The Psychology of Totalitarianism

This is brilliant and very important book linking the logical implications of the mechanistic grand narrative to the way it has played out during the Covid crisis. It was the case that if you Googled ‘mass formation’ nothing would come up as the algorithms have been removed by the company as the concept 'violated community guidelines’. My view is that the idea has very considerable explanatory power, and one can see its anticipation in the work of Gustave Le Bon dating back to 1895 about hypnosis, and its iterations during the 1930s where the same psychological mechanisms were at play. We now face the grim prospect of a technocratic totalitarianism using the latest electronic technology by means of 5/6G the internet of bodies and the internet of things.

The originality of Desmet’s approach lies in his understanding of the historical development of mechanistic materialism during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. As he points out, the fundamental premise rests on the (ideological) conception of a human being: ‘Do we view man as a biochemical machine that has to be technologically monitored and pharmaceutically adjusted, war as a being that finds its destination in mystical resonance with the Other and with the eternal language of nature.’ (p. 61) This issue is fundamental to the Network, and especially to the work of the Galileo Commission. The impending and catastrophic failure of this grand narrative in ecological, political and economic terms has given rise to widespread loss of meaning and free-floating anxiety that is fertile soil for mass formation. Individuals become what Hannah Arendt called atomised subjects adrift in ‘the mechanistic logic’ of a dead, soulless universe.’ (p. 119)

Mattias characterises the fundamental nature of science as open-mindedness and truth telling, but warns that when science morphs into the ideology or belief system of scientism, people become afraid to speak the truth, retreating into the safety of conformity, as has been evident over the last two years. As readers will be aware, Science is now grappling with the nature of consciousness, eventually we are encountering what was originally pushed out of view: ‘man as a subjective and ethical being’ whose essence escapes the mechanistic straitjacket. The author adds that Life itself can only be defended in terms of metaphor and poetry, echoing the argument of Iain McGilchrist.

A further consequence of mechanistic thinking underpinned by a mentality of control is the rise of what Mattias calls ‘regulation mania’ or ‘regulitis’, leading to a culture of hyper-regulation and over-administration where systems become inhuman since there can be no exceptions; indeed, exceptions by way of disagreement are not tolerated. In this respect, the bureaucrat acts with the same logic as a computer: no allowances can be made for individual cases in a system of expert technocracy where decisions are supposedly made according to objective and quantitative criteria. However, Mattias points out that ‘stories make the numbers, rather than the other way round’, and are constructed around facts woven into what becomes the official narrative repeatedly confirmed and communicated in the mainstream media. He comments on various aspects of the manipulation of the message, especially in relation to maintaining the level of fear and therefore control using tried and tested principles from behaviouristic psychology. As he explains in considerable detail (pp. 132-3), the accelerated transition from democracy to totalitarian technocracy as a hyper-controlled technological society ‘actually formed part of the logic of the mechanistic ideology from the very beginning. In a mechanistic universe, it is inevitably the technical expert who has the last word, based on his superior mechanistic knowledge.’

The second part discusses mass formation and totalitarianism, beginning with the rise of the masses and their relationship to their leaders. He builds on the work of Hannah Arendt and describes the basic conditions for the emergence of mass formation as social isolation and lack of social bonds, lack of meaning in life, free-floating anxiety and psychological unease, free-floating frustration and aggression looking for an object, which find expression in scapegoating and victimisation of the nonconforming minority who refuse to be subject to group pressure. All this is manifested in ’radical intolerance of other opinions and a strong tendency towards authoritarianism. These conditions obliterate diversity of opinion and stifle open debate.

The chapter on conspiracy and ideology advances a similar argument to Charles Eisenstein (see my review in this issue) by prioritising ideology over conspiracy. Mattias underestimates the historical evidence for the influence closed societies like the Freemasons, for instance in relation to the French Revolution and other revolutions since that time (see Nicholas Hagger The Secret History of the West reviewed last summer). He acknowledges that a good deal of prior scenario planning was involved, culminating in Event 201 in New York in October 2019, and neither this nor the publicly available WEF agenda can be classified as conspiracy theory. The chilling aspect, however, is the exact enactment of the authoritarian plans discussed within a biosecurity and intelligence framework that included the war against ‘misinformation’ that might derail the planned vaccines and expensive proprietary drugs as the only valid interventions.

The third part is entitled Beyond the Mechanistic Worldview with three chapters on the dead versus the living universe, matter and spirit, and science and truth. Most readers will agree when he writes that the most fundamental change we as a society have to aim for is a change in consciousness, and especially dispensing with the ‘ideology that sees the universe as a logically knowable, predictable, controllable, and undirected mechanical process.’ (p. 148) He points out that 19^th century determinism has been overtaken by 20^th-century quantum physics, systems, chaos and complexity theory, strange attractors, and self-organisation. He discusses the implications of the placebo effect and quotes an extraordinary description by Alexander Solzhenitsyn about Gregory Ivanovich and the astounding self-healing influence of his bright and spotless human spirit.

In the final chapter, Mattias returns to the issue of science and truth in the light of what he calls an ever-present totalitarian undercurrent embodied in the Fourth Industrial Revolution with its transhumanist agenda of merging humans with machines. He quotes the views of the great physicists from the first half of the 20^th century, notably Max Planck, observing that ‘all of them had a mystical worldview because they confronted in their research objects with an irresolvable mystery.’ He locates rational knowledge within the human, commenting that the ultimate knowledge can be received by tuning to the appropriate frequency, though he does not treat the non-dual and direct insight that is gnosis, where the subject-object distinction is transcended. This could also be added has the fifth form of truth-telling as formulated by Foucault and, and less it is subsumed under wisdom. These are prophecy, wisdom, techne and parrhesia – the last is a new word for me, and it means speaking boldly. Now is the time to speak boldly for the truth of the human spirit and the essence of life before we are steamrollered into mindless mechanistic conformity. Instead, we must insist on the integrity of human creativity, individuality, diversity and freedom of expression in the context of open and critical debate. In short, as Albert Schweitzer argued, we must uphold the ideals of the Enlightenment for which our forebears campaigned in an earlier era of dogmatism and intolerance.