When virtually the whole of a population believes what it is told, there is a serious flaw in its members' "critical faculty" or CF. That term refers to our ability to process information against a standard of common sense and credibility, rather than believing "everything we're shown on TV."

During WW2 I was in short pants and single digits, living in England. Imagine, if you can, that I was a child prodigy with a well-developed CF. All around me, everyone had three core beliefs: Britons were good, Germans were bad, and Hitler had started the War. Suppose I had asked my parents:-

Mum, do Germans know they are bad?
(Knowing Mum, I think she'd have kept mum.)

Then: Dad, how did Hitler start the War?
Well, son, when we gave him part of Czechoslovakia, he promised he would not take any more land on the Continent; but he broke his promise. A few months later he took the rest of that country, and a few months after that, he took part of Poland.
But Dad, I was looking at this pre-War map of Europe, and couldn't find any pink bits.* So if we didn't own it, how could we "give" him part of Czechoslovakia?
It's a bit more complicated than that. But he did break his promise.
So did God make England a kind of Headmaster for the world?
It's time for dinner. Go and wash your hands.

Those three core, unquestioned beliefs were amply reinforced by the most amazing firework displays for which any small boy could wish, every other night; searchlights waved around the sky, sharp bangs as the AA shells exploded, heavy thumps as falling bombs hit the ground, and the loud drone of scores of aero engines a few thousand feet above. Of course Germans were bad; just look at the ruin they are causing, the neighbors they are killing.

And when the BBC reported "our aircraft" had mounted thousand-bomber raids on Hamburg, we cheered; for we were the good guys! A bit later when they told us a whole city had been incinerated in an instant, using a brand-new super bomb, I was glad. I was as gullible as everyone else.

Change the scene: imagine now that I'd been a dozen years older, but with that mature CF intact. Suppose I asked simple, child-like questions like those in the hearing of a substantial crowd. I would have been spat upon and denounced as a draft-dodging coward and, had a lamp-post been handy, quite possibly strung up to it by the neck and left to dangle. All in the crowd would have lost someone in their family, killed in action while in uniform; and I would have implied that those agonizing losses were a total waste, and that the age-old memorial Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori was sheer hokum, a vicious lie. Mass gullibility leads to mass hysteria and mass violence.

Fast-forward now to the 2020s. In each country in NATO (at first, then others later) the government told the people that a dangerous new disease had broken out from China, and their well-paid and -rehearsed "experts" solemnly confirmed the tale. So extraordinary restrictions were put in place, normal life was put on hold. All the major media including all the choke points on the Net told the same story and de-platformed contrary views. It wasn't a monopoly like BBC radio, but a cartel, cunningly suborned during the 2010s to ensure conformity. The effect was the same: all believed it. Everyone was gullible, CFs were suspended. Blame the speakers - but also blame the hearers.

To my astonishment, this near-universal delusion continued even after the governments' own figures showed the tale to be fiction. On its own (without the comorbidities that killed 94% of "Covid" victims) it was no more lethal than the annual flu - which it mysteriously displaced. The forced face-masking was ineffective. The lockdowns were immensely damaging economically but, again, useless for protecting health. The "vaccines" turned out to be fake, for by now virtually all new "cases" come from "vaccinated" people - and yet, it's not possible in some cases (like international truckers, eh?) to earn a living unless one complies with laws to accept a jab of experimental juice.

Despite all that, the great majority still thinks the Plague was not bogus. This is mass gullibility.

And in addition, since late February when a block was put in front of NATO expansion in Ukraine, the great majority of TViewers obediently believe the fiction that Russian aggression is to blame. Along the road from me the owners of a fine home, who sport a "TRUMP" banner at election time, have begun to fly a Ukrainian flag; unless they happen to have family there, that indicates thay swallow the fable wholesale. Gullibility, writ large.

* Pink was the usual map color for His Majesty's Empire.