The collective psychological phenomenon of mass formation is critical for understanding why society is behaving as it is, most notably in western countries. Professor Mattias Desmet is the foremost expert in this field. There is also a previous post on this topic from May 5th for those interested in more detail. Mass formations are cult-like collective obsessions that take hold of segements of societies. They have existed throught history, but only from the twentieth century have they reach sufficient scale to capture the machinery of entire states, typically with diastrous effect. The conditions for mass formation are loneliness for societal atomisation, a loss of meaning in life, and consequent free floating anxiety and aggression. These conditions have become ever more prevalent over time, and as the scale of societies have increased far beyond human scale. A mass formation occurs when a major threat is collectively perceived, and the free floating anxiety becomes focused on that threat. When a supposed solution is suggested, a large percentage of people gravitate towards it, becoming radically blind to almost anything else, including hard evidence that the ‘solution’ is in fact no solution at all. The threat can arise naturally, or it can be manufactured by bad actors attempting to drive a population in a particular direction. That direction may be metaphorically off a cliff.
A society in the grip of a hypnotic mass formation generally becomes totalitarian, like Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. This is fundamentally different from a dictatorship, where a powerful leader is imposing his will under threat of violence. Under totalitarianism, the nexus does not lie with a leader, but with the masses themselves. If a leader is removed, another similarly minded one will be elevated to take his place. Mass formation gains its grip by seeming to solve the problem of loneliness, as people come together to face the common threat, thereby feeling connected again. Unfortunately, they’re not connected to each other as individuals, but to a unifying and all-consuming ideology. The atomisation actually becomes more extreme. They typically develop performative, and often self-sacrificing, rituals to demonstrate their devotion to the ideology. Failure to perform these rituals is regarded as disloyalty to the point of treason, even if the rituals make no logical sense at all, or are self-destructive.
Generally some 20-30% of the population becomes fanatically devoted to enforcing uniformity of thought regarding the threat and its ‘solution’. They may become the secret police, reporting even friends and family members to the authorities for transgressions. A majority of the rest typically goes along to get along, while perhaps 10% of the population resists. The fanatics become radically intolerant of dissent, and if the mass formation proceeds to its logical conclusion, they come to regard eliminating the dissenters as a moral duty. However, if the dissenters keep speaking out, they may not be able to convince the rest, but they can disrupt the hypnotic effect sufficiently to avoid the mass formation reaching that final stage. Unfortunately, the highly educated are the most likely to fall into the grip of mass formation, since so much of modern education is about conformity with received wisdom.
The response to the threat of covid is an example of this phenomenon. The fear was whipped up by the media to the extent that most people complied with extreme restrictions on their freedom that were arbitrary and nonsensical. For instance, one could eat maskless in a restaurant, but had to wear a mask to walk to the bathroom. Band members wore masks with holes cut into them so they could play their instruments. People were restricted from going outside, even though that was the safest place to be. Small businesses were forced into bankruptcy by the restrictions, ruining a multitude of livelihoods. Children’s education was massively disrupted by forced online classes. People were coerced, on pain of job loss and exclusion from society, into taking an experimental vaccine that demonstrated enough adverse reactions that it should have been withdrawn from the market within a month of its release. Children were forced to take it even though they were at no risk from the condition. The threat posed by covid was highly exaggerated through fear-porn, and many of the deaths attributed to it were the result of failure to treat with proven medications, or highly inappropriate treatment with toxic medications such as remdesivir, which has a black box warning because it destroys the kidneys.
As fear of covid waned, because its lack of lethality became obvious, the mass formation shifted its focus to the war in Ukraine and the demonisation of Russia. This was a major misunderstanding of the situation, but actual evidence is irrelevant in a mass formation. Any attempt to correct the record and stop the senseless killing was regarded as traitorous. The war was actually provoked by NATO, beginning in 2014. Russia was acting to ethnic Russians in the Donbass who had been under attack from Ukraininan forces for eight years, and had suffered some 14,000 casualties as a result. The war was almost orevented by peace treaty, but NATO representatives told Ukraine to fight instead. Now some two million Ukrainians are dead and their society is wrecked, all because NATO wanted to use them as a battering ram to weaken Russia so they could balkanise it and steal its resources. They were never supposed to win, just to be sacrificed for a geopolitical goal. Thankfully, Putin, who while not a ‘nice guy’ is also not a demon, has the patience of a Buddhist monk, and has resisted every provocation meant to cause him to over-react so a wider war could be justified.
The mass formation has now shifted its focus to threats against Israel and the consequent was againtst Iran. Israel has been conducting an obvious genocide for two and a half years, and has attacked multiple neighbours as well, but somehow it’s seen as a victim, and all attempts to defend the real victims are seen as anti-semitic, when really they’re merely anti-zionist. Zionism is a murderous totalitarian ideology separate from the religion of Judaism. For instance, there are more Christian zionists than all the Jews in the entire world. Iran has been mercilessly bombed despite posing no real threat to its aggressors, and the impact of the war on the global economy will be catastrophic, but those in the grip of mass formation are radically blind to all of it.
The only real solution is to restore genuine interpersonal connection, in order to cutail the epidemic of loneliness and meaninglessness that has created fertile ground for mass formation. Instead the world seem poised to convert oppressive over-bureaucratisation to even more oppressive technocracy and technofeudalism, with divide and rule as a major strategy to weaken opposition by preventing people from unifying against the idea of rule by algorithm for the benefit of the super-rich. This appears to be an example of hubris writ large though, and therefore destined to fail. The most likely scenario is war, leading to the collapse of existing socioeconomic complexity and societal scale. Given that overly large scale – a delarture from human scale – is a substantial contributing factor to the development of mass formations, this may eventually lead, in the long term, to distinct societies less prone to this form of collective madness.
