The Cloth and the Code; the Problem With “Mass Formation”

A Opening Critique of Desmet’s “Psychology of Totalitarianism”.

Addendum February 2024

What I have written herein (vide infra) was an August 2022 rough draft rapid fire critique of what was at the time a highly influential idea. So energised was I at the nonsense idea of mass formation, I was driven to get something down on the page and out to the anti lockdown dissident community. The article has since been savagely edited down into a chapter contribution to a book (see image), the release of which is much delayed. Should the book come to print, hopefully the timing is not missed as some of the wind has since come out of Desmet’s sails. Should it not be released — or should the chapter be forced into too great a brevity — I will keep this article, my maiden voyage on substack, and release a second edition.

Some of the Many Problems with “Mass Formation”

Aug 2022

Recently “mass formation” or “mass formation psychosis” has taken anti lockdown dissident circles by storm, the buzzword having uncritically become an instant gospel amongst otherwise critical thinkers. In so doing it almost proves itself by way of its own example. Almost.  

The conceptual child of Belgian professor of psychology Mattias Desmet, mass formation attempts to explain the social phenomena of hyper conformity to public health policy this past two plus years.

As if uncritical conformity alone were not disturbing, this was all too frequently accompanied by an unreflective faith in the message so strong that it militantly resisted efforts to consider the other side of the story. Even those cynical misanthropes conversant in propaganda and nudge theory who were prior aware how much like a sheep a human can be, even they could only watch on in amazement at the breathtaking ease with which a populace swallowed whatever their media and elites told them. They slavishly masked on and off at command. They obediently locked themselves down on command. Without hesitation they stood on marks taped out on grocery stores floors or places of worship. They watched the fear porn death toll on mainstream media without a shred of curiosity of what a covid case was or how a death data point was determined. They jabbed themselves once, twice, thrice or more when the synthetic nucleotide came along. Most worrying of all, it was common place to see them pompously participate in the demonizing of people who didn’t accept the “the narrative”. The same supposedly post enlightenment educated secularists who might deride the religious fringe who excommunicate the unfaithful now without a blush of conscience cut off unjabbed and covid critical loved ones as heretics or potential asymptomatic super spreaders. No amount of illogicality in “the rules” would wake them up. No amount of discord between what the media was telling them and the reality in the world of their own eyes would trigger a scintilla of curiosity. No amount of suffering in lockdown would soften their hearts. How else to explain it but by way of mass hypnosis, mass hysteria, the covid cult or, as psychologists are wont to do, a rebranding of older concepts into a new discoveries and jargon, e.g. mass formation.  

As material for this piece, I borrow only modestly from Professor Desmets hot off the press book “The Psychology of Totalitarianism. My critique is more addressed to the content of the various YouTube videos interviewing Professor Desmet and of many anti lockdown influencers promoting mass formation. As with many thinkers, it is the common reading of the idea that is the idea, and we do not do well to nit-pick the thinker themselves. In future pieces I shall go through the book chapter by chapter.  

In brief, Professor Desmet proposes a set of (more or less) explicitly stated essential criteria for the emergence of what many of us call the covid cult. 

These four factor criteria are  

1)   Lack of social bonds and connectedness. Desmet correctly points out many examples of alienation and loneliness in our contemporary world. If such a notion does not immediately resonate as true, either the reader is profoundly fortunate (to have bountiful social bonds), or profoundly ignorant (at how many live and die in abject loneliness). Against this nihilistic background we hunger for a tribe to belong to.   

2)   Lack of meaning in life. Desmet cites for example the anthropologist David Greaber and his thesis of “bullshit jobs”, the idea that many of us just work in some redundant 9-5, making no meaningful contribution to anything or anyone. And we know it. We push a pen to pass an exam. We then push a pen to fulfil some key performance indicator, sitting at a cubicle in some giant corporate or public machine. Eventually someone else pushes a pen and we are retired. Off fishing we go. Or so we plan to do before we die of an undiagnosed cancer a few months after the insincere retirement party held in our honour.  And as we lie in a palliative care death bed, the legacy of having pushed the pen leaves no sense of accomplishment. At least we have the morphine, more for pain of regret than the pain of the cancer. Against the spectre of this second nihilism we hunger for a mission, something to make it all worthwhile before we shuffle off this mortal coil.

3)   “Free floating anxiety”. That is to say we have an emotional disquiet. We feel unsettled, insecure and ill at ease. Insomuch as it is “free floating” we cannot quite put our finger on why we feel as we do, much less remedy it. There’s autochthonous mood without the respite of delusional systematisation. We take emotionally blunting SSRI’s and other psycho-pharmacopeia, maybe with some effect, usually not. We want to find a reason why. We need to know what we dread.  

4)   “Free floating” aggression. We also feel angry at our lot. Again the shadow is before us, for who and/or what can we blame? Who or what can be the object of our 3 minutes of hate? Are there any Nazi’s or terrorists or soviets anymore, or have we cruelly been deprived of an enemy. Nonetheless we need an enemy to sacrifice at the alter of meaning. Climate change is not concrete enough, at least not yet. It lacks immanence and personal memory. We have all had head colds.    

With the torment of this quartet in mind, along comes a virus. An accidental lab leak or cross species jump into a bat soup. Or maybe it took a ride on a comet. Origins make no difference. Suddenly the proto mass has their mission and their meaning. They are to take the Great Leap Forward into a Maoist adventure, bonded to fellow comrades to eradicate the virus, “stay safe” and “save lives”. They lock down for the good of the team, hanging on for the arrival of the fruits of man and (trademark) “the science” in the form of the synthetic mRNA. They wear the insignia of party membership as a piece of cloth across the face, and reflexively pull out the phone at every QR code. And when the vaccine arrives they are fully ritually baptised into the new religion. For just as being baptised or born again takes the Christ within the convert, the covid cultists of a false religion take within them Pfizer. Just as there is no God but mRNA there is no Satan but the virus. It is the terminus object of all fears. Apart from the virus, it is the dissidents who would seek to destroy this new found solidarity who are likewise hated and feared. Now all our leaders are Churchill against a virus which is Hitler. The appeasers and traitors who are “anti vaxxers” “lock down does not work” denialists, “freedom fighters” and “conspiracy theorists” are to be scapegoated in the form of selfish “granny killers” and  “the pandemic of the unvaccinated”. The mass are hypnotised, operating according to some hive mind and behaving as one. Homogeneity of the mass is a feature of Arendt’s, Le Bons and Desmets formulations. They (the mass) won’t let go of the new found meaning and the connectedness found for themselves. Given its relatively pleasurable valance, Desmet would say it intoxicates. It must be protected at all costs for they cannot go back to the way it was before. Better to believe there’s a virus which will surely kill me than return to insignificance and mediocrity, of endless consumption and being consumed. This is the narcissistic desire I see behind many a delusion. No matter how persecuted I am, at least I matter and the world is not so bland.         

So far so good with mass formation. Not quite. We could say that mass formation is a trivial observation and leave it at that. We observe the proverbial lemmings running off the cliff. They were not doing it before. Now they are. Thus mass is formed. Yet this is empty descriptivism and Desmet is rightly going after a psychological formulation, a “why” not a “what”. The fatal flaw in the case for mass formation is that it locates the problem within the mass itself as a psychological object, this despite the obvious fact no such object exists in the world. For if mass formation qua mass psychopathology is a psychological reality, then mass psychology qua normal collective psychology has to be similarly real. Yet where in the mass is mass mind as the first point of departure from its own sanity? Where can we point to it and how can we communicate with it? 

Only an individual perceives, feels and emotes, cogitates and behaves in the world as the output of a mind. Now to be sure an individual might observe a group of other individuals, then making decisions or being strongly impressed what to believe and how to behave based upon the heuristic that it is generally safer and more expedient to run with the pack. In some times and places it might have even been of greater truth value to run with the pack, though somehow I doubt truth has ever been a democratic matter, especially within the cadre of “experts” and “the science”. However it must be underlined that the collective itself has no conscious being or agency of its own. A mass does not perceive, think or feel. It does not decide. Even the very construct of mass formation requires an individual mind to conceive of it and propagate it to other individual minds. If the formulation is especially persuasive, it will find a home in other minds. An aggregate of instantiations does not an emergent consciousness make, as if to suggest enough people engaged in mind (lower case “m”) create a floating cartoon bubble of a Mind above minds. This sort of invoked egregore exists only in gnostic supernatural formulations of being and consciousness, something outside conventional secular psychological theory. But then this egregore too is just a demonic individual of a different nature, not a mass in the one emergent from the ones themselves. Or to put another way and assuming a demon exists, how many people can a demon possess simultaneously? Even legion cannot be everywhere at once. Legion went off in the pigs, without any description as to legion being in the minds of pigs, or pigs having mids as we do. These are not trivial distinctions. The anti reality of “social psychology” or “mass psychology” as anything more than an aggregate of individual minds cannot be over emphasised.  

In a similar vein, Desmet dispenses with the notion of powerful oligarchs conspiring towards a plandemic, imagining instead that ideology is the driver. Once again, even ideology does not drive ideology, or ideology is personal and phenomenological. Individual minds are the only place within which ideology has any meaningful existence. If the mind is able to extent itself outward with guile persuasion and sheer brute power then ideology can spread to other minds. Desmet seems to write as if ideology exists prior to minds and infects them on masse, like a brain virus.  

Mass formation resonates with us as testimony to the ease we bewitch ourselves with language, only this time strangely taken too far too fast into a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, much like the propaganda of the virus itself. None of us are driven to object with autistic pedantry that the “angry sea“ of the poet is not actually a body of briny water foaming with emotional dysregulation.  Neither do we believe that the umbrella behaves as a product of its own conscious intentionality to keep us dry. We might well say the umbrella keeps us dry. But what we know and what we really mean to say is that we keep ourselves dry by way of using a mindless soulless prosthetic called an umbrella. The same is the case with mass formation. A collective cannot become insane as it could never be sane to begin with. It is said that people go insane in masses and recover their sanity one by one. Not so! People might only recover their sanity one by one. But however quickly they lose their minds, they lose them in the same way, one by one, mind by mind, individual by individual.   

None of this is to suggest Desmets idea lack a kind of truth value. As a contemporary social commentary, an updated cover of an Arendt classic or even work of poetry for the academic class, mass formation is a wonderful addition to the discourse. But as a psychological theory it remains to be relocated back into the minds of individual persons and tested by our experience within the same location. It cannot hold that because some, many or even most covid cultists are neurotics with a bullshit job, that this explains the events of 2020 to now.  

Only now having put paid to the fallacy of mass psychology can we return to the individual and examine anew Desmets formulation and its putative essential criteria. Is it true that all or even most individual devotees of the covid cult whom we encounter are neurotic wretches, morbidly lonely, trapped in a bullshit job with free floating anxiety crashing against the inside of their skull, pathetic and desperate for an object with which to attach their angst? For if this is not true, if in reality manifold other psychological formulations are to be found, then aggregate behaviour cannot be driven by the forces so claimed. Certainly they cannot be essential or even pathognomonic criteria. Perhaps they don’t apply at all.

Contra the ubiquity of the four factor claim, I have personally met countless medical and other professionals flush with connectedness. They have family and friends a plenty. They have vacations and weekend BBQ’s. They have best men and brides maids at their small, socially distanced, almost interminably postponed and politically correct weddings. They have their professional societies and guilds. They are progressive in their politics. They watch and read their establishment legacy news, fully confident in the knowledge any opposing narrative is “fake news”, “pseudoscience” and “right wing extremism”, and other nonsense ad hominem besides such as “Trumpism” and “QAnon”. They mocked and derided “conspiracy theorists” before 2020 and mock them still, this despite the conspiracy theorists having a near full score card (just look at the changing landscape over the lab leak hypothesis). They held their noses high in a haughty pretence of knowing how to analyse data and tell a lie from truth, or so they thought. After all, they had a masters degree in x, y or z, or a MD or PhD. The possession of such a qualification of necessity meant something. Or so they thought. They are the kinds of people who would teach the fallacy of authority, justifying the truth of the lesson by pointing to the doctorate on the wall.

Far from a lack of connectedness being the problem, many am alleged element of the formed mass came into 2020 prefabricated as hyper-connected and replete with life’s meaning. They embraced the actions of their collective governments. They signalled their virtue with their mask face and vaccinated deltoid selfie, not as some desperate attempt to find any meaning making port in a storm, for they had already laid anchor long ago. And if they hated the dissident and sought to destroy them, it is hardly because they are desperate for a scape goat to attach their “free floating anxiety” or “free floating aggression” to. No it’s because the dissident is a pure competitive threat to their crafted persona of who they are, what they think the world is and what they want it to be. They created themselves as much as being created.

On the other hand, I might well venture to speculate that for some, hyper obedience and angst at the lockdown sceptic is a projection of self hatred at their own cowardice and laziness. If even for the briefest of instants this past two years, it perhaps dawned on them that things were not quite right and their media and leaders were either lost at sea or lying through their teeth. Rather than admit their gullibility and join the dissident in the fight, they shut off their mind every time it might have opened ajar, threw away the key and held their shoulder to the door. Suffering the tension of cognitive dissonance is difficult. Being a dissident is difficult. Holding to the truth is difficult. Suffering persecution at the hands of powerful elite interests is difficult. Not moving an inch when the nudge unit gives a hard shove is difficult. And too many people have too much invested in the big lie. Too many people have become wantonly infantilised this past couple decades. Attached to the tit of propaganda from big brother, even the boundary between reality TV and fiction is blurred, as it that between satire and reality. Even as most half heatedly join in with “the crowd” in criticising politicians and globalists, most have a fundamental quantum of trust the political and managerial elite not to be as rotten as they actually are. In this sense the people can be the real “controlled opposition”.

Worse still, when pinned down by the evidence, too many people I met tell me they simply do not care if they come to live in a future totalitarian state. If the stimulus cheque pays the bills and they can limp along in mortgage slavery, one gets the impression they would watch the procession of the dissidents marched off to the camps (if it came to that) and simply turn the other way. From any port in a storm it’s anything not to rock the boat as they sail towards the next weekend BBQ. There is no anxiety here in these souls. No apathy either as they do have some goals. There is simply the deracination of virtue. They do not want to be dangerously free. They want to be safely in a cage. Providing it is a pretty one complete with jet ski and big screen TV, they will happily submit to the cloth and the code. They would kiss the ring of the chief medical officer to purchase a little more comfort.    

What the laity does not realise is that we psychotherapists are story tellers. We can choose from dozens of formulations to explain identical phenomenology and behaviour, and sell these off as the truth of the human condition. These explanations are just metaphors, few of which are falsifiable and most of which are better sold to the patient if we have first sold them to ourselves. Beware especially labels and lists of diagnostic criteria in psychological constructs which rely on observances of aberrations of the human condition as opposed to concrete organic pathology. The former is technocracy and politics disguised as medicine, the latter the stuff of medicine proper. The best psychotherapists are coauthors of pleasing fictions.

As before, I might as well posit the covid cultist as being infantilised to the government and managerial elite as a parent objects. The horror of having a fully abusive and sociopathic parent too painful a reality to take on, they don’t allow themselves to see things as they are. Sure they allow a little cynicism to leach out and claim their leaders are incompetent or failed in their duty. No parent is perfect and they believe public health and “democratic” government function more or less as stated on the packet as the best system we have. But they believe the WHO is basically a benevolent force and Gates is a forgivably megalomaniac philanthropist. They have to love big brother because they lack the means or the fortitude to move out and grow up.

Or I could suggest the members of the mass, the “mask nazi” “Karens” to frequently possess high trait agreeableness and conscientiousness and low disgust tolerance as a personality attribute regardless of the problems in the formative social milieu. a very sterile psychometric hypothesis, at least this is falsifiable.

Or as above I could suggest many in the mass to be too lazy to seek or defend the truth, instead seeking the lowest moral energetic state. They would do anything to avoid being accused of conspiracy theory. They will swallow any injustice so as not to be excluded from the group. They are only human after all. If you think this one cruel, as the modern pseudo right says “facts don’t care about feelings”.  

Or I could formulate all this to an evolutionary theory. Once upon a time our most distant ancestors followed the alpha chimp. As do we. Once upon a time an ice age evolutionarily selected those disposed to hierarchy and collectivism. And so we follow too.   

Or we could combine sweeping social commentary and individual psychological formulation. Nietzsche pronounced the death of (a faith in) God. This did nothing to extinguish the religious drives in the century that followed. As a consequence in the twentieth century the Christian love for the poor and downtrodden and the economic world of the book of Acts inverted itself into an atheist heresy of communism infused with religious vigor, just as now the ressentiment plays out today in the appeal to victimhood within identity as identity itself continues to disintegrate. Similarly we might argue certain schools of fascism to have the form of a neopagan drive to reclaim the valorization of excellence of a pre Christian world. In the twenty first century the religious drive lingered on in the most pathetic form as a quasi religious battle between a technocratic church and a virus that would be Satan. Everyone had to wear the mask of a technocratic sharia. Everyone needed to take within the holy spirit of pfizer (though with boosters the vaccine can also take on the metaphor of communion as well as baptism). Through it all we might conquer death. Its a humanity floundering about in pathetic spiritual decrepitude. This is not a quest for meaning or interpersonal connection. Its a failed quest for the transcendent above the plane, this being very different to meaning and connection within the plane.

Another way of looking at things is boredom. People are bored and the cure for boredom is not meaning but entertainment. Now you might say this past couple years has been unpleasant and so cannot possibly class as entertainment. Au contraire. Entertainment often consists of perversions of sadism and masochism. Where once they watched Christians fed to the lions of Parisians fed to the Guillotin, now we watch covid death counts and zombie films. The film Total Recall explores the character arc of a man who holidays into a world of excitement, this despite his adventure involving torture and running for his life. But its an entertaining dream and a vitalistic one he craves. This too is not a want for meaning or a connection. Indeed entertainment is an escape from meaning.

Or another formulation. We are hyperconnected and saturated with meaning and the confected missions of a consumer society. Now the connections are often shallow I’ll grant, but more to the point they are frenetic ones of information transfer and the energies of western urban life. Somehow people intuitively sense the weight of 8 billion people hurrying and 10,000 jets flying above them. Though we might want or not want to travel, something in us knows that if we do we are wall to wall with bodies until we wrestle to the front to steal a momentary selfie with the Mona Lisa. Many latched onto the pandemic response as an excuse to slow down and exercise some deeply desired want for disconnection. That is why some (though not all) people loved the isolation. Providing of course they were paid for it by borrowing into the future, zoom work and reduced hours were fine by them. These sentiments are behind much of misanthropy of factions of the environmental movement. People sense the Venetian canals would be cleaner without humans, even though only the fish are there to see it.

Or most tragic of all, we could see many of the full throttled covid cultists as like ourselves because they are like ourselves. No doubt many are genuinely well intentioned caring folk who would stand up and fight for a cause worth fighting. They are simply too busy in the rat race and the propaganda is too pervasive. The bad guys got to them first. They believe they evaluate the evidence just as well. They believe our side is cruel and selfish and recklessly individualistic as we believe they have chosen an illiberal Hobbesian pact, trading liberty for collective safety. Neither they nor we are formed masses. We are opposing groups. We do not diagnose one another for there is nothing to diagnose. We judge one another and well we should. No human can really survive without discrimination of the other. When our goals collide with the potential for violence we call this politics. When violence itself erupts we call this war. 

Ultimately psychological selves are also political selves. This is the case anyone stands in oppositional relation to another on a matter impactful of each other’s freedoms. Some people simply want an authoritarian collective world. They like the duct tape telling them where to stand. They like the simplicity and convenience of a surveillance and social credit state. The do not want to be free and responsible. They don’t like risking their skin for principal. And so why would they want the same for you? Some just militate more than others against your freedom and responsibility, your private property and autonomy. They hate who you are and what you want. This is not a disease or the product of hypnotic suggestion. They cannot be cured of it. They understand the friend enemy distinction. It is those on our side who long to cure them who don’t get it.

This is where the language of mass formation psychosis and mass hypnotism reaches its most egregious consequences. If we truly take seriously the notion people are psychotic or hypnotised or massified by the four aforementioned criteria as a defining feature of group think and group behaviour, then we are compelled to engage with the question of diminished capacity. Shall we speak of those tried at Nuremberg as being mentally ill and driven by mass formation? What of those who spilled blood on the streets of Leningrad and those who raped and butchered their way through the French terror. If the protagonists of these monstrosities shall rightly face moral opprobrium, why not those architects of more benign evils who would ruin another life and lock them down over what the media tells them about a virus. Is there not a scale which places them on a spectrum with Eichmann? Ultimately what we might fear more than the virus is freedom, responsibility and the potentiality of the cruelty of justice. We ought not to avoid this by excuse making and psycho-pathologizing choices and characterological dispositions. In depriving the masses of individual freedom and responsibility we seek to save them from their conscience and themselves, a hateful love as much as locking them down to save them from a virus. This will not do. In order to love we need be able acknowledge peoples full freedom and responsibility in their choice to join the covid cult. I expect no mercy or medicalised excuse making for my own position as a dissident. And so we should grant them no mercy in return from the gravitas of their destructive choices, their cowardice and the persecution they metered out on us.

Mass formation also deflects from a realisation of powerlessness in the face of pervasive toxic oligarchy, and an avoidance of the most dreaded thing of all, i.e. being accused of “conspiracy theory”.  Quite apart from Desmets unconvincing and perhaps too clean dichotomy between the psychology of the dictator and totalitarian leader (as if these are two natural kinds cleaved along natural lines), there is the claim that all totalitarian systems always arise from the four factors in the mass. It is almost as if elite interests are at worst exploitative and incidental after the fact and the people hold the real power, even if this power being self generation of meaninglessness and neurosis. I have not the time, nor the scholarship, to survey all of history to evaluate such a claim. But I have a sneaking suspicion were I to do so I would find a Machiavellian hand on all of it from the beginning. From the correspondence of Voltaire to Fredrich to the intellectuals of the Parisian salons and cafes right on up through the rooms of the proto third Reich to the WEF, the Gates foundation, the Black Rocks and Vanguards, the nudge units and the whole pharmaceutical military industrial complex, elite hands are always planning and scheming to engineer both the consent of the individuals who make up the alleged mass, along with the attendant behaviours from their supposed madness. My own hypothesis is that behind and before every totalitarian move there was a vanguard of organised and well financed candidate or incumbent elites. They need not be comprehensively co-ordinated to be conspiring. They work in silos or loose associations or simply move in convergent directions. They are not automatons driven by ideology. They are people with minds and power. The likes of 2020 and onwards does not happen out of accident. The fact that the jab selfie is joined by the Ukraine flag is joined by the rainbow flag, these are not accidental causes with which to attach meaning. If the mass decided on covid and formed to it as a cause, how to explain why they shift to the next big thing when the media tell them to, because the media tell them and with content given them. God shaped holes are not filled, emptied and filled again so capriciously.

Desmet does acknowledge hierarchies of power. He also writes, in chapter 7, “mass formation take both victims and perpetrators in its grip”. One is left to wonder just how and why Desmet can be so confident that all our leaders are true believers. Why does he assert that suggestions they are motivated by money or power or possessive of psychopathic personality is a “misconception”. He gives in the same chapter the example of the reluctant nazi. Perhaps that nazi was reluctant. Yet are we to believe that 6 million were sent to the ovens based on reluctance or autistic adherence to efficiency, what Arendt called the “banality of evil”. Eichmann knew what he was doing and he did it anyway, with a sound theory of mind as to the suffering of his victims. This wasn’t “mindlessness” or an antisocial breaking of the rules. Elites do not break rules. They are the rules. Desmet admits this himself when he says the mass gives permission to do evil things from a predisposition prior to the mass being formed. And so the mass is not causal. The coordinated action of sociopathy is causal. And if planned in secret or covered in layers of deceptive propaganda (the great reset is openly available, though heavily spun), conspiracy is contributes heavily to the causal chain. and this is by minds with agency and responsibility.

Now we could say that the Nazis et al were victims of an ideology, only to return of full circle to an earlier point on language. I shall repeat. Ideology, like a mass, does not constitute a mind. It does not create a mind. It isn’t mental illness. It is not a contagion that infects minds. It is descriptive of a position held by an individual who wishes to promote it and the one who accepts the idea. Ideology, like mind, is a verb that all are responsible for. And yet in chapter 8, Desmet repeatedly states that ideology, like so called mass formation is driven by dynamics within the mass itself, and not conspirators. He writes, inter alia, “the mental and physical movements of the crowd that make it come across as the product of conspiracy”.   

I don’t think that Desmets denial of conspiracy as causal and upstream of group belief and behaviours makes of him a conspirator himself or “controlled opposition”. To speculate his thesis will not be seen as threatening to conspirators suggests they won’t likely seek to control or censor him as they do those who call out Gates, WEF, Fauci et al. That does not make him “in on it” either. It does regrettably leave us liable to aim the cannons in the wrong direction of the people themselves who, like Desmet, are just trying to figure it all out. I’m not disposed to the belief a professorial chair in psychology provides any greater insights than that the common folk can easily come upon all by themselves. So take his thoughts, like mine, with a grain of salt.

Ironically, I think Desmets formulation applies to the wrong target at the wrong time in the traumatic drama of early 2020 to now. This past 30 months I have met plenty of individuals who for whatever reason were immune from indoctrination. Many came into 2020 neurotic and vulnerable according the Desmets criteria. Many were perfectly connected and content in the 2019 calm before the storm. Regardless of their pre 2020 mental state, they either didn’t buy it from the beginning or snapped out of the pseudo hypnosis very quickly. Only after the fact of the event did they lose connectedness with friends and family. Many loved ones wrote them off as a kook and refused mix with them for fear of contracting a deadly virus. They felt betrayed and cast adrift from all who respected them only months prior. These are the people whose distrust in their western “democratic” governments turned from trivial cynicism to the horror of realising even base cynicism was wildly optimistic, the reality that their “classical liberal democracy” was dead, buried and not coming back. The doctorate on the wall lost meaning when the university that bestowed it went full covid cult. And it in these new lepers that I find them hold to the truth despite the anxiety and crisis of meaning that arose as a product of the actions of the covid cult which Desmet would say drives the hypnosis. Mass formation places the cart before the horse.