Mass Formation

Description

Mattias Desmet:

"What is mass formation actually? It’s a specific kind of group formation that makes people radically blind to everything that goes against what the group believes in. In this way, they take the most absurd beliefs for granted. To give one example, during the Iran revolution in 1979, a mass formation emerged and people started to believe that the portrait of their leader—Ayatollah Khomeini—was visible on the surface of the moon. Each time there was a full moon in the sky, people in the street would point at it, showing each other where exactly Khomeini’s face could be seen.

A second characteristic of an individual in the grip of mass formation is that they become willing to radically sacrifice individual interest for the sake of the collective. The communist leaders who were sentenced to death by Stalin—usually innocent of the charges against them—accepted their sentences, sometimes with statements such as, “If that is what I can do for the communist party, I will do it with pleasure.”

Thirdly, individuals in mass formation become radically intolerant for dissonant voices. In the ultimate stage of the mass formation, they will typically commit atrocities toward those who do not go along with the masses. And even more characteristic: they will do so as if it is their ethical duty. To refer to the revolution in Iran again: I’ve spoken with an Iranian woman who had seen with her own eyes how a mother reported her son to the state and hung the noose with her own hands around his neck when he was on the scaffold. And after he was killed, she claimed to be a heroine for doing what she did.

Those are the effects of mass formation. Such processes can emerge in different ways. It can emerge spontaneously (as happened in Nazi Germany), or it can be intentionally provoked through indoctrination and propaganda (as happened in the Soviet Union). But if it is not constantly supported by indoctrination and propaganda disseminated through mass media, it will usually be short-lived and will not develop into a full-fledged totalitarian state. Whether it initially emerged spontaneously or was provoked intentionally from the beginning, no mass formation, however, can continue to exist for any length of time unless it is constantly fed by indoctrination and propaganda disseminated through mass media. If this happens, mass formation becomes the basis of an entirely new kind of state that emerged for the first time in the beginning of the twentieth century: the totalitarian state. This kind of state has an extremely destructive impact on the population because it doesn’t only control public and political space—as classical dictatorships do—but also private space. It can do the latter because it has a huge secret police at its disposal: this part of the population that is in the grip of the mass formation and that fanatically believes in the narratives distributed by the elite through mass media. In this way, totalitarianism is always based on “a diabolic pact between the masses and the elite”.

(https://mattiasdesmet.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-totalitarianism)

History

Mattias Desmet:

"Let us first briefly consider the use of the term itself. Is it true that the term has never existed in the history of mankind? In German, the term is “Massenbildung”, in Dutch “mass formation”, in English usually “crowd formation”, but sometimes also “mass formation”. Below is a selection of the undoubtedly much wider number of examples of the occurrence of the term “mass formation”, whether it is translated into English as “crowd formation” or “mass formation”:

· The word “mass formation” appears on the back cover of the Dutch translation of Elias Canetti’s book Masse und macht(Massa en Macht, 1960) and the term is used twice in the text of the book. In the English edition, the word is translated as “crowd formation.”

· In Freud's text Massenpsychologie und ich-analyse (1921) the term “Massenbildung” is used nineteen times. In the Dutch edition, it is translated as “mass formation” and in the English edition, it is translated as “crowd formation”.

· Salvador Giner uses the term “mass formation” in his book Mass Society (1976).

· The Dutch edition of Kurt Baschwitz’ book on the history of mass psychology Denkend mensch en menigte (1940) frequently cites the term “mass formation”.

· The Dutch edition of Paul Reiwald’s book Vom Geist der Massen (De geest der massa (1951)) mentions the term “mass formation” around forty-six (!) times.

· And so on…

...

The scientific study of mass formation started sometime in the nineteenth century, with the work of Gabriel Tarde (Laws of Imitation, 1890) and Scipio Sighele (The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Psychology, 1892). Gustave Le Bon famously elaborated on this work in 1895 with “La psychology des foules” (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind). Sigmund Freud published his treatise Massenpsychologie und ich-analyse in 1921, in which he frequently uses the term “Massenbildung,” literally translated as “mass formation” in Dutch. The mass formation theory is endorsed and supplemented by Trotter (Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 1916), McDoughall’s Group Mind (1920), Baschwitz (Du und die masse, 1940), Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960) and Reiwald (De geest der massa, 1951). In the interwar period, founders of modern propaganda and public relations management, such as Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman, relied on the literature on mass formation to psychologically direct and manipulate the population. The philosopher Ortega y Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses, 1930), the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (The Fear of Freedom, 1942), the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1946 ), the philosopher Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) also made important contributions to the thinking about the phenomenon of mass formation. In addition, the entire secondary literature based on these seminal writers can be quoted, almost endlessly, when it comes to illustrating that, in radical contradiction to what Professor Ghaemi claims, there is indeed a conceptual basis for the term “mass formation” that continues to be developed today."

(https://mattiasdesmet.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-totalitarianism-70c)

Discussion

Micha Narberhaus:

"We're in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness in the West, linked to the sharp decline in birth rates and family formation, and exacerbated by the fact that we now spend most of our time in front of screens rather than with real people.

In addition, Christian affiliation is plummeting across the West and the void left by religion has led to a crisis of meaning.

Mattias Desmet, a clinical psychologist, argues that the crisis of meaning and social isolation increases the rate of depression in society and leads to what he calls 'free-floating anxiety'. He believes that these conditions make people susceptible to manipulation by propaganda and lead to mass formation: When people collectively find a cause that gives new meaning to their lives, they move from social isolation to massive social connection, feeling that they are waging a war against the cause of their collective anxiety.

People who feel unfulfilled by their individualistic lifestyles inevitably develop a longing for orientation and community, and for an escape valve for accumulated aggression.

In such a situation, a powerful media announcement of an emergency can have a surprising, even revolutionary, effect. When the population is told in an authoritative manner that a general threat has materialised and that overcoming it requires decisive and above all collective action, many feel existentially relieved and gratefully commit themselves fully and completely to the given direction.

Desmet argues that this is exactly what happened during the pandemic and how the propaganda against the so-called unvaccinated could be so effective. These patterns seem to be repeating themselves now that we are supposed to be saving our democracy from the threat of the far right.

Desmet describes very similar dynamics and patterns to those described by Hannah Arendt in her seminal book, Origins of Totalitarianism. The (potentially tragic) irony of this story is that many of the academics and researchers who have studied Hannah Arendt and the developments that led to totalitarian systems in the past seem to have missed the important lesson that totalitarian regimes can emerge from different ideologies: Instead of looking for superficial similarities, we should look for patterns that signal totalitarian tendencies, such as those Desmet has explored.

(https://michanarberhaus.substack.com/p/sleepwalking-into-totalitarianism-910?triedRedirect=true)