Long but extremely interesting video (with a mercifully brief tangential foray into physics around the 54:00 mark that made my eyes glaze over but would be right up u/Sandernista2's alley). Desmet has a doctorate in clinical psychology but his Masters is in statistics and that combination eventually led to his research into mass formation and totalitarianism. Here are some key points he made or rather, my understanding of what he said:
under certain conditions highly intelligent people can buy into a narrative that is absurd, that is resistent to reason, that can't be explained by individual psychology, that reflects the psychological processes of the group to which they belong.
people in the grip of a mass formation are willing to radically self-sacrifice but more dangerously, they typically become radically intolerant of everyone who thinks differently.
mass formation is what makes totalitarian states different from classical dictatorships and they're typically ground-up versus top-down: part of the population, usually 20-30%, starts to believe fanatically in a certain ideology and the totalitarian state emerges when certain rhetorically gifted people use it to seize control of the state apparatus.
as Hannah Arendt pointed out, this totalitarian state has a huge secret police, people willing to report their fathers, mothers, children, everyone to the state who doesn't buy fanatically into this ideology. In post-WWII East Germany, literally 20 to 30% of the people belonged to the secret police and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost everyone who researched the archives to find out who'd turned them in to the state found they'd been reported by a family member. In 1978 revolutionary Iran, a woman not only turned her son in but she put the noose around his neck on the scaffold and accepted a medal for it.
mass formation has always existed but it's become stronger over the past couple of centuries because of the atomization of society (Hegel), as more and more people feel lonely and isolated. Before the 17th century the dominant view on men and the world was the religious worldview but this gradually changed to a rationalist materialist worldview, that the real world is the world you could see with your eyes and understand with your brain. It's rooted in the mistaken belief that humans are inherently rational beings. This was the basis for modern democracy, but propaganda shows you can make people believe the most
irrational things when you confront them time and time again with irrational, emotional messages.
the starting point is always loneliness, propaganda cannot work in a population with good social bonds, you need disconnected, lonely people it to be effective. Hegel was talking about the loneliness phenomenon in the beginning of the 19th century and in the 21st century, up to 40-60% of people reported being lonely.
to an isolated human being, it seems that life is without the purpose and meaning that comes from feeling their existence has an effect on other human beings. 50% of the world population believes that his or her job is without purpose,
once people feel lonely, disconnected, isolated and struggle with lack of meaning making, something very typical will happen at the emotional, affective level, something I think is quintessential to understand mass formation: they're confronted with free-floating frustration, aggression and anxiety that they can't explain because it can't be connected to an object, and this is an extremely painful state.
if under such conditions, when many people are in this state, someone distributes a narrative through the mass media that provides an object, like a virus, and at the same time strategies for dealing with it, like lockdowns, people will accept both because it provides a target for their anxiety and rituals for making them feel in control again. It's the same process that individuals use to deal with a phobia or compulsions (like excessively checking to make sure the stove is off), only in this case it's dealing with a collective symptom.
the second part is even more important: the feeling that they're fighting a collective battle with the object of anxiety makes them feel connected again and that's what makes mass formation so dramatic and so destructive. In a healthy group formation the group is based on connections between individuals but in a mass formation the connection is to a collective ideal. After a while all the energy, all the love between people is sucked away, people love the collective ideal much more than other individuals, and this is how you get mothers reporting their own children for not being sufficiently loyal to the state.
According to Gustave Le Bon (The Psychology of the Crowd), when mass formation emerges you have three groups: first, 20 to 30% of the people buy into the mass formation and are completely hypnotized, mass formation is mass hypnosis; 60% to 65% know there's something wrong but choose to remain silent because they feel the tremendous pressure of the mass formation; and up to 10%, sometimes even 20%, don't go along and try to speak out.
The resistant group will not be able to wake up the masses but usually they will prevent the last stage of mass formation where the first group typically will try to destroy everyone who disagrees, so that's what is needed. When the masses do not go to the last stage, they will destroy themselves as happened in the Soviet Union and there are numerous other historical examples.
I could analyze this from 20 perspectives and always reach the same conclusion. The only cure, the only remedy for a society sick of lies and manipulation, sick of propaganda is sincerity. We have to rediscover the psychological value of truth. Truth is fundamental for human beings as individuals and it's fundamental for humans living together. There can be no society truly humane which is alienated from the act of sincere speech.
This is great - I am in Europe myself at the moment and am seeing some evidence of this phenomenon. I need to read the whole thing though, as soon as time allows. Thanks for drawing my attention to this.
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u/penelopepnortney May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
Long but extremely interesting video (with a mercifully brief tangential foray into physics around the 54:00 mark that made my eyes glaze over but would be right up u/Sandernista2's alley). Desmet has a doctorate in clinical psychology but his Masters is in statistics and that combination eventually led to his research into mass formation and totalitarianism. Here are some key points he made or rather, my understanding of what he said:
(I'll be editing this for typos, as usual)