How to Break Free of Fear Addiction by Dr. Joseph Mercola
- In his book “United States of Fear,” psychiatrist Mark McDonald diagnoses the U.S. as suffering from mass delusional psychosis, driven by an irrational fear of what is now a rather innocuous virus
- The fearful overreaction didn’t have its origin in what happened in 2020. Government, corporations and powerful individuals have engaged in a systematic “grooming” effort toward irrational fear addiction for decades
- Without fear, they cannot rob us of our freedoms
- The underlying motivation of this psychological campaign has been an attack on the core structures, foundations and institutions of society in order to nurture a sense of dependency on government
- To overcome their addiction to fear, a person must still have a sense of curiosity and be willing to look at new information. If they’re not, they’re not treatable and cannot be stopped from trading their (and our) freedom for a false sense of security. So, the key is finding those who are still open and receptive to new information, so that we can reach a tipping point where there are more fearless people than fear addicted ones
Dr. Mark McDonald is a psychiatrist in the Los Angeles, California, area. He’s written a book called “United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to Mass Delusional Psychosis,” which is the topic of today’s discussion. Around April 2020, McDonald actually made the brave decision to “fire” patients who refused to accept his stand on certain realities and truths.
“LA is a very politically-charged climate,” he says. “A lot of my patients, particularly those who would not identify as either conservative or even sincerely independent, tend to react in a very emotionally-charged way when they work with somebody who does not share their value system, and then it becomes difficult to work with them. I can’t help them …
I noticed that there was something bigger than just politics at play with the whole rise of the pandemic. About 10 to 20% of my patients, they either left abruptly without saying anything … or they argued with me. Some of them actually attacked me personally and condemned me.
A few threatened to report me to the medical board for saying such ‘horrible’ things as children should be able to breathe without a mask on their face. What I concluded after seeing the fallout from this is that those who left, those who attacked me, they really are no longer people that I can help, because really good therapeutic work, at least the work that I do, starts from a position of truth and reality.
Now, I’m not claiming to have the monopoly on truth or reality, but I certainly value it so highly that I’m not willing to sacrifice it for someone else’s emotional comfort or well-being in the moment …
The ones that stayed and those who’ve taken their places have all been far, far more committed to the work and to getting better, to healing themselves emotionally and psychologically, than any of the people that left.
So, I am in no way regretful of that decision. I think it’s made me a better clinician, a better practitioner. And most importantly, it’s enabled me to continue to speak clearly, publicly and honestly about what I think is a much more important problem than just shots and masks, which is the state of our country and how we are being controlled and manipulated by corrupt individuals and corporations.”
The Public Has Been Groomed to Fear
Fear is one of the most powerful motivators of behavior and, clearly, people’s behavior has been massively manipulated through the use of fear these past two years. The motivation behind the book was to provide a retrospective analysis and explanation for how it all happened.
“The wool wasn’t pulled over our eyes on March 15 [2020],” McDonald says. “What I suspected, uncovered and explained in the first third of the book is that this process actually began a long time before that.
What we’ve had, and have been suffering from, is a slow grooming effort by government, by corporations, by wealthy, powerful individuals for a number of decades … I even go back to post-World War II in my book with a very specific example for those who were growing up during those times, of the duck-and-cover exercises to protect against nuclear holocaust.
Obviously, hiding under your desk is not going to protect you from a nuclear bomb. And yet, we were all told to do this … This practice, in my view, instilled in children a sense of fear, a sense of vulnerability and a reliance on a higher power — not God, but a higher human power, usually an authoritarian power, the power of schools or officials to protect you from this very unspecified, vague … threat.”
The fearmongering about climate change and ecosystem collapse also falls under this “grooming.” “I’m not going to say the existence of pollution is not real,” he says. “However, to say that the world will end in 12 years … is not truthful.” The goal is to change people’s behavior, to instill a sense of compliance, so that resources can be reallocated.
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“So, at the outset of the book, my goal is to explain: ‘How did we get to be so afraid?’ How did we get to be so capable of being fear-struck so quickly by something that very early on was clearly not a significant threat to most Americans?
Even to those for whom it was a threat … there have been very helpful, successful, cheap, effective treatments that essentially cured nearly 100% of the people who were struck by this virus. So why [the fear]?
In explaining the how and the why of how we got to this point, my hope has been that people who are perhaps not entirely brainwashed, but those who are just somewhat confused, somewhat perplexed, not entirely clear-thinking but certainly want to be, will see their thoughts organized so that they can then move to the more important step, which is what do we do about it?”
Addicted to Fear
One likely reason why outright nonsensical countermeasures have been embraced is because fear paralyzes rational thinking. People who are terrified of dying from COVID cannot comprehend how ridiculous masking is because they cannot reason their way through the problem logically. What’s more, they don’t want to. As explained by McDonald, they’re not curious at all.
“This is my little diagnostic technique: Does the person express curiosity to know something different than what he or she knows right now? If the answer is no, I don’t even go further with that person in conversation. It’s absolutely pointless …
Ambivalence is another word that we use in motivational interviewing. We assess for ambivalence. Is the person trying to hold two different, opposing positions at the same time? Because that leads to a resolution. If there’s no ambivalence at all and there’s no curiosity, I don’t really know where you start. So, I’ll ask, ‘What is it that you understand right now about what’s happening?’
If I sense some ambivalence, if I sense some lack of confidence, then I’ll ask a follow-up question. I’ll say, ‘Are you curious? Are you interested in learning about some other information or some other viewpoints that you might not be aware of right now?’
And often, if I’ve got to that point, the person will say tentatively, ‘Yeah, maybe.’ If I get, on the other hand, ‘Absolutely not,’ or more of a condemnation, ‘What do you mean? Are you one of those anti-vaxxer hoaxers?’ Then I know I’m probably not going to really proceed very successfully, so I let up. I back off … If someone’s addicted to fear, I just wait and see if they’re open and willing and ready to lose their addiction.”
In short, unless a person is open to new information, it doesn’t matter how many peer-reviewed studies you throw before them. Facts and data don’t matter if they don’t have curiosity or this ambivalence. As explained by McDonald, this is not a data war. We won that a long time ago. It’s a psychological war, and it really needs to be thought of that way.
“You always have to keep in mind that information and data is only as useful as the psychological state of the recipient,” he says. You could actually worsen the situation if they’re not open and receptive.
