Professor Mattias Desmet, a Belgian
psychologist with a master’s degree in statistics, gained worldwide
recognition toward the end of 2021, when he presented the concept of
“mass formation” as an explanation for the absurd and irrational
behavior we were seeing with regard to the COVID pandemic and its
countermeasures.
He also warned that mass formation gives rise to totalitarianism, which is the topic of his new book, "The Psychology of Totalitarianism."
Desmet’s work was further popularized by Dr. Robert Malone, whose
appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was viewed by about 50 million
people.
But as the search term “mass formation” exploded in popularity,
Google responded by manipulating the search engine results in an attempt
to discredit Desmet and show people in their search results information
that would cause them to discount the importance of this work. Why?
Because Google is at the core of the global cabal and movement toward
totalitarianism.
Understanding the Psychology of the Times Is Crucial
Those who refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it, they
say, and this appears particularly pertinent in the present day because,
as explained by Desmet, if we don’t understand how mass formation
occurs and what it leads to, we cannot prevent it. How did Desmet reach
the conclusion that we were in the process of mass formation? He
explains:
“In the beginning of the Corona crisis, back in
February 2020, I started to study the statistics on the mortality rates
of the virus, the infection fatality rates, the case fatality rate and
so on, and immediately, I got the impression — and with me, several
world-famous statisticians, such as John Ioannidis of Stanford, for
instance — that the statistics and mathematical models used dramatically
overrated the danger of the virus.
Immediately, I wrote
an opinion paper trying to bring some of the mistakes to people's
attention. But, I noticed immediately that people just didn't want to
know. It was as if they didn't see even the most blatant mistakes at the
level of the statistics that were used. People just were not capable of
seeing it.”
This early experience made him decide to focus on the psychological
mechanisms at play in society, and he became convinced that what we were
seeing were in fact the effects of a large-scale process of mass
formation, because the most salient characteristic of this psychological
trend is that it makes people radically blind to everything that goes
against the narrative they believe in.
They basically become incapable of distancing themselves from their
beliefs, and therefore cannot take in or evaluate new data. Desmet
continues:
“Another very specific characteristic is that this
process of mass formation makes people willing to radically sacrifice
everything that is important to them — even their health, their wealth,
the health of their children, the future of their children.
When someone is in the grip of a process of mass
formation, he becomes radically willing to sacrifice all his individual
interest. A third characteristic, to name only a few, is that once
people are in the grip of a process of mass formation, they typically
show a tendency of cruelty towards people who do not buy into the
narrative, or do not go along with the narrative. They typically do so
as if it is an ethical duty.
In the end, they are typically inclined, first, to
stigmatize, and then, to eliminate, to destroy, the people who do not go
along with the masses.
And that's why it is so extremely important to
understand the psychological mechanisms at work, because if you
understand the mechanisms at work, you can avoid the mass formation to
become so deep that people reach this critical point in which they
really are fanatically convinced that they should destroy everyone that
does not go along with them.
So, it's extremely important to understand the
mechanism. If you understand it, you can make sure that the crowd, the
mass, will first destroy itself, or will exhaust itself, before it
starts to destroy the people that do not go along with the mass.
So, it's of crucial importance, and that's what my
book describes. It describes how a mass, a crowd, emerges in a society,
under which conditions it emerges, what the mechanisms of the process of
mass formation are, and what you can do about it. That's extremely
important. I will mention this from the beginning.
Usually, it is impossible to wake up the masses. Once
a process of mass formation emerges in a society, it's extremely
difficult to wake the masses up. But, [waking them up is] important,
[because] you can avoid the masses and their leaders becoming so
fanatically convinced of their narrative that they start to destroy the
people who do not go along with them.”
Indeed, to those of us who did not fall under the spell of the
irrational COVID narrative, the cruelty with which political leadership,
media and people at large tried to force compliance was shockingly
abhorrent. Many were physically attacked, and some even killed, simply
for not wearing a face mask, which we knew was a useless prevention
strategy.
Historical Context for Mass Hypnosis
It is easier to understand what mass formation is if you consider it
as mass hypnosis, because they’re not merely similar, they’re identical,
Desmet says. Mass formation is a kind of hypnosis that emerges when
specific conditions are met. And, disturbingly, these conditions, and
the hypnotic trance that emerges, almost always precede the rise of
totalitarian systems.
While totalitarianism and a classical dictatorship share certain
features, there are distinct differences at the psychological level.
According to Desmet, a classical dictatorship, at the psychological
level, is very primitive. It’s a society that is frightened of a small
group, a dictatorial regime, because of its aggressive potential.
Totalitarianism, on the other hand, arises from a very different
psychological mechanism. Interestingly, the totalitarian state didn’t
actually exist before the 20th century. It’s a relatively new
phenomenon, and it’s based on mass formation or mass hypnosis.
The conditions for this mass hypnotic state (listed below) were first
met just before the emergence of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, so
that’s our historical context. These conditions were again met just
before the COVID crisis. What we’re seeing now is a different kind of
totalitarianism, largely due to technological advancements that have
created extremely effective tools to subconsciously influence the
public.
We now have very sophisticated tools with which to hypnotize far
larger masses of people than they could in earlier times. But while our
current-day totalitarianism is global rather than regional, and the
information war more sophisticated than anything the Soviets or Nazi’s
could muster, the basic psychological dynamics are still identical.
Understanding Hypnosis
So, what are those psychological dynamics? "Mass formation" is a
clinical term that in layman’s jargon could simply be translated as a
kind of mass hypnosis, which can occur once certain conditions are
fulfilled.
When you are being hypnotized, the first thing the hypnotist will do
is to detach or withdraw your attention from the reality or environment
around you. Then, through his hypnotic suggestion — usually a very
simple narrative or sentence stated out loud — the hypnotist will focus
your full attention on a single point, for instance, a moving pendulum
or just his voice.
From the perspective of the hypnotized person, it will seem as though
reality has vanished. An extreme example of this is the use of hypnosis
to make people insensitive to pain during surgery. In that situation,
the patient’s mental focus is so narrow and intense, that they don’t
notice that their body is being cut into.
In the same way, it doesn’t matter how many people are injured by the
COVID measures, because the focus is on COVID and everything else has
vanished, in psychological terms.
People can be killed for not wearing a mask and the hypnotized won’t
raise an eyebrow. Children can die from starvation and friends can
commit suicide from financial desperation — none of it will have a
psychological impact on the hypnotized because to them, the plight of
others doesn’t register. A perfect example of this psychological
blinding to reality is how COVID jab deaths and injuries are simply
unrecognized and not even considered to be causal.
People will get the shot, suffer massive injuries, and say, “Thank
goodness I got the shot or it would have been so much worse.” They
cannot conceive the possibility that they were injured by the shot. I’ve
even seen people express gratitude for the shot when someone they
supposedly loved died within hours or days of getting it! It’s just
mindboggling. The psychological dynamics of hypnosis does explain this
irrational and otherwise incomprehensible behavior, but it’s still quite
surreal.
“Even while I know the mechanisms at work, I'm still baffled every time it happens,” Desmet says. “I
almost can't believe what I see. I know someone whose husband died a
few days after the vaccine, during his sleep, from a heart attack.
And I thought, ‘Now she will open her eyes and wake
up.’ Not at all. She just continued in the same fanatic way — even more
fanatic — talking about how happy we should be because we have this
vaccine. Unbelievable, yes.”
The Psychological Roots of Mass Formation
As mentioned, mass formation, or mass hypnosis, can occur when
certain psychological conditions are present in a large-enough portion
of society. The four central conditions that need to exist in order for
mass formation to arise are:
- Widespread loneliness and lack of social bonding, which leads to:
- Experiencing life as meaningless, purposeless and senseless, and/or
being faced with persistent circumstances that don’t make rational
sense, which leads to:
- Widespread free-floating anxiety and discontent (anxiety/discontent that has no apparent or distinct cause), which leads to:
- Widespread free-floating frustration and aggression (frustration and
aggression have no discernible cause), which results in feeling out of
control
How Mass Formation Emerges in a Society
Once a large-enough portion of society feels anxious and out of
control, that society becomes highly vulnerable to mass hypnosis. Desmet
explains:
“Social isolation, lack of meaning, free floating
anxiety, frustration and aggression are highly aversive because if
people feel anxious, without knowing what they feel anxious for, they
typically feel out of control. They feel they cannot protect themselves
from their anxiety.
And, if under these conditions a narrative is
distributed through the mass media, indicating an object of anxiety, and
at the same time, providing a strategy to deal with the object of
anxiety, then all this free-floating anxiety might connect to the object
of anxiety.
And, there might be a huge willingness to participate
in a strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, no matter how absurd
the strategy is. So, even if it is clear from the beginning — for
everyone who wants to see it — that the strategy to deal with the object
of anxiety might claim many more victims than the object of anxiety
itself ... even then, there might be this huge willingness to
participate in a strategy to deal with the object of anxiety.
That is the first step of every major mechanism of
mass formation. Whether it concerned the Crusades, or the witch hunts,
or the French Revolution, or the beginning of the Soviet Union or Nazi
Germany, we see the same mechanism, time and time again.
There is a lot of free-floating anxiety. Someone
provides a narrative that indicates an object of anxiety and a strategy
to deal with it. And then all the anxiety connects to the [proposed]
object of anxiety.
People participate in a strategy to deal with the
object of anxiety that yields a first important psychological advantage,
and from then on people have the impression that they can control their
anxiety. It's connected to an object and they have a strategy to deal
with it.”
The Problematic Social Bonding of Mass Formation
Once people who used to feel lonely, anxious and out of control start
to participate in the strategy presented to them as the solution to
their anxiety, a brand-new social bond emerges. This, then, reinforces
the mass hypnosis, as they now no longer feel isolated and lonely.
This reinforcement is a kind of mental intoxication, and is the real
reason why people buy into the narrative, no matter how absurd. “They'll
continue to buy into the narrative, because it creates this new social
bond,” Desmet says.
While social bonding is a good thing, in this instance it becomes
extremely destructive, because the free-floating frustration and
aggression are still there, and need an outlet. These emotions need to
be directed at someone. What’s worse, under the spell of mass formation,
people lose their inhibitions and sense of proportion.
So, as we’ve seen during the COVID pandemic, people will attack and
lash out in the most irrational ways against anyone who doesn’t buy into
the narrative. The underlying aggression will always be directed at the
part of the population that isn’t hypnotized.
Speaking in generalized terms, typically, once mass formation is
taking place, about 30% of the population will be hypnotized — and this
typically includes the leaders who pronounce the hypnotizing narrative
to the public — 10% remain unhypnotized and do not buy into the
narrative, and the majority, 60%, feel there’s something wrong with the
narrative, but go along with it simply because they don’t want to stick
out or cause trouble.
Another problem with the social bonding that emerges is that the bond
is not between individuals, but rather a bond between the individual
and the collective. This gives rise to a feeling of fanatic solidarity
with the collective, but there’s no solidarity toward any given
individual. So, individuals are remorselessly sacrificed for the
“greater good” of the faceless collective.
“This explains, for instance, why during the Corona
crisis, everybody was talking about solidarity, but people accepted that
if someone got into an accident on the street, you were no longer
allowed to help that person unless you had a surgical mask and gloves at
your disposal.
That also explains why, while everybody was talking
about solidarity, people accepted that if their father or mother was
dying, they were not allowed to visit them,” Desmet says.
In the end, you end up with a radical, paranoid atmosphere in which
people do not trust each other anymore, and in which people are willing
to report their loved ones to the government.
“So, that's the problem with mass formation,” Desmet says. “It's
solidarity of the individual with the collective, and never with other
individuals. That explains what happened during the revolution in Iran,
for instance. I talked with a woman who lived in Iran during the
revolution, which was actually the beginning of a totalitarian regime in
Iran.
She witnessed, with her own eyes, how a mother
reported her son to the government, and how she hung the rope around his
neck just before he died, and how she claimed to be a heroine for doing
so. That's the dramatic effects of mass formation.”
With No External Enemy, What Happens?
We’re now facing a situation that is more complicated than at any
previous time, because the totalitarianism that is now arising has no
external enemies, with the exception of citizens that aren’t hypnotized
and don’t buy into the false narratives. Nazi Germany, for example, was
destroyed by external enemies that rose against it.
On the other hand, there’s advantage to this, because totalitarian
states always need an enemy. That's something that was very well
described by George Orwell in his book “1984.” In order for the process
of mass formation to continue to exist, there must be an external enemy
onto which the state can focus the aggression of the hypnotized masses.
Nonviolent Resistance and Outspokenness Are Crucial
This brings us to a key point, and that is the need for nonviolent
resistance and speaking out against the narrative. Violent resistance
automatically make you a target for aggression, so “resistance from
within a totalitarian system always has to stick to the principles of
nonviolent resistance,” Desmet says. But you must also continue to speak
out in a clear, rational and nonabusive way. Desmet explains:
“The first and foremost principle the resistance has
to stick to during a process of mass formation and emerging
totalitarianism, is that people who do not go along with the masses have
to continue to speak out. That's the most crucial thing.
As totalitarianism is based on mass formation, and
mass formation is a kind of hypnosis, the mass formation is always
provoked by the voice of the leader, which keeps the population in a
process of hypnosis. And when dissonant voices continue to speak out,
they will not be able to wake the masses up, but they will constantly
disturb the process of mass formation.
They will constantly interfere with the hypnosis. If
there are people who continue to speak out, the mass formation will
usually not become so deep that there is a willingness in the population
to destroy the people who do not go along with the masses. That's
crucial.
Historically speaking, if you look at what happened
in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany, it's clear that it was exactly
at the moment when the opposition stopped to speak out in public that
the totalitarian system started to become cruel.
In 1930, in the Soviet Union, the opposition stopped
to speak out, and within six to eight months, Stalin started his large
purges, which claimed tens of millions of victims. And then, in 1935,
exactly the same happened in Nazi Germany.
The opposition was silenced, or stopped to speak out.
They preferred to go underground. They were thinking that they were
dealing with a classical dictatorship, but they were not. They were
dealing with something completely different. They were dealing with a
totalitarian state.
And by deciding to go underground, it was a fatal
decision for themselves. So, also in Nazi Germany, within a period of
one year after the opposition stopped to speak out in public, the
cruelty started and the system started to destroy first its opponents.
That's always the same.
In the first stage, totalitarian systems or the
masses start to attack those who do not go along with them. But, after a
while, they just start to attack and to destroy everyone, group after
group.
And, in the Soviet Union, where the process of mass
formation went very far, much further than in Nazi Germany, Stalin
started to eliminate the aristocracy, the small farmers, the large
farmers, the goldsmiths, the Jews, all people who according to him would
never become good communists.
But after a while, he just started to eliminate group
after group without any logic. Just everyone. So, that's why Hannah
Arendt said that a totalitarian state is always a monster that devours
its own children. And that destructive process starts when people stop
to speak out.
That's probably the reason why, in the beginning of
the 20th century, there were several countries where there was mass
formation, but where there was never a full-fledged totalitarian state.
Probably, there were enough people who didn't shut
up, who continued to speak out. That's something that is so crucial to
understand. When mass formation emerges, people typically feel that it
doesn't make sense to speak out because people don't wake up. People
don't seem sensitive to their rational counter arguments.
But, we should never forget that speaking out has an
immediate effect. Maybe not that it wakes the masses up, but that it
disturbs the process of mass formation and the hypnosis. And in that
way, prevents the masses from becoming highly destructive towards the
people who do not go along with them.
Something else also happens. The masses start to
exhaust themselves. They start to destroy themselves before they start
to destroy the people who do not go along with them. So, that's the
strategy to be used for internal resistance towards totalitarian
regimes.”
Push Back Against Transhumanism and Technocracy
As mentioned earlier, the leaders who declare the narratives are also
always hypnotized. They are fanatics in that sense. However, while
today’s world leaders are fanatics about transhumanism and technocracy,
they may not necessarily believe what they’re saying about COVID.
Many know that they’re telling lies, but they justify those lies as
necessary in order to bring the ideologies of transhumanism and
technocracy to fruition. The ridiculous COVID agenda is a means to an
end. This is another reason why we must continue to push back and speak
out, because once the counter arguments disappear, these leaders will
become even more fanatic in their ideological quest.
“In the end, the ultimate challenge is not so much to
show people that the coronavirus was not as dangerous as we expected,
or that the COVID narrative is wrong, but rather that this ideology is
problematic — this transhumanist and this technocratic ideology is a
disaster for humanity; this mechanistic thinking, this belief that the
universe and man is a kind of material mechanistic system, which should
be steered and manipulated in a mechanistic technocratic transhumanist
way.
That's the ultimate challenge: to show people that in
the end, a transhumanist view on man and the world will entail radical
dehumanization of our society. So, I think that's the real challenge we
are facing. Showing people, ‘Look, forget for a moment about the Corona
narrative.
What we are heading for if we continue in the same
way, is a radically, technologically controlled transhumanist society,
which will leave no space whatsoever for life for a human being.”
It’ll Get Worse Before It Gets Better
Like me, Desmet is convinced that we’re rapidly headed toward global
totalitarianism and that things will get far worse before they get
better. Why? Because we’re only in the initial stages of the process of
totalitarianism. On the horizon, digital identity still looms large, and
with that comes an unfathomably powerful control grid capable of
breaking just about anyone.
The glimmer of hope is this: Everyone who has studied mass formation
and totalitarianism has concluded that both are intrinsically
self-destructive. They cannot survive. And, the more means it has at its
disposal to control the population, the sooner it might destroy itself,
because totalitarianism destroys the core of the human being.
Ultimately, “totalitarianism” refers to the ambition of the system.
It wants to eliminate the ability of individual choice, and in so doing,
it destroys the core of what it is to be human, “because psychological
energy in a human being emerges at every moment a human being can make a
choice that is really its own choice,” Desmet says. The quicker a
system destroys the individual, the sooner the system collapses.
Again, the only weapon against the brutal destruction of humanity is
to push back, to speak out, to nonviolently resist. It may not stop
totalitarianism in its tracks, but it can keep the most heinous
atrocities at bay. It will also provide a small space where the
resistant can try to survive together and thrive in the midst of the
totalitarian landscape.
“Then, if we want to succeed, we will have to think
about parallel structures which can allow us to be a little bit self
sufficient. We can try to make sure that we don't need the system too
much anymore. But, even these parallel structures would be destroyed in a
moment if the people do not continue to speak out. So, that's the
crucial.
I try to bring this to the attention of everyone. We
can build parallel structures as much as we want, but if the system
becomes too destructive and decides to use it’s full aggressive
potential, then the parallel structures will be destroyed. But, the
system will never reach this level of depth of the hypnosis if there are
dissonant voices that continue to speak out. So, I'm very dedicated
myself to continue to speak out.”
While it’s impossible to make accurate predictions, Desmet’s gut
feeling is that it’ll probably be at least seven or eight years before
the totalitarian system currently emerging with burn itself out and
self-destruct. Could be more, could be less. Society is a complex
dynamic system, and even simple complex dynamic systems cannot be
predicted even one second in advance. This is known as the deterministic
unpredictability of complex dynamic ecosystems.
More Information
Regardless of how long it takes, the key will be to survive it all
and do what we can to minimize the carnage. A key challenge on an
individual level will be to maintain elementary principles of humanity.
In the interview, Desmet discusses Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book, "The
Gulag Archipelago," which highlights the importance of holding on to
your humanity in the midst of an inhumane situation.
“That, maybe, is the one and only thing that can
guarantee us of a good outcome of the entire process — which is a
necessary process, I think. This crisis is not meaningless. It's not
meaningless. It's a process in which society can give birth to something
new, something much better than exists up until now,” he says.
To learn more about this truly crucial topic, be sure to pick up a copy of Desmet’s book, "The Psychology of Totalitarianism."