Insights from Bruno Bettelheim into Covid-19 Pandemic Psychological Tactics

[Mayacaman]

Insights from Bruno Bettelheim Into
Covid-19 Pandemic Psychological Tactics

Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist, was a prisoner of Dachau concentration camp in 1938-1939. After moving to the United States, he systematized camp experience in scientific works, where he described methods of breaking the psyche of prisoners.

Today, any messages in the spirit of ′′Those who don't wear masks are murderers of other people ′′ remind Bettelheim's statement of these methods. Sentences - ′′ Wear, bitch, a mask not according to your understanding of danger, but according to someone else's representation!"-read the classic principle of ′′collective responsibility".

Bettelheim tells how the ward once ordered a group of prisoners to wash their shoes outside and inside with water with soap. The order was never repeated again. The boots were getting very hard and rubbing their feet. However, many prisoners continued to wash their shoes from the inside every day and scolded everyone who didn't, for ′′ non-surprise ". The principle of group responsibility is the fascist principle...

When the group responsibility of the individual is seen only as a representative of a stereotypical group, not as one expressing one's own opinion (in the subject of vaccination, by the way, this is also a similar reception). Recall a few more Bettelheim's wording from this row:

1. Introduce mutually exclusive rules, violations of which are inevitable. ′′We close your business, but we don't give money for life". ′′of quarantine no, but you can't leave the house ′′ - examples of such rules.

2. Make people believe that nothing depends on them. To do this, you need to (a) create an unpredictable environment in which it is impossible to plan anything, and b) force people to live according to the instructions, preventing any initiative.

3. Make a person do senseless work. It's easy to find a lot of pointless things in the actions that we were forced to do during pseudo-quarantine. For example, wiping surfaces, although back in April German scientists convincingly proved that the virus is not transmitted through the surface.

Bettelheim has a few more methods. The virus exists, like a million others... And it will continue to exist. But breaking people's mind is a crime.

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Note: I did not write this. I received it in an e-mail message from my forty-two year old daughter who lives in Brazil. I will say, in addition, that the Caribbean Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, whose book, "Wretched of the Earth" became a sort of handbook for the Algerian Revolutionaries of the early 60's, framed a good portion of the subsequent dialog on this phenomenon, when he coined the term "internalizing one's own oppression." As E.L. Doctorow wrote in the "Book of Daniel" "...it's still going on, Denny."