Vaccine Skeptics are the True Critical Thinkers
We Overcame the Most Sophisticated Forms of Manipulation
This post is the first in my future series, on how governments and shady non-governmental players psychologically manipulated us during the Covid-19 crisis. In this series, I will highlight various dirty tricks and explain why most people fell for them, one per post.
First, a little personal anecdote.
Richard Thaler is a brilliant behavioral economist, Nobel Prize winner, and a major contributor to the “Nudge Theory”, that provided impetus for the infamous UK “Nudge Unit”. His work on human decision making and cognitive biases was groundbreaking and, in part, helped governments worldwide to hypnotize most people into taking “Covid Vaccines”.
Richard Thaler, around 1999, also taught my favorite class “Decision Making”. He was my favorite professor at the University of Chicago, where I was an MBA student. He taught us a lot about ways that exist to hijack our decision making and how our adversaries use our subconscious biases to make us make wrong decisions — as well as how we can use these manipulations to our own advantage in business.
What I learned in that class was helpful throughout my entire life, affected many investment and business decisions, helped me convert prospects to paying customers, avoid several stockmarket crashes, and much more. This same decision making class possibly saved my life, because it made me able to recognize and resist Covid vaccine propaganda and manipulation. Prof. Thaler ended up on the wrong side of history, supporting Covid vaccine propaganda and the nudge units, but his teachings made me able to recognize manipulation, and resist it.
Thinking about that made me appreciative of people who never took any such class, often had no formal education, and yet they made the right choice instinctively. These people, many of whom are my readers, are worthy of admiration, if for no other reason than remarkable independence of thinking and a clear mind in a very confusing, dangerous, and rapidly shifting situation.
My future posts will go through various psychological manipulation concepts and how they were applied, by shady actors and co-opted governments, and how they affected each of us.
The Asch Experiment
“All experts agree that the vaccine is safe and effective. ”
That was enough to get most people vaccinated. Except that anyone could ask two questions:
How can I know that all experts agree, if those disagreeing are not allowed to speak up?
How can anyone know that “Covid vaccine” is safe and effective, if no time actually passed to ensure that?
Finally, someone with just a bit of knowledge could also ask a question, “are you sure that it is safe and effective, if no coronavirus vaccine ever worked, and no mRNA product was ever approved”?
The Asch Experiment, conducted by Solomon Asch, found out that most people, when seeing a “consensus” of participants agreeing on something that is fairly obviously false, actually ends up agreeing with those false opinions just because everyone else seems to think so.
The experiment was originally set up with eight persons, only one of whom was an experimental subject, and the rest were actors. These stooges, who the subject thought were other subjects, were all asked the same question, to which they gave an obviously wrong answer. The subject, who did not know he was the only real subject, was to speak up last.
It turned out that subjects of this experiment (it was repeated multiple times), seeing a consensus of seven smartly dressed men, would end up giving the same (obviously incorrect) answer as the stooges. This conformance experiment literally was a clever way to make people hold and express obviously false opinions.
This experiment was repeated many times, and in the most skillfully conducted experiments, they got 62.5% of subjects to agree with obvious nonsense at least once.
Oddly enough, vaccination rate in the US on Sep 1, right before federal vaccine mandates started, was 62.3%. Vaccination was running out of steam, just as Delta was showing that vaccines were not really “effective”.
It is at this time, on September 2, Richard Thaler concluded that “a nudge is not enough”.
Seeing a slowdown and a dip in confidence, vaccinators realized that they need to do more than mere manipulation with fake “expert opinion”. Vaccine mandates and hate propaganda supplanted “nudges” to drive vaccination forward. That will be discussed in other posts.
We literally lived through a worldwide Asch experiment. Every newspaper, TV station, every YouTube recommended video, kept telling us how the vaccine was “safe and effective” and how “all experts agree”. We were constantly force fed these “expert opinions” nonstop.
Enormous efforts were spent to silence “misinformation”. Why? Because Solomon Asch found out that any expression of disagreement — lack of consensus — immediately kills compliance:
Regarding mRNA “Covid vaccines”: anyone who would think for a minute, would realize that there was not a way to know for sure that vaccines were safe and effective, simply because not enough time has passed. Similarly, anyone could see that the masterminds behind the lockdowns and vaccinations, the billionaires behind the scenes, and the corrupt governments, all ensured that any dissent would be silenced. Thus, the purported consensus did not, in fact, exist at all.
The minority of people saw through that, decided accordingly, and refused vaccination. Who was that? You, my readers. What made you decide this? I am sure that there were just as many reasons as people here. The main factor is that you all took a few minutes to think about it critically. You were independently minded and decided to think for yourselves.
Was it your general distrust of the government?
Was is your deep knowledge of virology and molecular biology?
Was it your experience with wheeling and dealing, exposure to scams and knowing how con men operate?
Was it your ability to think independently without needing people to agree with you?
Even those who took the shots, and saw the light later, are critical thinkers. What is important is seeing the light — not necessarily the timing of when you saw the light.
To those who survived The Global Asch Experiment, congratulations. Please share what made you hold out, below — Why did you NOT get the shot?
P.S. Richard Thaler, a brilliant professor, author, and theoretician in the cognitive bias field, is not an evil mastermind of vaccination. He was merely one of many players, minutely related to me, and the author of concepts that played out in the pandemic. I do NOT want to create a wrong impression of my favorite college professor being someone like “Dr Evil of Covid-19”. He was not Dr Evil. But his theories are incredibly important to the story.
Vaccine Skeptics are the True Critical Thinkers
Your responses are incredible. They are literally coming faster than I can read them. I cannot read as fast as the rate at which they are arriving. I am overwhelmed. I will read all your replies over the next few weeks.
Sorry if you mentioned something important or missed some replies. I will try very hard to get to them. I always try to read all reply traffic for new articles.
I am also struck by how intelligent and well written the responses are.
I only read maybe 25% of comments so far, but I am struck by
- how different is everyone's thinking
- how substantial -- loaded with original thought -- the comments are
- How well spoken are most of the authors, instead of "yeah I beleeeeve science" they gave long, open ended, and well articulated accounts
Keep them coming please
Dear Igor Chudov,
Your insights - I'll characterize them as 'uneasy truth speech' - are both concerning and, well, helpfully true on a non-dogmatic level. What do I mean by that?
No figure like Richard Thaler graced my formal education (humanities); but one lecturer did question the proto-woke narratives rampant in the field at the time (Amsterdam, late 70's, still recovering from its faux reputation of 'magic center of the world' - meaning a cute, quaint, museumlike version of New York - or Vancouver perhaps, as far a drug use goes - where high-rises, believe it or not, where still a thing of the future).
My second, more informal education got serious in 2020 - which was true for many people: the one who approximated the idealtypical teacher during this was Mattias Desmet. His mass formation model described almost to the t the weird responses in (then) Facebook by those I thought I knew. Before he shed light on things, I had only my gut to go by. One cousin (before the first lockdown) said she hoped they'd hurry the vaccine, so that the threat would go away, in one fell swoop, worldwide. Upon hearing this, I cringed, without knowing why - or making a connection to tragedies like Thalidomite or AZT ('aids"), although I had lost friends to the latter. Instead, I made jokes about Guelphs & Gibellines (the Netherllandic version of that) to mock some authoritarian vibes I detected; while I'd never heard of the Venetian racket preceding 17th century imperialism or proto-globalism [exposed on outfits by Cynthia Chung & Matthew Ehret), the Papal Bulls & Royal Charters justifying a 'system of domination' ever since Cristobal Colón set foot on Turtle Island/the Americas (as researched by Steven Newcomb, Peter d'Erriico et al). and flitting this arena were beautiful messengers/angels like Tessa Lena, Reiner Fuellmich and people like James Corbett, Jeremiah Hosea, critics in the Dutch linguasphere.... the list goes on. As you highlight
While I still believe Mattias Desmet was on the money in re totalitarian tendencies - and ran in trouble with fellow warriors due to his intellectual modesty perhaps (which I also recognize, nutatis mutandis, in you, by the way. Desmet warned against 'counter group formation' within groups/people who do not trust shall the master narrative, mainstrain policies/media, the Papal bulls/edicts, or ways in which history (as well as 'the science') is being presented to us. However, I don't think this suffices to pinpoint the hidden mechanisms behind the divisiveness sown amongst our ranks. I see a trail of limbs strewn on the terrain of 'all things covid', all looking like the remains of an/THE elephant; but I never get to see the real (and proverbial) elephant in the room, the more so while its limbs & bodyparts seem far and wide, lots of gaps and too huge to be squeezed into the cubicles where conspiracy theorists, 'Putin Nazis', and other riffraff (thanks, CJ Hopkins) quibble and squabble. Virus or no virus; in response to you: new (artificial) covid outbreak or no; BRICS in cahoots or not in re Globalist agendas; vaccine rollout Eugenics 2.0 or 'merely' feudal/totalitarian technocracy? Was Geert VandenBossche right about the ratrace between new vaccines and new variants, or is Mike Yeadon right in saying the whole thing (and more: 15 minute cities,) is a pack of lies, meant to acare and enslave us, herd us into 'their' (rather nature-resistent) plantations where programmable coins (food stamps, rather) will be the only currency grated to the serfs.
I do not mean to go on a rant - although I did.
Why?
I am still pissed off by the hectoring tones to which my former friends (ironicists turned bully) have succumbed almost overnight. At once, the left (excepting 'the left' in true Trudeau-fascion) was no more. Not all of them display bullying behaviours, to be sure, but not one of those who kept silent ever apologized to us, or me.
Maybe some radiowaves infested with neural or silicone trickery carry the doctrine that apologies are, as the word indicates, too apologetic to be called anything other then 'fake news'? Repentance ditto, unless our forgiveness is a priori garanteed (the "Emily routine").
All the best, Igor. You post was amazing... I'lk return to my book-in-the-making, but will respond to anything you add if you feel so inclined. Hopefuly, this was in some mysterious way helpful to you Ciao, Pim