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ID: ba6c34 Oct. 14, 2020, 9:23 a.m. No.11067334   🗄️.is 🔗kun

 

COGNITIVE EXPLOITS

Contagious psychogenic illness or induced psychic epidemics

We humans imitate social behaviors and much imitated behavior is not learned but adopted unconsciously.

 

Social imitation is morally agnostic, imitated behavior can be a harmless mannerism or dangerous, irrational, genocidal or self-destructive worldview. Contagious self-replicating psychogenic illness can be trivially induced by common IW tactics.

 

Latahism is usually described as a Malaysian "culture bound" phenomena. Some social scientist believe imitative behaviors in latahs are related to the "startle response" as seen in Tourette's syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Lawrence Osborne wrote in the New York Times magazine, “The startle reflex is a universal one. When we are jolted by surprise, we tend to scream, shout obscenities or make involuntary gestures. And some of us are a lot jumpier than others. But with latahs, as sufferers are known, these reactions become prolonged to an extreme degree. In Malay village life, people who are susceptible to such exaggerated reactions are deliberately provoked further – through furtive pokes in the ribs or tin pots thrown behind their backs – to induce a frenzied startle-trance. Over time, latahs become so sensitive that trances can be triggered by a falling coconut. [Source: Lawrence Osborne, New York Times magazine, May 6, 2001 ++]

 

While in the induced trance state, latah are extremely receptive to and obedient to suggestion. They will carry out complex tasks if so instructed. What is interesting is that the behaviors are

Stress induced:

 

“…Serai, a frail 75-year-old explains, she was invited to join a wood chopping team of women in the forests outside Kuching… the other women constantly TEASED AND TORMENTED their inexperienced companion. "They poked and poked me," she recalls a little mournfully, "and I became latah."

 

“How can latah consistently strike two people at the exact same moment? It seems that Serai and Amin must have some control, even if they are unable to acknowledge it, over their affliction. And if they can remember what happens to them while in a trance state, then is it really latah? Is Michael Kenny right – that latah is more of a ritual than an illness?

 

Loud noises trigger the phenomena similar to "shock induction," a mass hypnosis technique that exploits the extreme susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion in the immediate wake of a collectively traumatic event such as 9/11.

 

Syndromes very like latah, Geertz reported, exist in many other cultures. In rural parts of the Philippines, for instance, a nearly identical condition known as mali-mali is widespread. In Siberia, there is a hyperstartle complex known as myriachit, while in Thailand it is known as baah-ji and in Japan, imu. In the 1930's, scholars made a curious film about hyperstartling among the Ainu, an ethnic minority in northern Japan. The faded reels show Ainu women being startled, waving their arms like windmills and running around in a frenzy. A form of latah has even been recorded in medical literature, rather improbably, as with "the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine." Are these hyperstartle complexes different forms of latah, Geertz asked, or were they all unique syndromes? "

 

It is trivial to exploit our human propensity for imitation, as in latah-phenomena, and use it to create unconscious self-replicating social behaviors in a culture for purposes of marketing or for social control. Such phenomena, ripe for exploitation would be ignored by legions of clinical and academic ‘brain science’ researchers, by advertising agencies and by those individuals who dominate the rest by controlling the future of human scientific, social and economic development.

 

“Indeed, the power of culture to propagate mental illness has become a subject of increasing fascination in the West. In recent years, scholars have seen mysterious maladies proliferate in a way that echoes the spread of latah. Multiple-personality disorder, for example, flourished among white, middle-class American women in the 1980's. And more recently, American and European psychologists have begun tracking apotemnophilia – a new, disturbing condition in which sufferers desire to amputate one of their own limbs. The Internet, medical anthropologists say, is helping spread the condition globally. “