The Madness of Crowds

“A year ago a gathering of this sort would have not only been unthinkable,

it would have been illegal. They’d have broken it up and gotten everyone tested.

But thanks to the vaccines, they no longer had to worry about the spread of a deadly virus.

They only had to worry about a riot.”

Louise Penny, The Madness of Crowds, 2021

In the movies hypnotized people awaken with a snap, but mass hypnosis won’t yield to fingersnappin’, heeltappin’ cues. Even the sound of distant thunder can’t alert a population gone under. Popular media induces deep sleep, even provides clues to planned sedations. Building blocks of hysteria. Cognitive Dissonance is an formiddable wall without foundations.

The process of medical hypnosis is ancient, utilizing shamanic abracadabra and priest voodoo. Modern mass communications sudses the soporific loading with brighter colors. The cure will need diverse truth tellers penetrating the mindwalls of the mesmerized to coax them around. Artists peer into the Zeitgeist to pull up Boxes left closed by the wary. Some hide secrets in crime and suspense fictions.

Louise Penny scatters clues in her latest novel about Homicide Inspector Gamache in post Covid Canada. Her Acknowledgment explains she started writing the book in March 2020, so her faith in vaccines was projection of a future without fear in this murder mystery set and solved in Three Pines, a cozy village off the beaten tracks of Greater Montreal.

Gamache reflects on the serial deaths in nursing homes he witnessed, but was unable to arrest or prosecute perpetrators. These are not the subject of this investigation though he files them away for future blackmail if needed to block eugenics mandates. Not vaccine mandates. It goes without saying that everyone’s jabbed, happy and healthy again, no mention of trucker convoys or sudden deaths.

Without giving away too many plot points, a statistician proving the only solution to strapped social spending is mass murder of the sick and damaged is either a suspect or intended victim. There’s a motley crew of likely suspects with motive and opportunity, huddled in town through a blizzard. It’s solved in the end. The essence of detective driven novels.

Postmodern crime fiction is a popular art along with suspense series where ignored information can enter the mainstream through the bathroom window. If the Smartest Cat can hear the long winter ice cracking from a Robert Reich tweet about Moderna profiteers, The Madness of Crowds signals a thawing of faith in medical and academic experts. Red pilling with candy coating.

The statistician (read epidemiologist) is accused of spreading “a plague of another sort, but just as deadly. [She’s] not just spreading death, she’s spreading despair.” Will these academic experts ever be held to account for their dire predictions about doomsday deaths? Probably not, Charles Krauthammer remains a trusted neo-Conadian pundit, while we’re still picking up roses in Iraq.

Penny notes that First, Do No Harm is not actually in the Hippocratic Oath medical doctors swear to uphold in not so secret ceremonies. Hippocrates wrote it in a “different text. On epidemics.” She quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupery from his 1943 children’s book, The Little Prince, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” twice.

The classic 1841 book by Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds contains a hidden clue. Henry Thoreau’s reply in his 1849 book On Civil Disobedience to Walt Emerson’s query on why he was inside the jailhouse, “What are you doing out there Walt?” haunts Gamache.

The plot twists around the human fallout from Canadian psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, variously president of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations. At Nuremberg, his diagnosis of amnesia helped Nazi Rudolf Hess slip the noose. Cameron’s decades long “psychic driving” experiments on human subjects at McGill University were funded by the CIA as part of their Project MK Ultra mind control experiments outsourced to academic experts.

The CIA “turned his findings into psychological torture methods they still use today.”, although they’ve undoubtedly refined them for zombie consumers. “The cerebrotronic machine applied the most effective and safest method for its inquiry, namely hypnotic interrogation.”

“Dr. Cameron was The God. The eminent head of psychiatry. They were beginning to understand how the mind worked. Not the brain, but the mind. He was helping the Free World against the Red Tide.” The Canadian government helped fund his research.

Cameron’s center operated in Ravenscrag, an “old stone mansion on the top of Mont Royal” in the center of Montreal. Monkeys were tortured along with humans. Another “Medical Ethics” dividing line dissolved.

Patients who consented to treatment for anxiety, insomnia or depression were subjected to “Mind Control. Brainwashing. He used LSD. Sleep deprivation. Electric shocks.” Loud Music, traumatic noise. Many were rendered unable to communicate, control bodily functions, memories erased.

All were severely traumatized, some becoming suicidal or catatonic in a month or three, then sent home with a bill. Two of his victims and their children play a role in the Three Pines investigation.

“What people do for power. How they’re willing to mutilate themselves physically, intellectually, morally for power and position. Some people would do just about anything to attain, then hold onto power. We’ve seen a lot of that in the last few years.” Gamache muses.

He recounts the case of Dr. Shipman in England, who killed more than 200 of his patients, but was only convicted for killing 15 years later. “He was a doctor, a respected member of the community, his explanations for the deaths were reasonable. The vast majority of those who died were elderly. It wasn’t worth the effort to investigate. Before we get all high and mighty, lets remember what happened her not long ago in the pandemic.”

Images of the nursing home dead are layered on this palimpsest of medical murders. “That experience in the pandemic would become part of their DNA. Part of every perception, every celebration, every moment. Every decision. For the rest of his life.”

post-modern fiction seldom has a hopeful ending, “She’s scared enough people into believing there won’t be enough resources to recover from the pandemic, never mind handle another. Unless the sick and elderly are allowed to die. Made to Die by lethal injection. Capital punishment [for] taking too long to die.”

Eskimos and Canadians floating their elderly and feeble minded out on the broken floes. Comforting to those on the shore until they realize they’re on thin ice too.