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Britain’s bacchanalia of public mourning for Elizabeth II. What would Nietzsche say?
For mass formation psychosis to be experienced in a given society four key conditions are required:
- lack of social bonds or decoupling of societal connections
- lack of sense-making (things don’t make sense)
- free-floating anxiety
- free-floating psychological discontent
In the midst of a grievous and catastrophic cost of living crisis in a society in which poverty was already endemic, with millions up and down the country forced to rely on foodbanks, and millions more dreading the onset of a winter in which they will be forced to make the grim choice between heating and eating, the UK is the very acme of a place where the conditions required for people to experience mass formation psychosis have long existed. This very mass formation psychosis is currently being experienced in the UK by millions in the wake of the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II.
A nine-miles long queue of people waiting to file past her coffin in Westminster Hall, where she has been lying in state, tells its own story in this regard. And this after her body was transported from Balmoral in Scotland down to Edinburgh, where thousands previously filed past her coffin as she lay in rest at St Giles Cathedral for…
