Now in Spain the mask is no longer mandatory in most indoor places, and yet there´s a very interesting phenomenon that has been yesterday referred to in some press articles as the “syndrome of the empty face”… It consists essentially in the persistence of people of all ages to still wear the mask, even when being aware that it´s no longer mandatory.
The reasons presented in such press articles for explaining this phenomenon seem to me extremely inconclusive, since they´re mostly based on psychological assessments that merely scratch the surface of the problem. As I often demonstrate in my books, human psychology constitutes an extremely thin layer of human consciousness, and is unable by itself to determine its dynamics. Rather, it’s the other way around… The psychological perspective outlined in these press articles allows us to realize that the problem is connected to individual anxiety and fear, which then “stiffens the phobia”, but the real issue here is to explain the root of such anxiety and fear, and this is something where all the psychological interpretations presented in the press articles slipup, clearly exposing the limits of practically all psychological understandings of human consciousness that emerged in Western culture during the 20th century.
Little do these psychologists realize that propaganda acts very superficially on the human psyche and acts much more deeply in reinforcing specific behavior patterns… Propaganda doesn´t modify “what you think” but your attitude under stress… If you take a close look at those people you know who suffer from this phobia today, you´ll realize that they were constantly justifying the use of masks because of the “risks of contagion”, the “existence of a lethal virus”, “the risks of a global pandemic”, and all the other many fear-mongering narratives presented by mainstream media since 2020. What´s more, such justification provided them an “ego boost” of social morality and civil concern... However, it´s never the act itself but the justification of the action, and all justification rooted in fear is like a spiritual “surrendering” and has a powerful effect on conscience… (look at Nietzsche´s “Pale Criminal” in his Zarathustra to sense a clear understanding of this process…) At the end, our conscience is a prisoner of our behavior and words... In the same line of thought, film director Godfrey Reggio –who I´ll have soon the pleasure to interview- wisely affirms: “Our behavior determines the contents of our minds”. Hence the individuals who surrendered to the unprecedented power of mainstream propaganda were not talking by themselves; fear was talking through them and they allowed such demonic intruder to stay inside their conscience, probably for the rest of their lives. Recall that no matter how much you demonstrated these individuals (with less than 1 in 500.000.000 chances of such demonstration being mathematically wrong…) that the nature of the recent health crisis had nothing to do with the existence of a “deadly virus”, they would never listen to you and claim that you have “no authority”. What´s more, they would reinforce the stubbornness of their state of mind by taking the 1st jab, 2nd jab, 3rd jab, and if this obsessive reaction to the propaganda wasn´t enough for them, they would still refer to such inoculations of nanotechnology as “vaccines”.
Just like in our handwriting, also associated to our speech is the gestures of our face; this gesture expresses in many diverse nuances the authenticity of our words. Not only can lie detectors excellently capture the deep physiological dynamics that determine such subtle motions in gesture- therefore detecting the gap between human thought and action- but also our own human perception can make us intuit with high certainty if someone is being honest to us or not, if someone is dominated by guilt or not, if someone´s background of actions doesn´t match their words… Deep down, under all the “ego boosts” and the constant repeating of all mainstream justifications, those affected by this new syndrome unfortunately accumulated for about 2 years a profound feel of guilt. According to the very recent data available, this phobia occurs in adults, but mostly in teenagers, and even in children who wore masks because such action was recompensed emotionally by their parents. As long as such kids need such parental emotional reassurance, they´ll not take it off.
But it´s not too outlandish to affirm that, during the last 2 years, society at large has demonstrated to be extremely infantile (Remember the toilet-paper hysterias?..) and now many adults are inevitably ashamed of it, ashamed of a guilt that needs to be hidden in order to function in society. In Spanish there´s an expression, “taparse las vergüenzas”, that apparently has no equivalent expression in English and means “to cover one´s shame”. And what better than a mask for covering this shame?...
However, it´s not that this global experiment on social control (so-called “pandemic”) caused this psychological damage… The damage was already there, already present in the values embraced by modern society during the last decades. As in all experiment, the only effect of this experiment was to make visible the phenomenon.