Insights, Biases, and Ideology Regarding Mass Psychology

Reaction to Europe's Mass-Psychosis Getting WORSE | Prof. Mattias Desmet

If you are unfamiliar with Prof. Desmet, watch this video.

Why so many highly intelligent people accept utterly implausible or absurd narratives is one of the most important problems in modern psychology and political science. The more cognitively capable you are, the less likely you are to be susceptible to delusion of any kind, but the research of Yale psychologist Dan Kahan on ‘identity-protective cognition’ shows that the more analytically intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be able to use your intellect to justify your existing beliefs rather than to discover the objective truth. Walter Lippmann made this point in his seminal 1922 work Public Opinion: we don’t “first see and then define”; we “define first and then see.” Narrative construction has been a tool of propaganda throughout history, as Edward Bernays described it: the engineering of consent; the creation of manufactured hysteria in the context of wartime mobilization; and the long, complex process of cultivating a sense of geopolitical animosity, such as Russophobia. Understanding how a society’s beliefs are created requires disciplined, empirical, and dispassionate academic inquiry. When the scholar is himself infected with ideological fixations, however, the legitimate pursuit of inquiry into social control can easily become polemical pseudoscience, as Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet’s work clearly demonstrates.

Desmet (Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University) became internationally well known through his 2022 book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, where he brought the notion of ‘mass formation’ to a wide audience (the term has since been adopted in popular culture and alternative media as mass formation psychosis’. I read it when it came out and was impressed. His central argument was that modern Western society was in a state of chronic atomization, lacking in meaning and afflicted by widespread ‘free-floating anxiety’ which in turn created the perfect conditions for a collective hypnotic trance. The public’s compliance with various health measures, lockdowns, and vaccination campaigns during the pandemic was not a response to an actual public health threat. It was, in his view, the very essence of mass formation psychosis, and the population was falling under the spell of technocratic authoritarianism. I was in a pandemic WhatsApp group during the pandemic where messages about ‘useless eaters’, engineered viruses, and defrag/depop were abundant, and everyone suddenly became experts in virology, epidemiology, and vaxinology. His initial discussion of modern alienation and the dangers of technocratic rule was a familiar theme in the work of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, but he quickly threw his analysis off course by insisting that his anti-establishment narrative take primacy over any epidemiological reality.

The mainstream psychological, psychiatric, and epidemiological authorities are all in agreement that Desmet’s claims are without merit and are deeply biased. The most fundamental objection is that “mass formation psychosis” is not a legitimate diagnosis at all; it is not in the DSM-5, and there is no evidence base for it in modern social psychology. Stephen Reicher (of the University of St Andrews, a leading authority on crowd psychology) goes so far as to say that Desmet’s theory “has absolutely no academic credibility” and is “more metaphor than science, more ideology than fact.” Reicher and others in the field (such as John Drury of the University of Sussex) point out that Desmet is simply reviving the discredited 19th-century theories of the crowd (most famously Le Bon’s notion that crowds are hypnotized, mindless automatons) and completely ignores the vast body of modern research which shows that crowd behavior in crisis is almost invariably rational, prosocial and based on the need to protect a shared identity.

Beyond the conceptual errors, Desmet’s pandemic commentary showed a very real and serious case of statistical and empirical confirmation bias. Throughout his time in the media, he consistently downplayed the clinical severity of SARS-CoV-2. He maintained the position that public health measures and vaccines were in fact causing more harm and death than the virus itself. That directly contradicted the global consensus supported by excess-mortality data, peer-reviewed clinical trial data, and epidemiological surveillance. The epidemiologists and data analysts were clear in their rebuttal: Desmet selectively used the ‘ODD model’ and ignored a mountain of contrary evidence. He offered a very appealing narrative to those skeptical of lockdowns and vaccines, one that was intellectually comfortable for them but utterly devoid of empirical basis.

In epidemiology, the ODD model is actually not a clinical or biological model of disease, but rather a highly standardized communication framework called the ODD (Overview, Design concepts, and Details) protocol.

The fallout from Desmet’s methodological failings eventually saw the university issue formal reprimands. In late 2022, after Desmet appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars show, Rector Rik Van de Walle issued a public statement distancing the university from Desmet’s claims. The CWI then investigated The Psychology of Totalitarianism and concluded that the work fell far short of scientific standards, citing a general lack of rigor, a plethora of unsubstantiated assertions, and a total absence of nuance. As a result, in early 2023, the university formally prohibited Desmet from using his own book as course material in his classes. That’s a very rare institutional sanction for a tenured professor’s published work. Of course, now Desmet is a heterodox, oppressed genius akin to Eric Weinstein, with plenty of independent platforms excited to host him.

Desmet’s trajectory is a case study in how easily the study of mass psychology can replicate the very pathologies it purports to diagnose. The human mind is a narrative ‘machine’; its susceptibility to propaganda, institutional dogma, and anti-establishment mythologies is all too widespread and well known. Intellectual defenses cannot rest on passive intelligence or cynical contrarianism (contrarians are just as prone to creating dogmas as rigid as the official lines they oppose). In an information environment so saturated with state-directed agendas, media sensationalism, and algorithmic echo chambers, you need epistemic humility of the highest order. As physicist Richard Feynman put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and that is the easiest thing to do.” Genuine intellectual independence requires the discipline to subject every narrative put forward by authority to the most rigorous interrogation and the rare courage to question your own assumptions as often as possible.