patrick.net

Dr. Desmet’s observations over the past 18 months have led him to conclude that the overwhelming majority of the world’s population has indeed fallen under a kind of spell. It is not literally a spell, he stresses, but a ‘mass formation’, a term first used by Gustave Le Bon, the French philosopher who 126 years ago in The Psychology of Crowds, was the first thinker systematically to outline how herd psychology differs from that of the individual. Le Bon it was who observed that the consciousness bestowed by membership of a crowd can be transformative, possessing individual members with ‘a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite differently from that in which each individual would feel, think and act were that person in a state of isolation.’ In such a ‘psychological crowd’, individual personality disappears, brain activity is replaced by reflex activity: a lowering of intelligence, provoking a complete transformation of sentiments, which collectively may manifest as better and worse than those of the crowd’s constituent members. A crowd may just as easily become heroic or criminal, but is generally disposed towards destruction. ...

He says there are four conditions that need to be in place to enable mass formation to occur in a society. The first is the presence of large numbers of socially isolated, atomised, people. The social bonds between people need to have been weakened. This is the most important, and the other conditions follow from it. Secondly, there will be large numbers of people who experience lack of sense-making in their lives and work — people who feel that their jobs are senseless, meaningless. Thirdly, there requires to be ‘a lot of free-floating anxiety’ — i.e. anxiety that is not connected to a mental representation so that the sufferer doesn’t know why he is anxious and afraid. And fourthly, there needs to be a lot of ‘free-floating psychological discontent’ — anger and frustration at, again, apparently nothing in particular.

And you also need mass media — without which mass formation would be impossible. Desmet does not explicitly say so, but of course it is also essential that these media be biddable and readily prone to corruption. ...

Intelligence, he says, is no guarantee of resistance to the hypnoidal attack. ‘In mass formation, highly intelligent, highly educated people become exactly as intelligent as everybody else in the masses — everybody becomes equally intelligent, which usually means extremely stupid, in the masses.’ At the start of the lockdown, many people said to him, ‘Yes, it is terrible, but we can stop the rat-race for a while.’ This was mainly the well-off, who had less concerns about the economic destruction threatened by the lockdowns. The anxiety of the educated become fixated on different things, perhaps on the possibility of ‘populists’ taking advantage of the crisis. This is how the ludicrous ‘far right’ trope, stoked by cynical media, gained ground. ...

The totalitarian leader, unlike the classical kind, who becomes more benign as opposition falls away, becomes more vicious when unopposed, stoking up the masses to carry out atrocities, long after he has suppressed all dissent. This is why every voice of dissent is so vital: to delay the moment when the totalitarian has a free rein. ...

The most important thing, Desmet says, is to continue speaking out, to keep saying that we do not agree with the mainstream narrative, to interrupt the constant flow of lies (propaganda) with the truth. This unsettles the hypnosis, causing the mesmermised to turn in their sleep.

Desmet says we have to continue to share rational counter-arguments, in the hope of breaking the link of free-floating anxiety to the virus, which he describes as a kind of welded joint created at the highest level of anxiety. Warning people of the dangers of a totalitarian state — itself a possible new object of anxiety — might cause this joint to be broken and a new one formed.

The presence of alternative voices also serves to curb the viciousness of the rulers and constrains the mob in its excesses. ‘Alternative voices, as Le Bon said, do not succeed in waking up the masses, but if the same group continues to talk and utter a different story, and ensure there is a different voice in the public space, then the masses might not become very cruel.

‘We have to aim to keep a path for the small group that doesn’t want to conform to the mainstream narrative. We have to continue to talk and to establish a parallel society that produces its own foods, its own clinics and hospitals and that can provide the means of surviving outside mainstream society. ...

His dark prognostications notwithstanding, he is a little optimistic. We should remember, he says, that ‘totalitarianism and mass formation always ends up destroying itself.’ All we have to do is to make sure that our story survives and that we survive outside the system ‘for a few years’.

How might it happen?

‘If the masses wake up, they start to realise what has happened.’

Then what?

‘Then they kill their leaders.’

‘You will see that the small group will survive and, in one way or another, after the collapse, it will play an important role in the rebuilding of a society according to more human and more ethical principles.’