Eric Clapton hasn’t backed down from his anti-vax beliefs in recent months. Along with releasing several songs protesting lockdowns in collaboration with Van Morrison, Clapton refused to play shows which require proof of vaccination against COVID-19. Now, in order to explain why people were made at him for his music, the former Cream guitarist began spewing off a debunked theory about “mass hypnosis” and “subliminal” YouTube advertisements.
The musician recently sat down for an interview with The Real Music Observer, which was ironically uploaded to YouTube. Clapton says he was “mystified” that he “seemed to be the only person” who thought protesting lockdown measures was “exciting, or even appropriate.” But instead of understand why he was in the minority on the issue, it made Clapton want to protest even more. “I’m cut from the cloth where if you tell me I can’t do something, I really wanna know why I can’t do it,” he said.
Clapton then began launching into a theory about “mass hypnosis formation,” which was apparently the only explanation why people didn’t like his anti-lockdown music. After learning about the theory, he “started seeing it everywhere,” including on YouTube (it seems Clapton’s “mass hypnosis formation” doesn’t include anything about confirmation bias, huh?). “I remembered seeing little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising; it had been going on for a long time — that thing about ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy,” he said. Clapton continued:
“I thought, ‘What’s that mean?’ And bit by bit, I put a rough kind of jigsaw puzzle together, and that made me even more resolute. And so I went from that to looking at the news stuff that was coming out in England and the UK. We have BBC, and it used to be an impartial commentary on world affairs and state affairs. And suddenly it was completely one-way traffic about following orders and obedience.”
The musician’s “mass hypnosis formation” theory, which is actually called the “mass formation psychosis” theory, is a term that has been seen spreading across the anti-vax corners of the internet as a way of explaining why so many people are willing to follow “strange” behavior, like health and safety guidelines about COVID-19 or waiting in line to get tested. It comes as no surprise that the theory was originally popularized thanks to The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Rogan invited the theory’s inventor, Dr. Robert Malone, on the show, where he claimed that “mass formation psychosis” is spreading across the globe. After the episode with Malone was released, over 250 scientists and medical, professionals, professors, and science communicators wrote an open letter to Spotify, asking the streaming giant to de-platform Rogan for spreading misinformation.
