Prof. Dr. Mattias Desmet explains his theory of mass formation as it relates to the COVID pandemic and responds to criticism
In an Epoch Health podcast, Dr. Ann Corson spoke with Prof. Dr. Mattias Desmet, the worlds leading expert on the theory of mass formation and its application on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Desmet discussed the degeneration of modern science and explained the effects this has had on society, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this had led to a global mass formation. He goes into great detail on what exactly causes mass formation and how people can resist the mass.
Prof. Dr. Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology in the Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Ghent University in Belgium and a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist. His work is widely discussed in Forbes, The Joe Rogan Experience, Fox News, The New York Post among hundreds of other media outlets and his interviews have millions of views. His previous works include The Pursuit of Objectivity in Psychology and Lacans Logic of Subjectivity: A Walk on the Graph of Desire and over a hundred peer-reviewed academic papers. In 2018 he received the Evidence-Based Psychoanalytic Case Study Prize of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and in 2019 he received the Wim Trijsburg Prize of the Dutch Association of Psychotherapy. His latest book is the The Psychology of Totalitarianism, a psychological analysis that builds on the seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.
Dr. Corson has four decades of clinical practice. Her patient population includes people who are immunocompromised due to conditions such as Lyme disease and co-infections as well as mold-induced illness. She treats patients with an integrative approach and is known internationally for her success. Dr. Corson grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania and obtained the Doctor of Medicine degree in 1982 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. She has been board certified in Family Medicine and in Integrative Holistic Medicine. Today, she has a solo integrative practice in Philadelphia and cares deeply about medical ethics and humanity. In 2008, she joined the non-profit organization Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of DAFOHs e-newsletter.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were many questionable methodologies used by the scientific community to justify their actions. However, in order for these actions to be taken in the first place, there needed to be a system in place to enable such things to happen. Dr. Desmet explained that science, once a form of truthful observation and thinking, devolved into a dogmatic ideology.
In the beginning, around the 17th century, science represented a discourse through which a minority went against an established discourse, namely established religion. In the beginning, science was a pragmatic form of truthful speaking, it was to listen to what nature had to say and observe the phenomena of nature, without being blinded or [deafened] because of the prejudices and the dogmas of the mainstream discourse, he said.
For us, slowly, this minority became the dominant, and the more it became the dominant discourse itself, the more dogmatic [it became]. It evolved from looking at the world in an open-minded way to an ideology or belief. Belief means prejudice, and people started to believe the universe was a machine, that nothing existed except material particles, that everything was logically deductible, he explained. Thats what science, the scientific ideology, represents.
When a certain theory, a certain view of the world, starts to become dominant, when the majority of the people start to believe in a certain discourse, that discourse becomes the privileged instrumentto manipulate society, to be successful, for instance, to win money, to have a grip on society and so on. And thats what happened with scientific discourse, he said. This resulted in this perverted state of science, especially in the medical sciences.
Dr. Desmet said that, for him, it all began in 2005, when it became clear that for instance, in the medical sciences, up to 85 percent of the papers cannot be reproduced, which is dramatic, of course. A separate research group, for example, would repeat the same analysis on the same data and find radically different results than the first research group.
It became clear that several factors played a role, such as massive errors in calculation and statistical analysis. Many scientists used [the] wrong methods to analyze data, [they used] sloppy, sloppy methods. And then also there was much more fraud than was ever before. So for all kinds of reasons, a lot of the academic research proved to be unreliable and without much value.
Dr. Desmet had done plenty of research in this regard and even wrote his PhD about this phenomenon. When addressing his colleagues and telling them about this phenomenon, most of [them] refused to see what I had when I tried to show them [they] even became angry with me.
I had the impression that the group dynamics and mass psychology were responsible for this blindness and for their radical incapability to see the absurdity of the research they were doing.
Science is however inherently flawed, Dr. Desmet claims. Scientists always had the ambition to validate the fact that only numerical or quantitative information is 100 percent accurate, so they began to separate things into one dimensional objects easy to quantify. So they want to measure everything and they forget that most objects in nature can never be measured adequately. Data measured in a scientific process can never tell the full story.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Desmet immediately saw that the way the dangerousness of the virus was measured was flawed.
I immediately had the impression that this research dramatically overrated the dangers, the dangers of the virus. Dr. Desmet said that people might be infected with COVID-19, but the deaths linked to COVID-19 were in fact mostly in those who already had serious comorbidities. There was plenty of data, showing that most people who were registered as corona victims actually suffered from three or four major other medical conditions.
They always make this measurement that confirms their own subjective preferences, meaning that in this case, all these global institutions such as the WEF, the WHO, the UN, all these institutions actually selected counting methods that confirmed the narrative that they wanted to distribute, namely, we are dealing with an extremely dangerous virus. Yet when Dr. Desmet published opinions and papers detailing the empirical evidence, it was clear that people didnt want to hear it.
So Dr. Desmet began focusing on the psychological processes in society and applied mass formation theory. But what is that exactly?
Mass formation has existed for as long as mankind exists, Desmet said. The Crusades, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and many more phenomena were an example of mass formation. It will exist as long as mankind exists, and there are very specific conditions that need to be met for it to take place, he explained.
The first condition is a sort of isolation, where people feel disconnected from their environment.
Weve seen throughout the last few centuries that the number of people feeling isolated, feeling lonely, and disconnected from their environment is constantly increasing, he said. And thats a consequence of the industrialization of mechanization. Its clear that loneliness almost perfectly correlated to the industrialization and mechanization of development and the use of technology, which might sound [paradoxical], but it isnt.
Dr. Desmet said feeling disconnected will then lead to a lack of meaning that bridges over to anxiety, depression, and frustration, because as human beings experience meaning, we see that we have an effect on the otherand if the connection with the other deteriorates or disappears then these spontaneous experiences will maybe not manifest anymore.
Once people feel disconnected and struggle with lack of meaning [they] may typically be confronted with anxiety, free-floating anxiety, frustration, and aggression people feel anxious or aggressive but dont know what theyre anxious, frustrated, or aggressive for.
And thats an extremely precarious mental state, because if youre anxious, and you dont know what youre anxious for, you just feel completely out of control. You cannot protect yourself from something that makes you anxious if you dont know what makes you anxious. So in this state, people areif under these conditions, someone distributes a narrative, preferably through the mass media, indicating an object of anxiety and at the same time a strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, then all this free-floating anxiety latches onto the object of anxiety and there might be a huge willingness to execute this strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, even if the strategy is absurd.
This strategy turns into a ritual, which doesnt have to be rational. They [the rituals] have a social function, a personal function, and an effective function, which is all they need.
Dr. Desmet says that mass formation is extreme collectivism. It destroys individuals ethical self awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.
A mass is a kind of group that emerges not because individuals connect to each other; the mass is a group that emerges because each individual separately connects to the collective. Meaning that this famous, typical solidarity that exists in a mass is never a solidarity between individuals. Its a solidarity between all individuals, separately, and the collective. The longer the mass formation exists, the more all the love and all psychological energy is sucked away from the connections between the individuals who bond with other individuals, and is invested in bond between the individuals and the collective, meaning that in the end, people feel much more solidarity for the collective than for someone else.
That explains, of course, why in the corona crisis, so many people were talking about solidarity, but at the same time, they accepted that if someones parents were dying in a hospital[that the children] were not allowed to visit their father or their mother. As this phenomenon unfolds, it becomes a kind of hypnosis that leads people to commit atrocities, Desmet explained.
During the course of the pandemic crisis, some have pointed at the elite as the true enemy and cause of the crisis. Desmet disagrees.
From the French Revolution onwards, you can say, a new elite, which immediately understood that the new leaders, the politicians, were not really leaders anymore. They were followers because they had to be elected by the masses, they knew that they couldnt really lead the masses. They had to follow the masses. And thats where the leaders of society started to realize that they needed something else. They needed propaganda and indoctrination to constantly manipulate the masses, and to constantly try to steer them when they wanted to get them. Indoctrination and propaganda it the subject of Desmets next book, which he is currently working on.
The elite is certainly powerful, and propaganda is real, Desmet said, but that is not what we are truly facing.
The real enemy is a certain way of thinking, its a certain view of man and the world, the mechanistic, rationalist view of man and the world. Its this delusional belief that we can understand everything on a rational basis, that we can control everything rationally, and that we should manipulate everything rationally. Its precisely this worldview that leads to an elite that would try to control society, he added.
Its this mechanistic thinking that is the real enemy, that leads to the development of this new elite and at the same time, that brings the population in this specific psychological state, where it is so sensitive for manipulation, where it is so sensitive for indoctrination propaganda.
Hannah Arendt says totalitarianism is always a diabolic pact between the masses and the elite, and thats true. But its wrong to say that its all the fault and only the fault of the elite. If we would destroy the elite, the problem would not be solved. The same elite would be recreated again if the population continues to be in the grip of this rationalist, mechanist view of man and the world. Thats why it is wrong to analyze everything in terms of one large conspiracy and nothing else. If thats the analysis you start from, then the logical, strategical conclusion, the tactical conclusion will be that we need a violent revolution against the eliteand if we do that, we will destroy ourselves, he said. The elite is also something that is created by the population.
As Solzhentisyn said, the dividing line between good and evil doesnt run between people, it runs through every heart, he said.
So how do we resist the mass? Dr. Desmet says the most important principle is that we always have to continue to speak out. Thats the most important principle. So mass formation is kind of [like] hypnosis, its identical.
Usually dissonant voices wont succeed [in] waking up the masses. But that doesnt mean that the dissonant voice doesnt have an effect, it has an effect. It has the effect that the mass formation doesnt become deeper.
As a human being, I believe we have the ethical duty to always articulate the words that seem sincere and honest to us and that in this pool of darkness, tries to represent a little bit of light, and gets more and more in touch with the ethical principles of humanity, and tries to live up to these principles.
Those who do usually go through a fast process of evolution, they become stronger and stronger and stronger as human beings Thats the most profound reason, the ethical reason, why we have to choose to continue to speak out also from a tactical point of view, this will be the best choice we can make.
If you, this group who doesnt go along with the narrative, makes the right choice, you will start to see that this crisis was meant to be there. We need this crisis. Its a process in which a large organism, a dominant society, puts a large pressure on a small organismand pushes it on a path where it would not go wrong, if there was this large path who puts this pressure on, he said.
But if we choose to remain silent, or if we refuse to try to reinvent and rearticulate the ethical principles of humanity in this period, in these times, then the opposite will happen. The masses will probably first destroy the people who do not go along with them, and then they will start to destroy themselves, and in the end, it will be one pure, destructive process.
But its absolutely critical that we do so peacefully and reasonably. While [the mass] probably will show the tendency to dehumanize us, we should not react in the same way, because if we react in the same way we will destroy ourselves and everything will become meaningless, he said.
If we are convinced that that the elite is pure evil and the rest of us are merely victims, then, as I said, the only conclusion is violence.
Its vital that we continue to speak in a sincere and honest way, not because we are convinced that we are the only ones who know the truth, and all the rest are liars and so on if we feel that, to our own best understanding something is right, sincere and honest, then we have to articulate it.
And you know, we dont have to be blind terrible things happened, wars were provoked, famine millions of people were sent into debt by the elite. Thats all true. Thats all true. And I know thats true. But its also true that the population is responsible, that the elite is also something that is created by the population that emerges from the population.
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