Dissenting Voices Must Speak Out to Extricate Society From the Grip of Mass Formation: Clinical Psychologist

Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium and a leading expert on mass formation, is seen during an interview for EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program on Aug. 18, 2022. Screenshot/The Epoch Times

Speaking out to articulate sincere and honest belief is the best way to break the social phenomenon known as mass formation, whereby many individuals believe in an unreasonable narrative but are unable to think critically of it, said Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium.

A very important characteristic of mass formation is that people gripped by it become radically intolerant of dissonant voices to the point of committing atrocities against the people who disagree with them, including their own children, Desmet told EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program in an Aug. 18 interview.

To illustrate this, the professor provided an example of a mother who, during the Iranian revolution in 1979, reported her son to the government and helped to execute him.

A poster displayed in late 1966 in a Beijing street shows how to deal with a so-called enemy of the people during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Zhang Hongbing took the Cultural Revolution's injunctions about "enemies of the people" seriously and turned in his own mother, who was executed. He now seeks to use her death as a way to educate people about the cruelty of that time. Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images

The phenomenon of mass formation has existed in society since ancient times and manifested itself in the Crusades, the French Revolution, and on a large scale in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, said Desmet, a leading expert on mass formation.

The first time a worldwide mass formation emerged was during the coronavirus crisis, Desmet said. “That’s never happened before in history.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, two new groups emerged in the society: the mass and a group of people that don’t go along with the masses, he said.

The group that doesn’t side with the mass is usually extremely diverse, and it runs through every preexisting social group such as families, companies, friendships, and political parties, Desmet said. “It comes from all social backgrounds, from all professions, from all races and colors.”

Prerequisites for Mass Formation

Desmet holds that a rational understanding is extremely important, and humankind has to push rational understanding as far as possible, but if it’s done in a harnessed way, people will soon see that they have arrived at the limit of rational understanding.

“All major scientists concluded the same,” Desmet said, citing the ideas of an influential 20th-century mathematician who said the part of reality that can be rationally understood is very limited, and the rest of reality can only be understood by “empathically resonating with it,” he said.

Desmet also quoted two eminent physicists and Nobel laureates, Niels Bohr and Max Planck, who expressed similar views about the limits of rationality in understanding the world.

Desmet said that most phenomena in nature behave irrationally and are completely unpredictable.

“Even with the mathematical formulas that determine these phenomena in your hand, you will never be able to predict how the system will behave. ... It’s unpredictable,” he said.

When a person starts to resonate with the eternal spirit of life around them, “it is at that moment that you also can tolerate the idea that you will die, that there might be some suffering in life,” he said.

Completely rational understanding that made people stop resonating with the world around them and made them scared of life is the real root cause of the problem, Desmet said.

“If you want to know the root cause of totalitarianism, then you have to situate it at that level. It’s at the level of the hubris, the human hubris, the human illusion, that everything in life can be controlled, that everything in life can be rationally understood, that everything in life can be rationally manipulated, that you can create an artificial new universe, an artificial new human being, which won’t suffer anymore or won’t die anymore.”

The mechanist, rationalist view of humans in the world and the belief that everything can be controlled in a rational way is the root cause of this new technocratic totalitarianism because it disconnects people from their natural and social environment, Desmet said.

Mass Formation Evolves

This disconnection makes people feel lonely and turns them into atomized subjects to the point that they start to suffer from a lack of meaning-making, and that, in turn, confronts these atomized subjects with “free-floating anxiety, frustration, and aggression,” Desmet said.

However, these people who feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive don’t know what they are anxious, frustrated, and aggressive about. They feel completely out of control, lonely, and devoid of meaning-making, Desmet said.

“That’s the perfect breeding ground for mass formation.”

If, under these conditions, a narrative is distributed that provides people with an object of anxiety and the strategy to deal with it, the free-floating anxiety connects to the object of anxiety, Desmet said. An example of such an object can be a virus, and a strategy to fight it can include lockdowns, mask wearing, and so on, he added.

People then start to follow the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, which connects them again in a heroic collective battle against that object, so they feel a new social bond, he said.

But that connection is only an illusion, because people are never connected to each other. They are each separately connected to the collective, meaning that everyone demands from the other to sacrifice all individual interests for the collective.

This is mass formation. The longer it lasts, the more energy is sucked away from the bonds between the individuals and invested in the bond between each individual and the collective, Desmet pointed out.

“That’s why at the end, people typically start snitching on each other,” he said.

Turning the Tide

A totalitarian state is based on mass formation, in which a segment of the population, usually about 20 to 30 percent, becomes fanatically convinced of a certain narrative or ideology, Desmet said.

In a totalitarian system, if a part of the totalitarian elite is eliminated, it will be replaced, and the system will continue as if nothing happened, he said, illustrating his view with an example of Josef Stalin, who killed 60 percent of his own Communist Party members who were later replaced.

In this respect, the totalitarian system differs from a classical dictatorship, which only relies on a small elite that imposes a social contract on the population by inciting fear, Desmet said.

Attendees at the Loudoun County school board meeting in Ashburn, Va., on Jan. 25, 2022. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

The first ethical and strategic principle to break the mass formation is that people always have to speak out and never stop speaking out, Desmet said, because the dissonant voices of those who disagree with the narrative constantly disturb the mass formation.

If people stop speaking out, “the mass formation goes to the last stage in which people start to commit atrocities, first to everyone who doesn’t go along with them, and then to each other.”

This happened in Nazi Germany, when the resistance stopped speaking out and went underground. “The system went completely mad” and started to destroy everyone who opposed them, Desmet said.

Speaking out might be difficult or dangerous, but it’s much more dangerous to stop speaking out, Desmet said.

“As a human being, you have the ethical duty to articulate the words that seems sincere and honest to you.” If people continue to do so, they will become increasingly stronger, and after a certain amount of time, the power of the small group, no matter how small, will become bigger than the power of the masses, Desmet said.

At that point, a new kind of society based on ethical principles emerges.

Desmet believes that human beings have to articulate the principles that emerge in them, not because they are convinced that they are the only ones who know the truth, but because these principles are the best of their understanding, and they sincerely believe that they are true.