Mass Formation, Cults, and The Origins of Totalitarianism
Are freedom of speech and a sense of belonging the antidotes to totalitarian rule?
The idea and the reality
Ever since the dawn of early humanity, survival has been one of the major concerns of the human race.
We want to live long, be healthy, and feel merry. Thanks to great technological advancements in medicine and other sciences, we have made remarkable achievements in prolonging the average human life expectancy and reducing the risk of dying from various causes. That is wonderful. Nonetheless, despite all of our breakthroughs, one thing remains certain — all people who have lived, are living, or will live are going to fade away one day, without a doubt.
As in the words of Ryan Holiday: “Death is the only prophecy which has never failed,” yet most of us think, live, and act as though it does.
For centuries people have been searching for the elixir of life, the philosopher stone, or some other magical substance that will make them immortal. Unfortunately, at least to my knowledge, none of these pursuits was fruitful.
Our refusal to accept our predicament historically has led people to various types of hysteria, irrationality, and madness on both the individual and communal fronts. Unfortunately, our ever-growing insistence to control and micromanage every aspect of living is not just crazy, it’s futile. How can a limited psycho-physiological organism, such as a human being, control and precisely predict the vastness of existence, with all its intricacies and creative unpredictability?
Of course, the desire to anticipate, secure and control are natural assets of the human instinct to live, thrive, and propagate. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be, yet — as so often forgotten by many — there can be no being without its opposite: not-being.
Life is a self-renewing process, some of its parts have to disassemble for others to amass. Naturally, every expression of being has its expiration date, even the stars. But a person, with all his fears, grudges, and anxieties sometimes fails to understand this. He denies the non-being side of existence and tries to transcend the law of birth and death at any cost necessary. Sadly for him, that can be done only in his imagination. Objective living is a different story.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
A person who denies death and believes that he can “trick the system” or submit Being to his demands is not just in the grips of grandiosity, he is dangerous.
Such a person will do all that he can to achieve his imagined goals. A desire to protect and prolong the wonderful experience of living is one thing, but the inability to accept its temporal nature is another. If a person of this nature rises to power, there is no knowing what monstrosities he will attempt to inflict on his community in order to test his ideological assumptions.
Great examples of such events could have been witnessed in the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Maoist China, and now — North Korea.
In her famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt warned:
“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”
Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be keen observers of history. Even though people know that the elimination of free speech ultimately leads to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, the silencing of dissonant voices is slowly becoming the new norm. The desire to believe in one’s rightness and the unquestionable acceptance of common narratives are pushing people away from multilateral observations, proof-checking, research, and open conversations.
New, yet mostly limited, narrow, and sometimes even straight-on preposterous beliefs and ideologies are taking shape. This is not something novel. It’s a recurring psychological process that seems to be almost ingrained in the populous DNA. A rational irrationality to believe anything that will subdue one’s feelings of free-flowing fear, anxiety, and anger. A way to attach these feelings to a specific, yet irrelevant or overblown representation with hopes to bring back a sense of control and stability — that is the essence of what the psychologist Mattias Desmet has named “mass formation.” Illustrated well by his predecessor Hannah Arendt:
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
In his book, Mattia Desmet has added:
“What one thinks does not matter; what counts is that people think it together. In this way, the masses come to accept even the most absurd ideas as true, or at least to act as if they were true.”
That is a dangerous narrative. How many times has history shown it repeating itself? Are we conscious enough not to repeat the horrors of the previous centuries? Can we limit the spread of new, inhumane, and preposterous ideologies that are sprouting in the world even today?
The process of mass formation
The author of the book The Psychology Of Totalitarianism, Mattias Desmet has argued, that the very first precondition for any totalitarian regime is the formation of an obedient, loyal, yet narrow-minded mass.
For such a mass to emerge, beforehand people must be gripped by a sense of meaninglessness, loneliness, and a disconnection from their environment. Furthermore, they have to be gripped by a constant feeling of negative emotions (such as anxiousness, and frustration) with no clear representation of why they are feeling that way. This is what the author calls free-flowing fear, anxiety, and anger, the last precondition for people to unite into a mass and follow any rational or irrational narrative given to them by their authorities. Illustrated by the author:
“People perturbed by loneliness, lack of meaning, and indefinable anxiety and unease generally feel increasingly irritable, frustrated, and/or aggressive and look for objects to take these feelings out on. The sharp increase of racist and threatening language on social media during the last decade (tripling between 2015 and 2020) is a striking example. What accelerates mass formation is not so much the frustration and aggression that are effectively vented, but the potential of unvented aggression present in the population — aggression that is still looking for an object.”
People labeled as witches, vampires, devils; religious or ethnic minorities, or any other body of individuals toward whom the built-up aggressive energy can be released more often than not serve as the objects toward whom blame, hatred, disgust, and eventually destruction can be inflicted. The rationale for such a release does not have to be logical or grounded in factual evidence. It has to be believed or “felt”. not logically deduced. The growth of such negative, built-up emotions can change a kind, educated, and mindful human being into a dumb, narrow-minded, and manipulatable brute. For such a person — anyone who does not adhere to his or her way of perceiving will be treated as an enemy, a tumor to be removed, a point-of-view to be destroyed.
As explained by the 19th-century French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon in his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind:
“An isolated individual knows well enough that alone he cannot set fire to a palace or loot a shop, and should he be tempted to do so, he will easily resist the temptation. Making part of a crowd, he is conscious of the power given him by number, and it is sufficient to suggest to him ideas of murder or pillage for him to yield immediately to temptation. An unexpected obstacle will be destroyed with frenzied rage.”
The antidote
Whenever open discussions and inquiries are deemed unethical or seen as acts of treason, a community is clearly in the grips of a mass formation. From there on, people will go almost anywhere where the dominating narrative suggests, be it toward heaven or hell. That is dangerous because in a mass ordinarily sane, sensible, and rational people turn into shallow lunatics. In a mass, long-term consequences are no longer a subject of concern. What matters is the here and now, or, to be more exact — how it appears to the people stuck in an illusion, carefully managed by the people to whom it is advantageous.
Before carrying on any further, one thing has to be clarified: groups are not the same as masses, as they don’t share equal characteristics. One major difference between a group and a mass lies in the relationships between their members. In a mass, the interpersonal bonds of people are weak. Sometimes, they don’t even exist at all! Instead of bonding to one another, the individuals in a mass only bond to the collective, the transcendent, the ideal. In a group, the dynamic is different. Members of a group share connections with each other on a deeper, personal level. They care for one another individually, instead of caring for an abstraction.
Another difference is that contrary to a mass formation (governed by a totalitarian state), group members don’t need to constantly monitor their companions’ behavior. They act on the lines of mutual trust and reciprocity. On the flip side, in a mass, the relationships are not as such and there are consequences relating to this change. Explained by Desmet:
“If human relationships are characterized by fundamental distrust, life becomes hopelessly complicated and society spends its energy at creating all kinds of “security mechanisms,” which in fact fuel mistrust even more and are, above all, psychologically exhausting.”
Psychological exhaustion limits a person’s ability to observe, reflect, fact-check, and think critically. When people become mentally drained, their narrowing scope of focus starts to exclude various possibilities that they would consider otherwise. At this moment they become more susceptible to stories that their authorities are willing to give them, without adequately thinking through their rationale. When in the grips of such a story, people feel as though they have regained their sense of control and clarity. Unfortunately, most of the time that clarity is fake. It puts them at ease but shames others to whom the negative aspects of the situation are often transferred.
“It’s the Jews! The Gypsies! The Muslims! The anti-vaxxers! It’s the given minority! Take care of them and the problem will be taken care of!” Unfortunately, most of the time things are not as reductionistic as we would like to believe.
A reductionistic approach to complex problems possess a threat to intelligence. Rarely are problems that simple. “Get rid of them and things will get better” does not seem like a constructive approach. Whenever one group is dealt with, if the problem remains, another group will be stigmatized.
Taking into account an example from the Soviet Union, when Joseph Stalin excommunicated most of the “threats” to the soviet regime (richer farmers, opposing intellectuals, etc.) he started filtering out his own party. During this process, it is estimated that Stalin killed around 60% of his own circle, most of the time picking them out almost at random. That is the disturbing heights to which a paranoid person can go to legitimize his or her irrational ideas of what he perceives as “the good”.
According to Mattia Desmet and Jordan B. Peterson, a way to stop such horrors from taking place is to speak up while the cult is still small and young. Otherwise, the beast will grow and stopping it will become more and more difficult. Paraphrasing the words of Hannah Arendt: the horror of totalitarianism is that once you agree to A, you will most likely follow through all the way to Z. That is why a strong moral stance of “no” has to be taken as soon as something odd is first recognized. This will stop it from growing and amalgamating power.
According to Desmet, totalitarian regimes become more and more brutal as the dissonant voices begin to fade. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union and in Mao China. Once the opposition goes underground or flees, the horrors of the gulags or the “reeducation camps” begin to spread rapidly.
An ethical stance
To believe that you can change the minds of people that are gripped in a mass formation is naïve, but that is not the reason to shut up or become quiet. According to the author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the function of free speech is not to break the spell, but to keep it from getting crueler and deeper. Playing groups is not the right thing to do here either, as the smaller group most of the time gets wiped out by the bigger group. The right thing to do in such a situation is to continue speaking up individually with the goal of calmly yet thoroughly disembodying the mass into separate components. Once the weak attachments to the ideal are broken, some of the cult’s adherents might regain their sense of personal identity and begin to inquire into the nature of the cult itself.
“Free speech is not just another value, it’s the foundation of Western civilization,” says J. B. Peterson.
But let’s not understand this wrong. Talking freely does not mean avoiding logic, falsifying facts, being full of biases, or straight on dishonest. It’s a rational, truthful way of stating your opinion in the hope to find the truth, not winning an argument. As put nicely by a former diplomat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
That is why before putting forth any argument it is necessary to get one’s facts right, which is not always that easy to do. Otherwise, we’ll just add to the mess, instead of trying to solve it. Aim for a discussion, not a debate. Maybe then both sides will find out something new, honest, and true.
Thank you for reading!
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