Collective Psychosis

On the topic of untenable belief systems, unsubstantiated conspiracies, intransigent disinformation and ideological absurdity – I was watching a lecture from Gresham College today in which psychosis was posited as the default mental state. If the default state of human mental life is in fact some kind of dissociative discontinuity and stochastic chaos, this might explain why so many people are so easily (and willingly) swept away upon tides of fallacy and disinformation. In this sense, the rising tides of fake news are not so much the arrival of some novel form of cognitive corruption as they are the atavistic throwback to a more primitive form of psychological experience. Food for thought.