Mattias Desmet "The Psychology of Totalitarianism"

Описание: Tähenduse teejuhid is an Estonian language monthly newspaper that is distributed with the country's largest daily Postimees. The conversation with Mattias Desmet appeared in the 55th issue of the paper (August 2025). Here are the seven highlights from the interview, the first comes from my short introduction, the other six are direct quotes.

1. I am particularly keen on this interview because it pulls together two overarching themes that have been our own primary concerns over the last ten years: the Great Petulance and the intensifying totalitarian cravings. There are two great books that have tuned my perceptive apparatus for making sense of the last decade: “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell. The Great Petulance refers to the penultimate chapter of the “Magic Mountain”, while “Nineteen Eighty-Four” remains the unsurpassed depiction of a totalitarian nightmare. When I finished Mattias Desmet’s “The Psychology of the Totalitarianism”, I said to myself: This is (analytically speaking) where Mann meets Orwell.

2. As I understand it, a society goes through a metaphysical revolution every time there is a fundamental shift at a level of the symbolic framework that structures its reality. The prevailing mechanistic worldview is just one out of many possible symbolic frameworks. It became dominant during the 17th century with Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and others. Their theories and discoveries were so successful in manipulating a certain part of reality that very soon some philosophers started to promote the idea that this little aspect of reality which could be understood in a mechanistic way represented reality in its entirety.

3. I feel we have reached the point where the mechanistic worldview is charging towards its inbuilt political consequences. As soon as we start from the materialistic and mechanistic assumptions and treat the universe as a gigantic machine and the human being as a biochemical robot, we are forced to conclude that a society built on such premises cannot be left under the care of democratically elected leaders. Such a society must be organised as a technocracy led by technical experts who grasp the inner workings of societal machinery.

4. With the replication crisis the general public became aware of something it had not yet fully realised: academic research is in an extremely problematic situation. It was a disaster. I myself could not believe things were quite that bad. It turned out that up to 80 percent of the published research papers could not be replicated. Replicability is, however, a basic cornerstone of scientific objectivity. The replication crisis showed to everyone who wanted to see it that something had gone badly wrong with the whole scientific enterprise.

5. At the collective level, we are closer to World War III than ever. At the individual level, almost everyone is in an individual crisis. 50–60 percent of the Americans are chronically ill, 25 percent of the world population is diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. 60 percent of the people declare themselves to be so lonely that they do not have one meaningful relationship. More than 40 percent of the people have – according to their own estimation – bullshit jobs. So we are probably both at the collective and individual level in the most profound crisis humanity has ever found itself. It is one big metaphysical crisis, at the heart of which is our distorted relationship to truth.
 
6. I argued that the mortality rate of the virus was at least ten times lower than was initially claimed. From the first week onwards I said that what was happening in our society at a psychological level was very similar to what happens when totalitarian systems emerge. After three months it became clear that the statistics had indeed been wrong, in fact the people from Imperial College admitted that much before the House of Commons. They said: we were wrong, the mortality rates were much, much lower. But that did not change anything, the plague narrative just gathered momentum. I realised then that I had to focus on the psychological level, for I could continue to tell people that the statistics were wrong but that will not change anything.

7. Freud showed that a mass is different from a group where fruitful connectedness and group formation happens on the basis of connections between individuals. People form a group because they love each other a little bit. There is a horizontal social bond from individual to individual within a group. That is not what happens in a mass. A mass is a group that emerges because each individual separately is connected vertically to a collective ideal. A mass sucks away all the love and the energy from the bonds between individuals and isolates people completely. In the end, the bond with the collective is much stronger than the bond between individuals. That is why mothers start to report their children to the state and children their parents.