Matthias Desmene is a Belgian clinical psychologist with a background in statistics and a love for statistics. He s also the author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, a book that explains why totalitarianism is on the rise.
00:00:00.000Totalitarianism is not a thing of the past. It is alive and well. Individual responsibility is dying and our love for our fellow man is dying. Herd mentality is helping to kill it.
00:00:15.940If you look at things like Antifa as individuals, they're total cowards. But when they don masks and march together, they see themselves as heroes. Group bonding literally boost oxytocin levels higher than the boost caused by alcohol or even cocaine.
00:00:33.640Today's guest is fascinating, and I urge you to read his book. He is a Belgian clinical psychologist with a background in statistics, the kind of Belgian Gen X Jordan Peterson, if you will.
00:00:48.680I discovered the book recently. It's the psychology of totalitarianism. It is eye opening. You ever wondered how what was happening in Germany happened? How you convince all those people of madness? It's happening again.
00:01:06.440Totalitarianism is on the rise, and that is different than authoritarianism. He explains it with a theory that he calls mass formation. The idea came to him during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
00:01:19.020He watched governments and news outlets pushing bad information in order to justify a dystopian new world, and he watched as people believed it.
00:01:28.880Then in December 2021, a guy named Dr. Robert Malone went on Joe Rogan's podcast and mentioned a theory called, you guessed it, mass formation.
00:01:38.540That episode exploded. People lost their minds. Neil Young says, I just can't. I can't rock in the free world anymore.
00:01:47.100And the media rushed to discredit today's guest all over the world.
00:01:52.660The theory of mass formation. Oh, it's just a conspiracy theory.
00:01:57.800I want you to listen and see if this sounds like logic or a conspiracy theory.
00:02:06.160It's really kind of funny. The witch hunt didn't eradicate the theory of mass formation.
00:02:14.040Instead, the hysteria shown by the media and big tech actually proves that mass formation is a very real threat.
00:02:26.000You will understand your world and what you have to do probably better than anything I have heard yet.
00:02:38.000And it's today's podcast with Matthias Desmond.
00:02:43.280All right, before we get into it, man, you're going to love this interview.
00:02:46.500I want to talk to you a little bit about advancement in science and medical, your progressive glasses.
00:02:53.860Have you been told to go home and just get used to your progressives?
00:02:57.580That's why I use Rodenstock glasses from Better Spectacles.
00:03:01.440Now, Better Spectacles is a conservative American company who is now exclusively offering Rodenstock eyewear for the first time in America.
00:03:11.080Rodenstock is a 144-year-old German company, been considered one of the gold standards for glasses forever.
00:03:18.100Rodenstock scientists use biometric research to measure the eye in over 7,000 points.
00:03:24.800They've taken the findings from over a million patients and combined it with artificial intelligence.
00:03:29.580And the result is biometric intelligent glasses or big glasses, which gives you a seamless natural experience that works perfectly with your brain.
00:03:41.260It improves your vision sharpness at all distances, including up to 40% better at near and intermediate distance, as well as providing you with better night vision.
00:03:52.540Ninety-eight percent of the people who have these glasses recommend them.
00:06:39.720I explain it in detail in my book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
00:06:42.600But, well, you know, when the corona crisis started, so I'm a clinical psychologist, a professor in clinical psychology, but I also have a master in statistics.
00:06:54.560And when the corona crisis started, I started to study the statistics a little bit and the mathematical models that were used.
00:06:59.980And then I noticed immediately that the models seemed to dramatically overrate the dangerlessness of the virus and that they also didn't take into account the extreme amounts of collateral damage that emerged as a consequence of the measures.
00:07:18.380And, like, after a few months, by the end of May 2020, I had the impression that it was proven beyond doubt that the initial models and statistics overrated dramatically the dangerlessness of the virus.
00:07:32.660So, at that moment, the mathematical models of Imperial College, for instance, had predicted that by the end of May 2020, about 80,000 people would die in a small country such as Sweden if the country didn't go into lockdown.
00:07:46.260And the country didn't go into lockdown and only 6,000 people died in Sweden.
00:07:50.980So, and that was the moment when I started to think about something else.
00:07:54.820How is it possible that an entire population fails to see that the narrative they believe in is utterly absurd and blatantly wrong?
00:08:06.900And it reminded me of the theories on mass formation.
00:08:10.320The mass formation is a specific kind of group formation, which has very specific effects at the level of individual mental functioning.
00:08:19.740For instance, it tends to make individuals completely blind for everything that goes against what the group believe in, even if what the group believes in is radically absurd and blatantly wrong.
00:09:10.600It is as if people lose every awareness of their individual personal interests.
00:09:16.740And, thirdly, also important is that mass formation makes individuals radically intolerant for dissonant voices, for people who do not go along with the masses, to the extent that, after a while, people in mass formation start to believe that it is their ethical duty to stigmatize, exclude, and, in the end, eliminate everyone who doesn't go along with the masses.
00:09:36.940This is what we saw before, you know, we've seen this in the 1930s and 40s in Germany, and I've always wondered, how do you get really brilliant people to go down this road where they are exterminating people and they think that it's the right thing?
00:09:58.480Something that it would not have been natural or normal to think just 10 years prior to that.
00:10:55.860The mechanist view on man in the world.
00:10:57.580So, the belief that the entire universe is a kind of a material system which can be perfectly rationally understood, controlled, and manipulated.
00:11:06.240This view on man in the world, on the one hand, created a new elite.
00:11:10.520A new elite, which started, which tried to understand psychological processes that are going on in society, in which tries to control and manipulate these processes through indoctrination and propaganda.
00:11:23.940So, that's one important evolution throughout the last few centuries.
00:11:29.060It's no longer an elite that uses power in an overt way.
00:11:33.340It's an elite that uses it in a hidden way through indoctrination and propaganda.
00:11:36.420And the second extremely important thing is that this mechanist view on man in the world, through industrialization, mechanization, and technology use, disconnected people from their natural and social environment, put them in a lonely state, confronted them with experiences of lack of meaning making, and in the end, confronted them with so-called free-floating anxiety, frustration, and aggression.
00:12:02.600So, throughout the last few hundred centuries, this increased more and more and more.
00:12:06.620And when these conditions are met, when people feel lonely, disconnected, struggle with lack of meaning making, and at free-floating anxiety, frustration, and aggression, that means a kind of anxiety, frustration, and aggression, which they cannot connect to a mental representation.
00:12:21.480So, anxiety, frustration, and aggression, in which people don't know what they feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive for.
00:12:26.740Under these conditions, something very specific might happen.
00:12:32.600When, under these conditions, a narrative is distributed through the mass media, indicating an object of anxiety, and a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety, all this free-floating anxiety might connect to the object of anxiety.
00:12:45.720And there might be a huge willingness in the population to participate in the strategy, to deal with the object of anxiety, simply because it gives people the feeling that they are in control of their anxiety.
00:12:58.220When you're anxious, and you don't know what you feel anxious for, you feel completely out of control.
00:13:03.040But if you start to believe that your anxiety is caused by something, no matter whether it is true or not, and that there is a strategy to deal with that something, then you have an experience of control.
00:13:14.500And also, you have an object to direct all your frustration and aggression on.
00:13:19.080So, that's the first psychological advantage, the first step of mass formation, where the first psychological advantage of mass formation.
00:13:25.520And in a second step, something even more important happens.
00:13:30.740Because so many people participate in a strategy, for instance, the lockdowns, but it could also be the concentration camps or the crusades or the witches.
00:13:39.100Because so many people participate in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety.
00:13:44.200They have the feeling to fight a collective heroic battle with the object of anxiety.
00:14:22.880This new social bond, this new connectedness, is not a social bond between individuals.
00:14:28.640It's always a social bond between the individual, between each individual separately and the collective.
00:14:35.580Meaning that in a mass, the famous citizenship, the famous solidarity that is so typical for mass formation, is never a solidarity between individuals.
00:14:44.240It's always a solidarity between the individual and the collective.
00:14:48.000Meaning that, and it is even the case, that the longer the mass formation exists, lasts.
00:14:53.720The more all solidarity and love is sucked away from the bonds between the individuals and injected in the bond between the individual and the collective.
00:15:02.220And that makes that, in the end, solidarity with the collective is much bigger than a solidarity with other individuals, leading to the famous paranoid state in totalitarian systems.
00:15:13.040Where every individual is willing to snitch on every other individual, to report every other individual to the state, if they have the feeling that this other individual doesn't show enough solidarity to the collective.
00:15:27.280In the end, this leads, typically, I've been talking with this woman, Shoray Fishtali, who lived in Iran during the revolution there, which was a huge scale process of mass formation.
00:15:37.560And she told me how she has seen how a mother reported her son to the state.
00:15:42.540And how this mother hung the noose around his neck when he was on the scaffold.
00:15:46.520And when he was hung, she claimed to be a heroine for doing what she did.
00:15:49.960That is a dramatic end stage of mass formation.
00:15:54.220That's what we have to avoid, that it goes to this end stage.
00:15:57.820We are seeing things, however, being pushed in that direction.
00:16:04.540We have leadership here in the United States that is pushing and saying, if you voted this way, you are the problem.
00:16:13.920I mean, it is I'm I'm a self-educated guy on World War Two and, you know, the Holocaust.
00:16:23.940But it is very much the same kind of words that came from Goebbels and and the party back then.
00:16:32.340You you identify a group and then you isolate them and you pour everything into that.
00:16:38.960And it is something we haven't seen here in America for a very long time.
00:17:34.180And so that that's just an illustration of the strength of the mechanism of this focusing of attention, which also happens in in in a mass formation.
00:17:49.200And that's the reason why people are not aware anymore that they lose everything, that they lose their health, their wealth, the future of their children and so on and so on.
00:17:57.000And as soon as you understand that the mechanism of mass formation is identical to the mechanism of hypnosis.
00:18:04.060You also understand that mass formation is something that is provoked by the voice, the voice of a leader.
00:18:09.920And that's why totalitarian leaders, whom system is always based on mass formation in contrast with classical dictatorships, which is not based on mass formation.
00:18:17.920That's the reason why totalitarian leaders intuitively use their voice, they constantly use indoctrination propaganda rather than terror.
00:18:27.620They also use terror when the first place they use indoctrination propaganda, because in that way, they keep the population in the state that is necessary to continue the totalitarian state, to continue the totalitarian state.
00:18:41.580So as soon as you understand that, you also understand that the most important method, weapon we have against mass formation is our own voice, the dissonant voice.
00:18:56.740We have to continue to speak out because history, you can understand that in a psychological, technical way.
00:19:02.500But history has also shown us that it is exactly at the moment the dissonant voice stops to speak out in public space that the totalitarian system goes completely crazy and starts to destroy everyone that doesn't go along with them.
00:19:17.120This is what Stolznytsin taught us in his last essay to the Russian people.
00:19:22.120They lose all their power once you simply refuse to buy into the lie.
00:19:42.760So, you know, first, you have to understand, well, Gustave Le Bon mentioned already in the 19th century, he's a famous psychologist who wrote a lot about masses.
00:19:51.320And he mentioned already in the 19th century that if a mass emerges in a society, there always is a group that doesn't fall prey to the mass formation.
00:20:02.040This group typically tries to wake up the other people.
00:20:13.520There is always a group that doesn't fall prey to it.
00:20:15.560And this group is always extremely heterogeneous.
00:20:17.540It's that has been remarked time and time again.
00:20:20.600It's probably some people who, for one reason or another, are not very or prefer to stick to what they consider something true and sincere rather than to take the easy way and go along with the group they belong to in their thinking and in their mental functioning.
00:20:38.360I had a woman who saved a bunch of Jews in the Holocaust.
00:20:43.980She lived in Poland and she told me once that that the people who did that, they weren't they weren't heroes.
00:21:53.840Have you ever walked into somebody's house and it smells like dog or worse cat smells like food and not good food, food that's been like hanging in the air for a while?
00:23:38.440Now, one other thing I want to talk to you about, and that is Relief Factor, which plays a big role in my time at home.
00:23:44.140I've been, I just told the audience on radio today that I'm painting a painting of Corrie Ten Boom and her sister at the moment and they're in the concentration camp and she's so filled with joy and Corrie's looking at her like, okay, I think you're nuts.
00:24:02.160Um, and I've probably have about 150 hours in this thing.
00:24:07.140Um, it's, it's the most complex painting I've ever done.
00:24:10.440There is no way I could have put an hour into painting without Relief Factor.
00:25:25.140What is the, first of all, what is the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism?
00:25:31.420Well, totalitarianism, I think authoritarianism, of course, it depends from author to author.
00:25:37.320Some people define it in this way, other people in another way.
00:25:39.600But for me, it is clear that authoritarianism is something that is related to, uh, classical dictatorships.
00:25:45.920It just means someone who in one way or another succeeds in imposing his will, his social contract, you need a letter to society.
00:25:53.340But totalitarianism is something completely different.
00:25:56.360Totalitarianism is a specific state system which is based on mass formation and mass formation.
00:26:01.180Because a totalitarian state starts always with the emergence of a mass.
00:26:05.400A mass which can be artificially created by certain leaders who use indoctrination and propaganda to use the mass formation.
00:26:12.280Or a mass which can, in the first, initially, uh, emerge in a spontaneous way.
00:26:16.960And only after a while, uh, be influenced by indoctrination and propaganda.
00:26:22.320So, like in the Soviet Union, the mass formation was artificially created from the beginning.
00:26:27.340In Nazi Germany, the mass formation first emerged more or less spontaneously.
00:26:31.500And then certain leaders of the masses started to use indoctrination and propaganda to manipulate the masses and to use them to seize power of society.
00:26:39.620And that is exactly what the core and essence of totalitarianism is.
00:26:46.720So, do you believe that that is the road we are on now?
00:26:51.000Because I, I, I, I don't think that this has been, um, orchestrated as a grand plan from the very beginning.
00:27:00.200Um, you know, I, I, I got into trouble that people called me a conspiracy theorist, which they're now calling you.
00:27:06.240Conspiracy theorist, um, because I said, you know, back in, uh, 2005, that you're going to have socialists, um, uh, anarchists and Islamists working together to overthrow the West.
00:27:22.000And I was very careful to say, not that they're calling each other or having star chamber meetings, but there comes a time when everyone sees, oh my gosh, it's going this way.
00:27:34.360And I see what they're doing and that helps my cause.
00:28:21.860We have this transhumanist ideal, uh, certain institutions who believe that the entire society should be reshaped according to a transhumanist ideal.
00:28:30.320That's also very typical for totalitarianism.
00:28:32.780It always tries to create a completely new society, an artificial society, which will be a paradise for the human being.
00:28:39.520Once, uh, it is full-fledged, but which in the end always turns out to be a hell.
00:28:45.240So, there is an elite, an elite who pushes a certain ideology, but it would be a fatal mistake to reduce everything to that elite.
00:28:52.800To believe that, as Solzhenitsyn said, uh, he said, it would be easy to believe that the dividing line between good and evil runs through, between, between human beings.
00:29:03.080And that there is a small group with pure evil and all the rest that is good.
00:29:06.320But he said, we all know that the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human being's heart.
00:29:12.840You can say that the elite is the elite because the population made them the elite.
00:29:24.720I said, that's the, the, the risk of too extreme conspiracy thinking that we start to believe that all evil is situated in the elite and that the only solution is an insurrection or a violent revolution against the elite in order, in order to destroy the elite.
00:29:42.920And that always leads to exactly the opposite.
00:29:45.760So, I've talked to people all over the world and, um, I think the average person feels the same way.
00:29:53.280And I've looked at this as a good thing, um, because I think all of our leadership, they have, you know, with the banks and the governments and, uh, world economic forum and all of them, they're all pushing for bigger.
00:30:11.700Statist kind of, uh, uh, of goals, uh, where the elites do take control of everything because they just think they know better.
00:30:20.640And I'm talking to people around the world and they all say, it's not our, it's not our left or right.
00:30:28.200That is the problem that we are arguing over here in America.
00:30:31.620It's not the Republicans and the Democrats.
00:30:34.260It's the people being separated from the decisions by the elites.
00:31:27.520And of course, they believe that the first who will arrive in this godlike state and is a godlike state will be themselves.
00:31:33.860But, uh, they, they do believe in their own ideology so fanatically that they believe it is justified to cheat and manipulate everyone and everything in order to convince them to go along with their plans.
00:31:45.880So I think this is something crucial to understand that if you understand that, you also understand that the dissonant voice does not only have an impact on the population, but also on the leaders.
00:31:55.440And that we have to continue to speak to the leaders or to speak out in public space, because also they are influenced.
00:32:06.500Um, so like the farmers, um, you know, over in, uh, uh, the Netherlands that are, are protesting or the Brexit people that were protesting.
00:32:21.600Um, they're not necessarily calling for revolution.
00:32:26.320They're calling for common sense in many, in many ways.
00:32:32.160Um, at least the farmers are for sure calling for common sense.
00:32:36.340Um, and the governments and the media done everything they can to make these people either invisible or into lunatics.
00:32:49.760And that's also, strangely enough, what the masses really start to believe of these people who do not agree with them, that they must be lunatics.
00:32:56.840Masses are so absorbed by this, their own absurd logic, which is very hard to contradict because their, their, their, uh, focus of attention is so much narrowed down to a small aspect of reality that they don't see the things anymore.
00:33:13.640Or that go against their own absurd logic.
00:33:15.900So, but they are so convinced that they are the only ones who thinks logically that they believe that the other people who do not go along with them must be completely stupid.
00:33:23.720Have you, have you thought of first cause?
00:33:26.780What started this ball rolling this time?
00:33:47.900I think it's the, the, the, the global institutions who have these ideological plans, who, who, who for a long time already wanted to replace, uh, democracy by a technocratic system where experts, uh, make the decisions also at the level of private life.
00:34:02.440Uh, and then there is a, on the other hand, there is a population who starts to become more and more sensitive for the, for propaganda and indoctrination because they feel disconnected, lack of meaning making and so on.
00:34:12.500Uh, and then, uh, uh, suddenly, uh, these, this propaganda that is distributed or these propaganda, it's just these institutions who push their ideological convictions through the mass media and all kinds of ways, suddenly start to, start to have this enormous effect of a mass formation.
00:34:33.640And, and, and, and, and then, uh, uh, we are in the beginning.
00:34:37.900Once that happened, happens, we have the basic mechanism of a totalitarian state.
00:34:42.580We have this diabolic pact between the elite and the masses.
00:34:54.280So my book is all about, and once that emerges, you have an extremely destructive system, like a classical dictatorship can control public space and the political.
00:35:03.620But a totalitarian state can also control private space.
00:35:14.440Which is, which fanatically believes, which is in the mass formation and fanatically believes in the state narrative and which is willing to report everyone to the state, even their own family members, if they do not go along.
00:36:02.980In a rationalist view on man in the world, everything is reduced to rational understanding.
00:36:07.580And in this way, that's what I explained in the first five chapters of my book.
00:36:11.120Automatically, when you try to reduce everything around you, the entire mystery of life, to the categories of your own logical, rational thinking, you isolate yourself from the mystery of life.
00:36:32.320When you have no empathic connection anymore with the world around you, you also lose touch with the eternal principles of humanity.
00:36:40.880And that's the reason why, in the end, there is a cold, rational ideology which seizes control of society in every totalitarianism and which pushes relentlessly a certain logic which is always absurd and, in the end, completely irrational, which pushes that logic relentlessly and which dehumanizes society completely.
00:37:05.380And the people who do not go along with that system, who refuse to go along, have to do exactly the opposite.
00:37:10.880They have to stay true to the principles of humanity.
00:37:13.240In the first place, the ethical duty to articulate the words that seem sincere and honest to you in public space.
00:37:20.500They have to stay true to these principles of humanity no matter what happens and no matter what they lose.
00:37:27.080No matter what we lose, we must be sure that we don't lose the only thing that is really important and that is our humanity.
00:38:13.000So, if we have to, if we have to, is it too late?
00:38:19.360And when you get to the point to where you have to make a decision of sacrificing yourself, you know, for what you believe in or go to jail or whatever it is.
00:38:31.000Why didn't why didn't that work in Europe in the 1930s?
00:38:37.020Well, that's a good question, but it seems that in Europe and the Soviet Union, the resistance decided to stop to speak out in public space because they thought that they were dealing with a classical dictatorship.
00:38:53.560And in a classical dictatorship, it sometimes makes sense to stop to speak out in public space, but not in a totalitarian state.
00:38:59.800Because a totalitarian state is based on mass formation, and the mass formation will become increasingly, will become stronger and stronger.
00:39:11.460So, that's the post-telementary principle.
00:39:13.280And it doesn't mean that this will, that we will not, that we might not lose something.
00:39:19.800If we continue to speak out, we might lose a lot, but the better you understand the mechanism, the more you see that we have no other option.
00:39:25.300If you stop to speak out, even if you conform to the totalitarian system, you might be destroyed by it.
00:39:31.060There is a very good chance a totalitarian state, in the end, always becomes a monster that devours its own children.
00:39:37.240That's what Hannah Arendt said, and it is like that.
00:39:39.500The masses, in the end, always devour their own children.
00:39:42.240And so, the better you understand it, the more you see, even from a purely strategical point of view, that we have no other option.
00:39:50.160And if you consider it from an ethical point of view, we definitely have no other option.
00:39:53.940And if we choose to stick to the ethical principles of humanity, then everything will start to make sense.
00:40:02.320Then we will see that what happens now is a process in which something new is born.
00:40:10.800Because that's what happens typically in totalitarian states.
00:40:14.400The people who do not go along with them, for instance, in the concentration camps, as it was described by people as Viktor Frankl and Solzhenitsyn, there was always a small minority.
00:40:23.500The most prisoners started to behave in a completely beast-like manner.
00:40:26.340But there was always a small minority who refused to do so, and who started to realize the extreme importance of ethical principles for a human being, and who became more and more loyal to these principles while they were in this pool of darkness.
00:40:43.580And these people went in a very fast way to a process of mental and spiritual evolution, to the extent that Solzhenitsyn describes certain people.
00:40:52.320For instance, Ivanovich Grigoryev, I think, I referred to him in the last part of my book, the last chapter of my book, was a sickly person when he entered the gulags.
00:41:01.240And while most people died in a few months in the gulags, he survived.
00:41:05.260And Solzhenitsyn said it was because he refused to do anything unethical.
00:41:10.180If the guards commanded him to do something unethical, he refused to do so, no matter what the punishment was.
00:41:14.900And if other prisoners stole his food and his clothes, he didn't steal food or clothes back.
00:41:20.460He preferred to go outside working in temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius, clothing only in a bag or something, rather than stealing clothes himself.
00:41:32.500And he said, Solzhenitsyn said, I've seen how this person became stronger and stronger and stronger, both at the mental and the physical level.
00:41:39.840And so that's what you have to realize.
00:41:44.780If we make the right choice, if we decide to go through this with our ethical principles, then we will, in one way or another, receive a certain strength for it in return.
00:42:02.040A strength which is more important than everything you might lose.
00:42:04.960So we don't have to focus too much on trying to predict what will happen and what we have to do.
00:42:11.060We have to focus on one thing, on our ethical principles, and to make sure that we stay true to them throughout this process.
00:42:18.400That's the most important thing, I believe.
00:42:20.700I have to tell you, if this makes you a dangerous radical, we are in real trouble.
00:42:29.520Because I haven't heard anything that a real servant of God would have said.