Mass formation psychosis (presentation by Mattias Desmet)

Below is an improved transcription of Mattis Desmet's interview with Tucker Carlson.

Mattias Desmet is a Belgian academics. He is a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University. He also has a Master's degree in statistics.

He did a PHD in 2003 where he discovered that 85% of academic papers were seriously flawed. He looked deeper into it and realised that most scientists could see that the methods used could only lead to flawed results but only 5% of them were opened to the idea of accepting that the results were wrong.

At the start of the pandemic, he wrote two papers warning about the dangers of the coronavirus propaganda. The official statistics and figures given everywhere didnt look right to him. Despite warning against it, nobody seemed to care and everybody continued to buy into the narrative.

By May 2020, he managed to show that the figures they used to scare people were proven wrong but still they were continuing with the same narrative.That's when he stopped looking at statistics and decided to start looking at the psychological mechanism that could explain why an entire society couldnt see that the narrative they believed in was completely absurb.

It took him about two months to pinpoint that we were dealing with a large scale process of mass formation. People who are at the grip of such a process lose all capacity to take a critical distance from what they believe in and it can go very far.

An example of how far this process can go is during the revolution in Iran in 1979. At that time, people there were highly educated but they fell into the grip of a large scale mass formation. People started to believe that a portrait of the Ayatollah was printed on the Moon and they would look out for it on a full Moon.

(PDF) Khomeini’s Face is in the Moon. Limitations of Sacredness and the Origins of Sovereignty (researchgate.net)

The higher the level of education in a society, the more vulnerable people are to mass formation.

Mass formation has always existed: the Crusades, the French Revolution, the witch hunts, the Soviet Union, the Nazi Germany and it became stronger and stronger in the last few hundred years.

Totalitarian states always emerge through a diabolic pact between the masses and its leaders. And it always leads to a completely new different state.

Totalitarianism is different from a classical dictatorship. In a classical dictatorship, a small number of leaders control the mass in an aggressive manner and the mass is totally scared of them.

The totalitarian state emerges in a different way. The totalitarian state emerges through mass formation. It starts with about 20% of the population who will fanatically start to believe in a dangerous ideology. It is usually done through indoctrination and propaganda.

20%-30% is enough because even if about 60%-65% don't really go with the narrative, they will never speak out. They will always choose the easy way and go along with the group of people who seems to have the largest voice.

So at the end, up to 95% (sometimes even more) goes along with the totalitarian narrative that lead to the mass formation. The 5% who doesnt go along with it, try to speak out and that's very important.

If you understand the mechanism of mass formation, if you really understand it, then you know what this small group should do. If this group makes the wrong analysis, the chances are very high that their voice will be destroyed. But if they make the correct analysis, it will highly likely survive.

That's why it is so extremely important to understand how this mechanism works because mass formation makes people completely blind for everything that goes against what the main group believes in.

The 4 stages of mass formation

This phenomenon of mass formation, which is a kind of group formation, emerges under 4 very specific conditions:

• Feeling socially disconnected

This is the first and the most important condition. A number of people need to feel socially disconnected from their natural and social environment. And that was definitely the case just before the corona crisis started.

Back then, the number of lonely people was peaking. Up to 40% of the population worldwide was reporting not to have one meaningful relationship and to only connect to other people through the internet.

And from this followed the second condition.

• Lack of meaning-making

  
  

If people feel disconnected from their natural and social environment, they will typically start to struggle with a lack of meaning-making.

To give an example from the situation just before the corona crisis, 60% of the people worldwide reported that they considered their job to be a so-called "bullshit job". That means a job without purpose or meaning.

• Feeling of frustration and anxiety

When people feel socially disconnected and when they feel a lack of meaning-making, they will typically start to suffer from something very specific at the affective level.

They will be confronted with so-called free-floating anxiety, frustration, and aggression. That means a kind of anxiety, frustration, and aggression that is not coupled to a mental representation. A kind of anxiety, frustration, and aggression in which people don't know what they feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive for. And that state is extremely aversive.

If you feel anxious and you don't know what you feel anxious for, you have the feeling that you cannot control your anxiety.

If you feel frustrated and aggressive and you don't know what you feel frustrated and aggressive for, you cannot take it out to someone.

And all the frustration and aggression piles up in your psychological system and leads to a certain very aversive tension.

And if the population is in this state, something very specific could happen.

• Distribution of a narrative

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 that object of anxiety, for instance, the lockdowns to deal with the virus, concentration camps to deal with the Jews, witch hunts to deal with the witches, and so on...

If under these conditions a narrative is distributed, disseminated through the mass media indicating the subject of anxiety and the strategy to deal with it, then there might be a huge willingness to participate in the designed strategy to deal with the object of anxiety no matter how absurd this narrative is and simply because, in this way, people feel that they can control their anxiety. They feel that they have something to direct their frustration and aggression on.

So that's the first extremely important step. And then follows another one, which is the really dangerous step.

Because so many people participate at the same time in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, they feel connected again. It is as if the loneliness disappears. They feel full of solidarity.

With the corona as instance, people had the feeling that they were fighting this collective heroic battle with the virus.

And they will consider everyone who doesn't go along with them as an egoist, as someone who lacks all solidarity.

And that in itself, the strange thing is, you could say, well, what's the problem? People felt lonely and now they feel connected again. So what's the problem? But there is a problem because the mass, the group that is formed is not because people connect to each other. This is formed because each individual separately connects to the collective.

Meaning that the famous solidarity of the masses is never a solidarity with other individuals. It's a solidarity with the collective. And the longer the mass formation exists, the more people will demand that everyone sacrifices all their personal interests for the collective. And that's exactly the reason why in the corona crisis, for instance, everyone was talking about solidarity. And at the same time, we accepted that if our father or mother were dying somewhere in a nursing home, that we wouldnt be allowed to visit them.

So it was all - everyone had to sacrifice everything for the sake of the collective. So mass formation is extreme collectivism.

It's the wrong balance between individualism and collectivism that goes completely in a direction.

The ones who encourage it, discourage the formation of individual relationships between people.

As an example in the US, the Biden administration, was encouraging children to turn in their parents to law enforcement if they said something that deviated from the explanation from the corona narrative online. The aim was to break apart solidarity between people.

The strange thing is that this always happens spontaneously.

In every group, which has an extremely strong group identity, all the energy will be sucked away from the bonds between individuals. For instance, in a military commando, if they have to do something dangerous, they will typically demand that there are no sexual relationships between the members of the group, simply because this special relationship between the members could threaten the group. And in a dangerous situation, these members could choose each other instead of the group.

So that happens in every group with a very strong group identity. And in a mass to an extreme extent, all solidarity, all the love between the individuals is sucked away.

And it's all injected in the love between the individual and the collective. And that's why in the end, even the strongest bond, the bond between a mother and her child completely impoverishes. And even mothers can report their sons to the state and get them killed if they feel that they are not loyal enough to the state. So it's a psychological process that is very logical but that is extremely dangerous. And that's exactly why we have to try to understand it.

And there are two important characteristics to take into account:

• The first one is that when people are in the grip of mass formation, they seem to lose all awareness of their individual interests.They are prepared to radically self-sacrifice. That's extremely strange.

• And then the other characteristic, which is the most problematic is that people in a mass formation become radically intolerant for dissident voices. In the ultimate stage of the mass formation, they will typically start to destroy everyone who doesn't go along with the masses. And they will do so as if it is their ethical duty to do so.

Going back to the revolution in Iran again, Mattias Desmet talked to a woman there, called Shohreh Feshtali (the conversation is available on the internet). And she told him how she has seen with her own eyes, how in the last stage of the mass formation, a mother reported her son to the state. How this mother hung the noose around the neck of her son when he was on the scaffold. And she claimed to be a heroine for what she had done.

That's the end stage of mass formation.

Why do the masses go along with this?

The reason why people buy into the narrative that leads to mass formation is not because they think that the narrative is correct, not at all. The reason why they buy into the narrative is because it leads to this new social bond. Because it makes them feel connected again. Because loneliness is the most painful state.

We don't know it, but it is like that. We don't realize it, but it is like that for a human being. And it wants to escape the feeling of loneliness. It wants this new social bond.

And the reason why the people buy into it is because it leads to all these psychological advantages.

It provides an object at which people can direct their frustration and aggression. It leads to this new connectedness. So that's the reason, this new social bond.

And the effective advantages is the reason why people continue to go along with the narrative no matter how absurd it becomes. We could even say more. It's exactly the same with people in a football stadium. They all sing the same song not because they think it's the most beautiful song in the world, no. It's because the song connects them with the rest of the crowd.

And you could even say more. The more absurd the measures become, for instance, the corona measures, the more they will be applauded by this part of the population that is really in the grip of the mass formation, simply because the measures have the function of a ritual.

And what is a ritual? Ritualistic behavior is always a behavior that has no pragmatic meaning and that demands a sacrifice from the individual. A sacrifice through which the individual

shows that the collective is more important than itself. We live in a time in which the materialist man in the world believes that rituals have no meaning and no function, but they are essential for us. And in totalitarianism, without knowing it, people engage completely in rituals, but they don't realize it. And with these rituals, people blindly sacrifice everything just to escape their profound feeling of social atomization, to escape their profound feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness. It's a kind of suicidal ritual that is committed.

And that's exactly why many people expected that if the rituals became more absurd, that people would start to wake up. But that usually doesn't happen, simply because it is unconscious, people don't understand that these measures have the function of a ritual.

And the more absurd they are, the more they fulfill the function of a ritual.

What can we do about it?

And that's why this is extremely important to speak up. This last stage of mass formation can be prevented if the small group who doesn't go along with it makes the right choices ie whether it will choose to speak out or to remain silent:

If it doesn't speak out, the masses will move to the last dangerous stage. So it's just quintessential for this group to continue to speak out in an honest and sincere way.

If you understand it, you will see why those who do not go along with it have to speak out.

People under the grip are totally blind and lose awareness of their own interest. They become radically intolerant to dissonant voices and destroy anyone going against it. It can lead a mother killing their own children. This is how far it goes.

The last state can be prevented by the 5% if they make the right choice - whether they chose to speak out or to remain silent.

Mass formation can be stopped by this small group of people standing up and saying no before it become totalitarism. Good examples are what happened during the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany.

The problem was that the resistance at a certain moment decided to go underground and to stop speaking out in public spaces. That happened in 1930 in the Soviet Union and around 1935 in Nazi Germany. And within six months in both countries, the destruction campaigns started. So there is an almost perfect correlation between the resistance that stops to speak out and the start of the atrocities and cruelties in a country, simply because if you understand the mechanism, then you know that mass formation is a kind of hypnosis.

It's identical. It's exactly the same. In a hypnotic procedure, there is someone - the hypnotist - who focuses the attention of someone else on one aspect of reality, for instance, an object that is swinging on a chain or something. And once the attention is focused on that one aspect of reality, all the rest of the reality disappears. It is as if the rest of the reality doesn't exist anymore. And this mechanism is extremely strong.

A simple hypnotic procedure is sufficient to focus someone's attention so much on one aspect of the reality that the person won't notice anymore that there is a surgeon who cuts through the skin, through the flesh, even straight through the breastbone to perform an open heart operation.

There is a professor, Elisabeth Faymonville, who uses this simple procedure to focus a patient's attention on something. And then the surgeon can do whatever he wants, cut through the breastbone etc. The patient won't notice it. So that's the power of this mechanism.

Exactly the same happens in a mass formation. First, people start to deal with all kind

of emotions that are no longer coupled to mental representations. And then all these emotions, all these anxieties are focused on one point. And consequently, people don't notice anymore that they lose everything, that they lose their health, their wealth, the future of their children, and so on. That's exactly what happens in a mass formation.

So once you understand that the mechanism of mass formation is a kind of hypnosis, you understand that it is a phenomenon that is always provoked by the voice of someone, the leaders of the masses, who use indoctrination and propaganda to continue the mass formation. And then you also understand that if you want to disturb the mass formation, then you have to continue to speak out.

If the dissident voices continue to speak out, they won't succeed in waking the masses up. Sometimes someone will wake up, yes. But usually, the people will continue to be in the grip of the mass formation. However, it doesn't mean that their speech has no effect at all. Their speech will constantly disturb the hypnosis to a certain extent. And it will prevent the hypnosis to become so deep that people become convinced that they have to destroy everyone who doesn't go along with them.

From the 19th century onwards, scholars like Gustav Le Bon have described this process.

And in this way, from a strategic point of view it is quintessential. What will happen is the following: the masses are always self-destructive. And they will slowly exhaust themselves. They will exhaust themselves and destroy themselves before they manage to destroy those who do not go along with them.

So once you understand that, you understand that the first and foremost strategic principle

that you have to follow is that you have to continue to speak out. And at the same time, it's also an ethical principle.

As a human being, you have the ethical duty to articulate these words that seem sincere and honest to you, no matter what the consequences are. We have numerous examples described by Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi or even Viktor Frankl.

If you do that, something wonderful will happen. If you stick to your ethical principles when the world dehumanizes, you go through a very fast process of mental evolution. As a human being, you start to become stronger and stronger at a mental level. And sometimes, even at the physical level too.

lf you read Solzhenitsyn (Russian author and Soviet dissident who exposed the Gulag system), he gives us interesting examples of how in the Gulags, most people started to act in a beast-like manner. But there were some, a small minority, who went in exactly the opposite direction. Those who in this pool of darkness chose to try to represent humanity and who became more and more deterministic to stick, under all conditions, no matter how difficult it was, to their ethical principles. And Solzhenitsyn gives these wonderful examples in which he describes how these people very often survived the concentration camps and became even stronger while most others died within a few weeks or a few months. Of course, it's not a guarantee. But I think that if you understand that, we understand that the process of mass formation and everything that happens now, in a certain way, has meaning and purpose.

It should motivate us to understand the value of ethical principles for a human being.

It should make us more determined to continue to live according to ethical principles while the rest of the world leaves them behind.

From the 19th century onwards, from the moment, the psychologists have started to study the phenomenon of mass formation, it has been observed time and time again that every time a mass emerges in a society, there is a small group who doesn't go along with it. But the small group is extremely diverse and heterogeneous. And nobody seems to know what connects these people. But in one way or another, they all make this fundamental decision not to choose the easy way and go along with the narrative everybody believes in, the one of which everybody actually knows that is utterly absurd and unethical.

How and why do they do this to us?

It does raise the question of motive, like why did Lenin do that? Why did Hitler do that? Why did our own government, not all of whom are evil, why did they do this?

Throughout the last few hundreds of years, we have seen two things developing alongside each other:

• In one hand, the population got in a state where it became more and more vulnerable for mass formation. And this simply has to do with our rationalist views. Something in our rationalist, scientific ideology disconnects people from their social natural environment. That's what Mattias Desmet describes in detail in the first five chapters of his book. He describes how our obsession with rational understanding, our delusional belief that the mystery of life, the essence of life can be understood and reduced to the categories of our own rational thinking. It's that delusional belief of the human being that more and more disconnects it from its environment. And that's exactly the reason, there was more and more disconnectedness in the population that led to the mass formation which became stronger and stronger. And in the end it made it so strong that totalitarian states could emerge.

• But at the same time, another process happened at the level of the elite. This mechanist, rationalist view of the man in the world created a new elite. An elite which rationally tried to understand the psychological processes in a society and then use this rational understanding to manipulate and control the population. And that's why immediately after the French Revolution (after the fall of the ancien regime in France), we saw the emergence of modern indoctrination and propaganda. Napoleon was the first one who established a Bureau de L'opinion Publique, a kind of office for propaganda.

And then in the beginning of the 20th century - 100 years later - we saw this enormous propaganda machineries of the First World War. And it became worse in the Second World War.

And now it's even much worse. Our entire public space is constantly saturated with indoctrination propaganda. If you read the works of the founding fathers of indoctrination propaganda such as Lippman, Trotter, Bernays, then you hear how these people think in the following way. They say, well, since modern democracy, the political leaders are not true leaders anymore. They have to be elected, meaning that they have to follow the masses.

So they can never control the masses.

And at that moment, they decided (see the work of Lippman, Trotter, Bernays etc) that they needed to constantly manipulate the masses or otherwise they would take over the country. So the elite relied more and more on indoctrination, propaganda, manipulation, psychological operations, brainwashing and so on - just to manipulate the masses from behind.

So why do they do it? Many people think that totalitarianism is all about power and money. And to a certain extent, that's true. But the ultimate motivation of totalitarian leaders is always ideological in nature.

Stalin actually believed in Marxism. And he wanted to sacrifice everything - all his money and all his power if he could just reshape society according to his Marxist ideas. That's so typical for totalitarian leaders. They want to sacrifice everything. And they actually believe it though.

They usually don't believe the narratives they use, but they blindly believe in the ideology.

The idea of technocratic totalitarianism and the lead towards transhumanism

In 1951, Hannah Arendt said that we've seen the collapse of fascist totalitarianism. And that we will soon witness the collapse of communist totalitarianism. But she said a new totalitarianism will emerge, the ultimate totalitarianism. And that is the technocratic totalitarianism. A kind of totalitarianism which is not led by gang leaders such as Stalin and Hitler, but which is led by dull bureaucrats and technocrats.

And that technocratic totalitarianism is the ultimate manifestation of this kind of materialist, mechanist ideology which believes that the entire universe is like a set of elementary particles - atoms and molecules that all interact with each other in a rationalist way - according to the laws of mechanics, and that can be perfectly understood. If you start from such a view of man in the world, then the logical conclusion is that this universe machine and this machine-like society should be led, not by democratically elected politicians, but by technocratic experts who possess the rational knowledge to make the machine run as smoothly as possible. So that's the delusional belief of technocratic system. It's a logical consequence of our rationalist, mechanist view of man in the world.

The real enemy for Mattias Desmet is not the elite but this ideology. That ideology, that rationalist view of man in the world, that on one hand created a new kind of population, which was so vulnerable for mass formation. And on the other hand created an elite which delusionally started to believe that it could manipulate, cheat, control, try to steer everyone in society.

So the root cause of the problem is this mechanist ideology, which always presents itself as science, but which has nothing to do with science.

What happened with the corona crisis?

Everything about our response in the West to the corona has been exposed as incorrect at best, fraudulent at worst.

But this doesnt really change the public's mind. Most will continue to buy into the narrative for the reasons mentioned previously.

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What should be our attitude towards people?

We will have to educate them in such a way that they start to develop the capacity to connect to the world in a different way.

First you can try to understand, rationally, what you have to do. But slowly, you'll start to feel it.

And that's the moment when you start to resonate with what you are doing. It's this resonating knowledge which is so important, the one which makes you feel the object that you're making in a craft, or which makes you feel the art that you're performing, or that makes you feel the object that you're studying in a scientific study, and so on.

And as soon as you're connected in this way with the object, you start to get in touch with eternal principles of humanity and with the eternal ethical principles of our existence as a human being. And all these principles can be the true cornerstone of a human living together, a really fruitful human living together. Now, since a few centuries, we believe that a rational knowledge should be the cornerstone of every human living together and of our existence as a human being. That's an illusion. Rational knowledge is always extremely relative and never really touches the real. Rational knowledge circles around the real but it cannot touch the truth of human experience.

Nobody acknowledges that, why? Because the illusion of complete rational understanding is so enticing for a human being. It make some believe that he is almighty.

It makes him believe that he will be able to explain everything. That he will be able to understand everything. That he will be able to manipulate everything, to control everything. It makes him believe that he will be able to live forever, to live eternally. An eternal happiness... If you read the books of someone like Yuval Noah Harari, then you see what this transhumanist ideology, which is only the contemporary version of the mechanist ideology, really believes in. It believes that man can become God, that's a problem, through rational understanding.

And, of course, it's extremely enticing for a human being to believe that.

But at the same time, it's what destroys life.

Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg. Schroeder, Bohr etc, all seminal scientists concluded the same. They say that you can understand a certain part of reality rationally, but the essence of life escapes rational understanding. Meaning that if you reduce life to rational understanding, you inevitably kill the essence of life.

Mattias Desmet believes in the fact that the universe is a system of material particles

of atoms that interact according to the laws of mechanics. There is just no possibility that the universe could be something else. The universe can be understood according to the laws of mechanics. And then slowly while reading all kinds of scientific theories, he slowly started to see that the seminal scientists all started from this rationalist ideology. But they all left it behind, one by one. They all concluded that the essence of the universe is not material in nature. You cannot understand it. It's not mechanistic in nature.

Someone like Niels Bohr (the Nobel Prize winning physicist who studied his entire life the elementary particles) said that when it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry. And he was dead serious. He said this behavior of elementary particles is so intrinsically irrational, transcends all rational understanding that you need poetry or mystical discourse to resonate with it, to have a certain feeling with it.

Mattias Desmet said that it wasnt before he was 35 years old when he dived deep into the mathematical basis of complex dynamical systems theory, before he suddenly started to see that what we call reality, what we call the facts simply are not rational.

And it's a paradox but it's what complex dynamical systems theory shows. This theory shows, in a strictly rational way, that the essence of life is irrational, literally, that all complex dynamical phenomena in nature, and that's most phenomena in nature, behave like an irrational number in mathematics. They are unpredictable, for instance, a complex dynamical system such as convection patterns in turbulence and fluid or gas can be described by a mathematical formula, by the Navier-Stokes equations. But even with these equations in your hand, you cannot predict one second in advance how this convection pattern will behave.

So this completely breaks the illusion that we would ever be able to really predict life. We will never be able. Our rational understanding stumbles upon an absolute limit. And it's beyond that limit that the essence of life situates.

The mystery of life transcends the rational understanding. And if you continue to build that wall of logical reasoning around you (because logical reasoning is really building a wall around you), you connect the one logical idea to the other. And in this way, you isolate yourself from your environment. But as soon as you start to be humble enough, as soon as you start to become aware of the fact that your rational understanding is limited. It is as if, literally, all these logical building blocks slide away from each other a little bit. And as if the eternal music of life can go through the holes of the wall and can touch the strings of your body and your soul. And it is at that moment that you can start to resonate with the mystery of life around you, with the eternal spirit of life. And it is exactly at that moment that you can start to tolerate the idea of death and dying. And that's the most elementary disease of our society, because we believe we are so obsessed by rational understanding. We don't know anymore what to do with the idea of death, dying, suffering.

And we deny it. We pretend that's not real. And that gives rise to great anxiety.

It leads to an incapacity to accept that life is risky sometimes. That we might lose something.This rationalist ideology reduces life to something completely meaningless, to a biochemical process in our brain or in our body. And at the same time, we cling to this life as if it is the only thing that counts. So that's a paradox.

We should be humble enough to know that our rational understanding is important. But that it is only the first stage. And that it should never be the goal in our lives.

There is something that transcends rational understanding that is much more important. Max Planck, also a Nobel Prize winning physicist, said something like: I've spent my entire life in the laboratory investigating elementary particles. And I came to the conclusion that our rational understanding is extremely limited. And that in the end, the only thing that counts is something that transcends rational understanding.

Science ultimately arrives where religion once started, in a contact with something that transcends all rational understanding. And that something that transcends all rational understanding is a personal god.

In his book, Max Plank describes an experience that most seminal scientists have experienced, namely that if you follow reason and if you really push rational understanding to the limit, you suddenly arrive at the limit. And it's there that the real journey of life starts.

What is to come?

The years to come will be difficult. This technocratic system and this rationalist ideology will impose itself in a radical way to our society. Everyone who doesn't want to go along with it will be ex-communicated. But if this group makes the right choice, and the most important thing is definitely that it should choose to continue to speak out. It should choose to continue to speak out, no matter how difficult it become. It will survive.

And it will, after a while, it will be able to deliver the real ethical principles that have the potential to organize a society in which human beings can live a life worthy of a human being.

It is important to try to do so in a calm and quiet way. We should try to speak out in a sincere and honest way, not because we are convinced that we are the only ones who know the truth or something, no. Just because we want to live up to this ethical duty of articulating the words that to the best of our own understanding or true words, sincere words, and honest words. The more you do it, you'll start to feel like a soft warm power become stronger and stronger in yourself.

We indeed might lose a lot. But we shouldn't care too much about that. We should make sure that we don't lose the only thing that is really important for a human being.

That's the only thing that we should really care of and make sure that we don't lose it.

All the rest is of secondary importance.

Another article to read:

The Doctor’s Prescription For Mass Formation Psychosis | Nasdaq