Since I was very young, I noticed a minority of people “got it” and could see through the current lie everyone else was falling for. Being like this can be incredibly isolating, so I tried to seek these people out and connect them. As time went forward, the question we all asked was, “What makes certain people be awake?”

Note: “Awake” was the best word we could ever find to describe this characteristic. This is somewhat frustrating because it is still not the correct word and because “awake” is also used by countless spiritual groups to gratify the participants and nothing more.

From looking into this question, we concluded depending on how strict the criteria you used, between 1-10% of the population was “awake.”

Interestingly, a market research study found 10% of the population was self-directed (meaning to sell them things, you had to justify the product on its merits), while 90% were not and bought products based on being repeatedly told to buy them. I was shown this study years ago, and I believe MIT or Harvard conducted it, but I could never find it.

Similarly, some meditation schools do not promote themselves (hence why few know of these faiths). This is because those schools felt that only the previously mentioned 10% had the necessary self-direction to complete their practices, and it was unlikely they would be among those who were persuaded into joining the faith rather than having sought it out of their own accord.

When I discussed this topic with Pierre Kory, he told me that his experience has been that, at most, only 10% of doctors were capable of non-algorithmic thinking and real problem-solving — which became quite challenging for him because his job was to train the next generation of ICU doctors.

Similarly, he found when he ordered consults, around 90% of specialists (irrespective of the specialty) would repeat a standardized algorithm back to him for the patients he had already seen more times than he could count. Conversely, only 10% could actually think about the case and provide valuable insights that assisted Kory in developing a treatment plan for a challenging patient.

As the previous example illustrates, when exploring this question, we often found being awake did not correlate with intelligence; many extremely intelligent but unawake people who often “just don’t get it” roam the earth.

Conversely, there are many remarkably perceptive individuals that could not succeed whatsoever within the conventional academic paradigm. Sadly, our educational system, which we trust with developing the young minds that can advance our society into the future, rather than addressing this trend, has increasingly discouraged critical thinking and replaced it with algorithmic thought and blind deference to authority.

This, amongst other things, has been reflected in a progressively declining quality of applicants to medical schools and the residency training that follows medical school.

In college, I attempted to prove to one friend that awake people were not as rare as they thought, and afterward, I shared my “successes” with my friend and was told, “Those people aren’t awake; you just replaced their programming with something a bit closer to the truth.” That stuck with me. I then began to notice this issue all around me.

For example, I would see many groups dedicated to an (often alternative) cause and realize that many members had adopted the group either because they wanted to conform to their peers or to look good to the world around them. Because of this, those members will typically abandon the principles the group stands for once the group no longer benefitted them.

Another way to put it is that people often say they sincerely care about things, but when you break it down, there is no integrity or substance behind those words.

This is a common critique of some of the newer spiritual movements and many aspects of the holistic health field (e.g., many of the health influencers you see on Instagram). However, this same issue also applies in a lot of other areas, many of which are encapsulated by this meme recently shared by Elon Musk.

Consider these examples:

Mattias Desmet and Mass Formation

One of the best explanations I have seen to explain the disaster we watched unfold over the last few years what Mattias Desmet’s mass formation hypothesis, which essentially describes how, under the right conditions, a collective crowd consciousness can form that approximately 95% of the population complies with.

I expressly endorse Desmet’s theory because he touches upon many aspects of totalitarian states that are very difficult for those who did not witness them firsthand to appreciate. Furthermore, much of what Desmet describes cuts to the core of so many issues in society that are imperative for us to address as soon as possible, and his perspectives, detailed later in the interview, match much of the life philosophy that many awake individuals I know all independently arrived at.

Half a year ago, Desmet sat down with Tucker Carlson and gave one of the best interviews I have seen in my lifetime, where he explained his hypothesis. I recently rewatched that interview as part of an intervention for someone struggling to leave a cult.

I did this after I realized almost all of Desmet’s points also applied to the victim’s experience, and it ended up being one of the key things that got through to that individual (I share that to highlight how broad the applicability of the interview was).

I would specifically like to share one quotation from this interview that I believed heavily influenced Tucker Carlson’s final speech:

“Tucker: This is one of the most amazing conversations I’ve ever had. And I’m so grateful that you’re here. I feel like you’re speaking directly to our country. What is the difference between the people who go along, which is the majority, it sounds like, and the smaller percentage who decide, “No, I’m going to say what I believe is true no matter what.” What makes people decide to take one path or the other? And can you predict it ahead of time?

Desmet: No, you can’t. From the 19th century onwards, from the moment the psychologists have been studying the phenomenon of mass formation, it has been remarked and observed time and time again that every time a mass emerges in a society, there is a small group who doesn’t go along with it.

But the small group is extremely diverse and heterogeneous and nobody seems to know what connects these people, which characteristic these people share, but in one way or another, they all make this fundamental decision, a decision that cannot be reduced to anything else.

They make this decision to choose for truth speech instead of choosing the easy way and going along with the narrative for everybody believes in, but which of which everybody actually knows that it is utterly absurd and unethical.”

Tucker Carlson’s Final Speech

Tucker Carlson was abruptly fired from Fox News shortly after he aired a segment criticizing the media’s crimes against the American people with the COVID-19 vaccines and its complicity with the War in Ukraine.

After his last broadcast, immediately before his unexpected firing, he gave an address at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary, within which he touched on a question many of us have asked since COVID-19 began.

“I would say two things that I think we’re thinking about. The first is, you look around, and you see so many people break under the strain, under the downward pressure of whatever this is that we’re going through.

And you look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, you see them going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs.

If there’s a single person in this room who hasn’t seen that through George Floyd and COVID and the Ukraine War, raise your hand. Oh, nobody? Right. You all know what I’m talking about.

The herd Instinct is very strong impulse. And you’re so disappointed in people. You are. And you realize that the herd instinct is maybe the strongest instinct. I mean, it may be stronger than the hunger and sex instincts, actually. The instinct, which again, is inherent to be like everybody else and not to be cast out of the group, not to be shunned.

That’s a very strong impulse in all of us from birth. And it takes over, unfortunately, in moments like this, and it’s harnessed, in fact, by bad people in moments like this to produce uniformity. And you see people going along with this, and you lose respect for them. And that’s certainly happened to me at scale over the past three years.

I’m not mad at people; I’m just sad. I’m disappointed. How could you go along with this? You know it’s not true, but you’re saying it anyway. Because I’m paid to predict things, I try and think a lot about what connects certain outcomes that I should have seen before they occurred.

And in this case, there is no thread that I can find that connects all of the people who’ve popped up in my life to be that lone, brave person in the crowd who says, “No, thank you.”

You could not have known who these people are. They don’t fit a common profile. Some are people like me. Some of them don’t look like me at all. Some of them are people I despised on political grounds just a few years ago.”

Tucker’s words echo a speech from Peter Gøtzsche, a remarkable physician who has dedicated his career to be one of the leading voices speaking out against the crimes of the pharmaceutical industry. In this talk, Gøtzsche describes what he believes drives a minority of the population to break from the herd and take on a great deal of risk to do the right thing:

Note: A common critique Tucker Carlson received was that he would not cover controversial subjects his audience wanted him to cover and, therefore, could not be trusted. My own read was that he was engaging in a delicate balancing act of saying the most he could without losing the ability to continue having an impact. This is a situation almost every awake individual repeatedly finds themselves in, regardless of the industry (e.g., I regularly see it throughout medicine).

Interestingly, Tucker recently admitted this was the case when he announced his plans for an uncensored production on Twitter — as did RFK Jr., who shared that his friend, the CEO of Fox News, very much wanted to air content discussing vaccine safety but could not due to 70% of the network’s revenue coming from pharmaceutical advertising (something only the United States and New Zealand allow).

As I have learned more about those who spoke out against COVID-19, I’ve realized, despite being in different fields and holding different values, the fundamental ways we all think are very similar, and I believe I would have followed a similar path to many of them had I entered their profession instead of medicine.

Similarly, while many caved to the COVID-19 (and vaccine) narrative, none of my mentors ever did. Many of them, in fact, are lifelong liberals who are in complete disbelief at what their party and peers now support (e.g., the current war policy). Because of this, what they had in common may be able to provide some valuable answers to what made some stand up over the last few years.

My Mentors

I have been fortunate to have been mentored by a few remarkably talented physicians. In turn, I have often wondered what set them apart from their peers, and in all instances, I found the following to be true:

They were “awake” individuals (which is also why they were willing to open up to me).

They did not rely on social proof to make decisions (I suspect this tendency increases with age, as that was my experience).

They tried to remain invisible and not publicly promote themselves (e.g., most of them still do not have websites).

They were very perceptive and frequently utilized this capacity in conjunction with their intuition and vast medical knowledge to practice medicine.

They had a spiritual faith (most commonly Christianity) they held a deep conviction in following.

They had a deep commitment to morality.

Note: Morality is another subject that I believe essentially boils down to those who follow it because they want to be moral versus those who follow it for convenience. The former are willing to suffer to do what they feel is right and put a lot of thought into the proper ways to handle difficult situations.

The latter are typically looking for ways to manipulate the existing rules of ethics to get what they want. This is a major problem in medicine, and I recently shared a court case against a doctor who forcefully vaccinated two teenagers that illustrates many of the shortcomings in the current model of medical ethics.

Dr. James Miller

A reader I’ve corresponded with for the last year reached out to me to share what happened to him, and since I felt people needed to hear, I offered to publish it. Dr. Miller has a powerful story, and the primary purpose of the rest of this article is to provide the context to further appreciate the importance of what he is sharing.

Dr. Miller’s story went viral and aired on Fox News for the whole country to see a few days later. There Dr. Miller did a remarkable job articulating its key points in the 5 minutes that were allotted to him:

Shortly after, he gave a longer interview on the Alison Morrow show, which filled in many of the other key details within his story:

Dr. Miller worked as a trauma surgeon (something very difficult to do, which requires a significantly larger investment than the typical path doctors follow to enter practice). During COVID-19, he saw that everyone, including colleagues he’d trusted for years, had lost their minds and were following a COVID-19 narrative that was at odds with reality.

Once the vaccines entered the market, he saw discrimination begin against the unvaccinated, which went against every principle of medical ethics he had been taught and had never seen throughout his career.

Eventually, he got fed up with the cruelty he was seeing and decided to start a free clinic because many of the unvaccinated patients abandoned by the medical system were suffering greatly and sometimes dying. Because he did this, he was retaliated against and eventually had to flee the state so he would not permanently lose his medical license. Three things stand out about Dr. Miller’s story.

• The personality traits that drove him to do what he did are very similar to those I have observed in many of my mentors listed in the previous section. So, if you want to get an appreciation for them, Dr. Miller’s interviews are the best examples I can provide.
• Dr. Miller provides an excellent example of what we all expect from physicians and what we, as the public, should encourage them to be.
• Dr. Miller’s experiences help to explain what drove physicians to not conform to the COVID-19 and vaccine narrative. I will also note that friends of other (now famous) doctors who have stood against the vaccines have told me that those doctors shared many of the same motivations Dr. Miller did.

In every era, remarkable individuals appear who can see what no one before them saw. They then create a variety of innovations from their observations that significantly advance humanity and have the internal strength to bring their message to the world regardless of the persecution they receive for doing so.

I believe these individuals represent the awake individuals found within the strictest cut-off for the definition and that their nature is a quality some people are born with that is entirely independent of how they were raised.

The best metaphor I have seen for this is how individuals deal with trauma. Most people who have traumatic childhoods are scarred by that experience for life (e.g., even the CDC acknowledges the severe and lifelong impacts of childhood trauma).

Yet, every once in a while, I meet someone who had a truly horrific childhood, that without any outside help, somehow has gotten completely past what happened to them and is a remarkably compassionate individual who accomplishes a great deal during their lifetime. In cases like these, I can only interpret that capacity as being something the individual was born with.

Note: Since trauma tragically is such a common issue, I attempted to compile my thoughts on the subject and approaches I have found helpful for dealing with it here.

Psychological Fulcrums

Over the last month I’ve worked on this article, I kept coming back to the same question — what causes some people to resist a mass formation? Saying someone is “awake” describes a commonly shared characteristic but still is a cop-out — saying someone was intrinsically resistant to falling for the narrative doesn’t explain why they didn’t fall for it. Today one of the answers finally came to me.

When I was in middle school and high school, I noticed many of the things people found meaning in life from were ultimately just them experiencing brief highs from dopamine rushes inside their brains. While that rush is classically associated with things like cocaine, it also holds for attaining any expectation one has held, and since our entire marketing system is built around fulfilling expectations, this comes up a lot.

In my case, once an expectation was fulfilled, I never experienced those rushes. Because of this, more and more, I only saw the whole process as a series of brief highs that would fade away and have nothing of substance behind them. Since I lacked the “high” to make life seem real and meaningful, it forced me to do a lot of thinking about what type of life purpose and focus I could pursue that would feel real and meaningful — which was very difficult.

Note: The above image shows a 2-dimensional fulcrum. The concept I am aiming to illustrate is in 3+ dimensions, but I am using this image because the concept is difficult to show in higher dimensions.

A fulcrum in this context is defined as the point which supports a system and the system organized around. One of my realizations in my early search for meaning and purpose in life was that almost every person’s mind had to have a “fulcrum” to support it, and if a fulcrum was not present, the mind could not function. Because of this, if people had the choice between a bad fulcrum or no fulcrum, they would always choose the bad psychological fulcrum.

Note: The filters that frame each person’s perception of reality are often determined by their pre-existing psychological fulcrum.

The thing that initially clued me into this was a few discussions with peers where I sought to understand why they so fanatically clung to dysfunctional ideologies, and in each case, I heard the same story:

“I was in a very bad place in life where I felt hopeless and as though my life had no meaning, then I was introduced to [the adopted ideology] by a very charismatic and intelligent individual who proved* to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that [the ideology] was true.

I became overjoyed there as finally a purpose and meaning to my life, and ever since then I’ve dedicated myself to promoting this ideology.”

*in each case I looked at, the “proof” was very questionable.

From these events, I realized the individual lacking an existing psychological fulcrum while simultaneously being unwilling to do the difficult work to develop their own made them extremely vulnerable to adopting whatever psychological fulcrum was forced upon them. This brings me to one of my all time favorite quotes (which has many variations and authors it has been attributed to):

“If you don’t stand for something, you fall for anything.”

Each of the well-known COVID dissidents I had gotten to know, beyond being an “awake” individual, as James Miller demonstrated in his interviews, also had, for one reason or another, a strongly developed psychological fulcrum before the pandemic began.

This lies in contrast to much of the population, who, instead of following a clear purpose they chose for themselves, move through life in a walking daze and adopt whatever (often corporate-sponsored) psychological fulcrum society forces upon them.

As the years have gone by, this has become a larger and larger issue because each of the anchors which previously gave us purpose and meaning (a strong community, a traditional family, a faith, regularly being outside, etc.) have been systematically dismantled so individuals desperate for a psychological fulcrum will readily adopt the one fed to them.

This is especially a problem in medicine — the conditioning we undergo to adopt the allopathic ideology as our identity is difficult for anyone who has not experienced it firsthand to appreciate — and I believe this is a key reason so few doctors questioned the narrative.

Closing One’s Mind

In a recent article, I discussed my perspectives on developing a healthy relationship with one’s emotions and which of the many treatments out there actually improve mental health. In the article, I argued that our culture’s critical mistake is the widespread tendency to intellectualize or constrict our emotions rather than choosing to accept and experience them.

That contraction prevents the emotion from being able to exit one’s body. Instead, the emotion is patterned into the body and, eventually, one’s unconscious mind, where it exerts a profound but invisible influence over their life. In many cases, those individuals will move through life in the same disconnected walking daze observed in individuals who lack their own psychological fulcrum and likewise easily fall prey to malicious external influences.

Trapped emotions cause many other issues, too, such as significantly worsening one’s moment-by-moment experience of life, compelling people to make self-sabotaging decisions their rational mind would never support, and disconnecting the individual from experiencing life. For all of these reasons, oppressive governments seeking to control the public always encourage this emotional suppression.

At the same time, wise individuals throughout the ages have continually reechoed the refrain that their fellow human beings needed to stop closing down their hearts.

The most common reasons why we habitually contract our emotions are the discomfort of experiencing the emotion (especially if it is painful) and the strain our awareness (particularly within the heart) is placed under when its reality is expanded to something outside of its familiar comfort zone.

For example, consider the psychological impact of having to both accept everything you thought you knew for over a decade was wrong and no longer knowing where to go or what to trust. Because of the difficulty in doing that, many will instead choose to follow the crowd and adopt its psychological fulcrum instead of taking on the responsibility of developing and maintaining their own.

In the same manner we contract the feelings within our hearts, as the previous example shows, we also contract the thoughts within our minds. In my own experience, I’ve found that while many crave the comfort of contracted thoughts and emotions, awake individuals typically do the opposite — although, in many cases, that unwillingness to contract exists only in one of the two but not the other.

If we again circle back to Dr. Miller’s story, it should be clear that he had developed a psychological fulcrum that was independent of his identity as an M.D. and that he had a mind that was not willing to contract or allow him to close his eyes to what he saw going on before him.

Note: His mental resistance to contraction is likely what drove him to create a strong psychological fulcrum in the first place. Conversely, many of his peers did share this trait, and even though they knew what they were participating in was wrong (either on a conscious or subconscious level), they still went along with it and, in many cases, embraced the mass formation being fed to them.

One of Desmet’s most important observations about mass formations is that their dissolution depends if enough awake individuals who resist the narrative are also willing to speak out against it. This cuts to the core of why stories like Dr. Miller’s are so important to share, as by inspiring others to do the same, they go a long way to creating the population-wide immunity we need to prevent future mass formations from occurring.

Furthermore, Desmet highlighted what is possibly the most important part of this story. Throughout history, in the most challenging situations, where almost everyone is pulled into a mass formation and committing abhorrent actions that create deep conflicts within hearts and minds, something very interesting happens to those who nonetheless take the risk to speak out with the truth.

They are filled with a strength they cannot explain that allows them to persevere through the darkest situations imaginable, and beyond Desmet’s claim, this occurs, I have also witnessed it in many, including some of the well-known figures in this movement.

I believe this observation is because much of our internal strength depends upon having a lack of internal contractions, which in turn requires you to be free of internal conflict by following the path you know in your heart to be right (which is also something spiritual systems throughout the ages have realized). Remember:

“If you don’t stand for something, you fall for anything.”

Conclusion

I believe that many of the problems we face now are due to a crisis of consciousness that allows people to be easily misled and a widespread loss of faith that has removed the anchors that could be relied upon to keep us from drifting astray.

In recent articles, I’ve tried to present solutions for a few of the common issues I’ve observed that hinder our ability to see what is in front of us, come together and then effectively work against the darkness that has entered our world. In addition to those mentioned previously in this article, those have included:

• Letting go of your need to be right and covet information or truths that make one feel superior to their peers. Beyond creating division between people who should be supporting each other, this coveting blinds you from being able to see what is directly in front of you.
• Tolerating ambiguity and accepting that until you fully understand something (which can border on impossible), there will always be contradictions with what you “know.”
• Recognizing how we selectively edit out much of the world around us, especially when we are confronted with an excessive amount of information — something which characterizes the modern age. Many of the things we need to see around us are only visible to those who can operate without these filters.

Throughout my time observing awake individuals, I’ve noticed many traits, are consistently seen within their minds, and as best as I could I tried to list them throughout this article.

Although some of these capacities are challenging to develop, I believe much in the same way we can restore the critical anchors of life (e.g., following a faith, having genuine human connections, being connected to your body rather than an electronic screen), many of them can also be developed if it is clear what is being aimed for and our priority is to promote the greatest good.

A Note From Dr. Mercola About the Author

A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician in the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate his exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and I’m grateful to share them. I also respect his desire to remain anonymous as he is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/06/01/what-made-doctors-do-right-thing-during-covid.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art2HL&cid=20230601&cid=DM1409366&bid=1816259191