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Four things need to exist or need to be in place if you want a large scale mass phenomenon to emerge. The first thing is that there needs to be a lot of socially isolated people, people who experience a lack of social bonds. The second one is that there needs to be a lot of people who experience a lack of sense-making in life. And the third and the fourth conditions are that there needs to be a lot of free-floating anxiety and a lot of free-floating psychological discontent. So: meaning, anxiety, and discontent that is not connected to a specific representation. So it needs to be in the mind without the people being able to connect it to something. If you have these four things — lack of social bonds, lack of sense-making, free-floating anxiety, and free-floating psychological discontent — then society is highly at risk for the emergence of mass phenomenon.
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one." — Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.A psychosis can be defined as a detachment from reality, or the loss of an adaptive relationship to reality. In the place of facts and thoughts based in objective reality in the world, those afflicted by psychosis become overwhelmed by delusions — false beliefs that are believed to be true, in spite of the available evidence presented, even if witnessed first-hand by the eyes and ears of the psychotic.
At Theranos' height, Holmes had amassed a fortune of $4.5 billion on paper and was lionized as a visionary in glowing media coverage that included a famous cover story in Forbes magazine and a profile in the New Yorker.A recap:
Federal prosecutors argued that Holmes used this positive media coverage to lure the investors she is now convicted of defrauding.
Holmes' rise to power was abetted by glowing media coverage and bolstered by the reputations of the board of directors she assembled.
Theranos' board members were a who's who of political and military power players. Their numbers included former U.S. Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, former Navy admiral Gary Roughead, and former Defense Secretary and four-star general James Mattis, all of whom sang Holmes' praises before her fall from grace.
As Carreyrou explained in his book Bad Blood, these board members were "men with sterling, larger-than-life reputations who gave Theranos a stamp of legitimacy. The common denominator between all of them was that, like Shultz, they were fellows at [Stanford University's] Hoover Institution."
The vote of confidence and effusive praise from these men boosted Holmes' credibility with Fortune magazine writer Roger Parloff, who wrote the first major media profile of Holmes.
During the trial, federal prosecutors depicted Holmes as a charlatan obsessed with fame and fortune. Holmes, who took the witness stand in her own defense for seven days, cast herself as a visionary trailblazer in male-dominated Silicon Valley who was emotionally and sexually abused by her former lover and business partner, Sunny Balwani.
The fraud-friendly business ethos of Silicon Valley was also put on trial in the Holmes' case, which cast Theranos as emblematic of the "fake it 'til you make it" attitude that defined the rise of big tech companies like Google, Netflix, Facebook, and Apple. In fact, Holmes idolized Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to the point of imitating Jobs' trademark black turtle necks, as she did in her famous Fortune magazine cover image.
Comment: This phenomenon of manipulated social hysteria, has been described previously by Andrew Lobaczewski, in his landmark book, Political Ponerology.See also: