Protective Stupidity by Michael Ellner

Ever notice how defensive some people become when you point out that the non-specific ‘HIV’ tests are not proof that anyone is infected with the putative ‘HIV’ ? Or that there is compelling evidence that low T-cell counts can reflect merely a chronic psychocortico-physiological redistribution of T-cells to the skin and other organs, not an indication of one's actual state of health or illness? Or that long-term antibiotic and chemotherapy/’anti-viral’ drug use are classically recognized to cause ‘AIDS’?
Instead of being relieved, most people are insulted! How dare anybody suggest ‘HIV’ is any less than the brutal killer ‘virus’ that every-body knows it is! Without ‘HIV’ we might have to look at the true nature of the world around us, and perhaps even our responsibility in it all. No. It’s better not to know that you can escape from the AIDS Zone; it’s better not to lose ‘HIV’ solidarity and the social tolerance one gains within an unaccepting society. Note that you're tolerated just as long as you die!

PROTECTIVE STUPIDITY
Epidemic hysteria, Mass Hypnosis and Escaping from the AIDS Zone by Dr. Michael Ellner
This document was provided by Continuum Magazine
VOL. 5 No. 2

Michael Ellner is President of HEAL - Health Education AIDS Liaison - in New York City. A prominent hypnohealer, he has received many honors including the first International Association of Counselors and Therapists’ Mind/Body/Spirit Award, and two Hypnosis Humanities Awards from the U.S. National Guild of Hypnotists (1989,1994). His new book Quantum Healing written with Richard Jamison Ph.D. explores self-healing and empowerment.

CAN WE TALK?
Cultural hypnosis, group fantasy and psychogenic death have profound social functions. They collectively serve to keep everyone’s attention off anything in life that matters like real love, health and happiness. They specifically serve to keep our attention off anything which threatens the focus of this paper –the Big Lie that: within a world in crisis, everything is OK.
Experts and officials also have a social function. If you think about it, when dealing with personal Big Lie issues, people not only expect to be lied to, but they depend upon it. As long as the lies have a seed of ‘truth’ it gives those who need it an opportunity to dismiss messy things like the role of self-responsibility in health and illness, not to mention things like economic injustice, political exploitation and most of all medical murder. And the experts all happily oblige; after all, they need the Big Lie too. Without it they would have to acknowledge their racism, sexism, homophobia, exploitation and countless other crimes against humanity.

PROTECTIVE STUPIDITY
When dealing with this sort of group think, the only thing we can be sure of is that nobody is thinking. This is confounded by the fact most hypnotized people cannot appreciate that they are already in a hypnotic Big Lie-protecting trance. In fact most people become irritated, defensive or even hostile at the mere suggestion, because once hypnotized there is a spontaneous impulse to defend the resulting mythology. Orwell called this "protective stupidity". (Orwell, G. "1984")
This defensive reflex is in itself evidence of the trance as without the trance a person would simply consider the information being presented. When in a trance however, one will dismiss as out of hand "dangerous information", i.e., any information which threatens the Big Lie view of the world or which suggests taking responsibility and/or action around issues of one's own health and happiness, particularly in the social realm.
This is what makes it so very challenging to help people realize that they have been culturally brain-washed throughout their lives (hypnotized without their knowledge or consent). Without the Big Lie, the true state of the world would be emotionally devastating.
The group fantasy ends up serving a powerful survivalistic and anxiety-regulating function. One is not even permitted to think about it let alone discuss it.

THE GROUP FANTASY NEED FOR ‘HIV’
The very ideas of group fantasy, cultural hypnosis, epidemic hysteria and psychogenic death are so unsettling that they almost always produce an "I can’t believe that!" response.
Put simply, group fantasy is the social agreement that black is white, up is down, and that the emperor is wearing clothes. It is used to mask rather than unveil the Big Lie and the identity of all who participate in perpetuating it.
‘Epidemic hysteria’ is the psychophysiological bridge between the group fantasy and the development of clinical psychogenic symptoms. Both have very important functions in that they are unconsciously used by the group to purge the social body of poisonous feelings that have been generated by the Big Lie in the first place. (C. Schmidt. MD, Group Fantasy Origins of AIDS. The AIDS Cult - Essays on the Gay Health Crisis edited by John Lauritsen and Ian Young).
Epidemic hysteria does, however, require a seed of ‘truth’ of its own (the core group, discussed later); it requires the existence of people who are actually sick to get started - people who are in fact sick because of the Big Lie. To dissociate this connection between sickness and the lie, we pull out the old standby: ‘viral’ scapegoats - like the group fantasy object ‘HIV’.

‘HIV’ AND THE BIG LIE
But how does one tell whether, in the case of epidemics of illness, one is dealing socially with hysteria, psychogenics and protective stupidity, or with an actual effort to curb social and physical illness? It depends on how the truly sick are dealt with. If their illnesses are used to direct attention to the Big Lie, health and better social conditions will result.
If on the other hand, it is being used to direct attention away from the lie, as in the case of ‘AIDS’/‘HIV’ and as evidenced by the many defensive reactions triggered by exposure of the fraud, there will be an escalation of both illness and social tension, i.e., a golden opportunity for the critically urgent psychosocial purge. This explains why most of us have such a hard time seeing that the perception of an ‘epidemic’ of ‘HIV disease’ particularly in the gay community is a group fantasy.
As Aids analyst Michael Baumgartner points out, more gay men will die of heart disease this year than ‘AIDS’. And yet no-one is putting any energy into heart disease.
Why is it that people are not up in arms over this? Without seductive and titillating triggers like sex, anal sex or the threat of sexual transmission, there is not opportunity to bring to a climactic head pre-existing social tensions. There is nothing titillating about heart disease. With AIDS however there is enough to arouse in everyone a hysteria. This mass hypnosis allows people to unconsciously act out their reconditioned roles, roles which are essential to perpetuating the Big Lie. If you’re tranced ‘HIV+’ your part is to get sick and die; if you are a doctor your role is to test for an antibody, make healthy people sick and sick people die, and then blame an alleged ‘virus’; if you’re a gay AIDS activist your role is to insure that unproven treatments get into everyone’s body and that everyone wear a condom as if everyone’s at risk; if you’re an AIDS organization your role is to deliver ‘HIV+’s’ to the pharmaceutical ovens and silence anyone who questions the insanity; and if you’re not in any of these groups your role is to wear a red ribbon, a latex condom and act like you care.
‘AIDS’ works because everyone has something to do. It all serves to keep us all from looking at what's truly going on in the world. The rampant death and subsequent social cleansing artificially absolve everyone of the repressed tension generated by the pre-existing social conditions. Meanwhile and more importantly they simultaneously help in evading the Big Lie which gave rise to both ‘AIDS’ and the need for the fantasy in the first place.

THE AIDS AND OTHER ZONES
Which brings me to the AIDS Zone. The AIDS Zone too serves a protective function within the Big Lie. I think it is the ultimate protective Zone within many other Zones. It is the little box within which ‘HIV’ causes ‘AIDS’, AIDS is always fatal, and poison can prolong your life. The broader Big Lie Zone sustains the AIDS Zone. The whole thing is structured and prolonged by our cultural myths, illusions and delusions. These are anchored to our deepest fears and doubts about sex, drugs and life, fears and doubts originally generated by the Big Lie itself.
Everywhere we turn in the USA the AIDS trance is being deepened; the lie is getting bigger. Vaccines, prenatal testing, notifiable diagnosis, enforced drug therapy, contact tracing - the lie is becoming more difficult to see, let alone escape. Remember the ‘Red menace’? Its social function was to scapegoat all the social problems in our lives. Economically it justified the multi-billion dollar war industries and reinforced the manufactured belief that we need military experts, covert operations and weapons of mass destruction to protect us from the ‘Reds’.
Today, the collective ‘Red menace’ has been replaced by the much more individual ‘viral ’ menace. The social function of the ‘viral’ menace is also to scapegoat all the social problems in our lives. Economically it justifies the multi-billion dollar AIDS War industries which reinforce through their mystery the manufactured belief that we need to invest in medical experts, Public Health operations and chemotherapies of mass destruction to protect us from (the Big Lie) ‘HIV’.

THE REALITY OF PSYCHOGENIC ILLNESS
Recently there was a brilliant essay published in CONTINUUM ("Communicable disease" – Alex Russell, vol 4/no 6 June/July ’97) designed to help ‘victims’ liberate themselves from the AIDS Zone. It was a masterpiece that offered readers a free pass out. This was followed by "Dissenting view" (WhoseHysteria?, by Cooper and Walker, vol 5 no 1). What we get in this essay is a conditioned reflex based on the authors’ unwillingness to address the staggering implications raised in Russell’s article. The reality of a transmissible hypochondria and subsequent psychogenic death was just too much for them.
Make no mistake about it, if you are branded ‘HIV+’ you do not have the luxury of ducking this urgent consideration. For you, understanding the nature and scope of the AIDS Zone and psychogenic disease (and how to escape both) is a matter of life and death. There are many concurrent epidemics of hysteria raging today and the psychogenic factor, particularly in the case of pseudo ‘HIV disease’, becomes clearer when we differentiate between the physiological factors of illness and the psycho-social factors of illness - that is, the core group of people getting sick and the much larger shadow group of people getting interpreted as identically ill if they really are ill, or as at risk of illness.

SOCIAL HEALTH RISKS
Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) is an excellent example of what I am talking about. The primary social health risk is the stress of war itself. From here things break up into two groups. In addition to the stress of war, the core group of people developing GWS symptoms suffer very serious exposures to very serious stressors, i.e. experimental vaccines, deadly pesticides, chemicals and possibly weapons of biological war - the very probable physiological factors of their illnesses. But the much larger shadow group unconsciously identifies with the core group and, even in the absence of the same complex of stressors, begin to generate physical, psychosomatic versions of these symptoms to express the intense emotional trauma of war.
This is also the case with ‘AIDS’. The core group of people who develop ‘GRID/AIDS’ indicator diseases and conditions suffer the physiological impact of very serious stressors, i.e., experimental vaccines, deadly medicines, street chemicals and sexually transmitted biological stressors (not ‘HIV’!).
The much larger group of people who are developing symptoms perceived by themselves and others as AIDS-related symptoms are suffering a combination of hypochondria and normal flu, colds etc. But within the AIDS Zone, these take on a life of their own. They were once called ‘ARC’ -AIDS- related complex, the precursor to AIDS, but are now called ‘HIV disease’ because in the absence of treatment a majority of ARC cases never develop into ‘AIDS’. Those actually presenting psychogenic symptoms though are suffering from the psychological consequences of the destructive social lies nobody wants to talk about - alienation, homophobia, racism, poverty, malnutrition, self-hate, medical consumerism and drug use.
The unaddressed emotional tension finds a substitute form of expression by gravitating to and identifying with the physical syndrome manifested by the core group - this, in addition to the medical choices based on the hysteria, can lead to death. In the case of pseudo ‘HIV disease’ the major emotional stressors, the major psycho-social stressors relate to being gay, non-white, and/or labeled ‘HIV+’. Simply put, it’s the core group that defines the badge and the others who later adopt it. If that sounds unfeasible consider this:
1) There are well documented case studies of people who are loosely called "the worried well". Even though they have repeatedly tested ‘HIV’ negative and have been repeatedly assured they are not at risk for ‘AIDS’, these people present a whole range of pseudo ‘HIV disease’ symptoms like dramatic weight loss, low grade fevers, skin disorders, diarrhoea, low T-cell counts and chronic flu like symptoms. The American Psychiatric and Psychological Associations named the disorder AFRAIDS (Acute Fear of AIDS) deeming its symptoms psychogenic (Redotz. Considering the psycho-social aspects of AIDS. Mi. Hosp. Jnl. 8/86, Vol.22 No.8) Of course such studies have failed to explore an equation between those who test negative and think they are ill and those who test positive and think they are ill. Since the ‘HIV’ test is unvalidated, both groups are actually dogged by the same beliefs and victims of the same ‘HIV’ hex.
2) Among certain cultures there is a powerful phenomenon called "bone pointing". Its similarity to an ‘HIV-positive’ diagnosis is a crucial and long over due consideration because among those cultures, the belief that the bone can kill is enough to cause death. The bone has no physical power in the same way that ‘HIV’ has no physical power, but inside the Zones, the belief in either the bone or ‘HIV’ can be deadly.

WE NEED AIDS!
Which brings us back to the mass hypnosis. Ever notice how defensive some people become when you point out that the non-specific ‘HIV’ tests are not proof that anyone is infected with the putative ‘HIV’ ? Or that there is compelling evidence that low T-cell counts can reflect merely a chronic psychocortico-physiological redistribution of T-cells to the skin and other organs, not an indication of one's actual state of health or illness? Or that long-term antibiotic and chemotherapy/’anti-viral’ drug use are classically recognized to cause ‘AIDS’?
Instead of being relieved, most people are insulted! How dare anybody suggest ‘HIV’ is any less than the brutal killer ‘virus’ that every-body knows it is! Without ‘HIV’ we might have to look at the true nature of the world around us, and perhaps even our responsibility in it all. No. It’s better not to know that you can escape from the AIDS Zone; it’s better not to lose ‘HIV’ solidarity and the social tolerance one gains within an unaccepting society. (Note that you're tolerated as long as you die!)
They react like many people who are told their GWS problems and symptoms are the result of post war stress. They are hurt and offended because like everyone else they have been culturally conditioned to seek the legitimacy of the medical industry for their health complaints; post war stress just isn’t an industrially or socially sanctioned disorder - we might have to consider things like economic injustice, political exploitation and emotional murder! As communities we have been persuaded and programmed to ignore and/or de-value both psychogenic disease and the intense distress of the war experience!
We have become unknowingly programmed to surrender our power to experts, germs and other government officials who know what's best for us; to ignore anything that challenges our necessary illusions. We believe in the entity of ‘AIDS’ through the same mechanisms as we believe in the marvels of modern medicine: brainwashing, protective stupidity and the social function of the lie.

THE DOCTOR WILL KILL YOU NOW
Modern medicine exploits the unconscious pain of a wounded society to obscure the real causes of its disease, while artificially numbing that pain. Even though in the US the day to day practice of conventional medicine kills at least three times as many people as are attributed to ‘AIDS’, we still insist on being treated by these charlatans. Surely this can be explained only by a lifetime of social and cultural conditioning to stop thinking while surrendering to "experts" all responsibility for our health. Which brings me back to the AIDS Zone. The ‘War on AIDS’ is a huge success socially, politically and economically because most people really don’t care if gay men and IV-drug users are being murdered. Their homophobia and own guilt and shame dull their basic humanity while contributing to their "stupidity". But as terrible as this gay extermination is, it is only the tip of the genocide. Most people really don’t care if 30 million of the poorest people on earth starve to death either. The Big Lie ‘HIV’ simplifies things. These horrific crimes are more easily ignored when these people are sentimentally written off as victims of a mythical ‘AIDS pandemic’.
The Zones are the only atmosphere in which pseudo ‘HIV disease’ and this massive cover-up could thrive. In other words, everybody has been hypnotized to turn off their thoughts and feelings and, instead of living, we are mindlessly sleepwalking from one Zone to the next. There is an ‘unconscious’ agenda at work - evading the role of self-responsibility in generating one’s own health and happiness - that simultaneously serves its broader social function - evading the Big Lie. Is there a better explanation?