How to create mass psychosis

We are now living in an age of media-induced mass psychosis. While this condition really bloomed as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, it began long before and has been growing incrementally over time. Between the litigious nature of our society since at least the 1980s and the media constantly pushing fear for ratings since at least the 1970s, people have lost their minds.

Without significant time spent researching, I don't know that I can put these in original chronological order, but I may come close. Just think about all of the warnings we've had to add to products over the past couple of decades, warnings that prior would have fallen in the category of common sense:

    •    May be harmful or fatal if ingested (on household cleaning products)

    •    Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling contents can be harmful or fatal (found on many households products and products containing VOCs, like paint)

    •     To avoid danger of suffocation, keep this plastic bag away from babies and children. Do not use this bag in cribs, beds, carriage, or playpens. This bag is not a toy (on plastic bags, like those from dry cleaners)

    •    Drowning warning labels on buckets

    •    Caution: contents hot (on a cup of coffee)

I'm sure there are plenty of others. For a laugh, here's a page with some funny actual warning labels (including one to not eat your iPod shuffle): https://www.rd.com/list/funny-warning-labels/

Next we move on to the idea of things like "micro-aggressions" (which may really be the proper place to look for the inception of the current psychosis), which led to the creation of "safe spaces." This caught on in the media. Next we have the media and many in government telling us that boys can be girls and girls can be boys, and we shouldn't keep one out of the others' bathroom or activities.

Fast forward to 2020. The media focused so heavily on the COVID-19 numbers that they created an inordinate amount of fear in a large portion of the population. By comparison, if the media focused in the same way on flu numbers each year, based on the reaction to covid, people wouldn't leave their houses all winter each year. Around the time COVID-19 numbers were originally making headlines, the CDC had already estimated approximately 700,000 flu hospitalizations and close to 65,000 flu deaths, which is fairly common. Now throw masking at people as a protection (though REAL science says it's not) from this fearsome microbe, and people have reached a state of psychosis where, not only is their perception completely removed from reality, even showing people ACTUAL science cannot (easily) bring them back to reality. Rachel Maddow's statements last year when mask restrictions were being lifted appear to reflect the sentiment of a large portion of the U.S. population:

"I feel like I'm going to have to rewire myself so that when I see someone out in the world who's not wearing a mask, I don't instantly think, ‘You are a threat,’" Maddow said. "Or you are selfish or you are a Covid denier and you definitely haven't been vaccinated. I mean, we're going to have to rewire the way that we look at each other."

That is psychosis, and in large part, the media has been the root cause.