Desmet’s Book a Beacon of Light in Dark Times
A review of The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet
1. False Premises
For once a book lives up to its cover jacket PR: “This is the most important book of 2022,” comments Dr. Robert Malone. What’s most impressive to me about Desmet’s book is that he resists the dictum of the professional to “just stay in your lane” of expertise and takes a generalist’s approach to pull back for a wide-angle view. It’s often the generalist—particularly those well educated in the arts and humanities—who is more capable than the narrowly trained expert to discern how disparate sets of information combine to form a whole. This is known as ‘big picture thinking.’ And as we saw early in the pandemic, the experts that governments relied upon turned out to be not just a little bit wrong but wildly wrong. Desmet dispatches society’s false reverence for expert culture early in the book when he reveals the professional crisis that woke him up long before Covid-19 arrived, a crisis that “had erupted in the scientific world in 2005…”:
“Sloppiness, errors, biased conclusions, and even outright fraud had become so prevalent in scientific research that a staggeringly high percentage of research papers—up to 85 percent in some fields—reached radically wrong conclusions. And the most fascinating thing of all, from a psychological point of view: Most researchers were utterly convinced they were conducting their research more or less correctly.”[1]
Desmet relies heavily on Hannah Arendt’s classic text, The Origins of Totalitarianism, based on her studies of the Nazi regime. Arendt wrote that totalitarian states typically rely on a “blind belief in a kind of statistical-numerical ‘scientific fiction’ that shows ‘radical contempt for facts.’”[2] With the Nazis it was their adherence to the dubious science of eugenics; with the Soviet Communists under Stalin it was their belief in Marx’s historical materialism and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that—unsurprisingly—never actually materialized. But millions were murdered in support of these doctrines. With the advent of computers and computer modeling, the potential for bogus science passing as fact became even more entrenched. James LeFanu, in his book The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, quotes Sir Austin Bradford Hill, originator of the medical criteria for determining causation, as saying: “… poorly conducted trials not only tell us nothing but may be dangerously misleading—particularly when their useless data are spuriously supported by all the latest statistical techniques and jargon.”[3] Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. As Desmet explains much later in the book, such data-crunching relies on a materialist, deterministic view of the universe that assumes everything can be broken down into its constituent elements, its behaviours manipulated and predicted.
This viewpoint also ignores decades of research and experimentation in genetics that has proven humans cannot make changes to DNA or RNA that result in uniform, predictable outcomes. Dr. Robert Malone and Vandana Shiva have pointed this out numerous times. LeFanu’s book explains that this is why early hopes of the future of medicine lying in gene therapy were dashed by the close of the 1990s. “The behavior of the genes turns out not to be determined by hard and fast rules, but rather is ambiguous, elusive, contradictory and unpredictable… The gene therapy experiments may have been scientifically very ingenious, but they were bound to fail.”[4] This is why Big Pharma has since doubled down on drug therapies, even though as LeFanu writes, genuine innovation and invention of new ‘wonder drugs’ had already tapered off by then. “Whereas the number of New Chemical Entities (NCEs) were running at around 70 a year throughout the 1960s, by 1971 they were down to less than 30 a year, a position from which they have never recovered.”[5] It also explains why the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine has proven such a reckless, dangerous experiment.
Unfortunately, the cult of rationalism that overtook Western culture with the advent of the Enlightenment has resulted in science replacing God as society’s ultimate authority. John Ralston Saul was onto this 30 years ago when he wrote his magisterial critique of the rationalist revolution, Voltaire’s Bastards. The pronouncements of scientists in this new paradigm are given the same factual and moral weight that priests were given 500 years ago, even as the cracks in the edifice become glaringly apparent in scandals like the one Desmet mentions. Thus, rather than starting with March 2020 when the first lockdowns began, he takes us back at least two centuries, revealing how society has been pre-conditioned for mass psychosis since the beginning of the machine age.
Mechanistic thinking has been a huge upheaval to humanity’s consciousness and historic ways of living, retraining individuals to think of themselves as simply cogs in a giant machine. No wonder government and media appeals to sacrifice one’s bodily autonomy for the so-called “greater good” were so successful. People had already been conditioned to subsume themselves to the collective for many generations. For thousands of years prior to that, craft-based economies provided not only basic incomes for families, but a basic sense of accomplishment and self-worth. Skills were passed on from father to son, mother to daughter or even from grandparents. If you were a carpenter, stonemason, tailor, or any other skilled trade, you likely worked in a shop supervised by a master craftsman and were a member of a trade guild. Desmet offers one of the most cogent summaries I’ve read as to the psychological impacts of this industrialized mindset:
“The mechanization of the world also had a direct effect at the level of meaning making. Mass production rendered the end result of labour less tangible. In the past, man worked to produce the objects needed to sustain the bodily existence of oneself and the people around him… That changed with the rise of the industrial environment. He now worked to produce objects for people far away. The answer to the question of what is the meaning of one’s work no longer welled up from one’s own body.”[6]
2. How the ‘Mass’ Forms
Thus, it’s no surprise that, as Desmet reports, surveys show a steadily increasing tide of misery, with soaring rates of depression, anxiety and suicide in modern society. He cites the late anthropologist David Graeber, from his book Bullshit Jobs, who noted that 37 percent of those polled felt their jobs made no meaningful contribution to society, with a further 13 percent unsure. Another poll returned the result that 63 percent ‘sleepwalk’ through their jobs.[7] That’s at least half the population who are unsatisfied with their jobs. Desmet notes that just in his native country of Belgium, its 11 million inhabitants annually ingest 300 million doses of antidepressants.[8] Modern technocratic society results in an existence that, for all its outward ease and opulence, is proving intolerable for millions. As Desmet explains:
“Much of the population is trapped in almost complete social isolation; we see a remarkable increase in absenteeism due to mental suffering; an unprecedented proliferation in the use of psychotropic drugs; a burnout epidemic that paralyzes entire companies and government institutions. … Anyone familiar with systems theory knows what this means: The system is heading for a tipping point. It is on the verge of reorganizing itself and seeking a new equilibrium.”[9]
All of these sociological conditions lead to what Desmet terms “free-floating anxiety,” meaning anxiety that has no concrete object to fixate upon. In addition to the spiritual and psychological crises noted above, such “unfettered anxiety plays a crucial role in mass formation and totalitarianism.”[10] Desmet frequently cites the work of pioneering sociologist Gustav LeBon and his now classic 1895 work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. LeBon’s work paved the way for a century of investigation and writing on the subject of what Desmet calls “mass formation,” the creation of a unified social mind through the psychological conditioning of propaganda and ideology. The commercial propagandist Edward Bernays—nephew of Sigmund Freud—would assert an ethics-free version of such manipulation in his 1929 tract Propaganda. Other less self-interested commentators such as Jacques Ellul would study its techniques in minute detail in his 1962 work Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. It would be naïve in the extreme to think that governments and corporations would fail to make use of such an open resource. Desmet explains how the creation of a society with so much “free-floating anxiety” lays the ideal groundwork for “mass formation”:
“The link between social isolation and irritability is logical and has also been established empirically. People perturbed by loneliness, lack of meaning, and indefinable anxiety and unease generally feel increasingly irritable, frustrated and/or aggressive and look for objects to take these feelings out on… What accelerates mass formation is not so much the frustration and aggression that are effectively vented, but the potential of unvented aggression present in the population—aggression that is still looking for an object.”[11]
This is a common tool of totalitarian regimes; for the Nazis the object of anxiety was the Jews, for the Soviet Communists it was capitalism, for the Chinese Communists under Mao Tse-tung it was “Western imperialists,” for our contemporary leaders it’s ‘anti-vaxxers.’ This is how the mass mind is formed, and despite our modern quasi-scientific worldview, even ‘the science’ doesn’t necessarily have to make sense. “The masses believe in the story not because it’s accurate but because it creates a new social bond,”[12] Desmet explains. This new bond coalesces around the target of peoples’ sublimated aggression. George Orwell intuited this in Nineteen-Eighty-Four with the ritual ‘hate sessions.’ He also intuited that it didn’t matter that the rulers changed the object of the hatred from year to year. What matters is its unifying effect and the control this gives authorities over the masses. And just as in Orwell’s novel, “The individual must at all times show that he submits to the interest of the collective, by performing self-destructive, symbolic (ritualistic) behaviours,”[13] such as wearing oxygen-stifling, germ-breeding facemasks, washing hands in toxic goo, and self-isolating for weeks or months at a time—on command. After insisting on my medical exemption to facemasks at our local post office, I was confronted by an RCMP officer who claimed wearing them was “a sign of respect for our neighbours.” I told him unequivocally: “No. They are symbols of obedience, nothing more.” But the facts didn’t really matter. What matters is the sense of cohesion with the mass and the false sense of safety it brings them.
In the more extreme cases personal compliance is not enough—the “Karens” psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald writes about in United States of Fear—women who went out of their way to enforce compliance in others. “Women’s fear of catching a viral illness not only manifested in public attacks on individuals. It also led to demands for stronger measures and more social controls,” writes McDonald.[14] I find it interesting that in Canada, nearly all of the Chief Medical Officers enforcing Covid rules province by province were women. Were they simply following orders, inventing them, or improvising on a script? The court cases of BC Chief Medical Officer Bonnie Henry and her Alberta counterpart Deena Hinshaw should prove revealing in this regard. McDonald cites a February 2021 Pew Research Center survey revealing that women were 50 percent more likely than men to report suffering ‘high levels of psychological distress,’ including anxiety, insomnia, and ‘a physical reaction when thinking about the pandemic.’”[15] Of course, we also have our male equivalents of the “Karen” enforcers.
As Desmet says (citing Le Bon), “authoritarianism and intolerance are essential characteristics of mass formation.”[16] To quote Justin Trudeau from his Quebec TV interview, speaking of the so-called “vaccine hesitant,” “Do we continue to tolerate these people?” I’ve argued in my Substack essay “Working Toward Our ‘1946 Moment’” that we’ve been in a state of war since March 2020 and that during wartime society exists in an ex judicio state, i.e. the ruling powers govern outside the law and in defiance of national constitutions. ‘Might is right’ becomes the de facto power. Thus, as Desmet explains, “totalitarianism always prefers to rule ‘by decree.’”[17] This enables them to leverage their power against the dissenting portion of the population, and in history’s worst-case scenarios that has resulted in mass murder. Yet even such atrocities are justified by the “mass formation” mentality:
“This radical intolerance ensures that the masses are convinced of their superior ethical and moral intentions and of the reprehensibility of everything and everyone who resists them… The masses are inclined to commit atrocities against those who resist them and typically execute them as if it were an ethical, sacred duty.”[18]
In a more passive-aggressive manner, I’ve seen this play out in my own small community, a rural mountain village that encompasses about a thousand people. Typically everyone knows everyone, at least in passing, in such communities. Almost every time I attend a public cultural event now, I get the ‘stinkeye’ from people whom I once counted among my friends. (One estimate put the vaccinated in this village at 80 percent.) By the virulence of their looks I can tell that if law and order broke down any further, I could be at serious risk of harm. At very least, they are ‘executing’ me socially, making me a social pariah. It’s tough being a truth-teller. As I wrote in the poem “The State of Resistance” in Diary of a Pandemic Year:
People hate the truth because its fire
demands that they feed the light
with their bones, not just their words,
those cheap things we scatter like confetti…[19]
3. Coming Out of the Spell
By now—unless you’ve spent the last two and a half years under the rock of mass psychosis—you’ve probably seen at least one interview with Desmet explaining his thesis. If so you’re likely familiar with the way he breaks down the demographics within the population at large: about 30 percent will be instantly and permanently brainwashed; between 10–30 percent will be critical thinkers and dissenters who smell a rat immediately; and the remaining roughly 60 percent are the ‘soft middle,’ those who have kids to support and mortgages to pay and therefore just ‘go along to get along.’ This group is still potentially reachable. The longer harsh measures go on, the more they see colleagues and family suffering, the more likely they are to be receptive to hearing the truth. “The fact that the human being can tolerate only a certain amount of control is completely overlooked.”[20]
And daunting though it is for those of us who find ourselves in the dissenting minority, Desmet encourages us to stay strong and keep speaking our truth, even if it’s only to our friends and family. Having a podcast with an audience of millions is great, but very few of us have such a platform. But everything helps toward the goal of breaking the spell, says Desmet:
“While dissenting voices are extremely aversive to individuals in the grip of mass formation, they are literally vital to him—a bitter drug he desperately tries to avoid but without which he is doomed. Without dissenting voices to break the massive resonance of the mass narrative, a totalitarian system lapses into radical self-destructiveness; the hypnosis becomes complete. The totalitarian state becomes, as Arendt described, ‘a monster that devours its own children.’”[21]
And indeed, totalitarian states such as the Khmer Rouge and Soviet Communism literally devoured their own in ideological purges, killing millions. Now we’re seeing something similar play out with the authorizing of gene therapy injections for babies and pregnant mothers. According to a recent report by Dr. Joseph Mercola, “Miscarriages, fetal deaths and stillbirths have also risen after the rollout of the COVID shots.”[22]
Desmet cautions against mass formation working in the opposite direction: a mentality that is vulnerable to all manner of bizarre conspiracy theories: “…fanatical conspiracy thinking testifies to the almost irresistible tendency of human beings to find someone who can be held responsible… and can thereby be made the object of aggression.”[23]It’s ideology, not conspiracy, he asserts, explaining how a dominant ideology easily leads to mass formation. The rage for order and control actually wells up from the population, not the leaders. He points out that scientists, doctors and political leaders also fall victim to mass psychosis. I don’t fully agree that it’s all just ideology; there’s good evidence for a command hierarchy that orchestrated the narrative globally, as for example the previously unheard-of consistency of media messaging such as “build back better,” “the new normal,” and other slogans traceable to the World Economic Forum.
Medical systems have devolved to a military-style command hierarchy that no longer allows individual doctors to exercise their therapeutic experience and judgment but simply do what they’re told, usually by administrative staff who have no medical qualifications. My own doctor, with more than three decades of clinical experience, told me he has no authority in his own clinic even though he is the senior physician. All that said, Desmet has a point. I’ve seen the resistance movement fractured by some frankly bizarre ideas, such as aliens exploiting the situation to collect human DNA. This only weakens the solidarity and credibility of the resistance. Let’s stay grounded, people! At the same time, what was ‘conspiracy theory’ two years ago is now fact.
Desmet does a brilliant job of structuring his book, starting by doing a deep dive into the sociological precedents that led us here through to an uplifting conclusion that provides solid ground for hope. This is not merely the “hopium” described by investigative journalist James Corbett. All totalitarian regimes eventually eat themselves alive; it’s just a matter of time and enough evidence of their atrocities coming to light. The continuing release of the Pfizer data is serving just that end. But more than that, society is in desperate need of a spiritual awakening, and events seem to be conspiring to move us in that direction.
Desmet’s final chapters lead us through a beginner’s guide to quantum physics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, chaos theory and the realization that most of reality is not quantifiable by rational means. He cites the works of Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Schrödinger, Eddington, Jeans and others whose explorations punctured the comfortable notion of a deterministic universe. While some might see this as terrifying, most great religious traditions have known this forever. When I was recovering from a religious cult some decades ago, I studied the Tao te Ching and had the epiphany that I don’t need to know all the answers to everything in order to be content. The Tao’s acceptance of the balance of the contrary forces of light and dark, symbolized by the yin-yang motif, calms the spirit, lessening its hunger for order and control. Contrary to assertions of ‘the science is settled,’ this is how Desmet puts it:
“The journey of science does not end in superior knowledge but in a kind of Socratic modesty. A human who has traveled this journey far enough knows better—he just knows—that all rational knowledge is relative and remains alien to the essence of the object he is trying to understand. At the end of this journey awaits an encounter with something that cannot be grasped with logic and rationality. The great minds of science testified to such encounter in many different ways. Albert Einstein liked to talk about the elusive mystery that he found everywhere in the universe and about the wonderful structure of reality.”[24]
And: “Science eventually arrives where religion once started, in a personal contact with the Unnameable.”[25]The “unnameable” is how the essence of Tao is described.
James LeFanu in The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine puts it this way: “Finally, however, we are left with the curious phenomenon that the origins of several of the most significant (medical) achievements remain to this day inscrutable biological mysteries that lie beyond the range of rational explanation.”[26] Such mystery isn’t a reason to inspire fear but a kind of radical acceptance of the way things are—the fact that even with all our supposedly advanced science, humans can never fully understand the universe. That includes an acceptance of the reality of death. This doesn’t mean we don’t try to make our lives healthier, or find cures for diseases if they exist. But as cultures have done for tens of thousands of years, we turn to the meaning-making myths, poems and stories that reconcile us to our mortality. To this day, Latin American cultures have their Day of the Dead celebrations—a great way of letting off steam about humanity’s deepest fear. Author Stephen Jenkinson in Die Wise explains how Western culture’s unwillingness to face death has led to a profitable death industry that removes us from the process altogether. In this context, LeFanu notes that as more and more medical discoveries were made, the level of anxiety about health actually rose in the population.
The Psychology of Totalitarianism is an indispensable book for the times we’re living in. Desmet avoids technical jargon, opting instead for clear, concise prose that communicates easily. At just over 200 pages, it’s a fast read, and a worthy addition to a century of literature on the topic. As with John Ralston Saul before him, Desmet concludes that it’s time we stopped living the false ideology of rationalism ushered in by the Enlightenment. Through wise writers throughout the ages he returns us to our own bodies—the very ground of being medical authorities have tried to strip away from us. He argues for a revolution based on “truth as a guiding principle,” which includes both wisdom and the capacity for prophecy, something writers often understand intuitively. As he concludes: “The awareness that no logic is absolute is the prerequisite for mental freedom. The gap in the logic literally opens up a space for our own style and for the desire to create.”[27]
Now that’s hope, not “hopium.”
[1] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont/London, 2022, Introduction, p. 3.
[2] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., Introduction, p. 3.
[3] James LeFanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, Abacus, Great Britain, 1999 (2004 ed.), p. 56.
[4] James LeFanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, Abacus, Great Britain, 1999 (2004 ed.), pp. 305, 309.
[5] James LeFanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, Abacus, Great Britain, 1999 (2004 ed.), p. 246.
[6] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 27.
[7] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., pp. 28, 95.
[8] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 95.
[9] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., pp. 3, 4.
[10] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 27.
[11] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., pp. 95, 96, emphasis in original.
[12] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 97, emphasis in original.
[13] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 98.
[14] Mark McDonald, United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, Bombardier Books, 2021, p. 21.
[15] Mark McDonald, United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, ibid., p. 21.
[16] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 104.
[17] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 158.
[18] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 104.
[19] Sean Arthur Joyce, Diary of a Pandemic Year, Chameleon Fire Editions, 2021, p. 12. https://www.seanarthurjoyce.ca/diary-of-a-pandemic-year
[20] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 7.
[21] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 117.
[22] Dr. Joseph Mercola, “COVID Jabs Impact Both Male and Female Fertility,” July 25, 2022: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/07/25/covid-vaccine-fertility-issues.aspx?ui=86f5700b015aead328078889a81fd3058a7c45ddb035c2d25d4bb455c02f6e95&sd=20201211&cid_source=wnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20220725Z1&mid=DM1215668&rid=1557685825
[23] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 128.
[24] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., pp. 178–79.
[25] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 15.
[26] James LeFanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, Abacus, Great Britain, 1999 (2004 ed.), p. 195.
[27] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chelsea Green Publishing, ibid., p. 188.
Reading Desmet's book also wakes one up to the fact that the government and financial elites have been running circles around the public for generations. These people will make full use of the psychological principles Desmet outlines to maintain their hegemony. It's become clear that they have also set up or financed the "opposition" movements in many cases. And now we're seeing how the climate change movement was also gamed by The System. That one had even the smartest of us fooled for a long, long time.
Thanks. I enjoyed your take on the book and the background to the many ideas.
Those that “see” are presented with a ground swell of new possibilities from the many exploring and posting what this all possibly means for our present and future.
It has been a great time of unlearning for me. As they say - one has to kill off the you that others instilled to become the you one is meant to be.