Dr. Mattias Desmet - Psychology of Totalitarianism

Mattias Desmet - The Psychology of Totalitarianism - JUN 2022

SUMMARY

Dr. Desmet joins host Sara Haboubi on the Making Sense podcast for a fascinating exploration of some of the key themes underpinning his best-selling new book 'The Psychology of Totalitarianism', a must-read account of the nature of the powerful psychological phenonema shaping our world today. During this conversation, Dr. Desmet reaches into history and describes how the process of massformation follows a reproducable evolutionary pattern. Whereas it is difficult to stop massformation outright, Dr. Desmet nonetheless suggests that it is possible by a vocal minority to shorten its trajectory before it reaches its most damaging self destructive phase, by speaking out against it. People who have not been caught in the vortex of the massformation thus have an ethical and a moral duty to speak out and should be aware that though their words may not wake up the masses, that is NOT to say they do not have a very real impact.

Please share this interview with your friends and family.

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BIOS
Dr. Mattias Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Flanders, Belgium. Dr. Desmet has a Doctor of Philosophy Psychological Sciences and a master's degree in statistics. Sara Haboubi is host of the Making Sense podcast. Sara is an international speaker, coach and an NLP master practioner and trainer who lives in Ireland.

BUY THE BOOK - 'THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MASS FORMATION'
The world is in the grips of mass formation—a dangerous, collective type of hypnosis—as we bear witness to loneliness, free-floating anxiety, and fear giving way to censorship, loss of privacy, and surrendered freedoms. It is all spurred by a singular, focused crisis narrative that forbids dissident views and relies on destructive group-think.
Dr. Desmet’s work on mass formation theory was brought to the world’s attention on The Joe Rogan Experience and in major alternative news outlets around the globe. Read this book to get beyond the sound bites!

BUY IT HERE: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-psychology-of-totalitarianism/
WATCH BOOK PROMO-VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv6TFnKv5TU

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ADDITIONAL LINKS featuring Dr. DESMET
* Breaking Free from Mass Formation with Mattias Desmet (RECOMMENDED) - https://www.corbettreport.com/desmet-massformation/
* The Crisis of Meaning Making and the Importance of Maintaining the Principles of Humanity (RECOMMENDED) - https://www.thedemocracyfund.ca/a_crisis_of_meaning_making_and_the_importance_of_maintaining_the_principles_of_humanity_in_a_dehumanizing_world
* Why were people so willing to sacrifice their freedoms? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANHaHNr4qxU
* Professor Mattias Desmet talks to the Children's Union - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRCDPy5C2ws
* Headwinds Roundtable - https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/videos-and-interviews/vanden-bossche-malone-and-desmet-en-vanden-bossche

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MORE DETAILS ABOUT TODAY'S MAKING SENSE INTERVIEW

The Academic community failed in addressing a serious problem undperinning academic research known as the Replication Crisis. This theory holds that upwards of 85% of research findings are deemed impossible to reproduce. The root cause for this phenomenon is the shift that occurs when a discourse transitions from being a discourse of the minority to being the discourse of the majority. During this transformation, the discourse loses the character of 'Truth Speech' an essential characteristic of true exploration and discovery. Most *breakthrough* scientific discoveries are initially characterised as a *breakwith* received norms and conventions. The history of modern science in the 16th century is a case in point as it was characterised by an exploration of the world from an 'open minded' perspective which was capable of challenging the dogmatic discourse of the day. The first modern scientists discovered something new and were capable of breaking all kinds of dogmas and prejudices that existed such as in mainstream religious discourse, however - and as a consequence of its success - science *itself* has become a dominant discourse. In so doing, science has lost the quality of 'truth speech' and became instead a dogmatic set of prejudices which simply replaced the old. This scientific view of 'man in the world' is ususally equal to the *mechanistic* view of man in the world in which people tend to consider the universe as a machine - a set of interacting elementary particles that can be described according to the laws of classical mechanics and which can be understood in a rationalist kind of way. That this would happen is a logical process: When a certain ideology becomes dominant in society, it becomes the priveleged instrument through which the population at large can be determined to have experienced success in life. It can however become a priveleged instrument used to manipulate the largest group in society. Science thus has become more like propaganda rather than truth speech. The Covid-19 crisis really shone a spotlight on this.

There is a radical difference between Dictatorships and Totalitarian systems, first and foremost at the level of the psychological mechanisms involved. In a classical dictatorship people are just scared of a small group of people and because they are scared they accept that this small group of people impose unilaterally its social contract upon society. In a Totalitarian state something completely different happens - there is first the emergence of a phenomenon of massformation and then the emergence of a mass of people which fanatically believes in the narrative seizes control and this diabolic pact between the masses and the leaders who share a fanatical belief in a specific ideology has a much much more suffocating effect on private life. A classical dictatorship can only control political space and public space BUT a totalitarian system can control political space, public space AND private life because of the part of the population which believes fanatically in the dominant ideology circulating in society. All Totalitarianism starts from a pseudo-scientific place with the use of a lot of stasitics in its propaganda.

What we are facing now however is not the emergence of a fascist totalitarianism, it's a kind of *technocratic* totalitarianism which Hannah Arendt warned about in 1951 when she foresaw the emergence of a new totalitarianism not led by a Hitler or Stalin but by bureaucrats and technocrats. There is an intrinsic logical connection between this totalitarianism and the emergence of the scientific mechanistic view of man in this world. You can explain how this view of man in the world put people in a specific state which predisposed it to massformation and in turn totalitarianism.

Yet if we look at what happened now from the correct angle we will see that it's actually something very beautiful that is going on. We should think about something Gustav LeBon said in the 19th century. He said when the people who are NOT in the grip of massofmration speak out they will typically be disappointed. They will notice the masses won't wake up and no matter how absurd the dominant narrative, they will continue to prefer to believe in this narrative. It's the same over and over again.

N.B. The people who speak out should realise that it's not because their words do not wake up the masses that they have no effect. That's crucial. When there are people who continue to speak out during a process of massformation, the massformation will nonetheless never reach the depth required for leaders and the mass to think that they have to destroy the people who do not buy into it. If we speak out, our rational arguments *disturb the massformation* and so the masses start to exhaust themselves before they start to destroy the minority. The group of people who continue to speak out, not only prevent *themselves* from being destroyed but also prevent the masses from destroying themselves.