Ep. 12 The Psychology of Totalitarianism with Dr Mattias Desmet

welcome back to the manipulation check we are back and better than ever better than ever with a special guest dr matthias desmond um he is a professor of clinical psychology in the department of psychology and educational sciences at ghent university in belgium he's a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist he also prior to receiving his phd he's earned a master's in statistics he is co he has authored over 100 peer-reviewed academic papers and has written several books including the pursuit of objectivity in psychology the khan's logic of subjectivity subtitle a walk on the graph of desire and most recently uh pertinent to our conversation today the psychology of totalitarianism so welcome dr desmond thanks for being here oh thank you it's a pleasure to be here and as a just a quick pause before we get going here i've heard you say in the past that your dissertation was on the replication crisis in psychology is that is that correct it was related related to replication crisis in psychology i studied uh methodological problems in psychology and then from there on i also investigated the replication crisis in psychology and later on more in general so yes it was related to the replication that's interesting because i myself have a research interest in the replication crisis in psychology and if i was told if a time traveler came back in 2014 and was like you're going to be talking to this guy dr matthias desmond in 2022 i would have said oh we're going to be talking about the replication crisis for sure that's what we're going to be talking about we're not going to be talking about this other stuff there's no chance so it's a crazy crazy life can't predict what we do want to talk about today is your theory matthias of mass formation and uh i guess you you you formulated that theory to explain the response to covid um and so maybe you could tell us a little bit about what led you to think about that theory and also what are the main elements of that theory yeah well um let me go back to when i finished my phd i finished my phd and i i in the years after after my phd i wrote a small book uh the book you just mentioned the pursuit of objectivity and psychology and in this book i i explained in a really accessible way in a very concrete and tangible way what exactly um the methodological basis was of of the lack of replicability of findings in psychology and i i showed it really in an extremely tangible concrete way so that everybody could understand it and to my surprise most people got angry at me [Laughter] at university and um and and from then on i started to be really interested in the question as to why people can be so blind for what they believe in or be so blind for every for for evidence that goes against what they believe in and slowly i started to be interested in in in mass psychology because because i i became convinced that uh only mass psychological phenomena such as mass formation can explain the extreme blindness people can develop under certain circumstances and um then um when when the crisis started the coronal crisis started in the beginning of 2020 i just started to study the statistics a little bit in the beginning and i immediately had the impression that they dramatically overrated the dangerousness of the virus uh in my opinion by the end of may 2020 this was proven beyond doubt it was clear at that moment for everyone who wanted to see it that the initial mathematical models for instance estimating the dangers of the virus dramatically overrated the dangerousness and the mortality rates uh because these these models actually predicted that in small countries such as sweden uh over 60 000 people would die if these countries didn't go into lockdown and the countries didn't go into lockdown and there were only like 6 000 people dying or something by the end of may 2020 in sweden so at that moment it was clear to me that um while the the mathematical models and statistics had been dramatically overrating the dangers of the virus the narrative continued as if the models were right and correct and at that moment they decided to focus on the psychological mechanisms that were at play in society and very soon i decided that we were dealing with a large scale of mass formation and then it took me a few months before i could you know formulate a theory on mass formation in such a way that it was accessible to um non-psychologists as well yeah that was how why i decided to to try to to summarize or to to to to formulate the theory of mass formation in this crisis and so what what are the main elements of the theory well you know many people have been talking about mass formation but the the elementary mechanisms very often remained unclear and i try to show how how a typical state the typical psychological state in a population leads auto almost automatically to mass information or at least you don't need much uh when a population is in a is in a specific state to provoke at the phenomenon of mass formation so the main theory is actually that uh well when so mass formation is a very specific kind of group formation i will just start with that it's a specific kind of group formation which which is characterized by an extreme blindness of the people who are in the grip of it when someone is in the grip of mass formation he is radically incapable of taking a critical distance of what the group or the mass believes in that's one thing then the second thing is that when someone is in the grip of mass formation he has this strange bizarre willingness to set to to sacrifice everything that was important to him before the mass formation started and then thirdly when someone is in the grip of masternation he he or she typically will become radically intolerant for dissident voices to the extent that in the end people will typically people who are in the grip of mass formation typically will start to commit atrocities towards the people who do not go along with them and they will do so and that's important as if it is an ethical duty to do so that's a very strange phenomenon and then this this strange bizarre kind of group formation emerges when a population in a very specific state and the most important characteristic is that many people have to feel lonely or disconnected from their natural and social environment um and this was definitely before the corona crisis started over 30 percent of the population worldwide reported that they didn't have one meaningful relationship so the the level of loneliness was speaking and then a second characteristic which follows from the first one actually is that there have to be many people who experience a lack of meaning making in life and think about the phenomenon of the jobs for instance just before the corona crisis 60 of the people worldwide reported that they considered their job to be completely meaningless or without purpose that's that and then once people are in this state once they feel lonely once they are confronted with lack of meaning making they will typically at the effective level be confronted with so-called free-floating anxiety frustration and aggression that means a kind of anxiety frustration and aggression they cannot connect to a mental representation meaning that people feel anxious without knowing what they feel anxious for they feel frustrated and aggressive without knowing what they feel frustrated and aggressive for and if a population have a major part of the population is in this mental state then something very typical might happen this mental state is extremely painful because if you feed anxiety for instance and you don't know what you feel anxious for you feel completely out of control you cannot control um an anxiety of which you don't know what you feel anxious for and in the same way if you constantly feel frustrated and aggressive and you don't know what you feel frustrated and aggressive for then you have the feeling that you cannot direct your aggression or your frustration at something so it remains inside yourself the aggression and frustration so in this condition something very specific might happen even if if under these conditions a narrative is distributed or disseminated through the mass media indicating an object of anxiety and a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety then all this freely floating anxiety might connect to the object of anxiety indicated in the narrative and there might be a huge willingness to participate in a strategy to deal with the object of anxiety even if the strategy is utterly absurd and that's the first step the first step in every mass formation so whether we are talking about the crusades or the witch hunts or a french revolution or the emergence of the large masses of nazi germany or the soviet union we see time and time the same mechanism first there is a narrative that indicates an object of anxiety the jews or the aristocracy or the witches or the muslims in the holy land doesn't matter first there is a narrative that presents an object of anxiety all the free-floating anxiety connects to this object and people are willing to participate in the strategy the collective heroic battle with the object of anxiety it can be the concentration camps the crusades the witch hunts the french revolution doesn't matter but that's always the first step and they people people simply do that because through participating in the in the collective and the battle with the object of anxiety um they have the feeling that they can control their anxiety they now know what they feel anxious for and they know how to handle it and also maybe at least as important is that they are they are offered a certain perspective they can anticipate a moment where they will be allowed to direct all that frustration and aggression at something outside of themselves so um that's the first step and then the second one follows from the first one because many people at the same time participate in a strategy to deal with the object of anxiety people feel connected again so the root cause of the mass formation the disconnectedness and the loneliness seems to be solved but that's crucial this it seems to be solved but it isn't solved because a mass and that's the problem of mass formation a mass is a kind of group that is formed not because individuals connect to each other a mass is a group that is formed because all individuals separately connect to a collective ideal meaning that the solidarity which is so typical of a mass solidarity and citizenship this enthusiastic feeling of solidarity the solidarity is not a solidarity for other individuals it's a solidarity for the collective or the group and it's even so that the longer the mass formation exists the more all the energy is sucked away from the bonds between the individuals and is all invested in the bonds between the individual and the collective and in the end the solidarity with the collective becomes much much higher than the solidarity with the individuals and that explains of course this strange paranoid atmosphere that is typical for all long-term mass formation as it exists typically in totalitarian states and for instance i was talking with this woman of iran uh two or three months ago a conversation which is available on the internet and she told me that she she was living in iran during the revolution in 1979 which was the beginning of a large-scale phenomenon of mass formation end of the end of a totalitarian state and she said that she had witnessed with her own eyes how her mother reported her son to the state and how she hung the rope around his neck when he was on the scaffold and when he was on she claimed to be a heroine for doing so so that's a typical end stage of mass formation all the bonds between individuals even the strongest bonds impoverish and they become less important than the bond with the collective that's a dramatic end stage of mass formation and it's crucial of course if we understand the mechanism of mass formation we will also know what we have to do in order to prevent the mass formation which is a kind of hypnosis to become so deep that we arrive at this dramatic end stage where people commit atrocities towards everyone who is not loyal enough to the to the mass and yeah that's that's that's the importance of that's also why they explain in my book it's the most important message of my book uh the psychology of totalitarianism if we just have to understand the mechanism to to to make sure that we know what to do so now it sounds if i'm understanding correctly part of what distinguishes mass formation from other types of crowd formation is how extreme it is and how potentially widespread it is so because of that would it not be possible to think of or let's say to try and explain it or relate it to people with more mundane examples like are there more everyday examples of mass formation that could be seen um or because of how it is how it's defined and how it how it evolves and created that that's not even that's not definitionally equivalent that there would be no such thing there are many many small scale examples of mass formation we have that we had this kind of mass phenomenon here lately around the phenomenon of needle spiking if you i don't know if you're familiar with that uh but there was this i was to two months ago there were all these reports about people spiking with the needle in someone's legs or or back uh at festivals okay those that goes back to i remember that in like the 90s people talking about that like discussions or telephone booths or things like that yeah and every time like a jury is formed that you i don't know if you're having uh the tradition of of juries when um during lawsuits but all juries for one for one reason or another um okay behave like a like a mass that's something strange nobody knows why that is but it is like that so there are many small-scale examples but the large-scale examples are rather rare because like you know um during the the war on terror and the and then the climate crisis and the in the woke movement were seemed resembled a little bit the phenomenon of mass formation but they were they they they were not the the the the real the typical characteristic of a large-scale real phenomenon of mass formation is that it splits society in two it reorganizes all pre-existing social structures that's crucial otherwise we are not talking about the real mass formation in a real mass formation um all kinds of groups that pre-existed political parties um companies families friends everything is split into and there are two new groups that are formed and the one group goes along with a certain narrative and the other group doesn't that's the that's the characteristic the signature of a real phenomenon of mass formation and otherwise you have like a kind of massification or something that resembles mass formation a little bit uh but it's not a real mass formation a real mass formation is energetically so strong that it reorganizes that it has the potential to redistribute all the social bonds in a society and that was what happened in the corona crisis for the first time and then of course the dramatic well what's so dramatic about mass formation is that it starts from um loneliness the the the root cause of mass formation is the loneliness in a society but it leads to even more loneliness that's so problematic about it because it it seems to reconnect people and this it seems to re-establish the social bond between people but it doesn't it destroys the social bond between the individuals even more and invests all the energy in the in the bond between individual and the collective meaning that after a real mass formation a large scale long-term real mass formation there is even more loneliness in society and that was we have seen this very clearly like uh since a few months students are allowed to come to the university again but they don't show up anymore uh the theaters the movie houses they are all empty the the personnel is allowed to work at university again but people don't show up they don't show up anymore so that shows something very typical the social bond has been destroyed even more than he was already destroyed before the corona crisis meaning that as soon as the corona narrative disappeared a little bit in the background we are not it will come back believe me but as soon as it disappeared a little bit in the background we immediately saw a similar phenomenon but this time centered on the the war in ukraine we immediately saw how there was again a narrative that indicated an object of anxiety in which the one there was a good in a bad guy in which people show this uh phonetic solidarity and in which people became radically intolerant for dissonant voices so i'm not talking about i don't say that i think putin is a good guy i don't care about that i'm just talking about the psychological function of the the of the narrative and um so that's that that's the that's of course so dramatic about mass formation it's a symptomatic solution which makes the problem worse and the problem ultimately is always the fragmentation of society the social atomization to use the term of hannah arendt in the frankfurt school that's the real problem and this this problem is connected to our dominant view on men and the world it's connected to this idea that the entire universe is a material machine a material a dead material machine that can be perfectly understood in the rational way i believe in my book i consider this to be the the ultimate cause of uh these large-scale phenomena of mass formation that we are witnessing since uh 150 years or something so it's interesting to hear you talk about the the splitting of society into these two groups and how that relates to mass formation because where we are we're we're in canada and a lot of that splitting has actually feels like it's come top down where sort of government and ideological centers have very much promoted and enforced this categorization of people into these two categories so it doesn't seem like it's been necessarily entirely organic or natural that it also seems like it's been manufactured vis-a-vis policies and and messaging and and media and you know government agencies for example the vaccine mandates might be a very good example yes of course of course and you know on the one hand you have the masses or the population you have a certain dynamic in the population on the other hand you always have the leaders of the masses you know in my book i describe how two things developed together throughout the last two or three hundred years on the one hand the population the psychological state of the population changed and became the population became much more vulnerable for mass formation just because the mechanization of the world and use of technology led to this disconnection of people with their social and natural environment which made the population much more prone to mass formation but on the other hand of course we also noticed how a certain elite formed in our society also as a consequence of the mechanist view on man in the world and how does he lead somewhere in the beginning of the 20th century started to develop an impressive propaganda machinery and that's it's very interesting to read the founding fathers of modern propaganda and modern public relations if you if you read people the work of people such as lipman trotter to name only a few founding fathers of modern propaganda and public relations and you see something remarkable you see how these guys were just starting from from a certain problem which was a real problem so also they these these people noticed that the masses the crowd became increasingly strong that was something that was very well described by gustav lebon gustaf lebon said we have a serious problem here he said the masses the mass formation is becoming stronger and stronger and stronger and the masses are always irrational and so and destructive and self-destructive so we are close to the point he said in 1819 and 1895 that the masses will seize control of society if there are a few leaders who use the masses they will be capable of seizing control of society so that was the problem we were facing at the end of the 19th century and then you had these guys trotter lippmann bernice and some other people who made the following analysis they said well gustavo obama's right the masses become stronger and stronger and our political leaders are not real leaders anymore because these political democratically chosen leaders actually are followers they just they have to be elected and hence they have to try to find out what the masses want and subsequently give them what they want or otherwise they will not be re-elected so the masses our our democratically chosen elected polit politicians are not capable of truly controlling the masses and of controlling their frustration their aggression their their their their irrationality and hence they concluded that society should invest a lot of energy and money in developing propaganda machinery that was the idea the idea in itself maybe was not so wrong like okay the masses are dangerous and they are irrational and destructive okay but then the conclusion that the masses should be manipulated that was a dangerous conclusion of course and what became clear very soon was that the people who used the propaganda machinery were hypnotized by the masses and their turn so and that's something that gustav rabon described already the people who try to lead the masses and to manipulate the masses who try to hypnotize the masses typically will become hypnotized themselves by the masses and in this way something very typical emerges namely a diabolic pact between the masses and the elite and this is the famous jewish german philosopher who wrote a wonderful book about authoritarianism the origins of authoritarianism that's it indeed i have exactly the same copy that was what hana ren said it is this diabolic pact between the masses and their leaders the guys who try to manipulate them with propaganda who is the who which led that led to the emergence of the first totalitarian states people often forget that but uh totalitarian states didn't exist before the 20th century before the 20th century we had classical dictatorships but we didn't have totalitarian states and i was so i was really fascinated by this phenomenon how first there are the masses then an elite who decides we will manipulate the masses mislead them by propaganda and how this elite very soon became hypnotized was in the grip of this of the masses themselves and how together they formed this diabolic pact which we see now again hannah arendt warned us in 1951 already that the new totalitarianism wouldn't be a communist totalitarianism also not a nazist or a fascist she said it will be a technocratic totalitarianism which is led not by gang leaders such as taran and hitler but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats and that's what we see now we see again this part of population which fanatically believes and in a certain ideology this this mechanist ideology the modern mechanist medicine and so on in the end actually the transhumanist ideology i think that uh ultimately what we are facing now is the emergence of the ultimate mechanist ideology which is a transhumanist ideology uh so we see this part of the population who who who who is in the grip of this rationalist few on man in the world and then we see an elite that represents it and that is convinced that the democratic system should be replaced by a technocratic system which is led by technocratic experts and which of course already for decades maybe for over 100 years try to replace democracy by technocracy and we see now the the population is in this in the optimal state now it's extremely lonely um um fragment that suffers from lack of meaning making is is confronted with epidemic uh depression and anxiety rates um and so on and and that's in this situation and and also it is prepared for decades by what someone like jacques little called pre-propaganda a kind of indoctrination which happens through culture movies theater movies uh education and so on oh why again it's the same copy as you have it's good we're reading the same books it's a good sign and then so that that's the populations in the state and the propaganda machinery has never been as impressive as it is now so we are ready for the new totalitarianism and if we know what to do we will be capable of limiting the destructiveness of this new totalitarianism and you'll be able to keep open a small path on which this group of people can walk that doesn't want to go along with with with the ideology the mainstream ideology uh that's the challenge now we should make sure that well that we survive it to put it in a nutshell so so matthias um i can imagine somebody listening who doesn't share these views and saying you know this sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory with like that's not really based on any real like literature or anything like that but you've already started to um basically share some of your references with us so you talked about edward bernays so this is that book propaganda and then you mentioned jacqueline you mentioned hannah arendt you mentioned lipman walter lipman right so i mean these are very classic famous works like i i think that people who who would sort of just try to brush this off as all just like weird conspiracy stuff might just be uh not well read in the historical work um there's also harold lasswell you know he has uh all that work on on propaganda what other is there any other key readings that come to your mind on which you based your theory and your your view that we could share with the audience uh well let me first and for all tell you this um there is a chapter in my book uh chapter nine i think which ones for for the the risks of uh of of of too excessive conspiracy thinking because of course there is always a conspiracy dimension in society always that it always has been like that in in in history there always there are always certain plans certain people who try to manipulate from behind the screens and so on uh it won't be different here but the essence of what is happening now is not a conspiracy essentially what we are dealing with now essentially is a certain ideology a certain viewable man in the world which is pushed to its utter limits and which at the same time um uh brought the population in a certain specific psychological state and at the same time also brought the elite in a certain specific state so what we are dealing with a complex dynamical system of which the point of gravity is not situated in the indeed it's rather situated in the masses but it's first and foremost situated the point of gravity is first and foremost situated in an ideology the essence of what is happening now has to be situated in a certain way of thinking in a certain symbolic structure so what i my theory has nothing to do with the conspiracy theory um um he and then and you know maybe the the the most convincing example is that many conspiracy thinkers are very angry with me they are very angry with me because they say that i that i try to convince people that the problem is not situated in the elite while according to them it usually it is but i don't think it is it's really you know totalitarianism the point of gravity of totalitarianism is never situated in the elite and that's exactly why um if you if if if a part of the elite is eliminated in a totalitarian system nothing happens stalin knew that he could perfectly eliminate sixty percent of his of his communist party um that the system would just continue if nothing happened if you try to do the same in a classical dictatorship the dictatorship will collapse and and that is that this exactly because in a classical dictatorship the point of gravity is situated in the elite so it's extremely important to understand the difference between a classical dictatorship and a totalitarian system in a totalitarian system it's the masses it's the ideology that has the masses in its grip and the elite in its grip that is the real problem so the leaders the leaders of a totalitarian system usually fanatically believe in their own ideology but and that's important they very often do not believe in the narratives they use to convince the population to accept all the changes they want to introduce in society so that's important you have to distinguish between the narrative and the ideology the totalitarian leaders usually fanatically believe in their ideology but they very often know that the narratives they use or rather a kind of propaganda rather than let's say what the ancient greeks called truth speech um oh so that's the question i think daniel isn't that you asked me something else isn't it just uh you you you did a great job answering the question except for uh other references yeah oh yeah you could share with our listeners um paul yes there are so many i think you mentioned le bon gustav lebon and uh mcdougall kenneth the crowd yes yes that's a wonderful book gustavo it's it it was published in 198 1995 1895 yes it was published in 1995 but it's still it reads as if it has been written yesterday if you read it yeah i find that book to be so haunting it's yes it's almost spooky to me as it is there's this one too uh todder i don't know if the rape of the mind yes it's also a very interesting book um [Music] he changed my whole view on fear merlot yes he changed my whole view of fear yeah that fear that's what what the fear mechanism is it's fear of living not fear of dying so this that you create this fear of of life itself and that that totally changed my view of the mechanism of fear being used in these situations and then also the words of mahatma gandhi actually is very relevant because because internal resistance against emerging totalitarianism always has to be non-violent aggressive resistance fuels [Music] the process of authoritarization while non-violent resistance is extremely powerful that has been remarked for instance by hannah arend as well uh because totalitarianism is based on a psychological process a fanatic conviction a fanatic belief in a certain ideology it can it's something complete like non-violent resistance usually doesn't work in a classical dictatorship in a totalitarian state it works and they're an imperialist atmosphere it also works but and the reason is of course that mass formation is a kind of group hypnosis and hypnosis is always provoked by the voice the voice of a leader and that's exactly why totalitarian leaders much much much more than classical dictators use indoctrination and propaganda because they know they feel consciously or intuitively that their grip on the population is based on uh their voice and and and so and this implies that the hypnosis or the mass formation is also disturbed by a dissonant voice so if there are other voices who continue to speak out in public space they will constantly disturb the process of mass formation they usually won't succeed in waking up the masses that was already described in a very nice and delicate way eloquent way by gustav lebon in the 19th century the people who are not in the grip of the mass formation typically are confronted with something absurd and they try to wake up the people in the masses and they usually won't succeed but and this is crucial this is really crucial it's not because these dissonant voices don't succeed in waking up the masses that they have no effect they have an extremely important effect they prevent the masses from becoming deeper and deeper from from going deeper and deeper in the group hypnosis and the mass formation and from arriving at this point where they start to feel uh convinced that they have to destroy everyone who doesn't go along with them so it's just of crucial importance historic history shows us what happens when the dissonant voice chooses to uh to stop to speak out like in nazi germany this happened in 1935 and 1930 this happened in the soviet union the resistance chose to stop to speak out because they thought it was too dangerous and within a period of six months the destruction campaign started so it's there is a very strong correlation between the dissonant voices and the destructiveness the aggression of a totalitarian state so as soon as you start to understand that you start to understand that we really have to do our best to continue to speak out and we have to do so in a very quiet way not so much trying to convince the people who are in the mass formation because that doesn't work but just claiming our right to articulate our own opinion now if you hear someone who is saying like look uh uh i was uh have been sick for 14 days it was terrible but happily for me i i received my three jabs or otherwise i would i would have been even even sicker so that's a good moment to say okay well listen i i have a different view on this uh and i will tell you my opinion and then you can do with it what you want so at that moment if you just speak out uh your voice will have an effect the person probably won't be convinced but your voice will resonate in his flesh and in his mind and his his he will he will uh and it will prevent him from going deeper and deeper in this in the fanatic convention conviction that is so typical for the for the masses so that's what you have to do and you have to do it as long as necessary that means a mass and the totalitarian system always always have the tendency to exhaust themselves they they in the end always destroy themselves and if and and the other group the group who doesn't go wrong with the mass formation and who tries to stay true who tries to stick to certain principles of humanity in a world that is dehumanizing at a very high pace because it's typical for a mass formation that it dehumanizes the world and if there is this small group who tries to remain humane and under these conditions that group will typically become stronger and stronger and stronger that's like the the typical almost automatic effect of sticking to ethical principles in a situation in which everybody or most people dehumanize that was described in a very nice way by sulcenochin in his book the gulag archipelago and also by viktor frankl how in the concentration camps both in russia and in germany most prisoners uh started to behave in a radically inhumane beast-like way in a beastly way and they killed each other to steal each other's food and clothes they became even worse for each other than the guards were already for them but there was a small group a small percentage of the prisoners according to sulcenichin that went in exactly the opposite direction sol senchin won the nobel prize with this book it's a wonderful book both in content and and in style it's a wonderful book and he describes how this small group of people there was a small percentage of the prisoners who reacted in the opposite way would try to represent a little bit of light in the spool of darkness and he and who became more and more aware of of the principles of humanity of ethical principles and these people saw sanchin said typically became stronger and stronger and stronger not all of them not all of them but many of them became stronger and stronger and stronger both at the physical level and the psychological level he refers to one prisoner in particular this guy uh ivanovich gregoriov it's a wonderful uh case that your narrative um and um so that's that's the point and then as soon as we understand that we understand that we do not have some we do not invest too much energy and trying to predict what will happen in the years to come because nobody can predict it exactly but i think we should remain focused on uh just trying to represent a little bit of humanity in a world that is becoming more and more inhumane that is dehumanizing and all the rest will be done for us and if you consider it like that i think you will see that what happens now is a kind of a natural process it's a process in which a large organism a large group of people the dominant group of people in society puts a lot of pressure on a smaller group smaller number and in that way pushes this group on a path where it would never go without this pressure of the large group and where it rediscovers the principles of humanity and in which at the moment the large group of people starts to be exhausted it will be perfectly ready to present new principles and a new way of living together as a human being i think that's the natural process that is typical for every mass formation it can this process can fail or it can succeed it fails if the small group of people doesn't live up to the ethical duty of articulating its own opinion that's crucial from a psychological point of view that's crucial if the small group of people stops to speak out then it will be destroyed and if it continues to speak out it will the the masses will exhaust themselves before the small group is destroyed so that's what we should try to do now finding the courage find the courage to continue to speak out even if okay we lose a lot because of it because that's also typical of a mass of course it's not friendly to the people who continue to speak out um if if there are enough and if people do it then it won't radically destroy them but well that doesn't mean that there is no risk of losing a lot but at the same time we will win the only thing that is really important for a human being namely we will stay in touch with what it is to be a human being and with the principles of humanity the ethical principles and that's what we should do it for i think some of these group dynamics you're talking about with respect to so even if we go back a bit you're talking about like the elite group and then everybody else sort of the general population those dynamics it really reminds me of sheep specifically i think an underappreciated aspect of sheep is that they always get labeled as being followers right like oh you're just being like a sheep you're following but one of the things about sheep is the sheep at the front of the pack are still sheep so they're not following they're being pushed so it creates this vortex of chaos and that sheep are following the sheep at the front and the sheep at the front are going because they're being pushed by the sheep at the back and it just creates this and this idea of uh of of mass formation getting sort of running itself out i think could also be almost applied to like a herd of sheep just going going nuts and getting into trouble where it just exhausts itself eventually yes does that bring a dynamic that exists in a herd of sheep i've i have a few sheep myself and i've noticed it it was it was very palpable to me because they'll create this frenzy but the sheep at the front doesn't know what's going on either i have five sheep okay so you you should be able to see it as well yes but the herd is too small i think for these dynamics of uh i have three i have three so like yeah the one at the front has no clue what's going on and it takes its cue from the ones at the back and the ones in the back takes takes take their cue from the one at the front and it's they don't know what's going on anyways i thought that was just a good analogy or yeah for me when you i hear you speak it's a way of understanding what's very very applicable you mentioned the possibility that once we come out of covid we might go into just another type of mass formation um with the whole russia situation right now is it possible to just kind of daisy chain these mass formations and and do you think elites might uh be interested in in using that mechanism if they could leverage it it's like an opportunity to advance some of their agendas what do you think about that since the 19th century uh many people were aware of the possibilities that mass formation offers to seize control of society many people were of course all the people who developed uh propaganda techniques uh psychological warfare techniques um public relations discourse human relations this course they were all aware of the work of gustavo for instance if you read them you will see that they almost all refer to the work of gustav le bond many of them refer to the work of gustavo and they all had this cynical attitude like okay the masses are stupid and aggressive so we should manipulate them we should free them of themselves and and so but but that's the that's that's the dramatic aspect of course of this entire enterprise that in the end it turned always out that they abused the masses to their own advantage and they and that they became uh even more aggressive and even more um irrational than the masses themselves so that's the that's that's that's yeah that's one of the dramatic aspects of the way in which the elite try to handle the masses um and now you're of course now you're in a very strange situation like in the during the second world war uh power was not as concentrated as it was now during the second world war the economic power was usually not in the same hands uh as the ideological power and now we see that all the different types of power started to converge and converge in in in in an extremely limited number of people a number of institutions so what we are facing now is the emergence of the ultimate totalitarian system the technocratic authoritarian system will which will not it will be more difficult for for such a totalitarianism to start to commit overt public cruelties because that zeitgeist the time spirit changed um but at the same time of course it will be a very concentrated kind of power so we will it will be necessary for the group who who who refuses to participate uh or to live according to this transhumanist technocratic ideology to be determined and to [Music] continue to speak out to develop parallel structures and so on we will have to do it all i think if we want to yeah yeah i have this book by uh noam chomsky you're probably familiar with a lot of his work and uh for our listeners noam chomsky was you know a linguist and then he turned into com to work on media and and was a commentator on media and propaganda um and yeah he talks about lippmann and his view that there's a specialized political class and then there are and he's quoting litman i think the bewildered herd right um and that the bewildered herd has to sort of be controlled and uh he's talking about the idea that democracy is really just um you know not meant for the masses to actually contribute but rather to be more like spectators um in the whole theater um and uh i i think it's kind of funny because during during covid i think that's that maybe became reified to some extent right we just there were just these dictats that came from above at least here in canada that was the case um uh it was all these dictats and and democracy so all of a sudden is kind of like more or less gone yes and yeah can you show the book of uh chomsky again media this is the short one yeah i didn't read the other one i didn't read that one i read um manufacturing concept of chomsky yeah that's this one here yeah yes yes that's the big one but indeed of course and then during the corona you know mass formation has existed uh as long as mankind exists i that's something that i mentioned in the beginning but there is one huge difference between the ancient masses and the modern masses there are several differences but there is one very important difference and it is that the modern masses are so-called lonely masses jacqueline described this in a very detailed way that the modern masses are lonely masses that means that the modern masses usually do not physically gather so the ancient masses were masses in which the individuals that formed the mass were physically together or were often physically together but in modern masses most people all all the individuals are isolated in their homes and they form a mass only because they all share the same narratives the same ideas the same or in the grip of the same images the same myths and so on which are disseminated through the mass media and it is this stage the stage of a lonely mass which makes people extremely vulnerable for propaganda indoctrination and so on so that's an additional very important aspect of a current situation i think um yeah what better combination than to be able to have isolation and loneliness while in in the crowd with the through the use of technology particularly given the preconditions you laid out of meaninglessness isolation loneliness um i'm curious to know where as you talk about totalitarianism in relation to mass formation where i'm curious to know where you situate mass formation with respect to totalitarianism namely is it a precursor is it is it a preconditioned causal is it does it occur simultaneously with or is it a consequence of totalitarianism like where would you situate it it can happen in different ways so okay we first have seen two centuries in which the power of the masses emerged in which the phenomenon of massing mass formation became increasingly strong and more intensive and lasted longer and so on and then in the beginning of the 20th century it for the first time the mass formation led to totalitarianism but that can happen in different ways for instance uh in the soviet union there was first a a a communist elite a small group of intellectuals who fanatically believed in historical materialist theory of marx and who used indoctrination propaganda first on a small scale later on on a larger scale to create a mass formation okay so the elite was first and this small edit succeeded in provoking a phenomenon of mass formation and they succeeded probably because the population was in a perfect state to do so if the population's not in the right state it's very like i think it's impossible to create a mass formation but but then for instance in nazi germany it happened exactly the other way around in aussie germany there was first the mass formation so first there was the mass and slowly from this mass movement from this mass dynamic certain leaders emerged certain people who were very successful at the rhetorical level very talented speakers and who succeeded and who who in one way or another articulated or whose voice resonated very much with what the masses felt wanted and so on and in both cases the ultimate effect was exactly the same it was a diabolic pact as hanaren said between the masses and their leaders that ceased control of society and which led to the emergence of the first authoritarian states in history so now now we we are like almost a century later or or 80 years later and the mean in the meantime the propaganda machinery has been uh sophisticated uh to an extreme extent the large institutions that represent this mechanism this mechanist thinking this id that there is like the the the the universe is a kind of a materialist machine that can perfectly be understood in a rational way that can be predicted in a rational way that's the the essence the the ultimate cause of totalitarianism describes is also in a nice way it's that ideology that prepares the minds of both the leaders and the population for uh totalitarian narratives and authoritarian state so when that narrative of course was even much more disseminated through education in in in at school uh through all kinds of movies and and the entire cultural apparatus actually and that that of course makes that now we are in the end stage i think of the tradition of enlightenment where this mechanist view of men in the world will really manifest and at the same time where it will collapse i i guess it will show that it is incapable of organizing a fruitful human living together you can never never establish a society on the basis of rational understanding that's impossible rational understanding is important but it can never be the cornerstone of human living together only ethical principles only principles can be the cornerstone of human living together and that's so important all major scientists have actually shown us that rational understanding is very limited we all believe that science in the first place represents like a huge accumulation of rational knowledge and in a certain way science is an accumulation of rational knowledge but science also brought us something completely different science also showed us that in the end reality is not rational if you look at modern physics and even much more complex dynamical systems theory that shows in a paradoxical way it shows in a strictly rational way that all complex dynamical systems in nature which is most systems in nature most phenomena in nature behave irrationally that the essence of life is irrational in nature strict literally that behaves as an irrational number in mathematics and it's that that's so crucial rational understanding is important the tradition of enlightenment was extremely important but if you follow the path of rationality sooner or later you arrive at the point where you see that it is limited and that you need a different way to know the world if you want to really know the essence of life around you like one of the most famous mathematicians of the 20th century and one of the founders of systems theory articulated articulated this in the following following way he said this part of reality that can be understood in a rational way is very limited and the rest of reality you can only understand by emphatically resonating with it so he referred to two kinds of knowledge to two kinds of knowing to two ways of knowing the world a rational way and then something he called a resonating way and you know every like in every culture of the past every intellectual tradition of the past knew that if you look for instance at the wonderful samurai culture in japan then they knew that in every process of learning an art or a craft or something there are two stages first there is a stage in which you learn rational technical rules and then if you practice these rules for a very long time you will start to develop an a different kind of knowledge which is much more feeling something that you cannot rationally explain and in japan there is this wonderful proverb saying you first have to protect the rules of an art and then you have to break them and it is first when you break them that you become a master in the art the samurai for instance said it's one thing to learn it's difficult and hard to learn the technical rules of swordmanship of the martial arts but it's even more difficult to forget them again and if you don't forget them again before you go to the battlefield you will die on the battlefield that's why they said show it which one they knew that rational technical knowledge is only something that prepares you for the real knowledge and that's what we see now we constantly try to build society on rational knowledge and in the end we become incredibly irrational absurdly irrational if we if a human being refuses to switch from rational knowledge to the more resonating knowledge then it becomes radically irrational you you're reminding me of the economic models and how historically some of the economic models were we're assuming a rational decision maker and those models typically start to fall apart you also have to um you know add this role of the not fully rational decision maker but and that's a rabbit hole because the way they define rational is in a very particular way but right but yeah very interesting um okay here's another quick question for you uh matthias your theory includes um a a series of preconditions right you have to have loneliness you have to have sort of meaningless work and so on and i'm wondering if those are necessary like could you get a sort of mass formation without those things or this kind of mass behavior without those things like could you could you just rely on having fear so there are people just afraid and then there is an authority that tells them do this would that be sufficient or do you think you really do need those additional features or factors i think you need them i think you need them psychologically speaking what you definitely need is a large a huge a large potential of free floating anxiety and so this anxiety that is not connected to a mental representation is necessary i think for a narrative that indicates an object of anxiety to have such an impact because if all the anxiety is connected to representations the new narrative will never be very successful and and capturing all this anxiety and in in in in in and then having this huge impact that that such narratives have i i think that you need the four conditions and the most crucial is definitely is definitely the disconnection you need enough people who are disconnected from their environment that's crucial because if people are firmly connected to each other and to their natural environment and even the connection with the natural environment is sufficient jacques described this in his book the book you have there behind you propaganda he describes this already people that live in nature usually will not be sensitive to propaganda no he said he said you you you yeah so people must be disconnected to a certain extent to be very sensitive for modern propaganda [Music] so i think i'm inclined to think that you need the four conditions i don't think okay that you can create a mass formation out of the blue in a population that is in a healthy psychological state we underestimate we underestimate the dramatic state of the the dramatic psychological state of the population before the corona crisis in a small country such as belgium with 11 million inhabitants 300 million doses of anti-depressants were used each year 300 million doses of antidepressants and then you have the anxiolitica the antipsychotics and so on all the rest but even only just 300 million doses of antidepressants were used each year the population was in a terrible state and then that that strange thing was that a few months before the corona crisis in december 2019 i looked around me and i saw how many people were confronted with burnouts and many people took anti-depressants and so on and i had a feeling the intuition that something would happen in society and i told my friends i was on a small holiday at the end of december 2019 and we were staying in a small house a holiday house and it was and i told my friends look you will see one of these days we will wake up in a new society in a different society because i feel society is a complex dynamical system and i feel that we are nearing a tipping point that this system will go to a new will or will reorganize itself and we'll find a new equilibrium and two months later the corona and then i arrived home from the small holiday i went to the bank i paid back my mortgage and i had a conversation of one and a half hour with a bank director because he wanted to know like how can you be so sure that something will happen how can you you be so sure because uh it would be better for you at the economic level to keep your mortgage and so on i said no i said no i will pay it back and then i we told for one and a half hour of course i couldn't really explain why i i thought i knew it but two months later the corona crisis started and it was like from from now suddenly we were all informed here in belgium that we were not allowed to leave our houses anymore uh the day after that and so i i i told everyone so it was something like that i meant something like that and um that was what i what i wanted to say and from the first day on i wrote my first opinion paper and yeah i don't know of course it can just have been a happy coincidence and maybe uh that i that i had this feeling before i kind of niels bohr said something very beautiful he said predicting is always difficult in particular if it is about the future he said and i like that i like that code i like that code very much but still i believe that somewhere i had this intuition uh and i think that that's a typical like a large-scale mass formation i would be surprised if it can emerge in a healthy uh happy uh population um i don't think so so your theory would would really posit that those things were all increasing the loneliness the meaninglessness and so on that was on the rise and then that then then triggered so okay got it sorry jeff go ahead so one of the things i've heard you say before i think you've said it today maybe is you use the word hypnosis and how it's it's not like hypnosis but it is hypnosis so i had this idea that okay because one of the things that seems to to always be on people's minds is particularly this mass formation idea is like who's susceptible who who's who gets you know caught up in it who doesn't and i had this idea that if it is hypnosis then you know maybe this is a study idea maybe we get some we can get some data to support the mass formation theory maybe here first ever on the manipulation check we'll get some we'll get a study going is if if you administer tell me what you think about this if you administer hypnotic susceptibility uh tests to people like like the the harvard one or the stanford one there might be other ones you know some people are more susceptible susceptible to actually being hypnotized than others in theory should those susceptibility scores correlate with narrative beliefs behavior pandemic response behaviors uh et cetera extremity in terms of their their belief so these people would be a deeper they'd be more deeply hypnotized than people who were less susceptible i wouldn't know it's possible if you ever investigate have you ever tested hypothesis please let me know what uh so you're not interested that's what i'm hearing i'm interested i'm very interested no i'm kidding it's a very hard question to answer because many people have asked that question and it probably has to do with several things well i also think that it depends on the ideology that leads to the mass formation if the ideology is very much in line with your own basic ideology you will probably be more vulnerable for the mass formation but even then even then i'm not sure uh i guess it also has to do like look as a as human beings we all try to find our stability in in something in life and the most basic choice we make at that level is that some people uh always have the inclination the tenants show the tendency to go along with the with with other people just to feel safe in a group other people prefer to take the more difficult way and they they try to stick to ideas and thoughts that seem sincere and honest to them even if this means that they have to go against the group that they have to swim against the tide and i think that i think that people who are let's say trained in swimming against a tide probably won't be will be more resilient when a mass emerges in a society i guess so but that's it's only my two cent worth opinion i know that i know that every time several people have asked this question hana aren't for instance in her book the origins of authoritarianism talks about it when she discusses the driveways affair in france and she also says like look this group who doesn't go along with the mass who defies the masses is extremely heterogeneous it's it's very difficult to find the common characteristic yeah you know yeah i i believe that you know i am inclined to think that the more you considered humanity and principles of humanity important before the mass formation the more resilient you will be just because masses always become inhumane at least this kind of mass formation i'm talking about there are different types of mass formation the dancing lake the dancing plague of strasbourg is something different than the mass formation that led to to the emergence of communism um but the real mass formation i'm not talking about mass hysterias that's something else actually that's too far at least it is too far to distinguish between all these different types of masses but for the real mass for me real mass formations always become inhumane and i'm inclined to think that people who paid a lot of imports who considered principles very important before the mass summation that it will also be more resilient but well yeah that's interesting so something beyond susceptibility or suggestibility could be preventative as well that's interesting to consider yes yes that's the beginning of a mass formation is always a moment of suggestion and that's what's described by gustave labor and that's in my in my narrative in my little theory the moment of suggestion is always the moment in which the narrative is distributed that indicates an object of anxiety that's the moment in which someone suggests punk this could be the cause of your anxiety and that's the moment where the suggestion starts with the hypnosis start one of the interesting parts of your theory if i understand it is that this may all lead to kind of ritualistic behavior is that correct so people will now engage in some sort of behavior that's that's that's related to their alleviating the anxiety is that correct absolutely so when uh when a mass formation emerges and when the narrative is distributed the narrative can only be successful if it is connected to behavioral changes so a narrative that leads to mass formation should always ask a population to change its behavior to uh to adopt new behaviors the book on your desk jacques iron that's also something that is uh that is uh described there yes that one jacqueline describes this he said a narrative that forms a mask and ever or a narrative cannot be cannot be successful in provoking a mass formation if it doesn't impose behavioral changes people have to start to behave as if the narrative is true that's when the narrative will have its most profound impact and this behavior these behaviors that's not in the book of illu but these behaviors actually function as rituals they function as rituals ritualistic behavior and these behaviors these behavioral changes can be as absurd as you want even the more absurd they are the more successful it will be and that's something that very often i've heard very often here in the corona crisis like when the corona measures became more absurd i've heard very often how people started to say like well uh now people will wake up now everybody now everybody will see how absurd these narratives are and i always warned them no they won't no no no no no no the people who are into the hypnosis will applaud that it is exactly because because the measures function as rituals and the ritual is always a kind of behavior that um is meaningless from a pragmatic point of view and that asks people to sacrifice something of their individual interests that's what a ritual is in through through participating in the ritual individuals show that the collective interests are more important than the individual interests and that's why the people who are in the grip of mass formation they do not go along with the narrative they do not buy into the narrative because they think that the narrative is right or correct or something no they buy into the narrative because the narrative leads to this new social bond because it re it gives them this new feeling of connectedness this false feeling of connectedness but still that's the reason why people participate in the narrative just like supporters in the football stadiums football supporters don't sing this this this song in the stadium because i think it's a nice beautiful or a correct song no they sing it because it connects them to the other people and that for exactly the same reason people in the mass and the real masses are usually not bigger than 20 or 30 percent of the population that's very important most people go along with the masses without being really hypnotized so most people go along with the masses just because they have the feeling like look it's too dangerous or to go to go against the masses so uh but but uh the people who are really in the mass formation uh the more absurd the measures become uh or the more absurd the behavior becomes that is imposed by the leaders the more the more they will be willing to participate in it and that's why several of the experts the virologists here in belgium uh from time to time they really know rich they admitted that well the wearing of masks is in the first place a symbolic measure the closure of the the closure of the pub center restaurants is a symbolic measure actually they too were aware somewhere that all this had not really something to do with but um fighting a virus that it was like a huge psychological process of course they were not aware consciously but from time to time they couldn't else then they they showed that unconsciously they all realized that what you were dealing with was it was a psychological phenomenon a psychological process and not so much a biological process [Music] so then then in terms of resisting the mass formation is it important to not go along with the rituals or how do the rituals and going along with with the rituals fit into resisting the mass formation yes from time to time you have to show that you don't want to participate in the rituals of course and in the first place oh as i said we have to speak out and speaking out can happen in many different ways you can do it with your mouth articulating words but you can also do it by showing something in in public space by refusing to wear the symbols and the science of the ideology that is uh seizing power and so on yes wow shorts knits in um i think he said something like never knowingly promote a lie and that's how you resist totalitarianism and so i guess going along with some of these things might be you know or not going along with them might be sort of a good a good way to resist exactly all right so you've been very generous with your time um dan do you have any any closing questions or closing thoughts before we let but maybe maybe matthias has something he wants to share in closing um but i think we covered the territory very well um well yes i i believe that um it's important that we from time to time that we can take a certain distance of what is happening now and that we can see that all this can lead to something beautiful in a certain respect that is even necessary without this crisis i think most of us would still sit in their seat look watch television eat have some chips and and drink some some some some crocodile and then and continue as if nothing as if nothing happened i think this had to happen um and we have to i i believe that the major challenge we are facing now in the nearby future in the years to come will be to find the courage to stick to our principles and that for the rest um we don't have to worry too much uh i expect that the next years will be very difficult years we will see the introduction of digital ids of digital coins issued by central banks and so on so it won't be easy to defy the system or to refuse to go along with the system far from that but going along with the system will also not be easy it will also be difficult and if we stick to our principles at least we will be sure that that is something that we won't lose our principles our awareness as a human being and that's the most important thing i think i think that that's what we should focus on that's great dan we wouldn't have started this podcast that's right now our podcast was started as a result of this uh this crisis because we're trying to bring um psychological thought to to uh to bear on these these issues and that's why you fit in so well with your theory of mass formation but thank you mathias and and and especially for your positivity um in the midst of this crisis i really like your positive take-home message at the end of all this yeah and when when all this started you were you know dan and i were sitting around saying you know psychologists got a lot to say about this we should probably you know somebody should probably say something yeah we're in our bunkers we look outside the bunker and you're out there with your bayonet and you've been out there for a very long time for a long time we're like okay matthias is out there well thank you very much for inviting me guys i'm happy uh yeah you invited me and maybe we see each other next time who knows absolutely thank you thanks for your time bye bye all right

Channel: The Manipulation Check

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Id: vwEVnA65YLk

Length: 83min 29sec (5009 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022