A great analysis of pandemic politics

This essay puts the concept of mass formation in the correct context

[As a service to my subscribers, here is another essay that stimulates critical thinking. To be clear, I have long invoked propaganda by powerful entities as causing harmful pandemic impacts as people became victims by putting their trust in the wrong institutions. This essay is long; consider reading it in several parts.]

Mattias Desmet: Mass Hypnosis Expert or Trojan Horse? The Full Story

by Peter Breggin MD & Ginger Breggin

Originally posted on America Out Loud Jul 27, 2022 | Health, Media, Politics

The author of the idea calls it mass formation and mass hypnosis. Others have added mass psychosis. He began promoting the concept in Europe to many enthusiastic media, intellectuals, scientists, and physicians. Then it took off in America, where “mass hypnosis” has become a buzzword among critics of COVID-19 policies and practices. 

Many thoughtful people who listened to him felt, at long last, they had a label to put on their fellow citizens who were acting zombie-like, soulless, and compliant in response to draconian pandemic measures and all the lies they were being told. Some of the most dedicated reformers in the truth-in-science and freedom movement embraced his ideas. To many, it was a relief to be able to label it — mass formation or mass hypnosis — and to think that there was good science or psychology to bolster the diagnosis. 

Now the author of the concept, European psychoanalyst Mattias Desmet, has written a book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism.1 I’m a psychiatrist and, like Desmet, I’m a psychotherapist; but early in my career, I rejected joining one of Freud’s psychoanalytic institutes for special training. I did that for many reasons. First, it was apparent to me that psychoanalysis was an unscientific cult that demanded conformity to a number of very bizarre theories that degraded the human spirit. Second, the training itself required an incredible degree of daily submissiveness to authority. Trainees, many of them already psychiatrists, had to pay to lie on a couch for an hour five days a week while a “training psychoanalyst” would very occasionally make incisive remarks that were supposed to get to their unconscious mind. Third, it smacked of victim-blaming — a subject I will address further that is key to Desmet’s dogma.

Reading an advance copy of the Psychology of Totalitarianism in July 2022 confirmed my fears that Desmet’s concepts lay in the general arena of an intellectual hoax, a nasty use of speculative psychoanalysis to dismiss serious researchers investigating the origins of COVID-19, and a purposeful cover-up of the elites and the globalists responsible for the worst outcomes inflicted on humanity during the pandemic. 

There was no reason to invent or apply a new concept like mass formation to explain the misery, apathy, and docility, seen in the general population and even among our colleagues. Individual doctors had, and continue to have, many good reasons to feel helpless, marginalized, and overwhelmed. Physicians who so much as voice doubt about the dominant views on COVID-19 are continuing to lose their teaching appointments, their clinical positions, their board certifications, and even their medical licenses. They continue to be censored and removed from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for simply disagreeing with the CDC, FDA, NIH, or even the media like ABC or CNN. Very few in the medical community dare to refuse vaccinations for themselves or their patients. 

Now, in one of the greatest betrayals of their patients in medical history, only the bravest among physicians are refusing to go along with jabbing infants, who have nothing to gain, since COVID-19 will not harm them, and everything to lose, including their good health, their reproductive capacities, and their lives.

Millions of other citizens are similarly intimidated and censored. Many are required to submit to vaccinations under threat of losing their jobs, educational opportunities, or participation in competitive sports. And if any dare questions the COVID-19 narrative, they continue to be ostracized, censored, shamed, and made to feel guilty by coworkers, friends, and family members — and even rejected by their personal physicians.

The simple truth is that what Desmet calls mass formation or mass hypnosis is the response of normal human beings to extreme threats and harassments, and the loss of personal freedom. Add to that the isolation that was more widespread and rampant when he was finishing his book in November 2021 and the escalating threat to our constitutional democracies — it would be a miracle if anyone survived unscathed.  

The bewildered, stupefied, demoralized, and compliant looks on the faces of so many people, including many of our colleagues, are similar to the responses of abused children, battered women, inmates confined in state mental hospitals, inmates of prisons, and citizens of brutal totalitarian regimes. I saw the same look on the faces of people forced to live in East Berlin shortly before the Berlin Wall came down.

Rather than birds flying beautifully in unison, as Desmet analogizes to explain mass formation, during COVID-19, many people have become more like a flock of goldfinches huddled silently together in the bushes hiding from the hawk circling above. When the hawk is gone, they come alive again and go about their cheery business.

Furthermore, the so-called mass formation has nothing whatsoever to do with the madness of crowds or mass hypnosis, which are Desmet’s favorite comparisons and sources of “science.” Crowds were outlawed during the worst COVID-19 oppression. COVID-19 victims were suffering, and many continue to suffer, from isolation and political abuse, not from deranged hyperactive crowd misbehavior.  

The victims of COVID-19 totalitarianism were not and are not energized and potentially violent, which is the model for the madness of crowds. They weren’t gathering in groups until very recently when resistance groups — including truckers and farmers — formed in Canada, the Netherlands, and other nations. Up until then, most of the time, the so-called “masses” were withdrawn and docile. The psychodynamics of abuse and submission to authority helps to explain what has been happening since early 2020 to all of us, while “mass formation” or the psychology of “mad” and out-of-control crowds has no relationship to the suffering of people under COVID-19. 

Similarly, mass hypnosis has nothing to do with behavior during the height of COVID-19 oppression. If mass hypnosis does occur, which I doubt, it happens at Nazi-like Communist rallies where people are primed by ideology, inspired by pageantry and charismatic speakers, and energized by the group — while ultimately terrified of doing anything other than conform. It may happen when a worshipped cult leader harangues his followers, fomenting group cohesion and paranoia toward outsiders. It may happen during the ritual sexual abuse of groups of children. It does not happen when people feel so alone and isolated that it breaks their hearts and renders them apathetic and withdrawn.

Desmet’s book is a classic example of blaming the victim — the group hypnotizes itself, he argues. But he goes much further into a bizarre assertion that the abusers do not even exist!  

If all this sounds bizarre to you, you are in good company. Both commonsense and genuine historical analyses of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes confirm how they were built and maintained on conspiracies and careful planning. Much like today’s Mexican cartels or the mafia, largescale abuse and control of people require perpetrators collaborating with each other and careful planning to have their way, usually with utter disregard for the misery inflicted on others. Indeed, there are criminal conspiracy laws, confirming the reality of conspiracy as a part of human malfeasance. 

Here are the destructive themes that run through Desmet’s book:

1. Mass formation arises from the victims themselves, who communicate it to each other in a mysterious or even mystical fashion. Desmet compares it to mass hypnosis or to the madness of crowds. 

2. Because the hypnotic force supposedly arises from the group itself, there are no leaders, authorities, or elites to blame for it. In fact, the concept of elites is a fiction generated by the mass formation. Even extreme totalitarian dictators like Hitler are really a product of the crowd and mass formation and are not to blame. He actually says this and cites historian/philosopher Hannah Arendt to confirm his argument.

3. Consistent with blaming the victim, Desmet says there are no conspiracies behind COVID-19. None. No one planned all the destructive policies, strategies, and practices. It was a series of human mistakes and poor judgment, typical of ordinary people doing their best. In fact, there were and are no malignant or purposefully destructive forces at work, and there is no evil either. Desmet argues there was not even enough secrecy to call it a conspiracy in what little planning was attempted. Desmet can only hold this position by ignoring the 8-10,000 year history of elites conspiring against everyone else to build fiefdoms and empires, and by neglecting the many contemporary reports and books about the elaborate planning behind the unfolding of the pandemic, including our book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey. 

4. Desmet believes all the scholars, journalists, scientists, and other people who are, in fact, unearthing and documenting conspiracies behind COVID-19 are suffering from a variant of mass formation or mass hypnosis. They are emotionally disturbed — intensely “anxious,” “confused,” and “bewildered.” Out of their personal psychological “needs,” they make up simple-minded conspiracy theories in order to focus on something outside themselves. They must instead look inside themselves. So, while our nation collapses beneath totalitarianism, Desmet wants us, metaphorically, to lie on the couch and examine ourselves, while he makes pointed comments on our inner conflicts, needs, and, of course, our “conspiracy theories.”  

5. Desmet’s concept of mass formation robs people of their individual value and free will. The “masses” and the scholars and researchers who unmask the conspiracies behind COVID-19 are described as helplessly driven by their unconscious motives and their needs. This is how authoritarian abusers always think about their victims — as devoid of value and free will — which enables these abusers to justify manipulating and controlling them.  

6. Desmet’s emphasis on the dangerousness of crowds, Ginger Breggin observes, can serve a more insidious and destructive purpose. Those who now control the U.S. government have politically imprisoned individuals from January 6, 2021, protests in Washington DC, many of whom are still languishing in prison without trial dates. The government is using such unconstitutional, draconian, and abusive means against these individuals that protests by the freedom movement have been squelched. Desmet’s negative characterizations of groups and “masses” contributes to the narrative that discourages and even prevents the freedom movement from using one of the most important political actions available — massive peaceful group protests against the government’s oppressive policies.

7. Desmet’s misuse of psychological concepts is aimed at undermining people whom he perceives as political threats. Ginger Breggin warns that Desmet’s work can set the stage for other psychologists and for psychiatrists to create and apply new psychodiagnoses related to “mass hypnosis” or “mass psychosis” in the legal and political arenas to discredit, psychiatrically confine, and/or drug individuals who are critical of the establishment. This is precisely how psychiatrists and psychiatric diagnoses have been used in totalitarian countries such as the old USSR2 and in contemporary China to crush dissidents.3

Scholars for Hundreds of Years Have Known Better than Desmet 

Evil people — tyrants and their collaborators — actually do conspire to control and exploit other human beings. To confirm how old this knowledge is, here are quotations from one of the greatest analysts of human freedom and human enslavement, Étienne de La Boétie, a writer and a judge (1530-1563). In his 1557 book, The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, he wrote about tyrants and their henchmen:4

Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. (p 8)

[T]hey find no other means to impose this new tyranny than by tightening control and removing their subjects so far from any notion of liberty that even if the memory of it is fresh it will soon be eradicated. (p. 10)

In short, when the point is reached, through big favors or little ones, that large profits or small are obtained under a tyrant, there are found almost as many people to whom tyranny seems advantageous as those to whom liberty would seem desirable. (p. 17)

Nevertheless, observing those men who painfully serve the tyrant in order to win some profit from his tyranny and from the subjection of the populace, I am often overcome with amazement at their wickedness and sometimes by pity for their folly. (p. 18)

And in places where the wicked gather there is conspiracy only, not companionship: these have no affection for one another; fear alone holds them together; they are not friends, they are merely accomplices. (p. 19)

The tyrant died in 96 A.D. after three years of bestial government inspired by abject fear of conspirators. (p. 25) [emphases added]

Desmet’s book is a dangerous Trojan horse calculated to keep us feeling confused and self-blaming and for giving hostile forces ammunition for discrediting both the suffering of people under COVID-19 and for dismissing anyone who researches and finds conspiracies behind COVID-19. It pushes a psychology and philosophy in which human beings are devoid of individual value and the ability to make rational choices. It strengthens the enemies of freedom while discouraging research into the enormous organized, highly coordinated threat of growing totalitarianism throughout the world. Worse yet, it could discourage well-meaning individuals from taking action to defend our freedoms — and that appears to be a major unwritten purpose behind his book.

We have examined three of the many interviews given by Desmet before his book came out. Each time, he dismisses “conspiracy theories” without elaborating further. 

In these three interviews, Desmet does not use psychology to analyze and discredit people who write about conspiracies — that will come out in the book. That makes his book a bait and switch. The back cover of his book has endorsements from several heroes from the freedom movement whom I hold in very high regard, including professionals who have done excellent research and writing about the conspiracies behind COVID-19. I am guessing, and I hope I am right, that my respected colleagues, who are extremely busy, based their endorsements on Desmet’s interviews and his personal contacts with them — and they had no idea what he was going to write in his book about the emotionally disturbed people who make up or believe in “conspiracy theories.” From the number of endorsements from within the freedom movement, Desmet clearly targeted the group.

The Bait and Switch

In an interview on De Nieuwe Wereld TV on October 11, 2021, Desmet gave a verbose dismissal of any conspiracy in COVID-19, stating in the process with clarity, “there is no reason whatsoever to say that they have the structure of a conspiracy theory.”5

In an interview with the Daily Skeptic in March 2021, Desmet discussed the inconsistency of data reporting during COVID-19 and then specifically said:6

Together, this means that the inaccuracies of the figures distributed daily by the media is so great that some people understandably suspect conspiracy, albeit apocryphally, in my opinion.

On July 30, 2021, Desmet was interviewed by attorney Reiner Fuellmich and his associates. Here Desmet more specifically warned about focusing on “intentional processes” — that is, people with bad intentions. He continued to criticize “extreme conspiracy theories:”7

And other people try to reduce everything to intentional processes and end up in extreme conspiracy theories which are also wrong. And so I think we have to acknowledge the complexity of the situation and try to build an image that is as realistic as possible. I know everybody tends to try to reduce the complexity of reality and either believes in the mainstream narrative or ends up in radical conspiracy theories. 

Can we say that Desmet makes a reasonable warning about “radical conspiracy theories”? I don’t think so. In his book, one of his illustrations of conspiracy thinking is “during the coronavirus crisis; many people started to think that the experts intentionally misled the population…” (p. 129). Desmet wants to dissuade us from investigating the authorities and influencers behind COVID-19 policies and practices. He considers all that bogus.

Desmet’s Book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

In “Chapter 8: Conspiracy and Ideology,” Desmet tries to psychoanalytically undermine anyone who makes a critique of the powers at work behind COVID-19. They are supposedly motivated by severe “anxiety” and are “bewildered” and “confused.” To escape from that painful emotional state, according to Desmet, these critics take flight into imaginary “conspiracy theories” to fulfill their own “needs” to believe in something (p. 127):

In this state, the confused spectator typically develops an intense need for a simple frame of reference, which allows him to mentally master the complexity, and in which to place and control the anxiety and other intense emotions that arise. An interpretation in terms of conspiracy meets that need. It reduces the enormous complexity of the phenomenon to a simple frame of reference: All anxiety is linked to one object (a group of people who intentionally deceives, the supposed “elite”) and thereby becomes mentally manageable. All blame can be placed outside oneself, with the Other and, subsequently all frustration and anger can also be directed at that singular object. (Pp. 127-128)

We used to call this “psychologizing” — dismissing threatening ideas as emanating from a person’s psychological disturbances. And Desmet is a psychoanalyst. He’s a member of the Freudian cult — the masters of outrageous psychologizing, whom almost no one pays attention to anymore.

Notice that he even dismisses the existence of the “supposed elite.” Earlier, he similarly dismissed the concept of “an evil elite” (p. 123). Desmet wants to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil on the part of people with power, wealth, and the ability to manipulate and control events within society.

If we are to believe Desmet, the systematic terrorizing that characterized public health totalitarianism at the height of COVID-19 must be interpreted as well-meaning people making mistakes or displaying poor judgment. 

Desmet not only psychologizes individuals who examine the causes for disastrous COVID-19 policies and practices, but he also puts entire societies on the couch: “something caused society to collectively continue reacting in the same, frenetic way, as if it were acting out a pressing, psychological need” (italics in original, p. 55).

But how does the “collective” communicate their distress to each other and in such a uniform manner? Now he becomes mystical: “For instance, there seems to be a real physical resonance [sic] among individuals who form a mass that cannot be explained solely on the basis of sharing the same narrative” (P. 125). It is as if, “all the individuals are connected to one another like cells in the same body” (p. 126). We human beings, in Desmet’s speculations about so-called mass formation, have no more sovereignty, self-determination, free will, choice, or even values than cells in a greater body.

Desmet: COVID-19 Plans Were Not Secret, So There’s No Conspiracy 

Desmet defines a conspiracy in lay terms that set up his argument: “a secret, planned, intentional and malicious scheme.” But I have bad news for Desmet and his associates if they are trying to discredit the conspiracy charges being brought in courts. Secrecy plays no role whatsoever in the legal definition of conspiracy or in prosecution of conspirators. Under American law, “Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement’s goal.”8 There is no mention of secrecy as a part of conspiracy charges. Catherine Austin Fitts alerted me to this fact while interviewing me about Desmet’s book.9

Desmet tries to advance his definition by arguing that COVID-19 cannot be a conspiracy because “It’s not much of a secret since all the aforementioned ‘plans’ are openly available on the internet” (p. 133). Actually, it took me and my wife Ginger more than a year of working seven days a week before we finally found a PowerPoint presentation of Bill Gates’ plan for the coming pandemic made to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2017. It describes the contents of a signed agreement in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Gates group and WHO — and we still have not found the MoU itself.  

A few months later, we found Gates’ 2015-2016 Preliminary Business Plan — the real master plan for COVID-19 —for an organization called, CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. We had to stop the presses to get it into our book. CEPI is a mammoth complex organization through which Gates, Schwab, Fauci, numerous federal agencies, the drug companies, UN, WHO, the Chinese CDC, and dozens of others worked together on the future management of COVID-19.  

Our book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, which describes the CEPI Preliminary Business Plan and the PowerPoint summary of the plan, has sold over 100,000 copies. It might be even more widely read if YouTube had not permanently taken us down less than 45 minutes after I put up a short video announcing the book. Desmet, is the mass censorship of everyone who discusses the forces behind COVID-19 a simple mistake by authorities or a mass formation somehow generated by the people being censored?

As for the breaches in secrecy surrounding the COVID-19 plans, there are reasons why people commonly signal their more egregious and violent crimes ahead of time. We see signaling from Hitler, who wrote Mein Kempf about his hateful plans to the Iranian leaders who constantly threaten to annihilate Israel. We see it in mass murderers who announce their intentions on Facebook. This signaling may be a form of grandiose bragging. In some cases of conflicted individuals, it may be a plea to be stopped. But in regard to COVID-19, the organizers needed to plan with other people, and they had to seek investors from around the world. Therefore, most of their signaling occurred in the context of planning sessions for the upcoming pandemic or in conferences where they tried to inspire colleagues to join them. 

Desmet does some not-so-subtle early signaling of his own. For example, on page two, he favorably cites Yuval Noah Harari, the transhumanist pseudo-historian and court jester for Klaus Schwab, who demonstrates an utter disregard for individual or political freedom, writes panoramic history books without mentioning the founding of the United States as a major event, and looks forward to the coming technological transformation of humans into cyborgs. Harari is more than a signal—he’s a glaring red flare — that Desmet is currying favor with the super-elites of the World Economic Forum who adore Harari. Desmet is so desperate to signal, that he does so at the risk of losing credibility with the worldwide anti-globalist freedom movement, which he is currently courting and infiltrating.     

On the same second page of his book, Desmet signals once again his reliance on emotionally and politically twisted individuals when he cites Hannah Arendt, the famous historian of the holocaust. We shall evaluate her blaming-the-victim ideology, which Desmet quotes favorably, later in this report.   

Explaining Mass Formation as Group Self-Hypnosis

Desmet believes that the “mass” of people during COVID-19 actually created their distressed inner state of mind on their own and that they communicated this distress to each other through “mass formation” or group hypnosis. He believes there are no “elites” or other human influencers who should be held responsible for the ongoing psychological torment, physical illness, and death inflicted upon hundreds of millions by COVID-19 policies and practices. His book is filled with indictments of the “masses” rather than indictments of the totalitarian forces that overwhelmed them. His approach to the “masses” is elitist in itself. The covert purpose of Desmet’s book is to head off any indictments, moral or legal, of the elite global establishment. 

By the bottom of page one, in italics, Desmet states his central thesis that totalitarianism somehow “emerged from within the population itself.” On the next page, he describes the process as “in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think ethically.” So the people are unethical and lacking in self-awareness — not the global powers and their governmental agents who are tormenting and oppressing them. Desmet’s entire book is a classic example of victim blaming.

How did these “masses” of citizens of the Western constitutional democracies manage to hypnotize themselves in such a methodical and similar manner? There is no known scientifically verified concept of societal self-hypnosis. Group hypnosis, occasionally used as a method of psychotherapy, requires an authoritarian leader, such as an army medical officer, and compliant subjects, such as emotionally distressed soldiers.10 Groups cannot hypnotize themselves.

A somewhat similar concept to group hypnosis is the more malevolent use of brainwashing, such as conducted by Chinese Communists and North Koreans. That process requires the systematic and extreme total control and manipulation of captured soldiers, confined together under wretched conditions, who have been removed from their officers.11

Desmet’s concept of mass formation or mass hypnosis is a mythical and mystical speculation that will require a great deal of intellectual squirming around as Desmet proceeds in his book. Meanwhile, its absurdity seems to have bamboozled many readers who, unable to make sense out of the concepts, decided they must have some deeper meaning outside their academic or professional specialties. 

Crushing Free Will and Blaming It on the Victim

I am a psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a lifelong concern about the dangers of brainwashing and other methods of controlling people, including totalitarianism. One of my earliest medical articles, “Coercion of Voluntary Patients in an Open Hospital,” was published in the AMA Archives of General Psychiatry in 1964 while I was still in my training as a psychiatrist.12

My book, Beyond Conflict: From Self-Help and Psychotherapy to Peacemaking (New York, St. Martin’s Press), is an examination of what I call the three dynamics of human relationship: love, liberty, and coercion. I observe that both the abuser and the abused lose their humanity in coercive situations. Abusers lose their sense of empathy and treat their victim like an object devoid of value or free will. The victims, in turn, lose their own sense of value and free will and become helpless and eventually docile.  

Desmet abuses both individuals and humanity with his concepts of mass formation and mass hypnosis by treating humans as objects with no value or free will. Then, by denying the existence of the abusers, he rejects the reality that people are often driven to feel that helpless — lacking in value or free will — when subjected to totalitarian regimes such as those systematically imposed under COVID-19 policies and practices. Then Desmet draws the noose tight by attacking anyone who tries to unmask the forces behind totalitarianism.  

Hidden in all the disconnected verbiage is the agenda of Desmet’s book — to stop people from examining the globalist forces behind COVID-19. He is dismissing precisely what I, with my coauthor Ginger, have documented in depth in 650 pages with over 1,000 citations in COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey. It is what courageous attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has written about in convincing detail in The Real Anthony Fauci. Both of us provide enough facts for a prosecutor to bring criminal charges of conspiracy against Fauci, Bill Gates, and a few dozens of their conspirators. 

Mass formation, group hypnosis, mass psychosis, mass hysteria, the madness of crowds. Desmet swims among these concepts and never gives a genuinely scientific description or explanation of his so-called mass formations. Instead, Desmet throws explanations as people throw mud against a wall hoping it will stick. Here is Desmet’s hypnosis explanation: 

Both the masses and their leaders are gripped by an ideologically colored narrative, the masses are hypnotized, the leaders are under a form of self-hypnosis. Both, so to speak, are in the grip of a voice (see the importance of indoctrination and mass media propaganda described in chapter 7). Mass formation, as a form of hypnosis, is a phenomenon where individuals are in the grip of the resonance of a voice—the voice of the leader of the crowd. P. 140

First, notice that Desmet gets around the problem of blaming a leader by stating that the leader, too, is hypnotized. This raises an obvious question, “Who hypnotized all of them?” Depth hypnosis, sufficient to significantly modify behavior, requires an authoritarian leader or guide, so there must be someone to blame somewhere, other than the victims themselves. Desmet does not even want to hold Hitler and the Nazis morally responsible. While admitting to some minimal planning leading up to the Holocaust, he ignores the long history of intense antisemitism in Europe, the depth and complexity of conspiracies surrounding Hitler, and summarizes, “For example, we have seen that the Holocaust came about through a mind-boggling process of mass formation that blinded both the perpetrators and the victims and drew them into an infernal dynamic” (p. 136). In this concept, the Holocaust is like a hypnotic tornado that drags everyone to destruction, including Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Mengele, and the rest of the Nazis. We shall find that he shares this view with his favorite resource person, philosopher Hannah Arendt. 

Second, Desmet does mention “indoctrination and mass media propaganda,” but if he went too deeply in that direction, he would have to account for the entire major media being so lockstep, so lacking in variation, and so monolithic in support of the establishment COVID-19 mantra that there would have to be a very powerfully organized plan behind it. He would also have to account for the amazingly consistent censoring of alternative views in the major media, including radio and television, and on social media like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Desmet specifically rejects the reality that this degree of vast, uniform, and effective censoring requires behind-the-scenes authoritarian planning that smacks of a conspiracy. He believes “there was no systematic, planned steering of the reporting” (p. 130).

One way Desmet repeatedly avoids attributing malevolent intention is by speaking of “unconscious” motivations, an obvious specialty of Freudian therapists. From more than 60 years of experience as a therapist and in psychiatric forensics, I have found that much of what people say they cannot remember, including their motives and actions, often amounts to lying, conscious avoiding of the truth, or its near equivalent “denial.” In therapy, it is amazing how often people cannot remember abusing a family member until the family member reminds them of the details in the relative safety of couples therapy, at which time all those details come back to the abuser, who then begins to justify his or her abusive actions. When a therapist relies heavily on attributing unconscious emotions and motives to people, including those who openly disagree with him, he risks becoming irresponsibly self-serving. Unless clients or patients trust a therapist enough to cooperate by honestly exploring their own memories, emotions, and motives, a therapist’s conclusions about their unconscious often become abusive speculations. 

Desmet continually acts like an elite, authoritarian therapist who makes psychological interpretations of other people about their “unconscious” needs and motivations, while utterly failing to explore his own “unconscious” needs and desires. 

What are Desmet’s needs and desires? To understand them does not require analyzing his unconscious. In his book, Desmet uses every intellectual trick and subterfuge he can to discredit the freedom fighters and their research allies, while exonerating the elite authorities and globalists who are bent on taking away their freedom. 

There is no need to speculate about Desmet’s motives because his book tells it all. Desmet wants to deny the systematic oppression that continues to crush “the masses” and their advocates and defenders, while exonerating those who are to blame for continuing to spread so much misery and death throughout the world.

Here Desmet describes a seemingly respectable scholarly basis for his mass formation speculations, Gustave Le Bon’s important 1895 analysis of the madness of crowds: 

A crowd is a specific kind of group. Its distinguishing feature is a far-reach­ing “uniformization” of individuals. In the crowd, everyone becomes equal to everyone else, people think together, and they tend to identify with the same ideals. Gustave Le Bon—the French sociologist and psychologist who published one of the most important works on mass formation, Psychologie des joules in 1895—argued that the “individual soul” in the masses is completely taken over by the “group soul.” This uniformization is accompanied by an almost absolute loss of rational thinking and the ability for critical reflection, even among people who, under “normal circumstances,” are extremely intelligent and capable of well-founded criticism. It is also accompanied by a strong tendency to surrender to impulses that, under normal circumstances, would be considered radically unethical. [two citations removed, p. 92]

There is an irredeemable flaw, not in Le Bon’s thinking, but in Desmet’s. Le Bon was analyzing crowds! His entire point was to distinguish the “madness of crowds” from people “who, under ‘normal circumstances,’ are extremely intelligent and capable of well-founded criticism.” He is literally talking about mob behavior.

No one now doubts that crowds can enable some people to act without reason or restraint. But there were no crowds during the time that Desmet is writing about, the high point of the COVID-19 pandemic. People were not legally permitted to form crowds.   

During the COVID-19 crisis at its worst, millions were off work. Those who were sick were confined to their homes, nursing homes, or hospitals. Many public places were often closed. People were afraid to get within six feet of each other. Some were even wearing masks while riding bikes or driving cars by themselves. People were suffering from isolation, not from crowd psychodynamics. There is no conceivable way that people could have spread their self-destructive feelings and attitudes in a coherent manner from one to another to create a mass formation. Their common misery was caused by the politicians and public health authorities working from a formal plan developed on a worldwide basis through global predators in control of the World Health Organization and other key institutions and agencies, and they had been planning it for ten years or more.

The Psychoanalyst at Work

Desmond is a psychoanalyst, a therapist trained in the methods and orthodoxy of Sigmund Freud. Freud turned blaming the victim into his most important theory, the Oedipus complex. Freud originally discovered and explained to a conference of his medical colleagues that many of his emotionally distressed female patients, all of them from elite families, had been sexually abused by family members as children. The elite Victorian fathers listening to Freud were apparently outraged at his accusation that anyone like them might be sexually abusing their children. His colleagues literally turned their backs on Freud and walked out. 

Jeffrey Masson, in his enormously important book, The Assault on Truth, used Freud’s personal correspondence to document Freud’s shaken response to this peer rejection and how he dealt with it. Freud responded over the next few months by developing a mammoth and outlandish lie to save his professional identity and career. He called it the Oedipus complex. Freud explained that children, starting at around age four, lust after their parents and make up theories of being sexually abused by them. Freud’s self-serving cowardice is an egregious example of victim blaming to preserve one’s own authority.

For decades, Freud was guilty of setting back society’s awareness of child sexual abuse. Like Desmet now does, he gave cover to the abusers. As a psychoanalyst in the tradition of Freud, Desmet accuses serious scholars of making up stories to fit their own “needs” (p. 127).

Desmet’s book is a lot of pseudo-intellectuality wrapped around a fistful of psychobabble. Desmet is an apologist for what has turned out to be a preplanned, organized mass murder through withholding amazingly effective early treatment and instead inflicting dangerous, lethal experimental “vaccines” on humanity, now including infants.

How Twisted Can Political Thinking Get?

About his explanations, Desmet tells us, “This approach allows us to focus on what matters most: Totalitarianism arises from evolutions and tendencies that take place in our everyday lives” (p. 8). Imagine, under the purposeful battering inflicted upon us during COVID-19, we are supposed to look around at ourselves and our every-day-lives to see how we are inflicting it on ourselves.

The historian Hannah Arendt is the most cited expert in Desmet’s book, and he quotes her on a similarly bizarrely twisted theme:

In substance, the totalitarian leader is nothing more nor less than the functionary of the masses he leads; he is not a power-hungry individual imposing a tyrannical and arbitrary will upon his subjects (p. 139). 

A Jewish historian seemingly exonerating Hitler and Nazis? Is Arendt a self-hating Jew? As a Jew, I’m familiar with this tragic phenomenon. Many critics,13 including the Anti-Defamation League,14 have attacked “Arendt’s defamatory conception of Jewish participation in the Nazi Holocaust.” In addition to that, Arendt blamed the Holocaust on the historical behavior of Jews, and she is anti-Israel. 

What Really Makes People Feel Brutalized?

What causes members of a family, institution, society, nation, or empire to feel brutalized? The odds are overwhelming that they are, in fact, being brutalized by the organized, strategized oppression of those in authority. 

Severe demoralization of individuals does not arise spontaneously within people. It requires systematic oppression, exemplified by the unfortunate citizens Russia or Communist China, Jews in concentration camps, inmates of state mental hospitals, members of cults, women with abusive husbands, and children being sexually abused by their parents. These evil-doers hide what their actions from those who could stop them, so child protective agencies, police, or investigative journalists, as well as concerned professionals and other citizens, must become involved to identify and to stop them.  

Desmet does not want anyone investigating in depth the sources of COVID-19 abuses among the billionaires and financiers in the pharmaceutical industry who have reaped obscene benefits and enormous power, or the authorities with whom they made and executed the plans at the UN, the World Health Association (WHO), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In addition, there are major planners and funders at the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation, the Welcome Trust in Great Britain, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Even schools of public health at universities like Harvard and Johns Hopkins are conspirators in developing strategies. 

The Chinese Communist Party was also deeply involved with making SARS-CoV viruses in cooperation with U.S. scientists partially funded by Fauci’s NIAID, sometimes with the money passing through the EcoHealth Alliance and its president Peter Daszak. When the release of SARS-CoV-2 occurred from the Wuhan Lab, the Chinese were helped by the diverse collaborators from WHO to the journal Lancet in covering up the source and deflecting criticism from the Communists.15 It took a decade of intense planning and collaboration, and the investment of billions of dollars, to enforce the lockstep submission to the same oppressive practices everywhere in the world, all at the same time.   

Desmet’s Solution to the Problem of Totalitarianism

Desmet’s solution to the problem of so much increasing human suffering under totalitarianism is consistent with his analysis of it. Since there is no one to blame except the masses who created mass formations, there is no one to blame but ourselves. The only solution is personal and psychological—we must better ourselves because we are the problem. He states, “The real task facing us as individuals and as a society is to construct a new view of man and the world, to find a new foundation for our identity, to formulate new principles for living together with others…” (p. 8). Not a word about fighting for our freedom—because he believes we have no enemies, except ourselves. 

Desmet does not want anyone to know that Western society and its sovereign nations are under assault, and that COVID-19 is part of the attack. Desmet wants to render us unable to defend ourselves, and he tries to do so by blaming us for the obviously authoritarian and totalitarian impositions on us by globalist billionaires, institutions, agencies, and assorted collaborators. The ultimate message of Mattias Desmet is “Stop thinking and surrender!” 

Desmet says that he himself has been “a subject of a few conspiracy theories.” He explains, “I was accused of being a so-called controlled opposition… to keep the opposition calm and quiet with my psychological theories” (p. 132). He ridicules the idea, saying some called him a “satanist.” But he mounts no defense against the accusations concerning the harmful effects of his ideology. 

What’s Really Needed

Our book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, shreds Desmet’s theory of “mass formation” by demonstrating that there are well-organized global predators who have been planning all the worst aspects of COVID-19 tyranny since Bill Gates announced the Decade of Vaccines in 2010. At that time, Gates, Klaus Schwab, the UN, Tedros of WHO, Anthony Fauci, and many other individuals and organizations began working with many collaborators, including Xi Jinping, to make even greater fortunes and gain even more power. Their continuing strategy is to force damaging and often deadly experimental GMO “vaccines” on the entire world’s population, recently including the babies. 

We must reject Desmet’s outlandish theories that distract us from the most important task since the founding of America—defending the free world from being further taken over and demolished by the globalists. We must unmask their apologists, like Desmet, and fight the globalist individuals and forces that are destroying Western democracies. Ultimately, we must refound America as a nation based, not on globalism, but on individual and political freedom, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and AmericaFirst policies. Then we can once again become an inspiration to the world for liberty, as our founders originally intended and hoped, spreading the good news that constitutional democracy is the best way for the citizens of the world to live as freely as possible and to prosper in peace. 

We urge people to dismiss the distraction of “mass formation” and “mass hypnosis.” And we have no fear of largescale peaceful crowds protesting our loss of freedoms. We need mass noncompliance in our private and public lives against the totalitarianism now being forced upon us around the world. 

References:

1 Desmet, Mattias. (2022). The Psychology of Totalitarianism. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.

2 Breggin, Peter. (2008). Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition. New York: Springer Publishing Company, p. 39 and Fireside, H. (1979). Soviet Psychoprisons. New York: W.W. Norton

3 van Voren, R. (2010). Political Abuse of Psychiatry—An Historical Overview Schizophr Bull. 2010 Jan; 36(1): 33–35.

4 Étienne de La Boétie (1942, original edition 1577). The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. New York, Columbia University Press. The book is searchable. https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/Boetie.pdf

5 De Nieuwe Wereld TV. (October 11, 2020).

6 Dewals, Patrick. (March 4, 2021). The Emerging Totalitarian Dystopia: an Interview with Professor Mattias Desmet. https://dailysceptic.org/interview-with-mattias-desmet-professor-of-clinical-psychology/

7 Reiner Fuellmich and others from the Eye of the Storm Corona Committee interview Mattias Desmet. (July 30, 2021). Mass Formation and Totalitarian Thinking in This Time of Global Crisis. https://ratical.org/PandemicParallaxView/EyeOfTheStorm-ProfMattiasDesmet.html

8 https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/conspiracy

9 Catherine Austin Fitts interviews Dr. Peter Breggin. Special Solari Report: Mass Formation with Dr. Peter Breggin. July 15, 2022. https://home.solari.com/special-solari-report-mass-formation-a-decoy-for-digital-concentration-camps-with-dr-peter-breggin/

10 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207140008415250 and https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/167/11/898/4819713?login=true

11 https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/167/11/898/4819713?login=true

12 Breggin, Peter (1964). Coercion of Voluntary Patients in an Open Hospital, A.M.A. Archives of Psychiatry, 10, 173-181. https://breggin.com/article-detail/post_detail/coercion-of-voluntary-patients-in-an-open-hospital-1964 Reproduced with a new Author’s Note in Edwards, R.B. (Ed.). (1983). Psychiatry and Ethics, New York: Prometheus Books.

13 Here is interesting observation: “Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, were published within 10 days of each other last month. The pieces cast further doubt on the overinflated, underexamined reputations of both figures and shed new light on their intellectually toxic relationship.” https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/10/troubling-new-revelations-about-arendt-and-heidegger.html and also see https://www.city-journal.org/html/hannah-arendt-and-origins-israelophobia-13451.html

14 see https://theamericanscholar.org/hannah-arendt-on-trial/

15 All of this planning and collaborating, and much more, is covered in Breggin, P. and Breggin, G. (November 2021), COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey.

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