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The world is in the grips of mass formation as we bear witness to loneliness , free - float anxiety , and dread giving elbow room to censorship , going of privateness , and surrendered freedom . It is all spurred by a singular , focussed crisis narrative that forbids dissident views and relies on destructive groupthink .
“ Humans have obtain themselves in a state of purdah , cut off from nature , and existing aside from social structures and connections , feeling powerless due to a cryptic sense of meaninglessness , living under clouds that are pregnant with an inconceivable , destructive potential , all while psychologically and materially depending on the glad few , whom he does not commit and with whom he can not identify . ”
The following is an excerpt fromThe Psychology of TotalitarianismbyMattias Desmet . It has been conform for the web .

We have to weigh the current fear and psychological uncomfortableness to be a trouble in itself , a trouble that can not be reduced to a computer virus or any other “ aim of threat . ” Our fear originates on a altogether different level — that of the bankruptcy of the Grand Narrative of our society . This is the narration of mechanistic science , in which gentleman’s gentleman is reduced to a biological being .
A narration that ignores the psychological , emblematical , and honorable attribute of human beings and thereby has a devastating burden at the stage of human human relationship . Something in this narrative causes human beings to become separated from his fellow man , and from nature ; something in it causes military personnel to stop resonate with the world around him ; something in it turns the human being into an atomized subject .
Mechanistic thinking gave man an enormous capacity to manipulate the material world.
combine with the ( self- ) destructive inclination intrinsic to valet , this has put him in the most precarious situation he has ever been in . For the first clip in account , man is able to pull down the “ natural resources ” on which he count , depleting the world ’s Pisces the Fishes stocks , for example , and clearing entire rain forest . Furthermore , with the industrial enterprise and mechanization of warfare , mechanistic thinking showed its destructive potential in an overt and direct direction .
The ten-spot of millions of victims of the devastation motorcar that were deployed in the world wars are mum witnesses thereof . And even more so in the years to follow , the minacious union between scientific discipline and murderous rage wreaked such havoc that the warfare misery of yesteryear paled in comparison .
To give just one example , Monsanto produced seventy - six million litre of Agent Orange , which was spray in Vietnam to defoliate the Tree and drive the Vietcong out of the hobo camp . The result ? 1000000 of both Vietnamese and American soldiers became seriously inauspicious , often with tumors and cancers , causing deformities in at least 150,000 children .
While mechanistic thinking and science sought to make the human condition more comfortable, in many respects it also made it more dangerous.
gentleman’s gentleman could not help but feel threatened by the tycoon he himself loose from nature . And , for the most part , those powers end up in the hand of a few . Due to the industrialization , automation , and technologization of the world , production electrical capacity , economical mightiness ( via a self - centralizing banking system ) , and psychological baron ( via mass medium ) fall into the hand of an ever - decreasing number of people .
The Enlightenment tradition had promised citizenry self-direction and freedom , but , in a way , it institute multitude greater ( feelings of ) dependency and powerlessness than ever before . This impotency caused mass to increasingly distrust those in power . Throughout the nineteenth century , few and fewer people finger that political leaders really represented their voice in public space or defend their interests .
As a result , man also became dissociate from the societal classes that were represented by the politicians and was left uprooted , no longer link to the whole of club , no longer belonging to a meaningful social group .
The Loss of Control
Although the Enlightenment custom arise from world ’s affirmative and up-and-coming aspiration to understand and control the globe , it has lead to the opposite in several esteem : namely , the experience of personnel casualty of control .
Humans have found themselves in a state of solitude , reduce off from nature , and existing apart from societal structures and connection , feeling powerless due to a mysterious good sense of meaninglessness , exist under cloud that are meaning with an unimaginable , destructive potential , all while psychologically and materially depending on the glad few , whom he does not trust and with whom he can not identify . It is this individual that Hannah Arendt name the atomized discipline . It is this atomized field of study in which we recognize the elementary factor of the totalitarian state .
see Mattias Desmet on The Aubrey Marcus Podcast discussing free - float anxiety and discontentment
Mattias Desmetis agnize as the world ’s leading expert on the theory of mass formation as it utilize to the COVID-19 pandemic . He is a prof of clinical psychology in the Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Ghent University ( Belgium ) and a practicing psychoanalytic clinical psychologist . His work has been discussed widely in the media , including on The Joe Rogan Experience and in Forbes , The New York Post , Salon.com , and Fox News , among hundred of other outlets .
His interviews have been view by 1000000 of masses around the human race . His late record admit The Pursuit of Objectivity in Psychology and Lacan ’s Logic of Subjectivity : A Walk on the Graph of Desire . Desmet is the generator of over one hundred peer - survey pedantic papers . In 2018 he get the Evidence - ground 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 .
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The Psychology of Totalitarianism
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