell prisoners: “You are alone. Your friends on the outside don’t know whether you’re alive or dead. Your fellow prisoners don’t even care”; the calculated result is “[unbearable] uncertainty and hopelessness” for the prisoner (Meerloo, 1956, p. 80). According to Zimbardo (2005, p. 131), “being part of a social support network is the most effective prophylaxis against mental and physical illnesses. Anything that isolates us from our kin kills the human spirit.” Abusers like to isolate their victims in order to exert more effective control over them (Anthony & Cullen, 2021).

Isolation was a key feature of the “Covid-19” operation, viz. the stay-at-home orders, enforced working from home, “self-isolation,” and mandatory isolation in hotels for some travellers. The prolonged isolation and chronic social deprivation imposed by the “lockdowns” served to “exacerbate the desire for social connection and group belonging, potentially fuelling susceptibility to group-based psychology and tribal identification, with all the propaganda vulnerabilities that entails” (Kyrie & Broudy, 2022).

According to the British Prime Minister in June 2020, “There is one certainty: the fewer social contacts you have, the safer you will be” (Prime Minister’s Office, 2020a). When announcing the second national “lockdown” on October 31, 2020, he told the clinically vulnerable to “minimise their contact with others and not to go to work if they are unable to work from home” (Prime Minister’s Office, 2020b). Yet, isolation meant that ordinary people saw their usual support mechanisms, such as being able to visit friends and family, see the doctor/dentist, go to church, attend local clubs, etc. stripped back. Loneliness and despair afflicted large numbers of people. Bill Gates, in December 2021, was aware that “stress and isolation have triggered far-reaching impacts on mental health” (Gates & Gates, 2021). In the United States, suicide calls and overdoses rose steeply during the “lockdowns,” as did suicide rates among young people (Farah et al., 2023; Salai, 2023).

Isolating people is psychologically harmful, because it deprives them of the social interaction necessary for mental wellbeing: “Social intercourse, our continual contact with our colleagues, our work, the newspapers, voices, traffic, our loved ones and even those we don’t like—all are daily nourishment for our senses and minds”; without them, one’s “entire personality may change” (Meerloo, 1956, p. 78). The “lockdowns” resulted in a sharp decrease in social interaction, with predictable effects on the public’s mental health. The UK Government knew in February 2021, for instance, that “Restrictions on socialising have had an adverse impact on people’s wellbeing and mental health with nearly half of adults (49%) reporting boredom, loneliness, anxiety or stress arising due to the pandemic” (Cabinet Office, 2021). Regardless, the Government maintained the third national “lockdown” until July 19, 2021.

Isolation leads to introspection, which in turn can lead to delusion. For example, “Solitary confinement acts on most persons as a powerful stress. A person cut off from external stimuli turns his awareness inward and projects his unconscious outward”; this can result in “superstition, intense love of any other living thing, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, hallucinations, and delusions” (CIA, 1983, § K-6). Biderman’s “Chart of Coercion” recommends methods that “foster introspection” (Amnesty International, 1973, p. 49). According to Meerloo (1956, p. 78), a person closed off from the outside world may find repressed memories and anxieties coming to the surface and assuming “gigantic proportions” as that person is unable to “evaluate or check his fantasies against the events of his ordinary days.” In the “Covid-19” context, Schwab and Malleret write, “Existential crises like the pandemic confront us with our own fears and anxieties and afford great opportunities for introspection” (2020, p. 94). The pattern is, thus, quite deliberate, and designed to produce dissociation and psychosis.

Defamiliarisation

According to the KUBARK Manual, it is important to create a sense of radical defamiliarisation within the prisoner: “the circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring, and of being plunged into the strange” (CIA, 1963, § 86). This principle appears to be based on tactics deployed in communist and Nazi regimes:

All of the victims of deliberate menticide – the P.O.W.’s in Korea, the imprisoned “traitors” to the dictatorial regimes of the Iron Curtain countries, the victims of the Nazi terror during the Second World War – are people whose ways of life had been suddenly and dramatically altered. They had been torn from their homes, their families, their friends, and thrown into a frightening, abnormal atmosphere [in which] breakdown is almost sure to follow. (Meerloo, 1956, pp. 4–73)

Ellul (1965, p. 311) remarks of Chinese brainwashing techniques: “The individual is cut off from everything, from his former social milieu, from news and information. This can be done only if he is placed in a prison cell or a camp. The individual is totally uprooted.” The idea of “resettlement” in Tavistock counterinsurgency operations serves a similar purpose (Minnicino, 1974, p. 50).

Covid-era psychological warfare involved similar techniques of defamiliarisation, applied to entire societies. According to Schwab and Malleret (2020, p. 8), for instance, “the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more, dissolved in the context of the pandemic.” The same tactic was used with “9/11,” the shock of which “exploded ‘the world that is familiar’ and opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that [was] expertly exploited” (Klein, 2007, p. 16). The idea is always the same: to create a moment of rupture in which “everything changes,” such that all the old rules can be done away with and a new regime of control can be introduced. The shock of the “lockdowns” in March 2020 was a success in that respect: “Intricate webs of well-established projects and pastimes were suddenly suspended or lost. Work stopped or changed radically. Over the ensuing months, our everyday habits of life were replaced with something new and unfamiliar” (Kidd & Ratcliffe, 2020).

The change was encapsulated in the idea of the “new normal,” which, in the “Covid-19” context, “relies essentially on the same principles and outcomes [as those described above] to induce disorientation and loss of cognitive function” (van der Pijl, 2022, p. 29). The WHO’s Maria van Kerkhove explained in July 2020: “Our new normal includes physical distancing from others. Our new normal includes wearing masks where appropriate. Our new normal includes us knowing where this virus is each and every day, where we live, where we work, where we want to travel” (“What the New Normal looks like after Covid-19,” 2020). In other words, the “new normal” reflects an alien, dehumanised biodigital surveillance state that only a shocked public would accept.

The mask mandates turned the social environment into something profoundly unfamiliar and disturbing, perhaps even resembling an LSD trip in keeping with some of the early MKULTRA experiments (McCoy, 2007, pp. 27–31, 46). If this sounds exaggerated, consider some accounts by those who have taken LSD. Alfred Hoffmann, who pioneered LSD in 1943, recounts: “the faces of those around me appeared as grotesque, colored masks” (cited in Campbell, 1971, p. 67). For others, “Other people’s faces seem to have become changing masks […] People’s faces are grotesque” (cited in Dobkin de Rios & Janiger, 2003, p. 38). According to the Beatles’ assistant Mal Evans, an LSD trip created the hallucination of “thousands and thousands of people all wearing masks” (in Grelsamer, 2010, p. 190). Another LSD account claims: “Faces turned into lurid masks” (Whitaker, 1969, p. 119). It does not seem to be uncommon for those tripping on LSD to see other people’s faces as lurid and grotesque masks. Compare this to the grotesque, dehumanised, masked world of “Covid-19,” as shown in the stunning photograph taken by Jose Carlos Fajardo, reproduced in Scott (2020). The “brave new normal,” as Scott calls it, thus resembles an LSD trip.

Implanting Triggers

Pavlovian conditioning in the USSR worked to degrade language, such that words came to act as behavioural triggers, rather than as bearers of meaning. Losing their communicative function, words formed “slowly hypnotizing slogans” and worked as “commanding signs, triggering off reactions of fear and terror” (Meerloo, 1956, p. 136). Language in a totalitarian system is weaponised and used to control the population. Propaganda terms, repeated over and over, are used to trigger fear-based behaviour, train obedience, and cripple independent thinking.

The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual states that the interrogatee “experiences a kind of psychological shock, which may only last briefly, but during which he is far more open to suggestion and far likelier to comply, than he was before he experienced the shock” (CIA, 1983, § J-2). It is at this moment of shock, with the victim’s suggestibility heightened, that key triggers words, sounds, and images can be implanted. Once implanted, triggers can continue to trigger subconscious associations with the original trauma long after the event, perhaps even for decades (Lacter, 2007).

“9/11” is a trigger word designed to reactivate trauma, associated as it is with the emergency number 911 and the traumatic events of September 11, 2001. Key messages were implanted during the moment of shock. Fox News (2016), for example, pinned the blame on Osama bin Laden just 33 seconds after the South Tower was hit, a theme which talking heads on the day were quick to seize upon and implant in the minds of their shocked audience. Quoting Mao, Klein (2007, p. 16) argues that viewers’ minds were turned into a blank slate by the shock—“a clean sheet of paper” on which “the newest and most beautiful words can be written,” such as “clash of civilizations,” “Axis of evil,” “Islamo-fascism,” and “homeland security.” MKULTRA-style programming was thus applied via the media to entire populations. Other trigger words such as “terrorism,” “bin Laden,” “Al Qaeda,” etc. were endlessly repeated by politicians and in the media, searing the new “reality” into the minds of the public.

When “Covid-19” hit and “lockdowns” were announced, complete with demands for “self-isolation,” “social distancing,” “contact tracing,” a “new normal,” etc. in the bid to “flatten the curve” and “stop the spread” of “SARS-CoV-2,” an alien lexicon of trigger words was injected into everyday discourse at the moment of shock and would forever be subliminally associated with the original trauma. Their calculated repetition ad nauseam by mainstream journalists, politicians, and talking heads was just like after 9/11, etching trigger words (and images like the ubiquitous computer-generated simulation of the “SARS-CoV-2” virion) into public consciousness so that trauma-based mind control could be exercised (see Chapter 3).

Mass Psychosis

The last century has witnessed the development of ever more cunning, complex, and large-scale applications of shock and stress in order to induce maladaptive responses among populations, such as neurosis or psychosis, which create mass suggestibility to propaganda and official narratives without relying on methods of terror familiar from totalitarian regimes of old. Those methods, during the “Covid-19” operation, were geared to the mass administration of injections allegedly intended to deliver an “artificial shock” to the human body in the name of mounting an effective immune response (Broudy & Kyrie, 2021, p. 152).

According to Versluis (2006, p. 143), “the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century represent a kind of collective psychosis.” Jung (1961, p. 212) describes the Hitler years as “the first outbreak of epidemic insanity,” in which millions of people were “swept into the blood-drenched madness of a war of extermination. No one knew what was happening to [them], least of all the Germans, who allowed themselves to be driven to the slaughterhouse by their leading psychopaths like hypnotized sheep.” This “mass psychosis,” Jung (1961, p. 236) adds, was evident from the moment Hitler seized power, yet “I could not help telling myself that this was after all Germany, a civilized European nation with a sense of morality […].”

The parallels between what Jung describes and life in the “civilized West” today are ominous. “Covid-19” was indeed an epidemic—an epidemic of insanity produced through all the deliberately absurd “measures” with which the public humiliatingly played along. Most of the population continues to get swept along, unaware, by propaganda for whatever the “current thing” is: support for Ukraine (despite political opposition being banned there [Rahman, 2022] and Nazi elements operating within the Armed Forces [News Wire, 2022]), reverence for the Royal Family (despite its dark history and proven close ties to Jimmy Savile and Jeffrey Epstein [Corbett, 2022]), the trans agenda (linked to the Tavistock Clinic), and so on. Today’s “leading psychopaths” (Jung, 1961, p. 212) are apparently driving the “hypnotized sheep” wherever they like, and the last time this occurred it ended in the worst horrors of World War II.

Pace Desmet (2022), totalitarian mass psychosis does not arise organically or spontaneously out of the social environment (a similar mode of argument to that of Emery [1977, p. 67] and Trist [1997, p. 519] with respect to “social turbulence”). Rather, it is deliberately inculcated by the ruling class. The real lesson from Nazi Germany is that

[m]ass delusion can be induced. It is simply a question of organizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way. If one can isolate the mass, allow no free thinking, no free exchanges, no outside corrective, and can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and television, with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be instilled. People will begin to accept the most primitive and inappropriate acts. (Meerloo, 1956, p. 157)

These techniques—isolation, monopolisation of perception, fear-mongering, etc.—were integral to the “lockdowns” and explain the willingness of the deluded masses to adopt the most primitive, inappropriate, and harmful of behaviours, such as mask wearing (see Chapter 3; Children’s Health Defence [n.d.]) and neurotically avoiding other people.

When there is a “fear of daily existence,” Meerloo (1956, p. 89) writes, “the mind can retreat into delusion” and “fantasy begins to prevail over reality, and soon assumes a validity which reality never had.” In 2020, psychiatrist Mark McDonald correspondingly identified “a delusional psychosis that has taken over where people are […] impervious to reason, to logic, to education at this point. They are psychotically managed by their fear” (in Tapscott, 2020). Those caught up in mass psychosis do not realise that they are, for “delusional thinking doesn’t know the concept of delusional thinking” (Meerloo, 1956, p. 156). It was similarly observed with respect to “Covid-19” that “people generally find it very difficult to recognise the delusional nature of a totalitarian master narrative” (Scott, 2020) and “those suffering from a mass psychosis are unaware of what is occurring” (Academy of Ideas, 2021). This creates an extremely dangerous situation where large numbers of people—most of society, in fact—are unaware of how irrationally they are behaving and how thoroughly manipulated their thoughts and behaviours are.

Since 2020, “social turbulence” has intensified: the shocks are coming thicker and faster than ever before. First it was “Covid-19,” a two-year psychological operation of unprecedented impact, complexity, and malice, keeping populations disoriented and demoralised. Around 16 months in, inflation began to soar, as was inevitable after historically unprecedented levels of quantitative easing in 2020 (cf. BlackRock, 2019), threatening hyperinflation, as was manufactured by the CIA in Chile in the 1970s to institute a new economic model (Klein, 2007, p. 7; see Chapter 8). Then came artificially manufactured energy shortages, not least owing to the US-led NATO sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline (Ponton, 2023), recalling the artificially created oil shortages of 1973 (Marcus, 1974, p. 7). Widespread disruption to food security in the United States (Hoft, 2022), at a time when Bill Gates became the largest owner of farmland there (Shapiro, 2021), threatens to result in food shortages, an early Tavistock tactic (Minnicino, 1974, pp. 6–45, 52).

Some commentators, such as Adam Tooze, fear that the confluence of such crises is creating a “polycrisis” whose danger is greater than the sum of its parts, possibly threatening nuclear war (Mercola, 2022). Seen through the lens of “social turbulence,” however, this seems unlikely, given that the whole point is to keep the population shocked, suggestible, and thereby herdable. The transition to technocracy must be managed, and the demolition of liberal democracy must be controlled. Things must not be allowed to spin out of control, although it helps with the production of stress and anxiety (see Chapter 4) if the population thinks that chaos could ensue at any moment.

The effects of shock do wear off, however. The rapid-fire sequence of shocks since 2020 may itself be a sign that the population is starting to develop immunity to shock and stress tactics as more and more people come to recognise them for what they are. It is also possible that too many shocks will cease to be shocking. If so, then the would-be global technocrats may have no choice but to resort to old-fashioned terror tactics (secret police, round-ups, massacres of dissidents, concentration camps, etc.). The warning signs are already present, with a wide variety of measures, some of them harsh, having been used to silence dissent against the “Covid-19” narrative (Liester, 2022; Doctors For Covid Ethics, 2023). Against an enlightened and restive global population that wants no repeat of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, however, such a move could prove fatal unless a revolution in warfare can give the transnational ruling class the decisive advantage (see Chapter 8).