Totalitarianism and the Covid Cult

Part 4 - Indoctrination

Introduction

The first three parts of this chapter argued that the “Covid-19” operation aimed at turning entire societies into a single, giant cult; that the Covid cult imposed a false reality on true believers; and that it functioned as an ersatz religion intended to supplant Christianity.

This final part explores further the means by which people were indoctrinated into the Covid cult.

Deindividuation and Creating False Identities

Totalitarian societies function as giant cults with their own cult leaders, viz. Goebbels’ creation of the “Führer cult” around Adolf Hitler (Gunderman, 2015), or the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union (Gill, 2021). In such societies, the identity of individual citizens is expected to reflect that of the Great Leader.

Joost Meerloo, a medical doctor and psychoanalyst who fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, wrote that the citizen in a totalitarian society “has no individual ego any longer, no personality, no self” and “no longer knows the real core of [their] mind” (Meerloo, 1956, pp. 112, 117). Instead, they are “the object of official barrage and mental coercion,” which strips from them individual conscience, personal morality, and the capacity to think clearly and honestly. The citizenry is thereby “tamed into personal and political somnambulism” or “mindless robotism” (Meerloo, 1956, pp. 117, 106).

Erich Fromm, a sociologist and psychoanalyst who fled Nazi Germany, likewise found that “the despair of the human automaton is fertile soil for the political purposes of Fascism” (1960, p. 221).

To mid-20th century observers, there appeared to be something in the nature of capitalist society itself that aids the process of deindividuation. Aldous Huxley (1958, p. 20), for example, observed:

These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized.

Is the capitalist worker-automaton, who has internalized dehumanizing patterns of behaviour, more susceptible to deindividuation and indoctrination?

The Tavistock Institute realized that individuals could, through various shock techniques, be induced into a state of “war neurosis,” whereby “the individual’s developed sense of identity is in effect ‘turned off,’ and a pseudo-identity is formed” (Marcus, 1974, p. 33). In a controlled environment, whilst individuals may not appear brainwashed, “The victim’s sense of reality is turned inside-out. ‘He’ or ‘she’ (the pseudo-personality) becomes ‘I’ [...]” (Marcus, 1974, pp. 24-5).

In groups, Tavistock discovered, the same effect can be achieved without the need for individual brainwashing, because the behavioural responses among the group will become “mutually reinforcing” (Marcus, 1974, p. 33). For example, the more people who profess a particular belief, the more likely it becomes that others will adopt that belief.

The Monarch mind control programme (allegedly the unofficial continuation of MKULTRA [Hughes, 2024, p. 80]) is said to have been named after the monarch butterfly, which “begins its life as a worm (representing undeveloped potential) and, after a period of cocooning (programming) is reborn as a beautiful butterfly (the Monarch slave)” (Vigilant Citizen, 2012). Its aim is to reprogramme the victim with a slave identity: “The person’s sense of identity is lost. The Monarch slave loses his/her sense of self to the cult and to the person’s master” (Wheeler & Springmeier, 2008, p. 85). The old self is eclipsed by a new one that lacks personal autonomy.

Cults seek to “impos[e] a new personal identity — a new set of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions — to fill the void left by the breakdown of the old one” (Hassan, 1990, p. 69). It is well known that individuals who become involved in cults “lose their sense of self identity and take on the identity of the cult leader” (Karlstrom, 2025).

Victims of cults would typically have rejected the new identity if asked for informed consent to the change, which is why Hassan and Shah (2019) prefers the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) term “undue influence” to “mind control.” Cults involve an outrage against individual sovereignty, not total control of the mind.

Let us begin, then, to apply some of these insights to understanding the Covid cult.

Breaking Down the Old Self

When cults initiate a new member, “To ready a person for radical change, his reality must first be shaken up. His indoctrinators must disorient him. His frames of reference for understanding himself and his surroundings must be challenged and broken down” (Hassan, 1990, p. 67).

In 2020, that technique was enacted transnationally through the “shock and awe” of the “lockdowns,” which led to people being isolated, their normal behaviour patterns being disrupted, and the world they thought they knew suddenly becoming strange and unfamiliar (Hughes, 2024, pp. 60-67).

The new cult member is told:

Your ‘old’ self is what’s keeping you from fully experiencing the ‘new truth.’ Your ‘old concepts’ are what drag you down. Your ‘rational’ mind is holding you back from fantastic progress. Surrender. Let go. Have faith” (Hassan, 1990, p. 69).

In 2020, the “‘old’ self” was to be dissolved in the “New Normal.” Whatever the previous frame of reference was no longer applied. Old-fashioned ideas about “rights” and “freedoms,” based on centuries of liberal tradition, suddenly had to be rethought in the context of a purported “global pandemic.” Previous protocols for dealing with epidemics were set aside in favour of draconian “lockdowns” and quarantining the healthy. Rational scepticism towards the impossibility of developing a “safe and effective” medical product based on just a few months’ safety data hindered the public from recognising the “fantastic progress” embodied in the new “Covid-19 vaccines.”

In cult settings, Hassan writes, “it is easy to see when the trance has set in. The audience will exhibit retarded blink and swallow reflexes, and their facial expressions will relax into a blank, neutral state” (1990, p. 57). Similarly, in the “Covid-19” context, Cullen (2021, 07:04) observed that a “blank, confused, sheep-like stare” often came from indoctrinated people “if you tell them anything different from what appears on the TV.”

Mask Wearing

Historically, mask wearing is associated with a change to personal identity: “Anthropologists and historians of primitive art have suggested that the origin of the mask is closely related to this transformation of identity” (Needham, 2014, p. 157).

In religion, too, covering the face is associated with changes to identity. The niqab, for instance, provides a certain degree of public anonymity and protection for the Muslim woman, whose identity becomes fully accessible only when she removes the face covering at home (Pageau, 2020).

In Jewish and Orthodox Christian traditions, the bride wears a veil, at one level symbolizing the disappearance of her former family identity; when her husband lifts the veil, he becomes the first to see her in her new identity as his wife.

The Latin word persona means “actor’s mask”; change the mask, change the persona.

Needless to say, face mask wearing in 2020/21 must have contributed to changes in personal identity. The face is traditionally where personal identity is expressed, yet the face mask hides half of it, including most of the muscles through which emotion is expressed (Fischer et al. 2012, p. 266). Worn with sunglasses and perhaps a hat or cap, the face vanishes almost entirely — and with it nearly all trace of personal identity and indeed humanity.

As Strongman (2021) recognised, “compulsory masking leads to the erasure of personhood and the homogenization of masses.” The “old” or authentic self was suppressed, allowing a more obedient and conformist version to emerge.

Outward Displays of Allegiance

Uniforms traditionally play a role in deindividuation, from school uniforms to combat gear. They signal subordination of the self to the organization or group. This makes the uniform an attractive device when demanding that the individual submits to the authority of the collective.

The uniform need not necessarily be austere, regimented, and invariant. In the cult TV series, The Prisoner (1967), for instance, which explores multiple themes of mind manipulation, the anonymous inmates of a “village” that no one is allowed to leave all wear some combination of blazer, multi-coloured cape, horizontal-striped jumper, plimsolls, and some form of headwear (typically straw boaters).

Nor is an entire uniform required if a single, dominant piece of attire can be displayed. In Nazi Germany, for example, the swastika armband or lapel badge served as a powerful display of commitment to National Socialism (Potts, 2020).

As I have discussed previously, the wearing of face masks during “Covid” served, at one level, as a public loyalty ritual. The face mask represented the outward symbol of “commitment to a great cause” and a show of solidarity with the adherents of that cause (Potts, 2020). It symbolised allegiance to the Covid cult.

The Power of the Situation

Personal identity can be manipulated through what the psychologist of evil, Philip Zimbardo (2007, p. 321), calls “the power of the situation.” The broad idea is that changes to the social environment can result in changes to personal identity as people adopt attitudes and behaviours that they otherwise would not have done.

The same principle is at work in cults: “A programmed cult identity is created through a complex social influence process. That false identity dominates real identity” (Hassan & Shah, 2019).

The “Covid-19” operation changed the social environment radically. Mask wearing, social distancing, hand sanitising, following one-way systems, etc., formed what Hopkins (2021) accurately described as “a collection of bizarre compliance rituals performed to cement allegiance to the cult.” Opposing them on the grounds that they did not work, he noted, was futile, because doing so implied acceptance of the false reality that was being created. For example, claiming that mask wearing did nothing to prevent viral transmission accepted the “reality” of a deadly virus and the need to do something about it.

The aim was to produce faceless nobodies — automatons without individuality, incapable of resisting groupthink.

This was modelled from the top down, for instance by G7 foreign and development ministers posing together in socially distanced, mask-wearing photographs, all in dark suits with their arms straight down like robots (Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, 2021).

It should be noted that the Covid cult did not have a “leader” as such. Rather, its orchestrators hid behind the doctrinal power of The Science™, as discussed in previous sections.

Incremental Behaviour Change

In cults, “behaviors are shaped subtly at first, then more forcefully. The material that will make up the new identity is doled out gradually, piece by piece, only as fast as the person is deemed ready to assimilate it” (Hassan, 1990, p. 69).

The first of Singer’s (1995, p. 274) six conditions of mind control is

Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group.

The same logic of incremental behaviour change was in evidence during the “Covid-19” operation — from small gestures (such as telling people to “stay safe” and “clapping for carers”) to psychologically damaging indicators of compliance (“social distancing,” following deliberately nonsensical “rules”), to physically harmful signalling of obedience through mask wearing and, ultimately, taking a dangerous experimental substance into one’s body more than once. For good measure, some even got a tattoo on the injection site (Hart, 2022).

As Hopkins (2020) understood at the time, “You don’t surrender to it all at once. You do it over the course of weeks and months. Imperceptibly, it becomes your reality.”

Obliviousness of Cult Members

By definition, those who are indoctrinated into a cult do not realise they are in one:

No one gives informed consent to join a destructive cult [...], because they have not been informed about the true nature of that cult. Members are deceptively recruited into a destructive cult. They are deceived by omission, by distortion or through outright lying (Hassan & Shah, 2019).

We know from GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group unit that, in the minds of spooks, “elegance” and “creativity” are required in “constructing experience in [the] mind of [the] target which should be accepted so they don’t realise it” (JTRIG, 2014).

Deception on a vast scale, aimed at constructing the experience of a “pandemic” in the minds of target populations, was key to the “Covid-19” operation (Hughes, 2024a, Chap 6).

So it was that most of society was deceptively recruited into the Covid cult. As Hopkins (2020) explained,

You do not recognize that you are in it, because everything you see is part of it, and everyone you know is in it […] except for the others, who are not part of it. The “deniers.” The “deviants.” The “foreigners.” The “strangers.” The “Covidiots.” The “virus spreaders.”

Only the latter camp could see the Covid cult for what it was.

Ordinary people are susceptible to cult indoctrination without knowing it: “Cult members can live in their own apartments, have 9-to-5 jobs, be married with children, and still be unable to think for themselves and act independently” (Hassan, 2013, p. 34).

Correspondingly, in the “Covid-19” context, (Scott, 2020) observed that “People who cannot see the totalitarian moves made upon them are not ignorant or unintelligent; they have been initiated into a cult through the methods of initiation, chaos, confusion and the short circuiting of critical thinking.”

Conclusion

Cults in whatever form involve suppressing a person’s true identity and replacing it with a new identity — that of the cult member. This can work on a small scale, or on a massive scale, as the history of totalitarianism shows. Either way, the cult member loses their ability for independent thought and proper moral judgment.

During the “Covid-19” operation, the shock and awe effect of the “lockdowns” worked to break down personal identity. The new, cult identity was instigated through various means, such as mask wearing, which reduced the wearer to a faceless automaton behaving like (almost) everybody else. Face masks, moreover served as an outward marker of obedience and commitment to the cause.

Radical changes to the social environment meant that the public ended up performing a set of compliance rituals that demonstrated their allegiance to the Covid cult.

Cult indoctrination took place gradually, over the course of almost two years, beginning with small gestures and culminating with the expectation that loyalty be demonstrated by unnecessarily risking one’s own health through receiving an experimental substance into one’s own body.

As is true of all cults, those indoctrinated into the Covid cult had no idea they were in one. Through various forms of trickery and psychological manipulation, their sense of reality was altered. They had no idea that they had become part of something vast, dark, and destructive.

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