The Purpose of the Mask

Timothy Birdnow

There is something sinister afoot about this insistence on people wearing face masks. I've discussed it here at The Aviary before and have made a number of points, but I wanted to see what psychologists are saying about it. This policy is clearly being driven by the Left for purposes of their own, and they got that idea from somewhere. So I did a little sleuthing.

Exhibit A is an article in a British psychology magazine called Mind. In it the argument is made:

• Covering your mouth and nose might affect the air you breathe, which might make you feel anxious or panicky. This can then cause other symptoms as well, like feeling dizzy or sick, which you might associate with the mask.
• You might feel trapped or claustrophobic.
• Covering your face changes the way you look, which may cause negative feelings around your identity or body image.
• Having certain materials touching your skin might feel very hard to cope with (sensory overload).
• If you wear glasses, they might get steamed up so you can't see clearly. This might add to feelings of being overwhelmed.
• Masks are a visual reminder of the virus, so seeing masks might make you feel on edge or unable to relax. It might seem like danger is everywhere.
• Seeing people covering their faces might make you feel uneasy or scared of others. They might seem threatening, sinister, or dehumanised.
• On the other hand, you might feel very anxious or upset around people who are not wearing masks in public. (Although many people are exempt from wearing them, and you won't always know their reasons.)
• If you are exempt from wearing a mask, you still might feel very anxious about being judged, shamed or stigmatised in public. Or about the possibility of being asked to pay a fine. This may feel especially hard to cope with if the reason you can't wear a mask is also to do with your mental health.

So it is clear that masking produces a plethora of negative emotions which separate us as a people. Was this unforseen? Or does it serve a useful purpose to the Left?


Then we have exhibit B from the Telegraph which makes the case:


Ahhh...now we're getting somewhere! This thing is normalizing strict Sharia obedience and the Dhimmitude that goes with it (for us non-Muslims).

It continues:

When we are excluded, misunderstood, deprived, unhappy, disregarded, insulted, isolated, discriminated against and so on, we develop (both as groups and as individuals) a range of unpleasant behaviours. We can be mean, aggressive, withdrawn, uncooperative, viciously competitive, belligerent. We can be anti-social and ever more so if disregard continues. But, if and when we feel included, when we feel we belong, our attachment system kicks in and expresses altruistic caring behaviours.

The society lockdown was successful because we were, for a while, in it together. Selflessness and considerable hardship for many were tolerated because people felt valued as individuals able to contribute to the public good. The fractures in society temporarily abated. Psychological and behavioural is both personal and social.

Well...masking alienates us from each-other, makes us feel excluded and isolated and angry.

I suspect psychologists understood this well before it happened. Yet nobody warned against it.

And now we have rioting and looting and revolution.

Now we go to exhibit 3 which states:

If partial masking increases attractiveness because the brain fills in, then maybe the key issue becomes what the brain speculates the mask is hiding. In a pandemic the face mask looks like it might be concealing a dangerous infection.

Filling in gaps in what you know about others, but doing so under background conditions where the brain projects threat onto the outside world,is now linked to serious mental illness. Diagnoses such as borderline personality disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, or severe autism, involve deficits in processing other people's facial expressions. Paranoia has been linked to a tendency to make negative assumptions about relatively neutral facial expressions.

In a recent study entitled "Mapping the emotional face: How individual face parts contribute to successful emotion recognition," individual faces expressing the basic emotions were hidden behind a mask of 48 tiles, which were sequentially uncovered.

The study, from researchers based at Bielefeld University, Germany, found that observers mostly relied on the eye and mouth regions when successfully recognizing an emotion. Furthermore, different moods are detected from contrasting parts of the face. So, spotting sadness and fear relies on focusing on the eyes, whereas disgust and happiness are more reliably detected by concentrating on the mouth area.

So?


In other words, we'll get angry with one another because of our hidden natures.

This article discusses women wearing veils when they are getting married and incorrectly draws the conclusion that that is because hiding part of the face makes her more attractive. No. The reason for the veil is symbolic of her virginity; she has a part of herself hidden, and gives it to her husband. The removal of the veil is the deflowering of the virgin.

At any rate, I would argue that masks are, as Anthony Fauci said in May, a talisman, or more accurately a sacrament where the individual is submitting to the Church of Covid and the authorities. And they are intended to separate us, to inspire fear and loathing. They are dehumanizing, by design. They are, like a military haircut, intended to break out independence of spirit and become part of the Borg Collective.

Back in 2016 I wrote an article for Canada Free Press in which I quoted extensively from an article by a former drill instructor about the psychology of military boot camps and how the same principles apply to many of the actions of the Left. See my article here.

If I may quote my own article:

The purpose of military boot camp is to break down the individual, to wed him to the group, to get him to believe things and do things that are clearly irrational, and to get him to obey orders unquestioningly. In the military this serves a real purpose, because a soldier has to act in ways contrary to personal interest and security.

Here is a good explanation of the purpose of boot camp from a Marine drill instructor:

Sound familiar? It's surprisingly similar to the wearing of these Wuhan facemasks.

I continue:

See where I’m going with this? Everything the Progressives do has a purpose, and usually not the one that is stated by them. Gay marriage, for instance, or transgendered bathrooms, or Black Lives Matter uprisings, have little to do with fairness for homosexuals and everything to do with breaking down the dominant culture.

It recruits a certain number of children or young people and turns them into social justice warriors, telling them they are fighting for freedom and justice. Those who won’t joint the campaigns are seen as the enemy, and are forced into silence through shaming, through bullying, through acts of aggression. You are taught that everything you were was weak and pathetic, oppressive and, well, wrong or even evil. You have to change, to become one of them.

Some of the ways that this is done is through a series of extremely well planned and timed events that, by themselves, are meaningless, but when strategically combined together will change a person.

The idea is to change people. While some won’t go along, many others - particularly the youths - will embrace the change, become social justice warriors.

The article continues:

"Receiving is a period before training. You arrive at boot camp, but for the first week or so, you don’t actually train. You are just doing paperwork to get into the federal documentation system. You will receive all your gear and start your initial process into "getting ready” for bootcamp. But it’s the way you do it that is important. The entire time you are yelled at, screamed at, hurried, and stressed. But there is more.

From the first moment you arrive, you are now neck-deep in terror.

1. Everything the drill instructor does has purpose; everything. It may seem funny to you, but it is all crucial and instructional in some way.
2. They are being yelled at before they ever set foot off the bus. You can hear this if you begin listening immediately.
3. Within 5 minutes, 200+ individuals with no group training at all have been trained by drill instructions on how to: listen and learn while at bootcamp, respond to instruction, stand in formation, and move as a unit. They have also all been read their rights and responsibilities as recruits and in single file moved to a different area. You will not appreciate the magnitude of this.
4. Every word the drill instructor is saying is memorized.
5. No recruit will be physically touched by a drill instructor. In fact, they won’t be touched by one, ever. Surprised?
6. This is a ceremony that has taken place every week for every new group of recruits for decades. It is very well-rehearsed and very well-engineered. As I said before, everything a drill instructor does has purpose.

As I said, this is just the first five minutes. There are three more months of this.”

Does that sound familiar? To any conservative it should; it’s the exact approach used by the Progressive Left to advance their agenda. They yell, they scream, they demand obedience. This is especially true on college campuses where students face chanting mobs and professors who ask for "muscle” to intimidate individuals who are not on board with the program. They organize marches. They organize squatter’s camps. They get everybody moving, and even those who oppose them wind up moving in the direction they want by virtue of having to address the initiative.

Consider; during the protests at the University of Missouri Columbia students were intimidated into wearing pro-protest tee shirts or adopting black colors and were pressured to join the protests. This is a way of breaking the individual as a person, to making him or her feel to be part of this revolutionary group.

Let us continue:

"Why is the haircut so important? It is part of the erosion of individuality. What? Yes, the erosion of individuality. Why should a warrior lose his individuality? It is what makes him special and unique. It is what makes him valuable. Well, that’s the problem. Individuality makes them special and unique. It makes them feel that they might be above someone or something else. They are better than the orders they might receive. They are too good for something. Not at boot camp. From Day 1, everyone is the same. In fact, during my time, being called "an individual” was an insult as it meant that you were a person who couldn’t put the needs of the unit first. Yes, individuality is repressed as they will spend the next three months dressed the same, act the same, and look the same.”

Doesn't that sound exactly like the mask?

This is fertile ground and I could easily write a book about it. Suffice it to say this demand for masking was carefully thought out and preplanned. We ignore that at our peril.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:22 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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