Social Contagion

Last year, I discussed how the naming of diseases and disorders helps to entrench and spread those diseases and disorders.

Oliver Sacks, in his classic work, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, points out that Tourette’s Syndrome and muscular dystrophy exploded in cases after a name was invented for them.

After he made his first diagnosis for Tourette’s he recalls seeing three other cases the very next day.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously said, to those who disbelieved the reality of his father’s ghost, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ The same is true of our modern, materialist philosophy.

In my piece, I discussed two possible causes for this phenomenon:

1. The nocebo effect. Just as placebos can cure people, because patients believe they can, so too can patients who dread disease and despair of treatment, help bring about negative outcomes.

2. Quantum entanglement. This was admittedly out there, and I included it mostly to point out that science is far stranger than people realise. How we observe the world changes the world. Can observing and testing covid obsessively create a pandemic, in a sense?

I recently came across this thread on Twitter, which applies this same phenomenon to bulimia and transgenderism.

Mia💚🤍💜 @_CryMiaRiver

🧵A thread about social contagions: In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next 7 years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition./1

‘Mia’ goes on to point out that by the 90s millions of mainly teen girls were suffering from bulimia.

Who else remembers the documentaries, the stories of Diana, stories of girls’ boarding houses having their pipes corroded by vomit, and the rehab clinics springing up for this disorder?

And then it disappeared from public view.

Mia, most disturbingly, points out the same effect in transgenderism.

Mia💚🤍💜 @_CryMiaRiver

Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010, and then, all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialised world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender./7

She points out in the thread that TikTok is full of videos of young girls showing off their ‘top surgery’ - the scars of breast removal.

Anecdotally, teachers from the UK tell me of whole social groups of girls, in particular, suddenly, together, identifying as male.

What a strange endgame to feminism, by the way!

This is aided and abetted by therapists who simply affirm whatever their patients say, and send them on a suicidal path, by the way. And aided and abetted by teachers who build transgender bathrooms and preach tolerance for children being brainwashed by a satanic media. The odds of you even meeting somebody genuinely suffering from gender dysphoria are so rare and even if you do, the best treatment is usually to leave them alone until their body settles down.

How often do you hear this kind of horrific story - they are more common than we realise in our current craze to celebrate bodily mutilation:

He will never forget the noise. Lying on the hospital trolley being pushed towards the operating theatre, he heard nothing but a primal wail. He looked back to see his younger sister sobbing, traumatised by the enormity of what he was about to do.

Andrew, born male, was minutes away from an operation that would make him a woman. Psychiatrists said he had a female brain in a male body. Gender reassignment surgery was the only way to ease the mental torment he'd endured since adolescence.

But as the wheels squeaked towards the operating table he was struck by an unshakeable thought: ‘It's not right.’ He remembers telling the surgeon: ‘I think I'm doing the wrong thing, it's not right, I think we've got to stop it.’

The surgeon stroked Andrew's face, telling him it was natural to feel frightened before an operation. He protested again, insisting it felt wrong. Then it went black. When he woke up he was sure the surgery had been cancelled. The romantic tales he'd read of transsexuals who awoke post-surgery feeling ‘reborn’ convinced Andrew the operation had been halted, because he felt no different.

‘Then I remember lifting up the sheets and putting my hand down and feeling it all bandaged and packed. I just started bawling my eyes out and screaming. I remember saying to myself, you f--king idiot, Andrew, how could you be so bloody stupid?’

Twenty years after surgery that left him feeling like a ‘desexed dog’, the grief can still overwhelm him.

I think we can include the phenomenon of serial killers and school shooters in this category of social contagions too.

Remember the serial killer movies and obsession of the 90s? What happened to that?

Would school shooters exist if a template had not been mythologized by Columbine?

I could say the same of Aids. What happened to Aids? Why was I subjected to endless workshops about it as a teen? (For some strange reason, HIV has returned to public discourse in a massive way. Why is that? More on that another time.)

As I have written previously, I believe covid has been of the same ilk. I believe the virus exists, and I believe it is serious.

But how much of the mayhem and chaos is a social virus, exacerbated by a new information system susceptible to toxic memes?

How else do we explain this kind of thing:

We all know covid is at its most dangerous on a beach.

Or this:

Masks have been the worst part for me:

I keep coming back to this piece, and these words:

It wouldn’t take much to push a population of such elderly and frail people into a life-threatening situation. Lock them up for months on end. Deny them human contact on pain of arrest and fines they couldn’t hope to pay. Withdraw medical treatment. Quarantine their carers. Terrorise them with propaganda about a civilisation-ending disease. Order them to stay at home and avoid the contact of other people like the plague. Tell them hospitals standing empty are on the verge of being overwhelmed. Turn medical centres into places to fear, the breeding grounds of a deadly new disease. That should be more than enough. It has been more than enough.

What are other social contagions circulating?

I would suggest climate change and the race to ‘net zero’.

Climate change angst among young people is causing them not to have children. There is an obsession to adopt electric vehicles, despite this inconvenient fact:

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that if every nation achieves their ambitious targets on increasing electric car ownership, it will reduce CO2 emissions in this decade by 235 million tons.

That, according to the UN Climate Panel’s standard model, will reduce global temperatures by about one ten-thousandth of a degree Celsius (0.0001c) by the end of the century.

Wait for meat bans and climate lockdowns. That is coming soon. The idea that cow farts cause global warming is ridiculous in my view. What about when the North American landscape was full of bison?

Any other contagions?

I would say transgenderism remains the biggest one.

This kind of thing is a civilizational threat:

I will give Mia the final word:

Mia💚🤍💜 @_CryMiaRiver

We're in the eye of the storm right now, so most people can't see the damage being done. But soon, all the young people emerging from this contagion sterile and missing body parts will be visible for all to see, and people will be horrified that they supported such evil./end