Breaking the Covid Trance: How the (Irish) people were psychologically manipulated (II)

We publish a full transcript of a seminal interview with John Anthony conducted by Dave Cullen of Computing Forever, uploaded on 1st October 2020.

Read the first part of the article

Engineering social pressure

Dave Cullen: I think that’s the social engineering. That’s the public shaming aspect of it, the disapproval of everybody else in the community. The rest of the community will disapprove if you do this! Oh, you shouldn’t do that! And part and parcel of the propaganda is that emotionality that’s imbued, and that people start to become evangelists once they believe in it. It’s like: when I was in the shopping centre, I was listening to the PA system, and every so often they would reinforce the messaging, and they’d say, ‘As per government guidance, the wearing of face covering is mandatory’, and so forth. And the HSE [Health Service Executive, the Irish state health service] says this, that and the other. And then they’d get into something that sounds right out of the Soviet Union – ‘We’re all in this together!’ – they’d say, ‘By wearing face coverings, you’re showing that you care abut other people!’.

Now, that is absolutely bananas, that the state would ever try to encourage this empathy among people. And the only reason they’re doing it is for the same reason as you’ve described there: Oh, it’s that we’re all trying to protect Nana! But it’s very interesting how the choice is taken away from people, not just through the enforcement of the collective, or the populace among each other, telling each other, you know, ‘Can you step away please, you’re too close to me!’ or ‘Why aren’t you wearing a face mask?’

We saw this in the beginning: before the lockdowns became mandatory, it was just a simple suggestion of ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’, and what we want you to do is just stay home if you can, and work from home if you can, and that’s that. And everywhere – in every country, at the same time – it was the same process I saw, which was, ‘Oh, let’s loom over a few people sitting in the park! And they’re not socially distancing!’, or ‘They’re not staying in their homes!’, ‘Those are the bad eggs! And they’re the reason why we have to now lock you all up!’

It’s the psychology of the teacher in the classroom who punishes the entire class because of the actions of one student. You know, ‘If one more person speaks now…’ Or, ‘If one more child does something, the rest of you are getting detention!’ And they did that in every single country, and it was like clockwork, and that always seemed to me to be the strategy all along, to achieve compliance.

John Anthony: Yes, I would agree with you wholeheartedly on all of that. But there’s a very precise and exacting way of doing this: if you study NLP, neurolinguistic programming, or if you have a look at hypnosis, at any level, or hypnotherapy, you look at the precise nature [of it], and there’s a great predictability about it. And what I would say is this. You can look at it from an individual point of view; you have relationships going on around the country, and you have people who are abusive, and you have victims, and all that kind of interaction. On a slightly larger scale, then you have family dynamics, and you can have narcissistic, abusive dynamics, in a family. Now, these are not psychiatric conditions. We’re not looking to label anybody here; we’re looking for finding words to describe a model. We’re searching to put a structure on this, or a little kind of map, so that people can begin to understand that there’s a very great preciseness about this, that there’s a predictability, a way of looking at this, and this has been known in psychology for quite some time.

There was a Professor Sam Vaknin, and he had compiled a tremendous database, but there are lots of [other] people. There’s another man called Ross Rosenberg, and he brought out a model, and he called it The Human Magnet Syndrome. And everybody is somewhere on the scale in this. On the extreme end of the scale, you’ve got psychopathy – very manipulative people, who are the rarer ones. And then you have narcissistic people, who are self-entitled, grandiose, and that kind of character. And they are manipulators, and you come down to a basic structure in their personalities and their behaviour that they’re looking for control, attention and manipulation. That would be qualities at one extreme end of the spectrum. And then you come to the centre, and you have most people in the centre, who are empathetic, who can have differences with people, who can be slightly manipulative at times. But these are ordinary people, who get on with life. They have a certain amount of empathy, they can say sorry to others, and behaving like that.

The narcissistic personality

Up at the extreme end, you don’t have that: you have people who are very much afraid of being blamed, who don’t take responsibility for themselves, who are grandiose and entitled in their behaviour. And what has happened – there was a Dr Ramani [Ramani Durvasula] who talks about this, and she says that sometimes this becomes endemic in society, and we start to praise, and to get a value system around, hard-nosed people who can ‘do the job and get on with it’.

A person who comes to mind is – we idealise people like – there was this guy [TV chef Gordon] Ramsay in Hell’s Kitchen, who’s this very rude person and he shouts at people, and he made his fame on this sort of thing. And he was a very good cook as well! I’m not debasing that, his skill. But do you see what I’m coming at: that there’s a value system that puts the value on the hard-nosed achiever who manipulates interactions for themselves, and you put them on a pedestal.

Narcissists help each other into power

Thomas Sheridan is another writer about psychopathy in particular. He wrote a book, many years ago now, called Strange Behaviours, and it’s about psychopathy. And he claims that people who have this psychopathic tendency, and on down the spectrum a bit towards the narcissistic tendency – and I’ll go into that a little more clearly, but just bear with me for the moment – that they become clustered, that in other words they find each other in positions of power, because that’s what they like: they like control, positions of power, positions of trust. And when you think back on the recent history of Ireland: you had the priests who were found to be paedophiles, you had the Tuam scandal, you had Brendan Smyth. You had people who were beyond reproach, and this was part of the problem.

I grew up myself in a staunchly Catholic family, and I know [that] my father, who is passed away now many years, had a great regard for the priests, and he didn’t like anybody saying anything about them. These people were looked up to: they were the moral theologians; they were the moral police, the moral advisers. So, people of this nature – the narcissistic, psychopathic, that kind of nature, began to cluster in these areas. Now that was only one area. They also do it in politics.

Thomas Sheridan, in his case, came across these people, and he was in the finance industry. And he said that you would often find these people as the CEOs of organisations, because they knew how to dole out instructions. They weren’t very empathetic, so they could cut people’s jobs, or fire them, or do whatever was necessary, and this was sort of looked up to, almost, as a way of life that you could aspire to, almost.

But as you come down the line, in the middle, most people have tendencies one side or the other, but that’s all they are: tendencies. We often have narcissistic bouts ourselves, where we feel we did something selfish.

And then you go down to the other end of the scale, and this is where it’s interesting now, because that’s what’s happening. At the other end of the scale, you have the compliant, the empathetic, the person who wants to please people. And these would be the people who – when they hear the authority speaking, telling them to ‘Wear your mask’ – they would be the people who say, ‘Look it, we’ll pull together and we’ll do it.’ Because these people have great empathy for each other, for other people, they want to solve the problem. They want to please the narcissist.

And this is where the dance begins: the group at one end, the compliant, empathetic, want to solve the problem think that if they do it right this time the person that they’re listening to, the authority – the NHS or the HSE, the health authorities – or the politicians, will be pleased, because these are the ones that are rolling out the instructions: to tell us to wear masks, to lock up our elderly people, to not have freedom of speech.

Now, that kind of dance between the two types of individuals has a very precise and predictable nature about it. And I’m talking here about people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder – it is not a psychiatric condition. Anybody can live like this, and do so well, and never do anything much out of the way. But if it becomes something that overtakes them, then they can do an awful lot of damage. And that’s where you hear phrases like ‘narcissistic abuse’: you often hear that in family dynamics.

D.C.: Well, John, you’ve described that very much on the macro level of what we’re seeing collectively, between the elites and what they’re doing to the general population. I feel it’s taking advantage of the better nature of most people. But, actually, if we’re looking at this as two people – a narcissist and their victim – in a household, domestic abuse, I feel very much what you described there is that the victim feels so trapped that they can’t do anything right.

And when we spoke a few days ago, I was saying that it reminds me of the battered wife who is in this relationship with a man who is constantly psychologically or physically abusive to her. One day, he could be very nice to her, and then the next day he could be very quiet, or a little bit distant, and then another day he might be shouting at her and another day he might be violent. And so she never knows what vector of assault he’s going to come at.

Stages of the abuse cycle

J.A.: Exactly. And what I would just interject here is that what you’ve describing is on the micro level. This is relationships between people. And it’s the very precise same roll-out that you get on the macro level as on the micro level. And I’ll just go into that now, if I may, and just describe exactly what you say.

On a relationship level, that’s exactly what you’re talking about. There’s a precise way that this occurs. The relationship is formed, and they say there’s four parts to it. It’s not a very complicated psychological aspect to understand. When you get to understand the model, it can be very simple. And when you see it being rolled out, then you begin to recognise it, once you know about it.

As you rightly say, it begins with two people having a relationship, a man and a wife. And the first part of the relationship is what’s called the lovebombing aspect, or the idealisation phase, or the identification phase, where they say, ‘Oh, you’re wonderful’, or, ‘Everything is terrific about you’, ‘We’re soulmates’, and words like that. Thomas Sheridan, in his book talks with some people who say there is this process whereby they emulate the other person. Very often, in the beginning, they will listen attentively to the other person – this is the narcissistic person, the abusive person, and what they’re doing is they’re gathering information from that person. Now, they do it intuitively, some of these people, they do it by default. Some of them can be very manipulative and do it deliberately. But a lot of the time, this happens because of the nature of the two personalities.

And everything is terrific in the lovebombing stage: the empathetic person feels they have found somebody that understands them, and listens to them, and the narcissistic person is listening to them and gathering information about this person, and begins to understand them and give sense to the information about them.

The second part of the process [kicks in] because the narcissistic person cannot maintain the persona. It’s a false persona that they produce: they’re massively insecure people, there’s no doubt about that; they need attention, and they need to get control, and they need this manipulation, in order to validate who they are. This is very important: ‘I feel alive!’ and ‘I feel loved!’, but any kind of questioning, or any kind of criticism, by joke, they take it very seriously. And they take what’s called ‘narcissistic insult’. Now, obviously, in any normal intimate relationship, that begins to break down, because of the fact that you’re dealing with a false personality to begin with. If they understand that you’re interested in literature, they will have a book under their arm and it’ll be something along the lines of what they heard you talking about, and they’ll say, ‘This is very interesting.’ So they’re ingratiating themselves with the other person.

Now, this is on the micro level. We’ll come to the political level in a minute, because it’s exactly the same.

Think of that for a moment – that kind of ingratiation, that kind of lovebombing – and think of the speech that Leo Varadkar made to the nation, and all the other speeches that other politicians made, when they were doling out the lovebombing of, ‘We are with you!’ This was the phrase that he used in his St Patrick’s Day speech, when he spoke about the ‘coming calamity’. And he said, ‘And it will come!’ He seemed to know stuff that nobody else seemed to know precisely. That’s on the macro level: you’re talking about society. That’s where you identify with people, and you begin to say, ‘We’re on together’, and ‘We’re all together in this.’

Again, I get back to the Ryan Tubridy Show: he was talking about looking in at Nana and Grandad and waving, and the children and they were all so happy – building this framework. And the compliant person fits themselves into their framework, and that’s the beginning of the second part of the process. On an individual level, it can be six months, or something like that. And again, because of the insecurity that they feel, they begin this process of denigration, the process of devaluing the partner that they have begun to target and control. And, because this person is compliant, he will begin to [devalue her] – we’re assuming here, by the way, that the target is a woman and the narcissist is a man, but it can be the other way around; we’re not being gender-biased here, we’re just taking examples.

So, he begins the denigration process, which is the control process, and he sees how it’s taking, he’s monitoring this all the time, and the abuse then begins to creep in. And, as you see, there are lots of films and there are lots of stuff in the soaps. You know, you often see this, where an abusive partner begins to take control – in the beginning, they’re buying them presents and things like that, and it’s never directly out in the open.

This is covert stuff, [when] they begin the denigration process and the devaluing, but at that stage the compliant person – the impact on the empathic person, who’s doing their best to keep it all together – they’re beginning to get addicted to the narcissist. This is where, at both ends of the scale the dance begins, then, and they begin to get addicted to the narcissist. Why? Because they say, ‘Well, he was so wonderful, and he did all sorts of things for me and he bought me this and that, and now it’s beginning to break down,’ but they will make excuses for them. They will become an apologist for the narcissist.

D.C.: Yes, John, it’s almost like the Stockholm Syndrome thing of identifying with your captor. You’ve just reminded me – I think you hit the nail on the head. In those opening months, there was so much trust: of the media, of the government, of Leo Varadkar, for example, in Ireland. It was a love affair, it was very passionate. It was all very lovey-dovey. It was a seduction process of, ‘We’re all in this together’, ‘We’re doing this to protect you’, and all this kind of language. They didn’t begin with the heavy-handed policing that we’re seeing in [the Australian state of] Victoria. They didn’t begin with the terror and the heavy-handed policing that we’re seeing now. That always has to come later. And it’s so difficult – because history is replete with examples of exactly what we’re describing – it’s so hard to tell people, ‘Look, this is always the same honey-trap situation, over and over again.’ This is always the same – the Venus fly trap, I should say – it’s always the same tactic over and over.

J.A.: Absolutely! And the hardest person to convince that they’re in this trap, from a therapeutic point of view, is when you get somebody in front of you and they’re making excuses for their partner and they have a black eye or … you know. I remember working with somebody once who had actually been beaten up and they made the excuse, ‘Do you know, I wasn’t so very good; I did this and I did that,’ and they were actually blaming themselves, right, and that’s what happens and that is so horrific to even hear, you know. But that is it: the honey[moon] period – you’re lured in and then you’re the soulmate and everything is fine, and then the denigration is covert and it’s also done in a way that it makes the empathic person, or the compliant person, feel that the other person is doing it for their good, right? So I can say to somebody: let’s say, if I was a narcissist and I was in this abusive cycle with somebody, I would begin to say, ‘Now, darling, you were never much good at that, really, you know, if the truth be told. But I can get you help with that.’ You know?

We will now support you by terrorising you

Now, that seems like as if I’m doing some good. It sounds like – now recall here what was done with the elderly in the beginning – ‘We’re doing it to keep you safe. Stay safe and it’s only a couple of weeks and we’ll get you through it.’ And some of the politicians came out and they said that these vehicles, all this extra security, right, and the Guards and soldiers – we’re having these vehicles… What were they for? Well they were to ‘support the community’, and they even suggested that the extra Garda vehicles were to, you know, to go to people who might be isolated, and bring them their medicines from the shop or whatever, because they couldn’t go out.

Now, that is totally right in the centre of this process that I’m talking about. It’s the very same aspect on an individual level. The abuser begins to put the person down. They begin to isolate them, right? This is a given, it’s a known sort of process, and it’s very predictable. They begin to isolate them from their family. That’s one of the signs. They isolate them from their society. So I could suggest, like, ‘We’ll go away somewhere and we’ll go to a different part of the country. And you won’t have to put up with those parents you have or those brothers and sisters you have. We’d be far better off on our own, and things will be idyllic when we get there.’

Let’s get you nicely cut off

When you do that, when you get there, this isolation begins then the abuse begins to get worse, because now they have you under more control. They have you isolated from your peers, from your family, from aspects like that. On the national level, that’s exactly what they’ve rolled out: the second phase was brought in; everybody was being told, ‘You can’t go out.’ Older people that we held in our esteem, and people that we loved, Nanas and Grandads and parents, you know. And one friend of mine mentioned, ‘I haven’t seen my mother in three weeks.’ This was kind of during the process, and he said, ‘It’s all this Corona stuff.’

And I said, ‘It’s not the corona stuff,’ quite openly to him. ‘I blame the lockdown. If you want to blame anything, blame the lockdown. That’s what it’s doing: it’s isolating people, it’s keeping them locked up. Forget about the Coronavirus just for the moment. That’s the first thing you [should] do, and then you take whatever precautions you think are necessary. But just weigh it up and blame it where belongs, you know?’

D.C.: Well, this is exactly what you said to me the other day, John: the government is coming out with this idea where – and it’s so childish – it’s this mindset of, ‘It’s not the government that’s keeping you locked up; it’s the virus’, or something to that effect.

Read the third part of the article