Closed-Loop Reality

How insulated belief systems sustain mass psychological certainty in defiance of evidence.

A few minutes ago, Glenn Beck was interviewing Buck Sexton about his new book, Manufacturing Delusion, which explores how propaganda and mind control tactics have been used throughout history to create compliant citizens. Buck mentioned Joost Merloo, a Dutch/American Doctor of Medicine and psychoanalyst, as a basis for some of his research. I discovered Meerloo a decade or so ago.

What follows is an update of something I wrote in 2021 about Merloo.

In Merloo’s 1961 book The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, he explained how mass delusions can be deliberately cultivated:

“If one can isolate the mass, allow no free thinking, no free exchange, no outside corrective, and can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and television, with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be instilled.”