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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.
Comment: OR, maybe the guards were a bit of an incentive to look the other way while Epstein "committed suicide"...
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