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.
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?
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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.
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Apr 19·edited May 2Pinned
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
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Writes Steve Kirsch’s newsletterApr 18Liked by Igor Chudov
Brilliant article. This is why Twitter had to ban me (twice). I actually got sucked into the narrative, but when my friends got injured, the math didn’t make any sense since those injuries would have been statistically unlikely. So my friends’ injuries was what got me to realize that “hey, this story they told us was a lie.”
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