The Psychology of Totalitarianism

A must-read treatise by Mattias Desmet on the death of nuance, unspoken understanding and freedom of the mind

Have you ever experienced an idea that resonated so much that it swept through your heart and mind like a fresh breeze on a hot day? Something that pierced through the swampy fog of contemporary discourse, producing a truly electric ‘a-ha’ moment, bringing with it an almost physical sense of relief?

That’s what I felt the first time I heard Mattias Desmet’s explanation of how totalitarian societies come about. It is beautiful in its simplicity.

Desmet, drawing a lot on the work of Hannah Arendt, identifies four conditions that create totalitarian societies. First, a generalised loneliness and social isolation among a population.

Secondly, a lack of meaning in life.

Third, a population in the grip of anxiety and psychological unease.

And finally, a “free-floating frustration and aggression” which solidifies the a mass formation mindset. 

Jodi Shaw first told me about Desmet and his formulation last autumn, as vaccine mandates and COVID restrictions were at their peak. Then Robert Malone mentioned him on Joe Rogan’s show in December, which prompted the fact-check brigade in the corporate media to weigh in with attempts to discredit Desmet, contemptuously dismissing him as a no-name “professor in Belgium” with an “unfounded theory.”

Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, is very much more than an unfounded theory. It is a crucial treatise on the mental torments that are afflicting wealthy Western countries. Desmet goes well beyond the four conditions to illuminate the origins of our modern malaise.

Most importantly, the book uncovers the birth of scientism — the worship of science for its findings as opposed to its method — in the replication crisis of the early 2000’s. Although our worship of the idea that man can know everything began in the Enlightenment, the mass failure of practicing scientists to conduct studies that hold up under the scrutiny of replication, which was exposed in 2005, is really where the foundations of the COVID crisis were laid down.

Desmet writes, “when several researchers performed the same experiment, they came to different findings. For example, in economics research, replication failed about 50 percent of the time, in cancer research about 60 percent of the time.”

And yet, instead of correcting course, Science (Peace Be Upon It), kept on going. Which is how we now live in a society where it is deemed acceptable for one of the government’s leading scientists to cry on camera and talk about her sense of “impending doom.” Science-y! 

As Desmet puts it: “In short, the scientific discourse, like any dominant discourse, has become the privileged instrument of opportunism, lies, deception, manipulation, and power.”

My favourite thing about Desmet’s work is that he makes a highly compelling, dare I say, scientific, case for bringing the human spirit back into to our highly secularised and technological world. For all the huge contributions that science has made to our understanding of the universe and our material wellbeing, we have lost a part of our human patrimony as well.

“Artificial light broke the rhythm that the sun and the moon had hitherto imposed,” he writes. “The compass alienated man from the stars; industrial labour drew him away from the fields and the woods. The psychological impact of all this usually wasn’t considered important — it it was even considered at all. But it was undoubtedly immense.” 

The Enlightenment brought about a “mechanistic thinking [that] became dominant and provided the only remaining Grand Narrative of Western culture.” We are living at end of the life cycle of that narrative — it is clearly falling apart around us, even if not everyone can see it yet. 

The need to control

Speaking to the human condition more broadly, Desmet zeroes in on the painful human reality that we can never entirely know another, not even our own mothers, who we depend upon for survival. This burden of the insecurity of not knowing, he argues, stays with us throughout our lives. It’s in our language, which, while on one level transmits information, can never be fully relied upon. Meaning and intent can never be fully known.

This insecurity is what the totalitarian mindset rests upon and tries to compensate for with its highly controlled, overbearing ways. The ultimate goal of totalitarianism, he argues, is not money or even power. It is “to realise an ideological fiction.”

“Totalitarianism is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society. It aims to create a utopian, artificial society led by technocrats or experts who, based on their technical knowledge, will ensure that the machine of society runs flawlessly.”

Think of bureaucrats in charge of welfare, or social housing, or prisons. They enter the profession because they want to improve the lives the unfortunates in their care, but instead, with each passing year, with each failed initiative, find themselves more hard-hearted, more cynical about those they are charged with helping. So do they opt out? Do they decide that maybe the solution to this problem lies elsewhere? No. They double down, but this time they implement their power with rage or at the very least contempt. Humans never run flawlessly, or to a machine’s time. Instead of blaming the machine, the mechanistic individual blames the human. Untold cruelties result.

The most disconcerting moments of the last few years for me, have all been grouped around a theme: the obvious, in-your-face collapse of integrity of these professional-managerial-policy classes. Once you fall out from underneath the illusion that these highly-regarded, highly educated, highly influential people actually know what they are doing and are acting in our common best interest, it is really impossible to go back. And that’s painful. With each new piece of evidence of the degradation, I would think of my father, of his trust in institutions founded upon a respect the work of Isaac Newton, Galileo, and Einstein, and I would feel it like a stab in the gut. We trusted you. You failed us. 

The entire Western liberal-left is trapped in a decades-long contradiction: whereby they complain about the same things they had been complaining about since the ’60’s, while simultaneously taking the exact same action to ‘fix’ the problem they have been complaining about since the ’60’s. So the answer to the problem is — keep doing what we’ve always done to fix a problem that never gets fixed. How can this be an acceptable analysis for so many supposedly smart people? How can so many people not stop to think…hmmm…maybe we should look at this problem a different way? 

Desmet’s analysis goes a long way to explaining why. 

“In a paradoxical way, the people who fall victim as a result of the measures…are used as an argument in favour of the measures…the stricter the measures, the more victims. The more victims, the stricter the measures.”

“The lack of critical reflection, the irrational allocation of empathy, and the willingness among part of the population to accept great personal loss are an extremely dangerous cocktail.”

“Technocratic thinking always walks on two legs:…it claims we can be delivered from all adversity and suffering…[and] it imposes itself based on anxiety, as a necessity to solve problems. With every ‘object of anxiety’ that has emerged in our society in recent decades — terrorism, the climate problem, the coronavirus - this process has leapt forward.”

“The fact that human being is like a flower that only blooms when it can enjoy the shade of privacy once in a while is of minor importance in a technocratic worldview….Your health is no longer your personal business, because some diseases are contagious.” 

This brings into disturbing relief just how close we are — in our supposedly free, diverse, tolerant, enlightened society — to the totalitarian mania of the 20th century.

What can we do about this? 

Ultimately, this book is a lyrical yet powerful treatise on how to reclaim the world for nuance, resonance, instinct and mystery — and helps us to finally understand the dangers of an overly proscriptive, mechanised reality.

One immensely comforting aspect of this book is that it confirms instincts I have had about a multitude of things, and that in turn meant almost everything he writes resonated with me hugely. Resonance is a foundational principle of the book. Reading it will give you permission — if you needed it — to listen not just to what is being stated — but to listen around the words as well. Note how the words and feelings land in your gut, up your spine, on the hairs on your arms. Do you sense, in a tightening of the stomach or the speeding up of the heart, that you are in the presence of a lie? Then listen to that feeling — not just the meaning of the words coming out of some hack’s mouth. 

A few years ago, helped along by the growing number of dissident voices speaking out against the ever-more oppressive orthodoxies of the day, I started imagining that if I spoke my mind, every word of dissent would go rippling through the world around around me like a pebble does when it has been cast into water. I would imagine that those ripples, however small, might be perceived by those around me. That these ripples might connect in ways that I would never even know about. Maybe even bring about a moment of clarity or relief from the drumbeat of anxiety and aggression we were all absorbing on social media every day. This image of the ripple and its onward effects helped me overcome both my natural reticence — who cares what I think? — and the fear I had of being attacked for my apostasy. 

Desmet describes something similar in his handy guidelines for dissidents:

“They should let their voices be heard and in as sincere a way as possible, so as to not let the resonance of the dominant, hypnotic voice become absolute. Asserting one’s voice should typically be done in the calmest and most respectful way possible, never in an intrusive way and always with sensitivity to the irritation and anger it may generate but with determination and persistence.”

Another example: when I see educated Western youth in action, one of the things I’m most struck by is their disconcerting confidence in what they think they know. Where do today’s young people get the confidence (some might say chutzpah) to correct their elders on matters of racial justice or approved narratives on women? Many young women, in particular, seem to me to be strident and aggressive. Most of all they are utterly, maddeningly wrong about everything and yet so loud and confident.  Frequently I find myself thinking: has no one introduced these dummies the concept of intellectual humility?

Desmet again provides me with relief that I’m not just turning into a middle aged scold: Wise is not the same as smart. To be wise is to know that you don’t know, whereas to be smart is merely a stop along the way. “The journey of science does not end in superior knowledge but in a kind of Socratic modesty,” he writes. Beautiful.

Living in a totalitarian age

Reading this book really brought home that we are living in a totalitarian age. Examples of people who are in the grips of the toxic thought patterns of mass formation abound. They exist on the left and the right — after all, this is not a political problem, it is a psychological one.

Just this week, I was interviewed on television in the UK about the Roe v Wade decision. My opening sentence was “I support the right to an abortion up until the end of the first trimester.” In the comments below the video on YouTube, the very first commenter raged at me for saying “I support the right to an abortion up until the end of the third trimester.” The person was so emotionally triggered by the topic that they literally could not hear the words that came out of my mouth. Another commenter corrected the pro-lifer but she was not mollified. I was pro-choice —albeit only up to a point — and therefore any nuance or analysis from me had to be rejected, wholesale.

About a month ago I wrote a piece about my father’s death and in it I included a brief reference to patently inhumane COVID policies like forcing small children to cover their mouths and noses all day. A reader fired off an email in response to this one brief mention of COVID in an article that was otherwise about my dad, calling me an “covidiot” and anti-vaxxer, and saying “I used to like you” — before he realised my opinions did not precisely align with his. And that could not be tolerated.

It’s ironic that Desmet’s work has been either ignored or placed in the misinformation camp — which we all know is right next door, in the ideological mind space of the mainstream media, to the conspiracy theorists. Because Desmet dispatches the conspiracy theorists along with the totalitarians. In fact, those who see puppet masters behind every terrible policy are just mirroring the mass formation mindset, he says.

“The ultimate master is the ideology, not the elite,” Desmet argues. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I like it nonetheless.

And what’s the good news?

“Hidden beneath the apparent chaos of the superficial experience of the wheel is an aesthetically magnificent order of universal forms, in many ways reminiscent of Plato’s ideal world.”

This one phrase brought back a powerful memory of my university days. I studied Italian and the very old-fashioned head of the Italian department made The Divine Comedy a pillar of all three years of the course. We all slogged through the medieval Italian — it was a tiring process, made all the harder by the grimness of the material, through Inferno and Purgatorio. Then, in third year, we started Paradiso. Imagine my surprise when the power of the luminescent imagery cut through the feigned cynicism of youth,  and gripped my imagination. Reading Paradiso made me feel as though I myself was bathed in the light of God and exulting in the sound of angels. The symmetry, the harmony, the light-filled descriptions of heaven. The power of Dante’s words reached out to me from Medieval Florence and planted a seed in my atheist, materialist mind. And, although I would not have used the word at the time, my soul. 

Desmet’s description of the beauty of true knowledge brought me back to Dante’s text.

“Twentieth century physics showed [atoms] to be swirling, energetic systems, patterns of vibration rather than solid matter. Yes, in the final analysis, they even turned out not to be material phenomena at all but rather to belong to the order of consciousness.”

Could we be at a turning point, the birth of a new transcendent narrative? Desmet gives us hope that it is a possibility, if we can but grasp it.

“This is the way to go: a science that does not allow itself to be blinded by any mechanistic ideology, but which pushes the rational analysis of reality to the maximum, to the absolute limit of rationally knowable, to the point where reason transcends itself.”

Sounds like to me like having a life well lived and then finding oneself at the gates of heaven.