Recently, Icelandic reporter Frosti Logason interviewed Dr. Mattias Desmet, author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. In this interview Desmet describes his theory of mass-formation and the totalitarian mindset, discusses the Covid-19 situation and the rise of the lonely mass.
This is an excellent interview (and with the Icelandic subtitles a good opportunity to practice your Icelandic). Desmet has been at the forefront of analysing and criticising the Covid-19 response, as many of my readers know and been under attack on many fronts, latest when he was forbidden to use his own textbook in a course at Ghent University where he is professor of psychology.
But Desmet has not budged. Instead he keeps developing and refining his theory of how a population loses its mind. Grounded in the studies of Gustave Le Bon, Hannah Arendt and Jaques Ellul among others, Desmet’s explanation of what occurred in 2020 is a seminal piece of work, and will just become more and more relevant as our societies continue to disintegrate and move closer to pure totalitarianism.
Thank you for this. I look forward to listening.
“Mass whatever” is a twist on a number of stories. It is well packaged in fancy sounding terms, so it is easily absorbable. The problem is that it is a self-supporting theory, not a baseline observation of a social phenomenon.
The major defect is that it tries to cover the whole population (“mass”), notwithstanding cultural, ethnographical, geographic, environmental or individual determinants. As if all people were die-cast from the same mold. This approach appears to have no support in any reasonable study, it’s just a story told with words that appear to be “psychological”. As such, it is not even a theory, it’s just a personal reflection, and an incomplete one. It doesn’t explain anything. At best, it sounds like a consolation for those who are so uprooted that any explanation is needed for them to feel ok.
Considering pretty nice following it accumulated, it is a major distraction, turning energy away from the need to find constructive solutions.
The way it is told creates the polarization into those who are too weak to understand psychological mechanisms and the elite capable of watching the game from a hill.
The worst thing is that - in the view of the proclaimed certainty of this theory - no remedies have been proposed. We know so much about it, we can use complicated terminology to name everything related to it, ok. What next? How a simple regular person can handle it?