“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”-1984 (George Orwell)
It may seem odd to begin a review of one book with a quote from another, but there seems no better place to begin. The Psychology of Totalitarianism, by Mattias Desmet, is a galaxy-guide for those who woke up to find that the world they were born into no longer exists, their neighbors replaced by fanatical germophobes, the institutions they once trusted abruptly converted into instruments of unbending repression.
In mass formation, an ideologically driven narrative replaces the individual pursuit of happiness. A superseding set of values, predicated on collective action, displaces the prevailing priorities. Spurred by a sense of emergent threat, independence becomes dispensable and the primal imperative to cohere with the group becomes dominant.
The effect is much like a fire drill in elementary school: at the ringing of a bell, the dutiful students line up, awaiting evacuation orders. At the outset of the medical fire drill known as COVID-19, various tactics were deployed to provoke this school-child mentality. For example, absurdly, the public was cautioned to wash their hands long enough to sing the traditional “Happy Birthday.” This brilliant bit of psychology reduced the compliant to hypnotized children, who don’t really like washing their hands or singing happy birthday, but do it anyway to please the authorities.
Similarly, the population was first warned against the use of masks; those were for the “big people” who worked in hospitals. Instead, again like schoolchildren, people were encouraged to make and collect masks for hospital workers. When they were finally allowed to wear the masks themselves, some of them surely felt like they had “grown up” and clung to the privilege jealously.
Desmet argues that this is the inevitable endpoint of mechanistic, deterministic philosophy, rather than an anomaly which accompanies the rise of a charismatic autocrat. The ideology itself, whether Soviet Communism, National Socialism, McCarthyism, or Covidian Collectivism, carries its cognitive implications to the logical extreme. As these ideologies are revolutionary in principle, no existing norm is respected.
In other words, the mass gathers around the myth of a better future, a utopian vision, the world as it would be perfected if only some singular problem could be solved. This is key; it allows each participant to believe that any fanatical step is justified on the way to a greater good. Only the uncooperative stand in the way, due to their stubborn and ignorant nature.
In such fashion, the captivated mass itself becomes the enforcer of the new, arbitrary mandates-even, as several graphic examples show, the sacrifice called for is one’s own life. Possessed by a monomaniacal fixation on the current threat, large numbers of people will reliably turn on their neighbors, families, and even willingly submit to slaughter themselves.
Others, however, do not, and these heretics become the object of inflamed hate to the loyal mass. They are the ones preventing the defeat of the lurking menace. By refusing to cooperate, or even voicing their concerns with the rapidly shifting social landscape, the nonconformists come to represent the threat itself.
The role of inevitable dissenters is central to the formation of the mass. Their very existence provides urgency to the social pressure to conform; as the defiant are progressively mistreated, their ideas are identified with an unthinkable personal outcome. The mass recoils at any thoughts which might lead to their own heresy, fearing ostracization and persecution.
Moreover, the propaganda targets these dissidents, accusing them of consorting with the enemy, blaming them for sabotaging the State’s benevolent plans. This works as well when the foe is a foreign state, as when the threat object is an invisible virus. In either event, to disagree with the authorities—whether to argue that a war is a deadly mistake, or to protest futile and counterproductive public health measures-is conflated with treason.
Lies fly around the globe, while the truth is still waiting in line. The success of a propaganda campaign is inversely proportionate to the absurdity of its premises. Unhindered by the complications and caveats of a reality represented with integrity, a totalitarian narrative provides rock-hard certainty, even as it routinely reverses itself.
The dissidents are blamed for the continuation of the threat, another convenient dodge for a state which must simultaneously appear all-powerful and all-knowing, while incapable of rapidly rectifying the threat object. The plan would work, the narrative goes, if only more of those malcontents would cooperate. This increases the authority of the state in proportion to the failure of its policy; the more uncontrollable the threat object appears to be, the more support there is for coercive and punitive measures.
What underlies this thesis of mass formation is that these retreats into collective irrationality are a feature, not a bug, of civilization. While there is great temptation to see the monomaniacal leaders as cackling villains, the greater challenge is to see them as they see themselves: propagators of a great transformation. While one might wonder how deeply the double-think penetrates into the minds of plutocrats, it is undeniable that they profess belief in their own benevolence.
Desmet proposes that the essence of totalitarianism is not merely the authoritarian seizure of truth by a monolithic ideological faction, so much as the cognitive and emotional response of the captive minds of the mass population. All are in the grip of the self-reinforcing narrative, which is engineered to protect layers of deception up and down the chain. The people must be deceived, decide the public health experts, or else they won’t take the precautions seriously. They must not hear of side effects or efficacy doubts, because then they won’t take the dangerous vaccine which doesn’t really work.
As appealing as the mass formation construct is as an explanation for what we’ve been experiencing, there is a danger that the author takes this pet conception too far, when Desmet engages the idea of “conspiracy thinking”. This is represented as parallel to the mass formation itself, as if there is some psychological discontinuity involved in a belief that powerful elites conspire against the common good. Is there any reason to doubt that this is manifestly so? Shall we ignore the Great Reset agenda, the corruption of the WHO and national public health agencies by Big Pharma, the early plans to deliberately amplify the risk of the disease in order to induce compliance? The notion that these plans were not malevolent, at their inception, seems as speculative as the corollary.
Here, at length, the text misses the mark entirely, ignoring the significant and manifest evidence that power structures are fundamentally conspiratorial, and that events themselves, rather than any psychological need for simple explanations, drive these notions about conspiring plutocrats. While it is certainly worthwhile to consider the failings of various “conspiracy theories”-including the theory that there isn’t really a conspiracy-the reasoning here consists largely of assertions and inferences, and leaps to an enabling conclusion.
In trying to portray the conspiratorial mindset as misguided oversimplification, the concept of conspiracy has itself been oversimplified. The example given, of the Protocols of Zion, is portrayed as an example of a false conspiracy…but the document itself, a forgery as described, does represent a conspiracy: a conspiracy to inflame passions against Zionists. It’s a false flag conspiracy, in which the conspiracy consists of the planted impression of a conspiracy.
Sometimes the conspiracy isn’t where you think it is.
The problem with this analysis, frequently promoted by thoughtful commentators, is that this dismissal provides cover for malevolent intent, which hides behind the polite myth that even the most manipulative movers and shakers mean well in their hearts. This may well be, but it runs afoul of the same speculative vein as the so-called conspiracy theories: guessing at motives, and dispensing with manifest realities. Since the definition of a conspiracy includes secrecy, it is difficult to know how the absence of a conspiracy could be proven.
This is reminiscent of Hanlon’s Razor, an aphorism which favors incompetence, rather than malice, as an explanation for events. This “sounds true”…if one is capable of ignoring the palpable malice which is routine in the basic institutions of society. One might believe in the purity of motives, if we did not have, as a basic component of nearly every polity, institutions dedicated solely to the limitation and elimination of the enemies of the State. It is not difficult for most people to believe that military-industrial interests would concoct a war for profit, as during the Iraq war, killing millions of people. Yet, somehow, we are to believe that public health officials and their “private partners” would not conspire to create a pandemic gold mine and new world order.
It takes some credulity to conclude, for example, that billionaires are just people like everyone else, and not pathological narcissists who have accumulated massive quantities of wealth while allowing the world to slink deeper into poverty; it takes some blindness not to observe that it was these same plutocrats who conspicuously directed the events which plunged the world into misery. If these drills and exercises were truly for the purpose of preparing for future pandemics, why were the authorities so unprepared?
Desmet points out that the World Economic Forum and the plutocratic cartel openly display their plans on the internet, and therefore do not meet the Wikipedia definition of a conspiracy. Is this enough proof that there is no such conspiracy? The Mafia is also a (poorly-kept) secret society, whose key figures sometimes fail to conceal their allegiance. Would anyone deny that a Mafia is a conspiratorial secret society, despite being well-known and frequently advertising their power?
Mass formation and ideological hysteria may go a long way toward describing the motivation of many, even most, of the effectors of the policies; but it insufficiently accounts for the motives of the architects, the well-known global oligarchs who, it is true, do not conceal their association. To hand-wave the notion of a eugenics conspiracy, wholesale, seems a bizarre departure. If the various pandemic planning exercises were simply well-meaning contingency exercises, how does one reconcile their startling accuracy with the incompetence of their response? How does one account for the unprecedented suppression of repurposed drugs, the fraudulent claims made for the new vaccines?
It is not without irony that, after accusing these conspiracy theorists of chasing simplistic solutions to the complex problems of vast institutional malfeasance, the mass formation itself is offered as a facile explanation for every phase of the fiasco, from beginning to end, top-to-bottom.
In the course of attempting to capture the slippery snake of cognitive dissonance, the book itself comes to serve as an example of that which it depicts, clinging to a narrative which throws more suspicious skeptics under the bus, while using collapsible reasoning to avoid some of the darker conclusions of the COVID-19 episode.
“Conspiracy theories”, like “coincidence theories” or the ideologically-oriented compromise Desmet offers, may produce wild and incongruent interpretations, but this is not a wholesale dismissal of them, any more than the theories of Lamarck serve to debunk theories of biological evolution generally. To serve up a straw caricature of conspiracy ideas, and then dismiss such notions as inherently misguided, does not treat the subject with depth. Despite this departure, perhaps even because of it, the Psychology of Totalitarianism is a provocative read, despite falling prey to the ideological fixation it critiques.
I do appreciate Desmet's providing a definition for the insanity. Once we realize the extent of the insanity and that it is totalitarianism it is only step one. The rational steps forward are recognizing we have all been abused by master puppeteers and exiting the relationship ASAP. We must recognize the problems first. Going forward with sanity may be the most difficult thing we have ever done as a species. No group of human beings should be so abused for so long by toxic narcissist psychopaths.
DeSmet does try to answer a provocative question: Why do millions of people silently endure a torrent of frightening words, recognize a few bits and pieces of the torrent as plainly false, but come away unable to voice any of their own ideas?
Perhaps the answer to the question is at least partly that certain of the plutocrats owned social media companies, and in the lands of the Blue Meanies, fear of being censored off social media overcame every other concern. This might explain why a stadium full of people chanting "(bleep) Joe Biden" in Tempe, gets broadcast into Hackensack by a commentator misquoting them as saying "Let's Go Gordon". In red country it was not particularly harsh to be kicked off Facebook or Twitter because ordinary social life continued normally.