The Pathologizing of Dissent

“The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.”- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German philosopher and experimental physicist (1742-1799)

It was probably sometime around 1964, during the earliest days of the Brezhnev regime, when Leonid Plyushch was first marked as politically questionable. Although a committed Marxist and staunch advocate of “socialism with a human face,” his letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (which proposed nothing more than lukewarm democratization of the Soviet system) was enough to earn the attentions of the KGB. The mathematician remained undeterred. Speaking out against the invasion of Czechoslovakia as well as the infamous “Trial of the Four,” Plyushch would find himself arrested and subsequently imprisoned, languishing in a cell for over a year before being diagnosed, in absentia and lacking the testimony of professionals, with “sluggish schizophrenia” – a wholly fictional condition used to silence voices the Kremlin deemed inconvenient.

The reader no doubt hears echoes of this tyranny today. Of course, it would be easy to decry The New York Times’ depiction of climate skeptics as unhinged delusionists or Ontario’s efforts to prescribe the unvaccinated psychotropic drugs and yet even these are but two chapters within an ongoing campaign to recast political unorthodoxy as a surefire symptom of psychological imbalance.

Weaponized Psychiatry

The latest iteration of such smear tactics began, at least in part, with the sudden profusion of “phobias” to emerge during the early waves of social justice hysteria. Needless to say, these were never intended as genuine descriptors. Instead, what they represented was an undisguised attempt to paint the perfectly reasonable fear of Islamic terror attacks and chameleonic sex predators as somehow rooted in primitive irrationality, a gaslighting which has only intensified with the recently rekindled accusation of “conspiracy theorist.”

First coined by the CIA in order to delegitimize suspicions surrounding the JFK assassination (suspicions since revealed to be entirely justified) the term is today employed by MSM propagandists as a means of watering down claims of election fraud, vaccine injuries, and America’s role in the Nord Stream pipeline bombing with rather more out-there assertions of a hollow earth and shape-shifting reptilian overlords. As such, publications including Psychology Today and Scientific American Mind have also weighed in on conspiracy theorists’ alleged insanity, their slander concealed behind peer-reviewed papers and intentionally obscurantist psychobabble. It might even be said that such hit pieces are most insidious of all, establishing as they do, the same justification for persecution the Soviets achieved with sluggish schizophrenia and yet, one need no more than scratch the surface to see that, practically without exception, their arguments rest on just five core contentions:

1. Conspiracy Theorists are Seduced by Confirmation Bias

It goes without saying that harboring a predisposition toward confirmation bias – a person’s tendency to seek out information supporting their preexisting beliefs while disregarding any which contradicts them – is in no way limited to any point along the political spectrum. Hell, just head over to Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter to see how leftist minds degenerate when confined to their digital echo chambers, however writing for Scientific American, Thea Buckley submits that:

“‘Confirmation bias is the most pervasive cognitive bias and a powerful driver of belief in conspiracies. We all have a natural inclination to give more weight to evidence that supports what we already believe and ignore evidence that contradicts our beliefs. The real-world events that often become the subject of conspiracy theories tend to be intrinsically complex and unclear. Early reports may contain errors, contradictions and ambiguities, and those wishing to find evidence of a cover-up will focus on such inconsistencies to bolster their claims.”

Why That’s Bullshit…

Naturally, while I cannot speak for everyone reading this article, it seems nonetheless fair to say that, back when the COVID Hoax began, most of us bought, to a greater or lesser extent, the fundamental lie of a deadly respiratory virus rampaging across the planet. Yes, there were inconsistencies right from the get-go. In hindsight, the videos “leaked” out of China appear almost laughable. Nevertheless, in that time of unprecedented uncertainty and wall-to-wall media fearmongering, scarcely a small sliver of society possessed either the capacity or the backbone to question the state-sanctioned hysterics.