I did read the piece you link below, and I was struck by, and strongly agree with, the sentiment you express there.
"Why all of a sudden all billion people are supposed to think equally for all billion people is something that no one can explain with reason."
I suspect you have heard of Matthias Desmet, and his explanation of why people do this, as a mass formation. Several conditions prime people for this way of relating to each other, perhaps the most salient is an inchoate anxiety, and second to that feeling disconnected and unfulfilled. As much as 30% of the population prior to the corona panic were so disconnected they reported not having one significant social contact, and most of us are driven to such inchoate sense of anxiety by the endless beating of the drums by enemedia of bad news.
When that enemedia rang the alarms and called everyone to action against covid, a great many people found fulfillment in pointing to covid as the source of their fears and anxiety, and an almost religious duty to do as told to counter it. They felt this fulfillment even if the religious observations were ridiculous, such as cloth masks to prevent viral transmission, comparable to highway tunnels stopping motorcycle traffic.
These people feel strongly connected to society, rather than to one another, yet that solidarity with society gives them a feeling of oneness with each other when they see others performing the same religious ablutions, lining up for the prescribed jabs, regardless of any harm such holy flagellation could do them or their children.
Some have characterized this formation as a psychosis, and it can certainly produce seemingly psychotic acts of cruelty and barbarism, as I have observed previously, after 9/11, when ordinary people advocated torturing people suspected of terrorism, even torture and rape of the children of suspects, because the government ordered it to keep them safe from terrorism - that the government itself committed.
Let us hope we do not see such deranged and savage barbarity against dissidents in the holy war against covid. There has already been far too brutal dismissal of our bodily autonomy, and even approval of the concentration camps that have been deployed in Oz, for example.
Thanks!
No, I don't know Matthias Desmet, but I would agree that people look for and need a task that marks them as "good" because they care immensely what others think of them.
Where it is easy to make a good name for oneself because it is accepted by the majority that "there is good to be done there", people jump up, I think that is obvious.
My thought behind this is what a person "in reality thinks of themselves", what image they have of themselves. Starting from an inferior self-worth, I would think, it rises proportionally in that person what others think and talk about oneself. The less a person sees him/herself as valuable, the more important the external image becomes.
The fact that such became a mass phenomenon in such a short time was a cause of concern for me personally, while for those who joined the "save the people" mission it had been more of a confirmation that there was now something "really significant to do". I was suspicious of this actionism, it made me sceptical, while others saw the exact opposite.
Once I asked a friend who joined the phenomenon if she thought it was realistic that all people without exception would join the measures without any further argumentation? She said, "Hm. No, that's actually not realistic."
I basically made this the core of my conversations. It's not only unrealistic, it's downright utopian to think, or even to want to have "all people on earth united" (share the same notion). It's for me not salvation, it's horror.
Yes, let's hope, the opposing camps find each other in better conversations and live and let live circumstances.