The Psychology Of Covid Totalitarianism

Covid Totalitarianism: The Deification of Error

By John Waters 

The most significant obstacle to our developing the necessary capacity to fight back against what is engulfing us is an imaginative block preventing us conceiving of the possibility that what seems to be happening could actually be happening. These things could not be happening here, now, for the very simple reason that they are the kind of thing that used to happen far away, in different times, to people who were not as ‘intelligent’ or ‘educated’  or ‘advanced’ as we are.

Dr. Mattias Desmet begs to differ with such perilous smugness. He is a professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. He lectures on Individual psycho-analytics psychotherapy, and the psychology of the crowd. He holds a master’s degree and PhD in clinical psychology, and a master’s in statistics.

As the Covid subterfuge shifts from the manufacture of mass terror concerning a dubious virus — and a related indoctrination with spurious medical data — to the mass mobilisation of mesmerised populations in silencing voices threatening to expose these crimes, Dr Desmet has emerged as the clearest and most meticulous voice describing the dangers and intimating what we need to do to offset them. A selection of his remarkable video interviews can be found at the end of this article, which I have written by way of an introduction to his thoughts and interpretations, which I believe are among the most crucial things we might hear at this precise moment.

Dr. Desmet’s observations over the past 18 months have led him to conclude that the overwhelming majority of the world’s population has indeed fallen under a kind of spell. It is not literally a spell, he stresses, but a ‘mass formation’, a term first used by Gustave Le Bon, the French philosopher who 126 years ago in The Psychology of Crowds, was the first thinker systematically to outline how herd psychology differs from that of the individual. Le Bon it was who observed that the consciousness bestowed by membership of a crowd can be transformative, possessing individual members with ‘a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite differently from that in which each individual would feel, think and act were that person in a state of isolation.’ 

In such a ‘psychological crowd’, individual personality disappears, brain activity is replaced by reflex activity: a lowering of intelligence, provoking a complete transformation of sentiments, which collectively may manifest as better and worse than those of the crowd’s constituent members. A crowd may just as easily become heroic or criminal, but is generally disposed towards destruction.

‘The ascendancy of crowds,’ wrote Le Bon, ‘indicates the death throes of a civilisation.’ The upward climb to civilisation is an intellectual process driven by individuals; the descent is a herd in stampede. ‘Crowds are only useful for destruction.’

These symptoms are manifesting now, perhaps as never before, in our once free Western world, in a process substantively resembling mass hypnosis, as a collective psychological response to the unrelenting, single-focus campaign of fear to which we have all been subjected for a year and a half.

Indeed, we may now have reached a stage in this process that even Le Bon did not anticipate, for now the mesmerisers have available to them tech and techniques he could scarcely have envisaged. Using electronic means, it is infinitely easier to convert the individual to the collective mindset than if he were a member of an actual physical crowd. The advent of social media has made the present situation not merely possible, but possibly inevitable.

‘The masses have never thirsted after truth,’ wrote Le Bon. ‘They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’

Facts are as nothing to crowds, which function via a kind of collectivised imagination, operating off images and the slogans which evoke them.

He explains many aspects of what we have been witnessing, including the strange phenomenon of people’s apparent indifference to their own deprivations, hurts and incurred damage arising from the lockdowns of the past 18 months: loss of freedoms, loss of work, income, education, human contact, leisure et cetera. During mass formation, he describes, there is 'a narrowing of the field of attention’, which allows the crowd’s constituent members to close out everything but that which the hypnotist tells them is important, which results in insensitivity to personal losses, and a willingness to sacrifice everything — education, jobs, homes, romance, health — and to disregard the losses and griefs of others. By offering a strategy to deal with the anxieties imposed by the crisis, the would-be totalitarians are able to create a bogus solidarity in a society that has destroyed true solidarity.

He is remarkably open about his own history of engagement with the Covid ‘pandemic’, acknowledging his early doubts about some of his own pronouncements. In the very early days, he briefly bought into the idea of a pandemic, but his suspicions were soon aroused by the disproportionality he observed between the measures being introduced and what he understood about the visible levels of risk from the virus. In those early weeks of the crisis, he wrote a paper titled The Fear of the Virus is More Dangerous than the Virus Itself.

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