Session #63, con't.
Professor Mattias Desmet Psychoanalytischer Psychotherapeut, Univ. Ghent (Belgium)
Studies mass psychology, also a statistician.
Talks about the specific conditions that allow totalitarian thinking to emerge within a society.
Why have people gone along with the govt directives, even when it was obvious that they were absurd?
4 things need to be in place for a mass psychology/totalitarian thinking to emerge:
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large gp without social bonds
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lack of feeling that "life makes sense"
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lots of free floating anxiety
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lts of free floating discontent
These four conditions existed just prior to Corona outbreak.
Free floating anxiety is the most painful condition people can experience.
They are looking for an explanation for that anxiety.
Phase 1 - People focus on the object causing the anxiety
IF media provide a narrative that gives an object of the anxiety, people cluster around the object.
Phase 2 - People battle the object of anxiety
Leads up to a kind of mass intoxication.
Gustav Le Bon, Hannah Arendt and others call this a form of mass hypnosis.
At that point, the field of attention is narrowed and they can't feel empathy.
Allows people to feel bonded - and able to avoid feeling of free-floating anxiety
They also become radically intolerant of dissent - and radically behind their chosen leaders.
Even if you take away everything from them, they won't notice.
Focus of attention can be so extreme that people can even feel no physical pain.
At that point, doesn't matter whether the narrative is wrong anymore.
We have been trying to show that the narrative is wrong.
But showing that the narrative is wrong does not work.
Instead: start by acknowledging the free floating anxiety.
How does it arise?
Many ways. Can be manipulated. Discussion about who does it - researchers, govt's, companies, scientists.
Even most psychologists do not really recognize these processes right now.
Took him six months to understand the nature of the crisis - to diagnose the problem.
In UK, some psychologists were hired by the govt to provoke fear among the public.
"Being funded by someone" - decreases ability to be independent. May be unconscious.
At this moment, science is really in a crisis. Because all science is funded by people who it should not be funded by.
What kind of people do this?
that is, manipulating the masses.
They are not normal criminals.
Totalitarians make the rules and then stick to them.
[They are true believers - SEE THE TRUE BELIEVER BY ERIC HOFFER]