Mattias Desmet quotes

Mattias Desmet is a talented writer and psychologist known for his expertise in the field of mental health. With a passion for understanding human behavior, Mattias has published numerous articles and books on topics such as mass psychology and the impact of group dynamics on individual thought. His insightful work has earned him a reputation as a leading authority in the field. Follow Mattias Desmet for valuable insights on psychology and mental health.

Stalin switched it to the Kulaks, the farmers, actually. And then to the goldsmiths, then to the Jews, one group after the other. Until finally, he also killed 50% of his Communist Party members, who usually didn’t do anything wrong, who were not disloyal to him, not at all. But he killed them. And the strangest thing about this was that these party members actually in a very strange way, which was also very nicely described by George Orwell in Animal Farm, for instance, but also by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and Hannah Arendt also describes it. These party members who were killed, who were condemned, all admitted that they had been disloyal, that they had been traitors and so on, which was very strange. Like people, observers from abroad, international observers were baffled. And they said, what is happening here? We can’t believe our eyes. These people didn’t do anything wrong. They did not go against the rules of Stalin. And then now they admit that they have done things wrong and that they deserve to die, which was extremely strange. And that’s exactly what happens in a process of mass formation. Someone is grasped so much by a narrative that he accepts the most absurd consequences of the narrative, even if it costs him or her their own life. So that’s one of the strangest things I’ve heard.

- Mattias Desmet

The third condition in order for mass formation to emerge is that there should be a lot of – what psychologists call – free floating anxiety and free floating psychological discontent. If you’re anxious of a lion, you know what you’re anxious for. So the anxiety is connected to the mental representation or the mental image of a lion. But if people feel socially isolated and if they feel that their life has no meaning, then they are confronted with a kind of anxiety that is free floating. That means that it is not connected to a mental representation and with a lot of psychological discontent that is not connected with a mental representation.

- Mattias Desmet

On the other side, there is a very similar process in which people are confronted with a lot of anxiety because they feel threatened by the process of the mass formation. They also deal with a lot of free floating anxiety, and they connect to a different object, to the elite, to the Illuminati or a small elite that would threaten them. They dehumanize this small group of people, so they have a different enemy. While the masses have as an enemy the people who refuse to conform with the masses, the other side also creates an enemy, an object of anxiety. And in a similar way, they want to destroy this enemy. They believe that if we destroy the elite, the problem will be solved, which, of course, is not true.

- Mattias Desmet

When people experience mental intoxication, it doesn’t matter anymore whether the narrative is correct or wrong, even blatantly wrong. What matters is that it leads up to this mental intoxication. And that’s why they continue to go along with the narrative, even if they could know by thinking for one second, that it is wrong. That is the central mechanism of mass formation. And that makes it so difficult to destroy it. Because for people, it doesn’t matter when the narrative is wrong. And what we try to do is we all try to show constantly that the narrative is wrong. But for people that’s not what it is all about. It’s all about the fact that they don’t want to go back to this painful state of free-floating anxiety.

- Mattias Desmet

Mass formation is a kind of hypnosis. But there are differences with classic hypnosis. For instance, in the process of mass formation, the hypnotist is hypnotized himself. That’s the most important difference. Like in a classical hypnosis, the hypnotist is awake. His field of attention is not narrower than normal, but the person who is hypnotized suffers from a narrow field of attention. But the hypnotist doesn’t. And in the process of mass formation, usually the opposite is true. The field of attention of the person who hypnotizes is usually even narrower than the masses themselves. So that’s why the experts in this situation, make mistakes that ordinary people wouldn’t make, and that was very clear to me from the beginning. If you look at the statistics and the numbers that are presented through the mass media, they are often so blatantly wrong that even a child can see it. And still it is as if many of the experts do not realize it. And that’s because in one way or another, they very often are hypnotized, or their field of attention is even narrower. So we could talk for days about the leaders of the masses. It’s very complicated because in one way or another, they are hypnotized. In another way, they often manipulate and cheat and lie to the people, and that’s because they do really believe in their ideology and the ideals they are striving for. That’s something they are usually hypnotized by. But usually they do not believe in the narrative that they are presenting to the people. They feel that it is justified to lie to the people and to manipulate them. So you have to make a distinction there. They are hypnotized in this sense that they really believe in a megalomaniac way, that their ideology will create a kind of a paradise for humanity. But that doesn’t mean that they believe everything they are telling, because usually they know that they are manipulating the population. So it’s double, I think.

- Mattias Desmet

The reason why people buy into the narrative is because it leads to this new social bond, this new solidarity. People are social beings and being socially isolated is really painful. And through the process of mass formation they switch from the very negative state of social isolation to the opposite state of maximal connectedness that exists in a crowd in a mass. And that in itself leads up to a kind of mental intoxication which is the real reason why people stick to the narrative, why people are willing to go along with the narrative, even as we said, if it is utterly wrong and even more important, even if they lose everything that is important to them personally.

- Mattias Desmet