I ran into this great documentary analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola of The Corbett Report
Documentary Film "Dissent into Madness". I find it easier to read his analysis than to watch the film.
It included information from Political Ponerology and also mention that 4% of psychopath currently exist in America.
https://cassiopaea.org/forum/javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$bcr$btnPrevFloat','')
This forms the basis of The Corbett Report documentary film “Dissent Into Madness,” featured above. The film explores how rebels are often branded as dangerous, and how academic and medical institutions reinforce this circle of oppression.<span data-hash="#ednref1">1</span>
I encourage you to watch the entire film, as it will teach you the tricks psychopaths use to get into positions of power and what you need to do to break free from them.
Corbett argues that these words are meant to discredit your judgment and push you out of public discussion. As he explains, when rulers or media call someone “crazy,” it’s often not because that person is wrong, it’s because they are inconvenient.
•A tool of oppression — Throughout history, people in power have used the diagnosis of “insanity” to remove those who opposed them. The film highlights how labeling someone as mentally unwell can justify locking them away, drugging them, or silencing them under the banner of “treatment.” It warns that this tactic doesn’t just happen in dictatorships or the past — it’s a recurring pattern whenever authority feels threatened.
•Then the film flips the usual story — Instead of asking what’s wrong with the dissidents, it asks what’s wrong with the rulers. “What if the ‘delusions’ of the dissidents are in fact real?” the narrator asks.
What if the people being called paranoid are actually seeing the truth about corruption or injustice? The film argues that maybe it’s not you who’s “crazy” for questioning power — but that the systems leading society are the ones showing signs of sickness. It also introduces the idea that political leaders can display traits of psychopathy — manipulation, lack of empathy, and obsession with control.
•The film invites you to question your own assumptions about sanity and authority — Instead of viewing dissenters as “mad,” you’re asked to see them as people reacting normally to a corrupt environment. The narrator ends the introduction with a challenge — perhaps the real madness is not in those who resist, but in the society that accepts cruelty, deceit, and control as normal.
This shift (from blaming the individual to diagnosing the system) sets the stage for the rest of the documentary’s investigation into what it calls “political psychopathy.”
In essence, anyone who spoke out against the government could be declared mentally ill, locked up in psychiatric hospitals, and given drugs or even placed into induced comas. These were not patients — they were citizens silenced under the banner of mental health.
•Other governments followed the same playbook — Nazi Germany used psychiatry as part of its brutal eugenics program, known as Aktion T4. Doctors decided who was “fit” to live and who was not.
In Japan (during and after World War II) and in Revolutionary Cuba, similar abuses occurred — people seen as threats to the state were forcibly medicated or electroshocked into compliance, revealing a troubling pattern. When governments merge with medical authority, the result is often cruelty disguised as care.
Then the film turns westward, highlighting that Western nations were not innocent observers of these crimes. American institutions, including the Rockefeller Foundation, helped fund early German eugenics research through the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. U.S. laws even inspired Nazi sterilization policies.
•Disturbing figures from early American psychiatry — Dr. Benjamin Rush, called the “father of American psychiatry,” believed rebellion itself was a mental illness he named “anarchia” — an “excess of the passion for liberty.” His so-called treatments involved confinement in darkness, sleep deprivation, and even spinning patients on a gyrator.
Introduced as a clinical guide in 1952, the DSM has grown into what Corbett calls “the psychiatric diagnostic Bible.” With each edition, more human emotions and behaviors have been reclassified as disorders, expanding the market for prescription drugs.
•Doctors contribute to the problems, too — Corbett presents striking data from research at the University of Massachusetts Boston, published in 2012 by Dr. Lisa Cosgrove. According to the findings, 69% of the experts who wrote the DSM-5 had financial ties to drug companies — some as paid consultants or spokespeople.
•The film also confronts the growing medicalization of everyday life — It cites surveys showing that one in six U.S. adults now takes psychiatric medication, while prescriptions for children, especially for antipsychotics like risperidone and olanzapine, have surged over the past two decades.
These drugs are not neutral — they shape behavior, limit emotional range, and teach children that compliance is chemical. Instead of asking why people feel anxious, restless, or angry, society simply tells them to take something for it.
•Defiance is being treated as a legitimate mental illness — Dr. Bruce Levine, featured in the documentary, gives a chilling example — “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” or ODD. He explains that this label targets children who question authority or refuse to obey adults, even when they’ve done nothing illegal or harmful.
The DSM’s definition describes behaviors like arguing with teachers or resisting instructions as symptoms of a mental disorder. Levine calls this “pathologizing rebellion,” warning that it punishes independence and curiosity. The documentary ties this back to its core argument that psychiatry, once again, has become a tool to silence dissent. By teaching children that disobedience means they’re sick, society ensures fewer people grow up willing to challenge power.
In 1945, Chisholm delivered a lecture titled “The Reestablishment of Peacetime Society” where he urged psychiatrists to free humanity “from its crippling burden of good and evil.” By calling morality itself a psychological problem, he redefined the doctor’s role — not to heal mental suffering, but to reshape how you think about right and wrong. This idea, the film argues, was the seed of psychiatry’s use as a social engineering tool.
•Psychiatry used by any means necessary — The film introduces Colonel John Rawlings Rees, a British military psychiatrist and head of the Tavistock Institute, who took Chisholm’s ideas to the next level. In 1940, Rees gave a speech describing a plan for psychiatrists to infiltrate key institutions such as education, religion, and the media. He called this a “fifth column” strategy — borrowing a term from wartime espionage — to quietly shape public thought from within.
“Parliament, the Press, and other publications,” he said, “are the most obvious ways by which our propaganda can be got across.” Rees even admitted that secrecy was essential because “many people don’t like to be ‘saved,’ ‘changed,’ or made healthy.” By his logic, public manipulation wasn’t unethical — it was therapeutic.
•The film connects these early psychological campaigns to Cold War mind-control programs — Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) projects like MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD, and ARTICHOKE tested drugs, hypnosis, and electroshock on unsuspecting people to control thought and behavior.
One example is Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose “reprogramming” experiments used massive doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and electroshock to erase patients’ personalities. The documentary shows declassified documents detailing operations like “Midnight Climax,” where the CIA observed civilians through one-way mirrors after dosing them with LSD, which was “used to study the effect of sexual blackmail and the use of mind-altering substances in field operations.”
•The controlling mindset didn’t end with the Cold War — After 9/11, psychologist Dr. Jim Mitchell — once inspired by research on “learned helplessness” — helped design the CIA’s torture program. His method was based on breaking a person’s will through fear and despair, not extracting truth.
The documentary also notes that a quarter of the “9/11 Commission Report” footnotes were based on information obtained through torture, suggesting that false confessions became official fact. Simply put, extracting false confessions was the entire point of the CIA program.
To elucidate his example, he shows a familiar media phenomenon — a flood of nearly identical articles across major outlets like The New York Times and BBC, all titled some version of “Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?” Each story, the documentary explains, starts with the same premise. There’s a growing number of people who hold outlandish beliefs about those in power and ends by framing those people as emotionally unstable, delusional, or even dangerous.
•The articles, while packaged as scientific, carry a subtle but powerful message — If you question authority, there’s something wrong with you. These reports usually quote psychologists who suggest that “well-meaning but emotionally unstable people” cling to conspiracy theories to feel control in an uncontrollable world.
Corbett points out how this language moves the conversation away from evidence or debate and into diagnosis. This means that you are no longer engaging with ideas — you’re “helping” a patient. The audience is advised to speak in soothing tones to friends who question official stories, as if handling a frightened animal.
•Repetition makes the idea stick — Corbett highlights the uniformity of the messaging across hundreds of media and academic outlets — from the American Psychological Association to TIME magazine to Scientific American. This repetition, he argues, functions as coordinated conditioning — an effort to equate skepticism with sickness.
By flooding the public sphere with the same narrative, dissent becomes socially and psychologically risky. If you ask too many questions, you risk being viewed as unstable, irrational, or in need of de-radicalization.
A clip from the 1970s sitcom “Barney Miller” features a man ranting about the Trilateral Commission while police officers smirk and call him delusional. Later, the “tinfoil hat” meme (first inspired by a 1927 Julian Huxley story) became shorthand for insanity. The film explains that these jokes weren’t harmless; they created a cultural reflex to laugh at anyone who challenged authority. By the time talk shows and news panels began mocking “truthers,” society had been trained to dismiss skepticism as madness.
•Those who looked for the truth were ridiculed — That casual ridicule hardened after the attacks of 9/11. According to the film, President George W. Bush’s warning to “never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories” became a signal to the media mock truthers.
Late-night hosts like Bill Maher joked that 9/11 conspiracy theorists should start “asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you,” while newspaper columnists diagnosed them with paranoid delusions. These taunts, the narrator says, prepared the public for something darker — the idea that questioning government narratives was not just foolish, but dangerous.
Commentators from across the political spectrum began referring to truthers as potential extremists. The film argues that this rhetoric laid the groundwork for reintroducing psychiatry as a tool of punishment rather than healing.
•Real-world examples where dissent led to psychiatric detention — In 2006, New Zealand journalist Claire Swinney was forcibly confined in a psychiatric ward and medicated after she publicly questioned the official story of 9/11. She later discovered that her detention violated New Zealand’s own laws, which forbid psychiatric confinement based solely on political beliefs.
The film also recounts the case of Dr. Meryl Nass, an American physician whose medical license was suspended after she spoke against official COVID-19 treatment policies, and who was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before reinstatement. The pattern continues with Swiss cardiologist Dr. Thomas Binder, whose blog posts criticizing pandemic lockdowns led to a police raid on his office conducted by a whopping 60 police officers.
Corbett explains that psychopathy isn’t about insanity — it’s about the absence of conscience. These individuals lie easily, manipulate emotions, and charm their way to the top. They don’t feel guilt, remorse, or empathy, and they treat other people as tools.
•Psychopathy is normal for people in power — To explain this, Corbett references the work of Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, whose Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) is used worldwide to identify psychopathic traits. Hare’s checklist includes qualities like grandiosity, superficial charm, deceitfulness, lack of empathy, and manipulativeness.
As Corbett walks through the list, you start to see unsettling similarities between these traits and what you observe in politics and big business every day. The film flashes images of campaign rallies, boardrooms, and press conferences, asking you to notice the pattern — leaders who lie without hesitation, exploit crises for gain, and smile while doing it.
•Corbett backs up his claim with research findings — Studies from organizational psychology show that individuals with psychopathic traits are overrepresented in leadership roles, especially in corporate and political environments. For example, around 4% of the population are psychopaths, “and they are responsible for much of the havoc in our society.”
This psychological sleight of hand keeps the public distracted from the real source of harm. But projection goes deeper than language. Corbett describes how corporations and governments begin to act like the individuals running them — deceptive, remorseless, and image-obsessed.
•Corporations follow the psyche of its leaders — Corbett draws from the 2003 documentary “The Corporation,” where Dr. Robert Hare explains that a company managed by a psychopath often becomes psychopathic itself. It shows the same traits, such as charm without depth, deceit dressed as public relations, and moral indifference cloaked as “strategy.”
Corbett describes how businesses that repeatedly break laws calculate fines as “the cost of doing business,” mirroring the psychopath’s lack of remorse. Over time, that attitude spreads throughout the organization. Employees absorb the system’s values, such as faking empathy, prioritizing profit over honesty, and learning that ruthlessness earns rewards.
•Secondary psychopathy — From there, he moves into what it calls “secondary psychopathy,” or the process by which ordinary people adopt psychopathic behavior under certain pressures.
For example, in Dr. Solomon Asch’s conformity study, participants agreed with obvious lies rather than break from group opinion. The obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram, Ph.D. showed that most people would administer what they believed were deadly electric shocks simply because an authority told them to.
These studies revealed a troubling truth — even healthy people could commit cruel acts if the system around them demanded it. The most striking example, however, came from Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which spiraled into sadism in less than a week as volunteer “guards” invented new ways to humiliate their peers.
•From the lab to the real world — Corbett links this pattern directly to real-world atrocities like the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. According to Corbett, the U.S. Department of Defense’s own “Schlesinger Report” cited the Stanford experiment to explain how “systemic pressures” enabled cruelty among guards.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s approval of aggressive interrogation techniques, including stress positions and psychological humiliation, set the tone from the top, effectively authorizing moral collapse. The transcript reveals that the experiment itself had been funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research “to study antisocial behavior,” a chilling sign of institutional interest in replicating and controlling such outcomes.
Once this pathological minority gains control, it reshapes every institution — government, media, education, and even medicine — to reflect its twisted values. The result is a world where cruelty is rewarded, and honesty is punished.
•Under a pathocracy, the traits of normal human decency become liabilities — You see this reflected in workplaces where obedience matters more than integrity, or in politics where truth-tellers are marginalized while manipulators thrive. Corbett explains that pathocrats depend on fear and confusion to keep control.
They create constant crises, such as wars, health scares, or economic emergencies to justify expanding their authority. In this kind of system, the average person learns to stay silent and in doing so, slowly absorbs the system’s sickness.
•Trying to reform a pathocracy is like pruning a poisoned tree — Eventually, it grows back the same way. The film emphasizes that simply replacing corrupt leaders doesn’t solve the problem, because the very structure of centralized power naturally attracts those without empathy.
Popular culture has distilled that study’s findings, saying that 65% of participants were willing to deliver the shock, but Corbett highlights a part of the study that’s rarely discussed. When participants saw someone else disobey authority, obedience collapsed. Only 10% continued to deliver the maximum shock after witnessing another person’s refusal. That single act of defiance rewired their moral compass.
•The overlooked finding reveals a simple truth about human nature — Obedience is contagious, but so is courage. Once one person stands up to authority, others quickly follow. Corbett calls this a “circuit-breaker” — a moment when collective fear short-circuits and people remember their own agency. The film shows you that every authoritarian structure, no matter how intimidating, depends on your consent to function.
•An example of defiance — To paint a picture, Corbett turns to a real-world example — the collapse of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Romania. On December 21, 1989, Ceaușescu stepped onto a balcony in Bucharest to deliver yet another speech praising socialism and his rule.
For decades, the crowds had clapped on command. But this time, someone booed. The sound was faint at first, then grew louder as others joined in, chanting “Timișoara!” — a reference to a recent massacre of protesters. The film shows Ceaușescu’s stunned face as he realized the crowd no longer feared him. Within days, his regime fell, and he and his wife were executed after attempting to flee. In short, the entire revolution began with one voice breaking the silence.
Corbett begins by explaining that corrupt systems are self-limiting. They feed on deceit, fear, and domination, but these forces inevitably destroy trust and cooperation, which are things society needs to function.
•The next step — Stop waiting for top-down reform. You don’t heal a sick structure by rearranging its leadership — you replace the incentives that make it sick in the first place.
•The solution is not grand revolution, but everyday modeling — You’re urged to practice circuit-breaking acts in your own life:
In the first two experiments, participants read a fake story claiming that either almonds or cashews were contaminated. Later, a subset of those people were invited into a lab to take part in what they thought was a food marketing study. They were asked to sample nuts — including the very ones mentioned in the fake article — to see if the earlier misinformation influenced what they actually ate. It didn’t.
Despite being told that the nuts had been “contaminated,” participants showed no meaningful drop in their willingness to eat them or rate them positively.
•To ensure the result wasn’t a fluke tied to one story, the team repeated the experiment — This time, with different fabricated contamination tales, such as stories about fungus, rodent urine, spider eggs, and E. coli. Again, no significant changes were found in people’s attitudes or behavior. That’s a strong indication that most one-off misinformation exposures are not powerful enough to alter real-world behavior when the stakes are neutral and the topic doesn’t tie into personal identity or politics.
•The third experiment raised the stakes — This time, the researchers moved from food to climate change, which is a deeply politicized issue that strongly divides opinion. A total of 413 participants were randomly shown one of four fake news stories, either supporting or denying the seriousness of climate change.
Afterward, they were given the chance to act on what they’d read. They could sign a petition supporting environmental action, join a mailing list for climate initiatives, or donate a portion of their study payment to a climate organization.
Here’s where things shifted slightly. The only real behavioral effect appeared in one low-effort activity — signing the petition. Those who read climate-skeptical misinformation were less likely to sign the petition (23.4%) than those who read pro-climate change misinformation (36.5%) or those who saw neutral (control) content (39%).
The other two actions — donating money or joining a mailing list — did not change based on what participants had read. In short, misinformation has the most pull on quick, low-cost decisions, not on meaningful ones that require time, money, or genuine commitment.
•The study showed that people’s preexisting beliefs were far more powerful than the misinformation itself — For instance, participants who already believed in climate change were consistently more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviors, regardless of what kind of fake story they read.
But if you’re unsure or uninformed, repeated exposure to biased information from familiar or trusted voices can gradually tilt your perception. The researchers pointed out that this cumulative effect — being exposed to similar lies again and again — creates “illusory truth.” It’s the brain’s habit of confusing familiarity with accuracy. Once something sounds familiar, it starts to feel true, even if it isn’t.
In practical terms, your best defense against misinformation isn’t avoiding all media — it’s awareness of your own biases. If a headline feels immediately right or wrong, that feeling often reflects your identity more than the actual evidence. The researchers emphasized that consistent, ideologically aligned misinformation — seeing the same claim shared repeatedly by friends or influencers — poses a much greater threat to behavioral change than any single fake headline.
1.Bad language — Be on the lookout for poor spelling, grammar or punctuation.
2.Emotional contagion — Bad actors know that content that triggers strong emotions are shared the most.
3.News gold or fool’s gold — Beware if the news is shared by a single source, especially if the writing suggests that something is being hidden from you.
4.False accounting — Double check if the source is using fake social media profiles. Also, look for misleading images and fake web links.
5.Oversharing — If someone is strongly urging you to share a piece of news, they could be gaining advertising revenue from it.
6.Follow the money — Consider who stands to gain the most from extraordinary news stories.
7.Fact-check — Read the story all the way to the end. If it’s questionable, search for other sources to confirm the facts.
Documentary Film "Dissent into Madness". I find it easier to read his analysis than to watch the film.
It included information from Political Ponerology and also mention that 4% of psychopath currently exist in America.
The Revolution Starts Once You Gain the Power to Say ‘No’
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola- November 23, 2025
https://cassiopaea.org/forum/javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$bcr$btnPrevFloat','')
Story at-a-glance
- Mainstream media and authorities use labels like "crazy" to discredit dissenters, transforming psychiatry from healing into a control tool that silences opposition throughout history
- The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has expanded to classify normal behaviors as disorders, with 69% of its authors having financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, promoting medication over addressing root causes
- Psychopaths disproportionately rise to leadership positions in politics and corporations, reshaping institutions to reflect their lack of empathy, creating what's called a "pathocracy" or sick system
- The experiments of Stanley Milgram, Ph.D., showed that witnessing one person's defiance dramatically reduces obedience to authority, proving that individual courage can trigger collective resistance and systemic change
- Research reveals single fake news stories rarely change behavior, but repeated exposure creates "illusory truth"
This forms the basis of The Corbett Report documentary film “Dissent Into Madness,” featured above. The film explores how rebels are often branded as dangerous, and how academic and medical institutions reinforce this circle of oppression.<span data-hash="#ednref1">1</span>
I encourage you to watch the entire film, as it will teach you the tricks psychopaths use to get into positions of power and what you need to do to break free from them.
When ‘Crazy’ Becomes a Weapon
“Dissent Into Madness” opens with a bold statement — words like “crazy,” “insane,” and “deranged” are not harmless insults. Instead, they are tools of control. Broadcast clips from major news networks are shown, where guests and hosts casually use these labels to ridicule people who question official stories.Corbett argues that these words are meant to discredit your judgment and push you out of public discussion. As he explains, when rulers or media call someone “crazy,” it’s often not because that person is wrong, it’s because they are inconvenient.
•A tool of oppression — Throughout history, people in power have used the diagnosis of “insanity” to remove those who opposed them. The film highlights how labeling someone as mentally unwell can justify locking them away, drugging them, or silencing them under the banner of “treatment.” It warns that this tactic doesn’t just happen in dictatorships or the past — it’s a recurring pattern whenever authority feels threatened.
•Then the film flips the usual story — Instead of asking what’s wrong with the dissidents, it asks what’s wrong with the rulers. “What if the ‘delusions’ of the dissidents are in fact real?” the narrator asks.
What if the people being called paranoid are actually seeing the truth about corruption or injustice? The film argues that maybe it’s not you who’s “crazy” for questioning power — but that the systems leading society are the ones showing signs of sickness. It also introduces the idea that political leaders can display traits of psychopathy — manipulation, lack of empathy, and obsession with control.
•The film invites you to question your own assumptions about sanity and authority — Instead of viewing dissenters as “mad,” you’re asked to see them as people reacting normally to a corrupt environment. The narrator ends the introduction with a challenge — perhaps the real madness is not in those who resist, but in the society that accepts cruelty, deceit, and control as normal.
This shift (from blaming the individual to diagnosing the system) sets the stage for the rest of the documentary’s investigation into what it calls “political psychopathy.”
When Medicine Became a Tool for Power
Psychiatry was not always about care or healing. Instead, it was often used as a weapon to control people who questioned authority. Corbett reveals how Soviet leaders labeled political dissidents with a made-up diagnosis called “sluggish schizophrenia.”In essence, anyone who spoke out against the government could be declared mentally ill, locked up in psychiatric hospitals, and given drugs or even placed into induced comas. These were not patients — they were citizens silenced under the banner of mental health.
•Other governments followed the same playbook — Nazi Germany used psychiatry as part of its brutal eugenics program, known as Aktion T4. Doctors decided who was “fit” to live and who was not.
In Japan (during and after World War II) and in Revolutionary Cuba, similar abuses occurred — people seen as threats to the state were forcibly medicated or electroshocked into compliance, revealing a troubling pattern. When governments merge with medical authority, the result is often cruelty disguised as care.
Then the film turns westward, highlighting that Western nations were not innocent observers of these crimes. American institutions, including the Rockefeller Foundation, helped fund early German eugenics research through the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. U.S. laws even inspired Nazi sterilization policies.
•Disturbing figures from early American psychiatry — Dr. Benjamin Rush, called the “father of American psychiatry,” believed rebellion itself was a mental illness he named “anarchia” — an “excess of the passion for liberty.” His so-called treatments involved confinement in darkness, sleep deprivation, and even spinning patients on a gyrator.
Diagnosing Rebellion — How Normal Behavior Became ‘Disorder’
Modern psychiatry has shifted from treating illness to labeling normal behaviors as diseases. The film examines the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known as the DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association.Introduced as a clinical guide in 1952, the DSM has grown into what Corbett calls “the psychiatric diagnostic Bible.” With each edition, more human emotions and behaviors have been reclassified as disorders, expanding the market for prescription drugs.
•Doctors contribute to the problems, too — Corbett presents striking data from research at the University of Massachusetts Boston, published in 2012 by Dr. Lisa Cosgrove. According to the findings, 69% of the experts who wrote the DSM-5 had financial ties to drug companies — some as paid consultants or spokespeople.
•The film also confronts the growing medicalization of everyday life — It cites surveys showing that one in six U.S. adults now takes psychiatric medication, while prescriptions for children, especially for antipsychotics like risperidone and olanzapine, have surged over the past two decades.
These drugs are not neutral — they shape behavior, limit emotional range, and teach children that compliance is chemical. Instead of asking why people feel anxious, restless, or angry, society simply tells them to take something for it.
•Defiance is being treated as a legitimate mental illness — Dr. Bruce Levine, featured in the documentary, gives a chilling example — “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” or ODD. He explains that this label targets children who question authority or refuse to obey adults, even when they’ve done nothing illegal or harmful.
The DSM’s definition describes behaviors like arguing with teachers or resisting instructions as symptoms of a mental disorder. Levine calls this “pathologizing rebellion,” warning that it punishes independence and curiosity. The documentary ties this back to its core argument that psychiatry, once again, has become a tool to silence dissent. By teaching children that disobedience means they’re sick, society ensures fewer people grow up willing to challenge power.
The Hidden Engineers Behind the Psychological Weapon
The film introduces you to the people and institutions who turned psychiatry from a healing profession into a mechanism of control. It begins with a man named Dr. George Brock Chisholm, a Canadian psychiatrist who later became the first Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO).In 1945, Chisholm delivered a lecture titled “The Reestablishment of Peacetime Society” where he urged psychiatrists to free humanity “from its crippling burden of good and evil.” By calling morality itself a psychological problem, he redefined the doctor’s role — not to heal mental suffering, but to reshape how you think about right and wrong. This idea, the film argues, was the seed of psychiatry’s use as a social engineering tool.
•Psychiatry used by any means necessary — The film introduces Colonel John Rawlings Rees, a British military psychiatrist and head of the Tavistock Institute, who took Chisholm’s ideas to the next level. In 1940, Rees gave a speech describing a plan for psychiatrists to infiltrate key institutions such as education, religion, and the media. He called this a “fifth column” strategy — borrowing a term from wartime espionage — to quietly shape public thought from within.
“Parliament, the Press, and other publications,” he said, “are the most obvious ways by which our propaganda can be got across.” Rees even admitted that secrecy was essential because “many people don’t like to be ‘saved,’ ‘changed,’ or made healthy.” By his logic, public manipulation wasn’t unethical — it was therapeutic.
•The film connects these early psychological campaigns to Cold War mind-control programs — Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) projects like MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD, and ARTICHOKE tested drugs, hypnosis, and electroshock on unsuspecting people to control thought and behavior.
One example is Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose “reprogramming” experiments used massive doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and electroshock to erase patients’ personalities. The documentary shows declassified documents detailing operations like “Midnight Climax,” where the CIA observed civilians through one-way mirrors after dosing them with LSD, which was “used to study the effect of sexual blackmail and the use of mind-altering substances in field operations.”
•The controlling mindset didn’t end with the Cold War — After 9/11, psychologist Dr. Jim Mitchell — once inspired by research on “learned helplessness” — helped design the CIA’s torture program. His method was based on breaking a person’s will through fear and despair, not extracting truth.
The documentary also notes that a quarter of the “9/11 Commission Report” footnotes were based on information obtained through torture, suggesting that false confessions became official fact. Simply put, extracting false confessions was the entire point of the CIA program.
How Questioning Power Became a ‘Disorder’
Corbett argues that one of the easiest ways to silence dissent is to label it as mental illness. Rather than relying on complex psychological experiments or covert operations, the new form of control comes from branding suspicion itself as pathology.To elucidate his example, he shows a familiar media phenomenon — a flood of nearly identical articles across major outlets like The New York Times and BBC, all titled some version of “Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?” Each story, the documentary explains, starts with the same premise. There’s a growing number of people who hold outlandish beliefs about those in power and ends by framing those people as emotionally unstable, delusional, or even dangerous.
•The articles, while packaged as scientific, carry a subtle but powerful message — If you question authority, there’s something wrong with you. These reports usually quote psychologists who suggest that “well-meaning but emotionally unstable people” cling to conspiracy theories to feel control in an uncontrollable world.
Corbett points out how this language moves the conversation away from evidence or debate and into diagnosis. This means that you are no longer engaging with ideas — you’re “helping” a patient. The audience is advised to speak in soothing tones to friends who question official stories, as if handling a frightened animal.
•Repetition makes the idea stick — Corbett highlights the uniformity of the messaging across hundreds of media and academic outlets — from the American Psychological Association to TIME magazine to Scientific American. This repetition, he argues, functions as coordinated conditioning — an effort to equate skepticism with sickness.
By flooding the public sphere with the same narrative, dissent becomes socially and psychologically risky. If you ask too many questions, you risk being viewed as unstable, irrational, or in need of de-radicalization.
From Laughter to Lockdowns — When Mockery Turned Into Force
The film shows how the treatment of “conspiracy theorists” evolved from punchline to punishment. It begins by showing how popular culture planted the idea that questioning power was laughable.A clip from the 1970s sitcom “Barney Miller” features a man ranting about the Trilateral Commission while police officers smirk and call him delusional. Later, the “tinfoil hat” meme (first inspired by a 1927 Julian Huxley story) became shorthand for insanity. The film explains that these jokes weren’t harmless; they created a cultural reflex to laugh at anyone who challenged authority. By the time talk shows and news panels began mocking “truthers,” society had been trained to dismiss skepticism as madness.
•Those who looked for the truth were ridiculed — That casual ridicule hardened after the attacks of 9/11. According to the film, President George W. Bush’s warning to “never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories” became a signal to the media mock truthers.
Late-night hosts like Bill Maher joked that 9/11 conspiracy theorists should start “asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you,” while newspaper columnists diagnosed them with paranoid delusions. These taunts, the narrator says, prepared the public for something darker — the idea that questioning government narratives was not just foolish, but dangerous.
Commentators from across the political spectrum began referring to truthers as potential extremists. The film argues that this rhetoric laid the groundwork for reintroducing psychiatry as a tool of punishment rather than healing.
•Real-world examples where dissent led to psychiatric detention — In 2006, New Zealand journalist Claire Swinney was forcibly confined in a psychiatric ward and medicated after she publicly questioned the official story of 9/11. She later discovered that her detention violated New Zealand’s own laws, which forbid psychiatric confinement based solely on political beliefs.
The film also recounts the case of Dr. Meryl Nass, an American physician whose medical license was suspended after she spoke against official COVID-19 treatment policies, and who was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before reinstatement. The pattern continues with Swiss cardiologist Dr. Thomas Binder, whose blog posts criticizing pandemic lockdowns led to a police raid on his office conducted by a whopping 60 police officers.
When Charm Hides a Lack of Conscience
Many people in positions of political and corporate power exhibit traits of psychopathy. Unlike violent criminals portrayed in movies, these “successful psychopaths” wear suits, smile for cameras, and influence laws, wars, and economies.Corbett explains that psychopathy isn’t about insanity — it’s about the absence of conscience. These individuals lie easily, manipulate emotions, and charm their way to the top. They don’t feel guilt, remorse, or empathy, and they treat other people as tools.
•Psychopathy is normal for people in power — To explain this, Corbett references the work of Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, whose Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) is used worldwide to identify psychopathic traits. Hare’s checklist includes qualities like grandiosity, superficial charm, deceitfulness, lack of empathy, and manipulativeness.
As Corbett walks through the list, you start to see unsettling similarities between these traits and what you observe in politics and big business every day. The film flashes images of campaign rallies, boardrooms, and press conferences, asking you to notice the pattern — leaders who lie without hesitation, exploit crises for gain, and smile while doing it.
•Corbett backs up his claim with research findings — Studies from organizational psychology show that individuals with psychopathic traits are overrepresented in leadership roles, especially in corporate and political environments. For example, around 4% of the population are psychopaths, “and they are responsible for much of the havoc in our society.”
When Systems Absorb the Psychopath’s Mind
The film explains that psychopaths in high places don’t just manipulate individuals — they reshape entire institutions to reflect their own lack of empathy. Psychologists refer to this as “projection,” wherein leaders disown their own moral emptiness by accusing critics of the same flaw, labeling dissenters as “paranoid,” “unstable,” or “dangerous.”This psychological sleight of hand keeps the public distracted from the real source of harm. But projection goes deeper than language. Corbett describes how corporations and governments begin to act like the individuals running them — deceptive, remorseless, and image-obsessed.
•Corporations follow the psyche of its leaders — Corbett draws from the 2003 documentary “The Corporation,” where Dr. Robert Hare explains that a company managed by a psychopath often becomes psychopathic itself. It shows the same traits, such as charm without depth, deceit dressed as public relations, and moral indifference cloaked as “strategy.”
Corbett describes how businesses that repeatedly break laws calculate fines as “the cost of doing business,” mirroring the psychopath’s lack of remorse. Over time, that attitude spreads throughout the organization. Employees absorb the system’s values, such as faking empathy, prioritizing profit over honesty, and learning that ruthlessness earns rewards.
•Secondary psychopathy — From there, he moves into what it calls “secondary psychopathy,” or the process by which ordinary people adopt psychopathic behavior under certain pressures.
For example, in Dr. Solomon Asch’s conformity study, participants agreed with obvious lies rather than break from group opinion. The obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram, Ph.D. showed that most people would administer what they believed were deadly electric shocks simply because an authority told them to.
These studies revealed a troubling truth — even healthy people could commit cruel acts if the system around them demanded it. The most striking example, however, came from Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which spiraled into sadism in less than a week as volunteer “guards” invented new ways to humiliate their peers.
•From the lab to the real world — Corbett links this pattern directly to real-world atrocities like the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. According to Corbett, the U.S. Department of Defense’s own “Schlesinger Report” cited the Stanford experiment to explain how “systemic pressures” enabled cruelty among guards.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s approval of aggressive interrogation techniques, including stress positions and psychological humiliation, set the tone from the top, effectively authorizing moral collapse. The transcript reveals that the experiment itself had been funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research “to study antisocial behavior,” a chilling sign of institutional interest in replicating and controlling such outcomes.
When the System Itself Becomes Sick
Corbett also introduces the “pathocracy,” a term coined by Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski in his banned 1984 book “Political Ponerology.” Lobaczewski described pathocracy as a society ruled by a small group of psychologically disordered individuals — people who lack empathy and moral conscience yet rise to the top of power structures.Once this pathological minority gains control, it reshapes every institution — government, media, education, and even medicine — to reflect its twisted values. The result is a world where cruelty is rewarded, and honesty is punished.
•Under a pathocracy, the traits of normal human decency become liabilities — You see this reflected in workplaces where obedience matters more than integrity, or in politics where truth-tellers are marginalized while manipulators thrive. Corbett explains that pathocrats depend on fear and confusion to keep control.
They create constant crises, such as wars, health scares, or economic emergencies to justify expanding their authority. In this kind of system, the average person learns to stay silent and in doing so, slowly absorbs the system’s sickness.
•Trying to reform a pathocracy is like pruning a poisoned tree — Eventually, it grows back the same way. The film emphasizes that simply replacing corrupt leaders doesn’t solve the problem, because the very structure of centralized power naturally attracts those without empathy.
The Power of Saying ‘No’
Even the smallest act of courage can ignite the fall of an entire oppressive system. Corbett revisits psychologist Milgram’s famous obedience experiments from the 1960s, where ordinary people believed they were giving painful electric shocks to others simply because a man in a lab coat told them to.Popular culture has distilled that study’s findings, saying that 65% of participants were willing to deliver the shock, but Corbett highlights a part of the study that’s rarely discussed. When participants saw someone else disobey authority, obedience collapsed. Only 10% continued to deliver the maximum shock after witnessing another person’s refusal. That single act of defiance rewired their moral compass.
•The overlooked finding reveals a simple truth about human nature — Obedience is contagious, but so is courage. Once one person stands up to authority, others quickly follow. Corbett calls this a “circuit-breaker” — a moment when collective fear short-circuits and people remember their own agency. The film shows you that every authoritarian structure, no matter how intimidating, depends on your consent to function.
•An example of defiance — To paint a picture, Corbett turns to a real-world example — the collapse of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Romania. On December 21, 1989, Ceaușescu stepped onto a balcony in Bucharest to deliver yet another speech praising socialism and his rule.
For decades, the crowds had clapped on command. But this time, someone booed. The sound was faint at first, then grew louder as others joined in, chanting “Timișoara!” — a reference to a recent massacre of protesters. The film shows Ceaușescu’s stunned face as he realized the crowd no longer feared him. Within days, his regime fell, and he and his wife were executed after attempting to flee. In short, the entire revolution began with one voice breaking the silence.
Healing the System by Living Differently
In the closing portions of the film, there is a shift from diagnosis to prescription. After charting how systems ruled by the ruthless eventually collapse under their own weight, the narrator offers a hopeful message — you can help build something better by practicing the opposite values of a pathocracy.Corbett begins by explaining that corrupt systems are self-limiting. They feed on deceit, fear, and domination, but these forces inevitably destroy trust and cooperation, which are things society needs to function.
•The next step — Stop waiting for top-down reform. You don’t heal a sick structure by rearranging its leadership — you replace the incentives that make it sick in the first place.
•The solution is not grand revolution, but everyday modeling — You’re urged to practice circuit-breaking acts in your own life:
Can a Single Fake News Article Rewrite Your Actions?
On a related side-note, a study published in Nature Scientific Reports by researchers from University College Dublin and University College Cork tested something that sounds simple but had never been rigorously proven — whether reading a single fake news story changes what you do in the real world.<span data-hash="#ednref2">2</span> The researchers designed three separate experiments to isolate how misinformation influences different behaviors.<span data-hash="#ednref3">3</span>In the first two experiments, participants read a fake story claiming that either almonds or cashews were contaminated. Later, a subset of those people were invited into a lab to take part in what they thought was a food marketing study. They were asked to sample nuts — including the very ones mentioned in the fake article — to see if the earlier misinformation influenced what they actually ate. It didn’t.
Despite being told that the nuts had been “contaminated,” participants showed no meaningful drop in their willingness to eat them or rate them positively.
•To ensure the result wasn’t a fluke tied to one story, the team repeated the experiment — This time, with different fabricated contamination tales, such as stories about fungus, rodent urine, spider eggs, and E. coli. Again, no significant changes were found in people’s attitudes or behavior. That’s a strong indication that most one-off misinformation exposures are not powerful enough to alter real-world behavior when the stakes are neutral and the topic doesn’t tie into personal identity or politics.
•The third experiment raised the stakes — This time, the researchers moved from food to climate change, which is a deeply politicized issue that strongly divides opinion. A total of 413 participants were randomly shown one of four fake news stories, either supporting or denying the seriousness of climate change.
Afterward, they were given the chance to act on what they’d read. They could sign a petition supporting environmental action, join a mailing list for climate initiatives, or donate a portion of their study payment to a climate organization.
Here’s where things shifted slightly. The only real behavioral effect appeared in one low-effort activity — signing the petition. Those who read climate-skeptical misinformation were less likely to sign the petition (23.4%) than those who read pro-climate change misinformation (36.5%) or those who saw neutral (control) content (39%).
The other two actions — donating money or joining a mailing list — did not change based on what participants had read. In short, misinformation has the most pull on quick, low-cost decisions, not on meaningful ones that require time, money, or genuine commitment.
•The study showed that people’s preexisting beliefs were far more powerful than the misinformation itself — For instance, participants who already believed in climate change were consistently more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviors, regardless of what kind of fake story they read.
But if you’re unsure or uninformed, repeated exposure to biased information from familiar or trusted voices can gradually tilt your perception. The researchers pointed out that this cumulative effect — being exposed to similar lies again and again — creates “illusory truth.” It’s the brain’s habit of confusing familiarity with accuracy. Once something sounds familiar, it starts to feel true, even if it isn’t.
In practical terms, your best defense against misinformation isn’t avoiding all media — it’s awareness of your own biases. If a headline feels immediately right or wrong, that feeling often reflects your identity more than the actual evidence. The researchers emphasized that consistent, ideologically aligned misinformation — seeing the same claim shared repeatedly by friends or influencers — poses a much greater threat to behavioral change than any single fake headline.
7 Signs of Fake News
While it seems like there’s no hope, change starts by saying “no.” And that means saying no to the fake news that mainstream media bombards you with every day. Now, how do you effectively spot fake news? Here are seven signs, according to a study published in 2022:<span data-hash="#ednref4">4</span>1.Bad language — Be on the lookout for poor spelling, grammar or punctuation.
2.Emotional contagion — Bad actors know that content that triggers strong emotions are shared the most.
3.News gold or fool’s gold — Beware if the news is shared by a single source, especially if the writing suggests that something is being hidden from you.
4.False accounting — Double check if the source is using fake social media profiles. Also, look for misleading images and fake web links.
5.Oversharing — If someone is strongly urging you to share a piece of news, they could be gaining advertising revenue from it.
6.Follow the money — Consider who stands to gain the most from extraordinary news stories.
7.Fact-check — Read the story all the way to the end. If it’s questionable, search for other sources to confirm the facts.
