Almost the largest living science fiction writer Werner Wedge publishing his novel “the End of rainbows” in 2006 could assume that his brainchild will be prophetic. In the novel, one of the main story lines was a pandemic caused by a combination of Macrovirus and exposure to certain populations of carefully selected Internet content. Today, no serious epidemiologist doubts the reality and danger of COVID-19, which is fraught not only with serious health deterioration in certain groups of patients, but also with fatal outcomes.
Perhaps the best explanation of what is happening from the point of view of Virology for people far from medicine is the opinion of a world-famous pulmonologist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Chuchalin. With regard to the coronavirus epidemic, experts who are far from conspiracy theories and assumptions that Bill Gates is an agent of Satan, who through vaccination seeks to destroy 80% of the world’s population, are increasingly using the term “infodemia”. Here’s how the respectable media write about it: “There was no such panic, no such acute reaction to the information attack caused by the coronavirus, neither during the H1N1 avian flu pandemic, nor during the epidemics of swine flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS, a relative of the current coronavirus). But, of course, previous infections have not been as widespread as the current one.
The reason for infodemia – which is much faster than the virus itself, the spread of information and misinformation related to it-is that thanks to social networks and the new configuration of the global information environment, we know a lot about it. In the modern world, information itself is spread virally. The model of spreading “fake news” (fakes), memes in social networks, rumors in telegram channels is actually nothing more than a model of spreading a contagious disease. American researcher Douglas Rushkoff even dedicated a book to this phenomenon – “Mediavirus”.
However, in my humble opinion, the situation is much more serious, and the topic is not so much the responsibility of the chief state sanitary doctor. Head of Rospotrebnadzor, how to address the issues of the security Council of the Russian Federation.
No serious analyst, let alone professional virologists, considers the COVID-19 epidemic as a fake or a repeatedly exaggerated threat, under the pretext of which the construction of a global digital concentration camp under the control of artificial intelligence is being carried out at a rapid pace around the world. At the same time, today no one will challenge the fact that the coronavirus epidemic is being used as the cause of a global, and in the long term terminal, crisis of the world capitalist economy system.
This is called force majeure, so no one is to blame, and the largest banks and corporations must receive billions of dollars in aid to survive.
However, a serious approach to the coronavirus should not prevent the identification of unusual anomalies and oddities that accompany this global attack. Briefly highlight the main ones.
The Spanish flu epidemic in 1918-1919 killed between 50 and 100 million people, or between 2.7% and 5.3% of the World’s population. In total, a third of the world’s population at that time, or 500 million people, was ill. The 1959 Asian flu killed 1.1 million people worldwide. The 1968 Hong Kong flu also killed more than 1 million people. The relatively recent swine flu in 2009 claimed the lives of approximately 600 thousand people, and, for example, in the United States, it affected 61 million people. In none of these cases did the economy stop, logistics chains did not break, social and political life did not stop. As of today, COVID-19 has sickened about 3.5 million people, and died all over the world about 250 thousand people, and the pace is slow, but began to decline (when official estimates of the number of cases, unbiased medical statistics pay attention to the fact that often the cause is established in accordance with very inaccurate tests and even by eye). In General, the percentage of deaths from COVID-19 is 0.00318% of the world’s population at the beginning of may.
The coronavirus, its origin, causes, course of the disease, consequences, and the possibility of re-infection are discussed by the global epidemiological community for at least three months. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that the coronavirus itself in bats has been the subject of close, well-funded research by doctors and geneticists in many countries since the noughties, and is not a curiosity, something out of the ordinary.
If we analyze separately the academic medical periodicals and the content of the leading serious media, not to mention the “yellow” press, we immediately notice not only the differences in tone, but also the nature of statements. For serious epidemiologists in Russia and America, Europe and China, COVID-19 is not an unsolvable mystery.
They are well-known methods that allow them to provide serious help to the body at an early stage, as well as drugs that facilitate the course of the disease. Some of these methods, by the way, were developed in the last years of the USSR, including under the leadership of the already mentioned academician Chuchalin.
Against this background, not only fake-producing sites look provocative and irresponsible, but also the world’s leading media, which amaze readers and viewers with one nightmare, worse than another. And literally the next day, the already used horror story is forgotten and a new one is used. Surprisingly, there are only two professional and impartial resources in the world that are engaged in registering publications of leading media on the topic of coronavirus and their fact-checking. Both resources belong to the German-speaking part of the Internet.
We will note only two Champions-the sophisticated, experienced Angela Merkel and a specialist in force majeure, a fan of Twitter and controversy, Donald trump. Merkel has repeatedly scared her fellow citizens of tens of millions of Germans who will inevitably get sick with the coronavirus, and trump considered the possible death of “only 120-200 thousand Americans” as his personal success and achievement of the administration.
Examples can be given again and again, but they do not change the essence. Instead of calmly informing citizens on a regular basis that the state ships, although experiencing serious threats, are nevertheless on a balanced course and will definitely come to victory over COVID-19 in accordance with national solidarity, the leaders either get off with General phrases, or within a week change their point of view to the opposite.
Even during the Cold War in the XX century, epidemiologists of the USSR and the United States, the Warsaw Pact and NATO worked together and in contact to overcome dangerous epidemiological diseases. In a competitive competition, it happened that Soviet Newspapers accused the Americans of inventing AIDS, and overseas media published reports about the development of new strains of plague in the USSR. However, these were no more than single, strictly metered cold war offensive operations that did not interfere with real cooperation. Now the opposite situation is happening. The US and China are exchanging accusations about the spread of COVID-19. And the trump administration is seriously trying to create a coalition to charge China for the damage done to the American economy. It would be impossible to imagine such a relationship between the USSR and the USA in the XX century.
Here are statistics for several countries where the economy did not stop, and social life had clear, understandable minimum restrictions for the population. Taiwan: population of about 24 million people, less than 19 thousand people got sick, 6 people died. The first cases took place in February. At the same time, the country did not even restrict air traffic with China, with the exception of Wuhan. South Korea: population of about 52 million people, 209 thousand people got sick, 252 people died. Japan: 127 million people, 120 thousand people got sick, 510 people died. Belarus is 9.5 million people, sick of 16.7 thousand people died in 99.
We should also mention the Syrian refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan. Dozens of volunteer doctors, mostly from EU countries, work in these camps. They closely monitor the epidemiological situation. The fact that they are misleading, is literally frightened. For almost 5 million refugees, only a few cases of the disease have been registered. Although, it would seem, the camps should have turned literally into burial grounds and, accordingly, the most terrifying images on the Internet should have recorded not the fertile Lombardy, but the desert of southern Turkey.
In recent years, the topic of information wars has become extremely popular not only among specialists, but also the General public. As a rule, there are two generations of information wars. Information wars 1.0 is good old-fashioned agitation and propaganda, using new Internet tools and aimed at erosion or change of beliefs. Information wars 2.0 is the brainchild of a combination of behavioral psychology, big personal data, and behavior-inducing interfaces. Information wars 2.0 deal not with beliefs, ideals, and thinking, but with instincts, habits, and stereotypes.
It is only partially related to information, and to a large extent to quite physical, material wars.
Man is only for scientists divided into the psyche and somatics, the material and ideal, the physical and mental. Man is one. Accordingly, technologically accurate exposure to the body can cause permanent mental wounds, and informational exposure, as in Vijay’s novel The end of rainbows, can lead to physical diseases and even terminal epidemics.
In the thirties of the XX century, the famous canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye first put forward a hypothesis, and then proved it on a variety of field studies, creating a theory of stress. In the seventies of the XX century, the leading positions in the study of stress were taken by Soviet scientists and first of all by L. A. Kitaev-Smyk, who developed the system theory of stress.
Stress is a combination of physiological and psychological reactions of the body to a certain stimulus — the so-called stress factor.
The effect of stress on the body can be considered as a process consisting of several stages, successively replacing each other:
1. The stage of mobilization: there is a surge of energy, the heart begins to beat faster, breathing becomes shallow, blood pressure increases, adrenaline and another “stress hormone” — cortisol-is strongly released. This is in a sense a “primitive” reaction that prepares the body to execute the command “hit or run”.
2. Resistance stage: the first shock passes, hormone production is somewhat reduced (but still above normal), but the body continues to be in a state of high readiness.
3. Stage of exhaustion: if the body is too long in a state of stress, its defense mechanisms inevitably fail. Physical and emotional resources are running out.
All this can lead to a negative impact on the work of the immune, nervous, pulmonological, cardiovascular and other systems of the body. In small doses, stress (eustress) can be useful for the body and play a mobilizing role for the will, thinking, and other types of psychological activity.
Stress that exceeds a person’s adaptive capacity is called negative stress or distress. Distress is destructive, and its features are quite different:
– both chronic and acute forms of the course;
– suppression, reduction of labor productivity;
– loss of ability to adapt to the surrounding world;
– physiological malaise on the background of negative emotions;
– development of somatic and mental diseases.
Causes of distress: serious threat to life and health, long-term conflict situations, loss of income, serious illness of a loved one, etc.
In fact, stress, along with the placebo-nocebo phenomenon, is based on the unity of the psyche and somatics, ideal and material. Based on this unity, information factors negatively affect physiology, causing serious failures, diseases, and even death.
Modern science, as a result of generalization of huge amounts of experimental material, has recognized that the reactions of individuals or groups that occur in the course of their interaction with information factors can lead to a sharp decrease in the adaptive potential of a person and the development of pathological processes, up to lethal.
According to the science of stress, the most profound stress and the impact of information factors on somatics is caused in conditions of constantly growing uncertainty in combination with threats to life, especially against the background of catastrophic events. It is easy to see that this triad perfectly describes the current situation with the coronavirus. The average citizen is in a state of skillfully supported media uncertainty, conviction against the background of speeches by various authorities in the deadly danger of the coronavirus for him. And all this-against the background of lack of money or a rapidly decreasing airbag.
As you know, man metaphorically has three brains: the oldest lizard brain, the animal brain, and the actual human brain. The lizard brain reacts to the external environment with only three types of behavior: flight, stupor, and attack. The animal brain is an emotional brain that reacts to changes in the environment, as well as to various threats, reactively, i.e., acting in response to a stimulus. Finally, the human brain allows you to perform search activity, resist fear, make more conscious decisions, and so on.
Under stress, the vast majority of the population triggers the first, rarely the second, and very rarely the third brain. a Person feels in a hopeless situation, from which you can not escape, and accordingly triggers the maximum negative emotions, especially strong in conditions of social isolation and restrictions on physical activity.
As a result, the adaptive potential of a person is rapidly depleted and pathological physiological processes are triggered. The most powerful blows are applied to the cardiovascular, endocrine, pulmonological (pulmonary), immune and gastrointestinal systems of the body. Prolonged exposure to stress for more than two or three weeks causes deep distress, which is fraught with not only exacerbation of existing diseases, but also heart attacks, strokes, severe lung diseases, etc., up to fatal outcomes.
According to statistics collected in many countries of the world, including Russia, in any, even the most difficult conditions, 12-20% of people retain their composure and the ability to act clearly and decisively in accordance with the situation. Approximately 60-75% of long-term stress causes not only panic attacks and phobias, but also leads to somatic diseases of various severity.
In the framework of planned and implemented psychosomatic operations, people are killed as in a conventional, traditional war using fire, striking weapons. Only this death is carried out in the framework of medical statistics, as death from certain diseases, primarily from the above.
Along with severe physiological consequences of distress, as well as phobias, neuroses and psychoses that occur in about 60-70% of the population who are caught in extreme situations of various types, man-made disasters, natural disasters, and epidemics entail pathogenic consequences. Soviet and Russian psychologists and psychiatrists became leaders in the study of this area.
Over the past 30 years, the entire post-Soviet space has suffered a maximum of one-time and year-long emergencies. In the mid-noughties, the famous Russian psychiatrist Nikolai Nikolaevich Pukhovsky published a book “Psychopathological consequences of emergencies“. It summarizes a huge amount of empirical material, including the pathological consequences of such catastrophes as Chernobyl, Spitak, railway accidents, the destroying of the USSR, mass poisoning with Royal alcohol, etc.
Hostress or behavioral manifestation experienced an emergency situation is expressed in several basic types of behavior.
The first type is associated with the affect of painful perplexity. People do not understand how, why, and why they are in a new, extremely difficult and dangerous situation, and who is to blame for this. As a rule, the affect of painful perplexity manifests itself either in a withdrawal from reality, a desire to close within four walls and interrupt as much as possible most, if not all, social contacts, or Vice versa in excessive sociability and a feverish orientation to action.
Another manifestation of the affect of painful perplexity is the search for blame for what happened. Here, the more fantastic the attribution, the more it suits the person with affect. It is the affect of painful perplexity that explains the vitality of reptiloids, conspiracies of the world backstage, the West as the eternal enemy of Russia, etc.
At the same time, with the affect of painful perplexity, a person remembers their own happy times or comes up with ideal countries and great rulers with features that are opposite to the characteristics of the current powers-that-be. I. Ilf and E. Petrov in” the Golden calf ” described the affect of painful perplexity as follows: “We need to remember something, remember the most important thing on which happiness depends. And again, we need to think about everything, to understand when finally, what happened, why everything became bad, even though everything was good before.”
Not finding satisfaction and reassurance, a person goes from the affect of painful perplexity to the affect of psychalgia. This affect is associated with the experience of mental pain, suffering, an increasing sense of danger and insecurity in their own health, etc. If the affect of perplexity is characterized by a short existence, then the affect of psychalgia can last a long time and form a stable type of behavior associated with the search for escape from suffering or with various kinds of asocial actions, including the manifestation of unmotivated aggression.
The third type of affect generated by an emergency in the time order of unfolding is the so-called stress of awareness. In this phase, the person is desperate to find a way out of the situation on their own, gets tired of understanding it and predicting future events, and turns on the mechanism of personal regression.
Personal regression is manifested primarily in the fact that a person returns to early, usually adolescent (12-18 years) forms of behavior. People in this phase seek to find a leader, a magical Savior, or a commander who can be trusted to solve their own problems. In this phase, people behave in a highly disciplined manner, are ready for self-restraint, for external control over their own behavior, and strive for obedience. This does not exclude that due to excessive psychosomatic overload of this type of people, and they make up, as already noted, 70-75% of the population. they are prone to unmotivated aggression, acts of violence and vandalism. However, such destructive phenomena are short-term, quickly suppressed and accompanied by remorse for what they have done.
Thus, a special psychosomatic operation is aimed at triggering powerful, covering millions of people of distress. Distress, in turn, rapidly and severely deteriorate physiological health, lead to phobias, neuroses and even psychoses in psychological terms, and change and simplify the behavior of citizens beyond recognition.
First of all, these are information cascades. Information cascades occur when individuals, when making decisions or choosing a behavior model, copy the behavior of other participants who have already made a choice, without taking into account their own information. The more participants have already made the same choice, decision, or behavior pattern, the more willing individuals are to follow them. In fact, the technology of information cascades is a tool for generating herd behavior as the only possible one.
Another technology is glyph anchoring. A glyph is a photo or visual image that is literally imprinted in memory and becomes the setting and dominant that determines individual and collective behavior. The glyph, in contrast to the meme, has deep features that are based on archaic layers of the psyche. In practice, the glyph becomes a kind of semantic core around which are formed behavioral patterns, relations, installation, etc.
The glyphs themselves can be either real or fake. For example, the European refugee crisis that erupted in 2012 was largely triggered by a photograph of the body of a three-year-old refugee boy washed up on the Turkish coast. An example of a fake is a tent hospital for coronavirus patients deployed in new York’s Central Park. In reality, one odious American sect tried to deploy this tent city in order to distribute food there and agitate in favor of its doctrine.
There are also glyphs that are partly true and partly fake. Russian YouTube was filled with footage of an hour-long queue of ambulances in front of the gates of a medical facility. The footage was commented on so that there are no more empty seats in the hospital and ambulances are waiting for instructions on where to take patients next. Reality, however, was more meaningless in Russian. There were plenty of places in the hospital, including those with ventilators. But at the reception of patients sat the only girl who slowly typed and processed the necessary documents.
There is reason to believe that the psychosomatic operation used a modification of the newly created method of “stimulated amplification of Social Actions” (SASA). The essence of the method is as follows. An elaborate video file or series of photos is thrown into social Internet communities with a level of cohesion that is not lower than average. They must necessarily be recognized by members of the community, memorable, but allow for different interpretations. Then, with the help of agents within the community, a lively discussion is launched, in which different points of view are formed. Then the influencer enters the arena-an influential and popular person, but not an official. It sums up a kind of discussion and makes a verdict, which is called a normative interpretation of the meaning of the image contained in the video or photo content. After a sufficiently closed community within the echo chamber effect consolidates around the opinion of the influencer, an official enters the arena and formulates actions to be taken by the community members in accordance with the conclusions of the influencer and the General consensus reached.
The essence of it is quite simple, but the application is very, very effective. Any true, but unprofitable or undesirable information for the organizers of a special operation, especially if it is factual and supported by scientific reports, is instantly detected using advanced search engines and is deliberately noisy.
At the same time, fakes are not necessarily used to create noise. Conflicting opinions or interviews of professionals directly related to the subject of noise work much better. In a specific situation with coronavirus, it is extremely rare for well-known, venerable epidemiologists to speak. TV screens, computers and smartphones were filled with doctors of various but not virological specialties, politicians, officials, etc. As a result, the population finds itself in a situation of global lack of information. Experiencing this situation in itself is a powerful stress factor and makes an additional contribution to the psychoticization of the population.
Examples of tools already used in the framework of special operations could be multiplied further. However, I think it is much more valuable to wait for the end of this stage of the COVID-19 epidemic and sum up its actual demographic, economic, social, cultural, military and other results, as well as to separately inventorize the entire set of behavioral weapons used in psychosomatic special operations.
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