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by Peter Breggin MD & Ginger Breggin

Originally posted on America Out Loud Jul 22, 2022 | Health, Politics

The author of the idea calls it mass formation and mass hypnosis. Others have added mass psychosis. He began promoting the concept in Europe to many enthusiastic media, intellectuals, scientists, and physicians. Then it took off in America, where “mass hypnosis” has become a buzzword among critics of COVID-19 policies and practices. 

Many thoughtful people who listened to him felt, at long last, they had a label to put on their fellow citizens who were acting zombie-like, soulless, and compliant in response to draconian pandemic measures and all the lies they were being told. Some of the most dedicated reformers in the truth-in-science and freedom movement embraced his ideas. To many, it was a relief to be able to label it — mass formation or mass hypnosis — and to think that there was good science or psychology to bolster the diagnosis. 

One – Mattias Desmet Demoralizes the Freedom Movement

Two – Mattias Desmet Diagnoses Researchers as Mentally Disturbed

Three – Mattias Desmet Blames the Victims and Absolves the Perpetrators

Now the author of the concept, European psychoanalyst Mattias Desmet, has written a book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism.1 I’m a psychiatrist and, like Desmet, I’m a psychotherapist; but early in my career, I rejected joining one of Freud’s psychoanalytic institutes for special training. I did that for many reasons. First, it was apparent to me that psychoanalysis was an unscientific cult that demanded conformity to a number of very bizarre theories that degraded the human spirit. Second, the training itself required an incredible degree of daily submissiveness to authority. Trainees, many of them already psychiatrists, had to pay to lie on a couch for an hour five days a week while a “training psychoanalyst” would very occasionally make incisive remarks that were supposed to get to their unconscious mind. Third, it smacked of victim-blaming — a subject I will address further that is key to Desmet’s dogma.

Reading an advance copy of the Psychology of Totalitarian in July 2022 confirmed my fears that Desmet’s concepts lay in the general arena of an intellectual hoax, a nasty use of speculative psychoanalysis to dismiss serious researchers investigating the origins of COVID-19, and a purposeful cover-up of the elites and the globalists responsible for the worst outcomes inflicted on humanity during the pandemic. 

There was no reason to invent or apply a new concept like mass formation to explain the misery, apathy, and docility, seen in the general population and even among our colleagues. Individual doctors had, and continue to have, many good reasons to feel helpless, marginalized, and overwhelmed. Physicians who so much as voice doubt about the dominant views on COVID-19 are continuing to lose their teaching appointments, their clinical positions, their board certifications, and even their medical licenses. They continue to be censored and removed from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for simply disagreeing with the CDC, FDA, NIH, or even the media like ABC or CNN. Very few in the medical community dare to refuse vaccinations for themselves or their patients. 

Now, in one of the greatest betrayals of their patients in medical history, only the bravest among physicians are refusing to go along with jabbing infants, who have nothing to gain, since COVID-19 will not harm them, and everything to lose, including their good health, their reproductive capacities, and their lives.

Millions of other citizens are similarly intimidated and censored. Many are required to submit to vaccinations under threat of losing their jobs, educational opportunities, or participation in competitive sports. And if any dare questions the COVID-19 narrative, they continue to be ostracized, censored, shamed, and made to feel guilty by coworkers, friends, and family members — and even rejected by their personal physicians.

The simple truth is that what Desmet calls mass formation or mass hypnosis is the response of normal human beings to extreme threats and harassments, and the loss of personal freedom. Add to that the isolation that was more widespread and rampant when he was finishing his book in November 2021 and the escalating threat to our constitutional democracies — it would be a miracle if anyone survived unscathed.  

Rather than birds flying beautifully in unison, as Desmet analogizes to explain mass formation, during COVID-19, many people have become more like a flock of goldfinches huddled silently together in the bushes hiding from the hawk circling above. When the hawk is gone, they come alive again and go about their cheery business.

Furthermore, the so-called mass formation has nothing whatsoever to do with the madness of crowds or mass hypnosis, which are Desmet’s favorite comparisons and sources of “science.” Crowds were outlawed during the worst COVID-19 oppression. COVID-19 victims were suffering, and many continue to suffer, from isolation and political abuse, not from deranged hyperactive crowd misbehavior.  

The victims of COVID-19 totalitarianism were not and are not energized and potentially violent, which is the model for the madness of crowds. They weren’t gathering in groups until very recently when resistance groups — including truckers and farmers — formed in Canada, the Netherlands, and other nations. Up until then, most of the time, the so-called “masses” were withdrawn and docile. The psychodynamics of abuse and submission to authority helps to explain what has been happening since early 2020 to all of us, while “mass formation” or the psychology of “mad” and out-of-control crowds has no relationship to the suffering of people under COVID-19. 

Similarly, mass hypnosis has nothing to do with behavior during the height of COVID-19 oppression. If mass hypnosis does occur, which I doubt, it happens at Nazi-like Communist rallies where people are primed by ideology, inspired by pageantry and charismatic speakers, and energized by the group — while ultimately terrified of doing anything other than conform. It may happen when a worshipped cult leader harangues his followers, fomenting group cohesion and paranoia toward outsiders. It may happen during the ritual sexual abuse of groups of children. It does not happen when people feel so alone and isolated that it breaks their hearts and renders them apathetic and withdrawn.

Desmet’s book is a classic example of blaming the victim — the group hypnotizes itself, he argues. But he goes much further into a bizarre assertion that the abusers do not even exist!  

If all this sounds bizarre to you, you are in good company. Both commonsense and genuine historical analyses of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes confirm how they were built and maintained on conspiracies and careful planning. Much like today’s Mexican cartels or the mafia, largescale abuse and control of people require perpetrators collaborating with each other and careful planning to have their way, usually with utter disregard for the misery inflicted on others. Indeed, there are criminal conspiracy laws, confirming the reality of conspiracy as a part of human malfeasance. 

Here are the destructive themes that run through Desmet’s book:

1. Mass formation arises from the victims themselves, who communicate it to each other in a mysterious or even mystical fashion. Desmet compares it to mass hypnosis or to the madness of crowds. 

2. Because the hypnotic force supposedly arises from the group itself, there are no leaders, authorities, or elites to blame for it. In fact, the concept of elites is a fiction generated by the mass formation. Even extreme totalitarian dictators like Hitler are really a product of the crowd and mass formation and are not to blame. He actually says this and cites historian/philosopher Hannah Arendt to confirm his argument.

3. Consistent with blaming the victim, Desmet says there are no conspiracies behind COVID-19. None. No one planned all the destructive policies, strategies, and practices. It was a series of human mistakes and poor judgment, typical of ordinary people doing their best. In fact, there were and are no malignant or purposefully destructive forces at work, and there is no evil either. Desmet argues there was not even enough secrecy to call it a conspiracy in what little planning was attempted. Desmet can only hold this position by ignoring the 8-10,000 year history of elites conspiring against everyone else to build fiefdoms and empires, and by neglecting the many contemporary reports and books about the elaborate planning behind the unfolding of the pandemic, including our book, COVID-!9 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey. 

4. Desmet believes all the scholars, journalists, scientists, and other people who are, in fact, unearthing and documenting conspiracies behind COVID-19 are suffering from a variant of mass formation or mass hypnosis. They are emotionally disturbed — intensely “anxious,” “confused,” and “bewildered.” Out of their personal psychological “needs,” they make up simple-minded conspiracy theories in order to focus on something outside themselves. They must instead look inside themselves. So, while our nation collapses beneath totalitarianism, Desmet wants us, metaphorically, to lie on the couch and examine ourselves, while he makes pointed comments on our inner conflicts, needs, and, of course, our “conspiracy theories.”  

5. Desmet’s concept of mass formation robs people of their individual value and free will. The “masses” and the scholars and researchers who unmask the conspiracies behind COVID-19 are described as helplessly driven by their unconscious motives and their needs. This is how authoritarian abusers always think about their victims — as devoid of value and free will — which enables these abusers to justify manipulating and controlling them.  

6. Desmet’s emphasis on the dangerousness of crowds, Ginger Breggin observes, can serve a more insidious and destructive purpose. Those who now control the U.S. government have politically imprisoned individuals from January 6, 2021, protests in Washington DC, many of whom are still languishing in prison without trial dates. The government is using such unconstitutional, draconian, and abusive means against these individuals that protests by the freedom movement have been squelched. Desmet’s negative characterizations of groups and “masses” contributes to the narrative that discourages and even prevents the freedom movement from using one of the most important political actions available — massive peaceful group protests against the government’s oppressive policies.

7. Desmet’s misuse of psychological concepts is aimed at undermining people whom he perceives as political threats. Ginger Breggin warns that Desmet’s work can set the stage for other psychologists and for psychiatrists to create and apply new psychodiagnoses related to “mass hypnosis” or “mass psychosis” in the legal and political arenas to discredit, psychiatrically confine, and/or drug individuals who are critical of the establishment. This is precisely how psychiatrists and psychiatric diagnoses have been used in totalitarian countries such as the old USSR2 and in contemporary China to crush dissidents.3

Evil people — tyrants and their collaborators — actually do conspire to control and exploit other human beings. To confirm how old this knowledge is, here are quotations from one of the greatest analysts of human freedom and human enslavement, Étienne de La Boétie, a writer and a judge (1530-1563). In his 1557 book, The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, he wrote about tyrants and their henchmen:4

Desmet’s book is a dangerous Trojan horse calculated to keep us feeling confused and self-blaming and for giving hostile forces ammunition for discrediting both the suffering of people under COVID-19 and for dismissing anyone who researches and finds conspiracies behind COVID-19. It pushes a psychology and philosophy in which human beings are devoid of individual value and the ability to make rational choices. It strengthens the enemies of freedom while discouraging research into the enormous organized, highly coordinated threat of growing totalitarianism throughout the world. Worse yet, it could discourage well-meaning individuals from taking action to defend our freedoms — and that appears to be a major unwritten purpose behind his book.

One – Mattias Desmet Demoralizes the Freedom Movement

Two – Mattias Desmet Diagnoses Researchers as Mentally Disturbed

Three – Mattias Desmet Blames the Victims and Absolves the Perpetrators

1 Desmet, Mattias. (2022). The Psychology of Totalitarianism. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.

2 Breggin, Peter. (2008). Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition. New York: Springer Publishing Company, p. 39 and Fireside, H. (1979). Soviet Psychoprisons. New York: W.W. Norton

 3 van Voren, R. (2010). Political Abuse of Psychiatry—An Historical Overview Schizophr Bull. 2010 Jan; 36(1): 33–35.

4 Étienne de La Boétie (1942, original edition 1577). The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. New York, Columbia University Press. The book is searchable. https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/Boetie.pdf