Loss of Social Bonds Leads to Mass Formation, Rise of Totalitarian State: Mattias Desmet

When many people feel disconnected from their social environment they become prone to fanatical belief in an unreasonable narrative, creating favorable conditions for the emergence of a totalitarian state, said Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology.

The psychological phenomenon where individuals who feel disconnected from their natural and social environment and experience purposelessness in life start to fanatically believe in a certain narrative—even if it is absurd—is a specific kind of group formation called mass formation, Desmet told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program on June 16.

The individuals in the grip of the mass formation are blind to the absurdity of the group narrative to the point “that they become radically intolerant for dissident voices, and that in the end, they also stigmatize and ultimately try to destroy the people who do not go along with the narrative,” Desmet explained.

They are willing to sacrifice everything that used to be important for them for the narrative they believe in, said Desmet, one of the world’s leading experts on the mass formation phenomenon and author of “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.”

For example, there was an incident during the Iranian revolution in 1979 in which an Iranian mother reported her son to the government for not being loyal enough to the state and helped to execute him, the professor said.

“It is exactly this kind of mass formation that leads to the emergence of totalitarian states.”

Totalitarian State and Classical Dictatorship

A totalitarian state is always based on a segment of the society–usually 20 to 30 percent of the population–which becomes fanatically convinced of a certain narrative and of a certain ideology, for instance, the racist ideology of Nazi Germany or the Marxist ideology in the Soviet Union, Desmet explained. This fanatical part of the society, together with a few leaders, succeeds in

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases