Glenn Diesen interviews Mattias Desmet on the psychology of mass formation and emerging technocratic totalitarianism
Glenn Diesen, professor and host, interviews Mattias Desmet, professor of psychology at the University of Ghent.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Mattias Desmet, professor of psychology at the University of Ghent and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, about the psychological mechanisms underlying what Desmet argues is an emerging technocratic totalitarianism in Western societies. Desmet introduces his concept of "mass formation" — a specific type of group psychology rooted in social atomisation, loss of meaning, and free-floating anxiety — which he argues is the foundational psychological process behind all totalitarian systems, distinct from classical dictatorship. He contends that the corona crisis, the Ukraine war narrative, and other recent episodes of enforced conformity are examples of successive mass formations in Western societies. Desmet argues that the new totalitarianism is not fascist or communist but technocratic, as predicted by Hannah Arendt in 1953, and that it is driven by an increasingly mechanistic and bureaucratic worldview. Both speakers discuss the role of propaganda, the corruption of science into an expert priesthood, and the importance of sincere speech as the only effective resistance.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Suffocating Conformity of the Past Decade
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Mattias Desmet, a professor of psychology at the University of Ghent, to discuss among other things his book on the psychology of totalitarianism. You have argued yourself that Western societies are showing tendencies at least associated with emerging totalitarianism, and I think it's important to unpack this concept — what it actually means. Thank you very much for coming on the program.
Mattias Desmet: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
Glenn Diesen: I've spoken to many leading experts who make the point that to discuss international politics we have kind of left the realm of politics and we need psychology to understand it. I guess that's where you come in, because it is interesting to look at the psychology of the masses to understand politics. The past decade in particular has been very suffocating. We began with Russiagate in 2016, which continued for years — an evidence-free narrative, completely absurd in many ways, but it had to be believed. There was huge intolerance of any dissent. Only one perspective was permitted, and anyone dissenting was essentially smeared.
It feels like society has delved into a kind of mass psychosis, and things aren't getting better. We have a massive war in the Middle East, economic decline in the West, a legitimacy crisis among political elites. The environment is quite suffocating. We must all believe the exact same thing, no matter how ridiculous it is. There is no dissent, no addressing of arguments. Anyone dissenting is essentially smeared and destroyed. And we see that politics tends to enter all realms of personal life as well.
You make the point that modern totalitarianism doesn't emerge through brute force but through a psychological and social process, and you refer to this as mass formation. I thought a good place to start would be: what is mass formation, and how do you explain totalitarianism in psychological terms?
What Is Mass Formation? The Psychological Roots of Totalitarianism
Mattias Desmet: That's maybe a good point to start. I can walk you through my theory. About twelve or thirteen years ago I started to become fascinated by the topic of totalitarianism, initially because I got interested in mass psychology. At university I noticed time and time again how completely blind highly intelligent or highly educated people can be when confronted with something that doesn't fit their ideology or the narratives they believe in.
I made my PhD about research problems — methodological problems in contemporary academic research. I'm also a statistician by training; I'm a professor in clinical psychology but also a statistician. When I tried to show my colleagues in academia how certain research methods that are widely used cannot possibly lead to valid results, I noticed that most of them actually got angry at me. I started to become fascinated by this strange phenomenon — that highly educated people, and probably highly educated people in particular, can become completely blind to certain facts when those facts conflict with the ideology they believe in.
I started to study mass psychology because I noticed that this strange expert blindness probably cannot be explained on the basis of individual psychology alone. You need to understand how an individual is very often in the grip of a certain culture, subculture, or group, or in the grip of a certain narrative that organises group life.
Then back in 2020, when the corona crisis started, I was already very well aware — as soon as I had started studying mass psychology — of the fact that a phenomenon I use the term "mass formation" for is actually responsible for the emergence of a completely new kind of state system in the 20th century, which we usually refer to as a totalitarian state.
I was interested in particular in two questions. The first: what is the difference between a totalitarian state and a classical dictatorship? Most people believe that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — the two most famous examples of totalitarian states from the beginning of the 20th century — were classical dictatorships. But this is not true at all. They were totalitarian states. They were the first totalitarian states in history. And the difference between a totalitarian state and a classical dictatorship is huge. They are two completely different phenomena at the psychological level.
I think it's extremely important to understand this psychologically, because now in the 21st century we are confronted, I believe, with the emergence of a new totalitarianism — not a fascist or communist authoritarianism, but a technocratic totalitarianism, for which Hannah Arendt, probably the most important philosopher on totalitarian states, already warned us in 1953. She said fascist totalitarianism in Germany had collapsed and we would probably soon witness the collapse of communist totalitarianism, but very soon we would see the emergence of a new kind of totalitarianism — a totalitarianism no longer led by ring leaders such as Stalin or Hitler, but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats.
The emergence of a totalitarian state always leads to a certain group who doesn't want to participate, who doesn't fall prey to the totalitarian psychological processes, and who tries to resist. History has shown us that usually the resistance chooses the wrong strategy. They behave as if they are fighting a classical dictatorship, and that is a fatal mistake when you are confronted with a totalitarian state. That's why I believe it's important that we try to understand what actually happens.
Classical Dictatorship Versus Totalitarian State
In a nutshell — and this is a little simplistic — a classical dictatorship at the psychological level is very primitive. There is a certain group of people who are experienced by the population as having a huge aggressive potential, and the population is so scared of this dictatorial regime that they simply accept that it unilaterally imposes its social contract upon them. That means that if the population succeeds in destroying the dictatorial regime, there is a very good chance the dictatorship will collapse.
Compared to that, the emergence of a totalitarian state is completely different. In a totalitarian state, the first thing that happens is the emergence of a very specific group formation in society — what I call mass formation. A certain part of the population, usually around 20 to 30%, starts to believe fanatically in a certain ideology — for instance, the race theories of Hitler, or the historical materialism of Marx in the Soviet Union. First there is a mass formation: a crowd of people emerges that very fanatically believes in a certain narrative. Then, in a second step, usually gifted rhetorical speakers put themselves at the head of this mass and use it to seize control of the state system.
In that way, a new state system emerges which has a much more suffocating impact on society, because — as Hannah Arendt put it — it has a huge secret police at its disposal: namely, that 20 to 30% of the population who so fanatically buys into the state narrative that they are willing to report everyone who doesn't conform to it.
The Three Psychological Effects of Mass Formation on Individuals
That emergence of a mass is the most crucial thing to understand. Mass formation is a kind of group formation that has a very specific impact on individuals. When an individual is in the grip of a mass formation, they will typically be completely incapable of taking critical distance from what the group believes. They will typically become willing to radically self-sacrifice — very strangely, willing to lose everything in order to follow the state narrative: their health, their wealth, the future of their children, everything. And the third characteristic is that individuals in the grip of a mass become radically intolerant of everyone who thinks or speaks differently.
These three things together lead to this very strange atmosphere when a totalitarian state emerges. People become completely blind, incapable of seeing the flaws in what the masses believe. They become radically willing to self-sacrifice. And they become radically intolerant of everyone who thinks differently — to the extent that mothers will report their children to the state.
I had a conversation on the internet with a woman who lived in Iran in 1978, who was forced to witness how a mother who had reported her son to the state put the noose around his neck when he was on the scaffold, and when he was dead she was very proud to receive a medal for heroism. That is what happens in a totalitarian state. Children report their parents, parents report their children — everyone reports everyone — because of mass formation.
The Social Conditions That Produce Mass Formation
That's why I believe it's so crucial to understand what really happens at the psychological level. Mass formations have existed as long as mankind exists — the Crusades were examples, there were several examples throughout history. But something very specific happened throughout the last two centuries: mass formations became stronger and stronger. And I believe the reason is connected to another phenomenon that emerged in modernity — namely, that more and more people started to feel lonely. More and more people started to feel isolated from everything around them: their fellow human beings, society, nature. Society got atomised, as Hegel said. It fell apart.
Just before the corona crisis, a Gallup world poll found that somewhere between 40 and 47% of people reported feeling completely isolated and lonely. Once you understand that this is the basis of the increasing strength of mass formations, you can very easily understand the entire mechanism.
Once people feel lonely and disconnected, they will typically start to suffer from a lack of meaning-making in life. Loneliness typically leads to a feeling that life has no purpose or meaning. We could see this very easily at the level of jobs: up to 60% of people consider their own job to be a so-called "bullshit job" — meaning they believe the work they do has no meaning or purpose at all, which is typical of our bureaucratic systems.
Once people are in this state — lonely, disconnected, struggling with a profound lack of meaning and purpose — something very specific happens at the emotional level. They will typically be confronted with a very specific kind of frustration, aggression, and anxiety. I coined a term for this: free-floating frustration, aggression, and anxiety. That means a kind of frustration, aggression, and anxiety that people cannot connect to a mental representation — in plain words, people feel frustrated, aggressive, and anxious without knowing what they feel frustrated, aggressive, and anxious about. That is a very painful state. It is the most aversive state a human being can be in. Feeling anxious without knowing what you feel anxious about. Feeling anxious without being able to resist or protect yourself from what you feel anxious about.
How a Narrative Triggers Mass Formation
Now, when many people are in this state in a society, something very specific might happen. When someone — intentionally or not — disseminates a narrative through the mass media indicating an object of anxiety (for instance, the coronavirus) and a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety (for instance, the lockdowns), there is a very good chance that many people at the same time will buy into the narrative, associate all their anxiety with this object, and be willing to participate in the strategy to deal with it — no matter how absurd that narrative is.
That's a strange thing. When people feel anxious enough and are not capable of associating their anxiety to a certain object, they will be willing to associate it to no matter what — even when they know somewhere in the back of their head that this object of anxiety is actually not very dangerous. That's what happens at the individual level all the time when people develop phobias or compulsive symptoms. They know somewhere that this snake doesn't live in the country they live in, or that these spiders are not so dangerous. But they want to believe it is dangerous, because in that way they can control their anxiety a little bit, just by avoiding the spider.
That's what happens in a mass formation, but in that case it doesn't happen at the individual level — it happens at the collective level. Many people at the same time all buy into the same narrative, all associate their anxiety with the same object. This leads first to an experience of being more in control than before. And second, more importantly, because so many people at the same time buy into the narrative, they feel connected again. They escape the loneliness, because they are fighting this heroic collective battle — this collective war with the object of anxiety: the virus, the Jews, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union.
That's the first step of the mass formation: many people at the same time associate their anxiety to an object of anxiety and then all blindly buy into the strategy to defeat that object.
The False Escape from Loneliness
The second step is extremely important. It seems as if people escape the most fundamental problematic condition of a human being — anxiety and isolation. I say "seems as if," because in reality they are more lonely than ever before. That has to do with a very particular characteristic of a mass formation.
A mass is a group that emerges not because individuals connect to each other, not because individuals start to love each other and form a group. A mass is a group that emerges because all the individuals separately connect to a collective ideal — the battle, the mask-wearing, the vaccination, which all have the psychological function of a ritual that makes you belong to the mass. The connection between the individual and the collective ideal gets much stronger than even the strongest connection between individuals — for instance, the connection between a mother and her child. That is the reason why, after a while, mothers start to report their children to the state when they feel that their child is not loyal enough to the collective ideal.
That's what happened in the corona crisis. Even if you believe that the coronavirus was to a certain extent dangerous — and I believe the mortality rate was much, much lower than they said in the beginning, and that is beyond the shadow of a doubt — even then you cannot ignore that we saw this very strange phenomenon. People suddenly started to be willing to report their neighbours to the state, or even their children. Everyone was talking about solidarity. But strangely enough, we accepted that the elderly had to die lonely somewhere in a hospital or institution where they would not even be allowed to be visited by their children. People suddenly accepted that when someone got into an accident on the street, we were no longer allowed to help that person. That's a very strange kind of solidarity — solidarity with a collective ideal, and a complete lack of solidarity with your fellow human being.
That's mass formation. It's the basis of all totalitarianism. It's extremely dangerous. And you can see how after the corona crisis, the mass formation of the corona crisis was suddenly replaced — just like that — somewhere in 2021 by the Ukraine narrative. That's very typical. Once a new narrative is disseminated that offers a new object of anxiety — perhaps an even more dangerous monster, Putin — there is a good chance that this complex dynamical phenomenon of mass formation chooses a new object, leaves the first, and a new mass formation emerges.
Which of course doesn't mean — I wrote several articles about the war in Ukraine — I'm not someone who believes that Putin is a saint. Not at all. I'm not someone who believes that the way Putin rose to power, or what Putin did in Chechnya, or anything else Putin has done, is praiseworthy. Not at all. It just means that we are blindly projecting all our problems and anxiety onto an external object, onto Putin, and that we are simply not capable anymore of seeing that there are a lot of problems on our side — that NATO did a lot of things which actually forced Russia to react with the war, and so on.
The Anger of Educated People and the Failure of Rational Argument
Glenn Diesen: That's interesting — the anger part is something I've realised as well as an academic. In security studies, all theorists recognise that the reason states are in conflict is what they refer to as international anarchy — all states compete for security. There's a kind of consensus in the literature: if we want peace, we have to first reduce the security competition, recognise the security concerns of our opponents as was done towards the end of the Cold War, reduce mutual threats, and then we can have peace.
I thought I was following the common recipe. But I realised that as soon as I argued — with this war, for example — that we have to recognise Russian security concerns, it was met with massive anger. No rational arguments, just: "You're repeating their views. You are now part of them." And it wasn't just about the Russians — it was the Iranians, the Chinese. People just want conformity around the same slogans: how evil Putin is, the mullahs, the Chinese communists. All facts are dismissed. "That's a Kremlin talking point." "Panda hugger." "Kremlin apologist." "Apologist for the mullahs."
I even had colleagues who suggested I should write some books on Russian imperial history so people would know I was "one of us." And even in debates about the war in the Middle East, you always have to condemn Hamas. They always ask: "Do you condemn Russia?" It's always forcing you into a position as some kind of activist on behalf of the state. You can't be an analyst and take yourself out of the situation. You have to participate in the moral outrage — condemnation is now obligatory.
I even had a strange experience last year. I noticed that in my country, when the Russians first invaded Ukraine, we had a prime minister who said we can't send weapons because that makes us a participant — we never did this. And now every single member of parliament is for sending weapons. Not a single one is arguing we should talk to the other side. So I thought, okay, I'll run for parliament.
It was quite insane. Every media outlet essentially said this was pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian. People were tearing down political posters, and when asked to comment on this vandalism, they actually compared it to liberating Norway from Hitler during World War II. All this self-righteousness, this moral superiority, this strong tribal activity — they were all fighting for freedom. And essentially my argument that instead of sending weapons we should restore diplomacy was just evidence of being in the hands of Putin. I was called a fascist agent. Politicians argued that they should look into whether the Kremlin was financing me. At the end, even the defence minister came out and criticised media for having spoken to me. When asked what I had done that constituted Russian propaganda, the answer was: he blamed NATO for the war.
It doesn't matter what the arguments are, what facts you point to, what expert opinions from leading American politicians you cite. Nothing matters. It's just: conform to the narrative or we essentially destroy you. It doesn't feel like democracy to me.
But how do you see this linked to democracies? People have been told that we don't have propaganda — propaganda is something that happens in authoritarian states. But when you focus on what you call the atomisation of the individual, I don't think people appreciate how powerful this is. Whether it's sociology, political studies, or psychology, the key focus is often this duality of human beings: we're rational individuals, as the Enlightenment would tell us. However, the duality is that we're also a group animal. We organise in groups for security and meaning, as we've done for thousands of years. And the individual does have to adjust to the group. So we have on one hand the rational individual, but also this instinct — almost — where we adapt to the group. How is this manipulated or channelled? Because on one hand we become more atomised, which is a trait of modernity — often defined by rationality and individualism — but if we aren't only individuals and aren't only rational, what does this mean for how society is impacted?
Are We Still in a Democracy? Propaganda and the Rational Individual
Mattias Desmet: To start with the question of whether we are still in a democracy — I don't really think so. Many people believe that a democracy is a state system where an elected majority rules the country, but that's not true. As Tocqueville said in the 19th century, a democracy is a state system where an elected majority rules the country with respect for the fundamental rights of minorities. And that's of course what lacks in a totalitarian system. In a totalitarian system it's also the majority that rules the country, but it has no respect whatsoever for the fundamental rights of minorities. That's very clearly what happened in the corona crisis — the rights of minorities were extremely violated. So I believe we are at danger of ending up in a completely anti-democratic system.
And as you said, it's connected to a more fundamental question: what is the nature of the human being? Is the human being a rational being? Since modernity, since the so-called scientific revolution in the 17th century, the mainstream dominant view on man was that the human being is a rational being, capable of rational thinking and making choices on the basis of rational argumentation.
You can clearly see this when the first modern democracy emerged in 1778 with the American Revolution. When you read the texts of the founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, you can see that they started from the idea that citizens — the human beings who were members of the state — would be able to think rationally and choose a good candidate in a democratic way. After five or ten years, the founding fathers of modern democracy already knew that they had made a fatal mistake and had been believing in illusions.
Thomas Jefferson actually started from the idea that a democracy can only function when the majority of the people are small landowners who live a self-sufficient life, who can take care of themselves on their own plot of land. He had very good reasons to believe so. He said: only when an individual is able to see all the facts, the entire reality that matters for his own life, can that individual choose a candidate and evaluate by his own rational thinking whether the political candidate they elected was a good or a bad one.
Very soon it turned out — because the world industrialised more and more — that this local life was an illusion. More and more people started to be dependent on industries that were invisible to them, which they couldn't observe themselves. Meaning that very soon modern democracy needed a new institution: the media and the press, who made all the invisible facts visible for the people, who told the people about the world that mattered to them.
In a next step, after ten years, they knew already that it was almost impossible to build a media system that would be objective — for all kinds of reasons. It was impossible, for instance, because there could never be enough eyewitnesses to describe every significant event that happened and allow journalists to report in an objective way. And even when there were eyewitnesses, all these eyewitnesses contradicted each other. So after ten years they knew that an objective press was an illusion. They also noticed that the population didn't want to pay for good journalism. And within ten years, journalism became dependent on large industrial and monetary players who wanted to finance it because they knew they could manipulate the population in this way. So in a very short span of time, journalism became necessary and became very close to propaganda.
The History of Modern Propaganda
What the first propagandists — probably the Marxists from 1850 onwards — noticed was that the telegraph had been invented, photography had been invented, and for the first time in history a kind of propaganda system emerged that was much more sophisticated than anything that had preceded it.
Probably the Crimean War was the first heavily propagandised war — 1853, we're talking about the Crimean War of the 19th century, which was, by the way, ideologically speaking exactly the same as the war in Ukraine we have now. Then in the second half of the 19th century, Marxism emerged and probably for the first time developed a very coherent and extensive propaganda system.
By the time the First World War happened, propaganda was already fully developed. And very interestingly, it started from exactly the opposite idea to what the mainstream worldview of modernity actually believed. The dominant view on man believed that the human being is a rational being. Well, propaganda started from exactly the opposite position: the human being is an emotional being. And when you control the emotions of the human being, you can do no matter what you want with it. When you spread narratives that are completely irrational but repeat them time and time again, people will start to buy into them.
So propaganda was actually the return of something that was repressed in the beginning of modernity — namely, that the human being is not a rational being, it's an emotional being. The human being is capable of rational thinking, but that requires first a certain control of its emotions. Without that control, it will become completely irrational.
So when you ask me whether we are living in a democracy — no, I don't think so. We are living in a society of which the most important organising principle is propaganda, which means a society where people are incapable of choosing democratically a candidate in a more or less lucid or rational way. Meaning that we fundamentally live in what people like Marcuse called a velvet glove authoritarian system. Up until now it's a velvet glove, but it could very soon take off its velvet gloves and become very aggressive and use terror.
Glenn Diesen: What you mentioned about repetition is quite important, because that's how narratives are formed. It's in human nature that we confuse the familiar with the real — if you hear something over and over again, it seems more real. It's also interesting that a lot of the original literature on propaganda — from people like Edward Bernays or Walter Lippmann — recognised that liberal democracies are more reliant on propaganda than others, simply because if sovereignty is transferred to the people, it's more important what they believe. But somehow we've propagandised what propaganda means, because now it's assumed to be something that others do — authoritarians — which is fascinating.
You also see that propaganda was more utilised when voting rights were expanded, because now there was more need to manage the masses. And when societies industrialised and became more complex, it's not realistic for people to understand everything happening — from agriculture in Brazil to great power politics in Russia. So you simplify everything down to very simple heuristics and stereotypes, and this becomes a way of managing.
And then you don't need brute force as in a dictatorship. This is also what Walter Lippmann made the point about — he worked in propaganda for the US government in the First World War. He made the point that individuals have a basic understanding of the world, and if you challenge those basic assumptions, you don't need to manipulate them further. They experience great discomfort when their worldview is challenged and will essentially reject new information no matter what it is. So propaganda doesn't mean you have to tell people what to believe or appeal to their rationality. All you have to do is appeal to building up those fundamental ideas of who's good and who's bad. Which is why in every war — we're a liberal democracy fighting imperial Russia, fighting Muslim extremist terrorists — if you just make people buy into the premise of good versus bad, all reality kind of goes away.
That's why I think psychology is an important aspect. It was Sigmund Freud who brought in the concept of group psychology — we're all nice rational individuals, but you have group psychology. We are group animals. We adjust to the group, and this will overwhelm the rational individual. And his nephew Edward Bernays essentially took that material, and it became the foundation of the literature on propaganda: how do you manipulate group psychology? How do you appeal to the non-rational aspect of human nature to overwhelm the rational individual?
But I was curious — you mentioned the fascists and communists had the 20th-century version of propaganda, but now we're moving into technocratic thinking and technocratic elites, which you described as dull and boring — I can't help but find that the perfect description of the EU at times. What is it about the technocrats that makes them the key conveyor of this kind of totalitarianism?
Why Technocrats Lead the New Totalitarianism
Mattias Desmet: That's a good question. I always wondered how Hannah Arendt knew back in 1953 that the next big totalitarian system would be a technocratic system led by dull bureaucrats and technocrats.
I think it has to do with the fact that since the middle of the 20th century, our worldview became more and more rationalistic and our society became more and more bureaucratic. The number of rules exploded. If I'm not mistaken — I'm not quite sure about the figures anymore — I think in the beginning of the 19th century only about 10% of people had an administrative or bureaucratic job, and now the totality of bureaucratic work and tasks is up to around 70%. Our society became more and more bureaucratic, meaning of course that it selects the people who by nature have a talent for or are attracted to bureaucracy.
I also think that the dominant worldview starting from the 17th century onwards became more and more materialist and rationalist in nature. We started to believe more and more that the human being is like a biological machine — which is one of the big problems, because it's not a biological machine, if you ask me. But anyway, we started to believe that. We started to consider the human being as a machine. This machine metaphor got more and more grip on society, until we arrive now at ideologies such as the one Yuval Noah Harari articulated in his mega-bestseller Homo Deus, where he says: of course we are ordered machines, we have no soul, even no real consciousness. If you open up the skull of a human being, you will only find biological electrical wires there. And so we can optimise this biological machinery of the human being just by merging the human being with all kinds of technological devices — sensors, brain chips, artificial joints, and so on.
This mechanistic view on man became stronger and stronger, which probably also explains why the ideologies that have a very big impact on the human being also became more and more mechanistic. The communist ideology was materialist in nature. The race theories of Hitler were also biological in nature. But now we are confronted with a society that is even much more in the grip of a much more explicit mechanistic worldview. Within such a society, where everybody more and more starts to look at the human being as a machine, the technocrats — the people who represent a technical, mechanistic expertise — will have more and more psychological impact.
So what we will see is that the new authoritarianism will be led publicly — and I'm talking about the public leaders of the new totalitarian system — by a combination of bureaucrats and technical experts. That seems rather logical if we start from the fundamentals of our culture.
The Crimean War as a Historical Parallel
Glenn Diesen: I was thinking about what you mentioned before — the Crimean War in the 1850s and how it's very similar to what we're doing today. There's been some important work by British scholars in the 1950s about the Crimean War in the context of Russophobia and propaganda. They made the point that before the Crimean War, the Turks were presented as barbaric easterners — essentially the bad guys to the Christian Greeks, the ones who were terrorising them. There was not a good view of the Turks — a little bit like how people recognised Ukraine was deeply, profoundly corrupt, and so on.
But when it was time to go fight the Russians in Crimea, new basic stereotypes and identities had to be created. Suddenly overnight the Turks became innocent victims — the damsel in distress — and that was their role. The Russian was this evil barbaric aggressor. And then the UK and France would be these knights in shining armour, altruistic, seeking to help the poor victim and go against evil. So essentially all great power politics, competing security interests, everything was stripped away, and it was just down to these bare, naked, silly stereotypes in which all strategic thinking, all room for compromise and mutual understanding, had to give way to goodness fighting evil. And if anyone challenged this view — saying this makes no sense, this is a bit ridiculous — then: are you with us, the in-group, the good? Or are you sympathising with the bad guys? They had a nice way of ensuring full conformity to this propagandistic view. I can't help but think we're doing exactly the same thing this time around. There's no difference at all.
Mattias Desmet: Literally. Also at a strategic level — the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 — the strategy of the allies in the Crimean War was inspired by Lord Palmerston, who was then the Secretary of External Affairs or something like that of Great Britain. He was the first who really realised that if you can isolate Russia from the Black Sea, Russia will cease to be a superpower, because they would have no access to the southern seas anymore. Palmerston built his entire strategic doctrine on exactly this: we have to isolate Russia from the Black Sea. And of course that's what NATO does now, or what NATO has been doing for the last thirty or forty years — trying to isolate Russia from the Black Sea.
It's very clever at a strategic level, but it's suicidal if you consider it from a different point of view. Everyone knows that when you really try to isolate Russia from the Black Sea, you are genuinely at risk of a nuclear war. And the strange thing is that's the most dangerous aspect of our society — that it is suicidal. Our rationalist, mechanistic worldview has led to an escalation of the death drive. Many people at the top just don't care anymore. They are so much in the grip of a destructive drive that they say: maybe we can just better enjoy one last time our full destructive potential, knowing that it might lead to the destruction of the entire planet.
That's the danger. That's what we are at risk of. And that's why we have to speak out. We didn't talk about this in this conversation, but as I showed in my book and as I've discussed time and time again in podcasts, there is only one real effective resistance against authoritarianism, and it's sincere speech. The people who do not fall prey to the mass formation have to make this difficult choice to continue to speak out, even when the people in the mass will not wake up. They probably won't. But sincere speech will prevent them from going to the last stage of every mass formation — the stage in which everyone starts to become convinced that it is their ethical duty to destroy everyone who doesn't go along with the masses. So we have to continue to speak out, and in particular to the people in charge, the people in power.
These people are hypnotised by their own propaganda. That's so typical. If you read Hitler's Mein Kampf, you will see that after a while he was completely hypnotised by his own propaganda. That's what happens time and time again with people who use propaganda. Look at Bernays, look at Lippmann — in the beginning they were very well aware that they were making propaganda. And after a while, if you read their works, you have to conclude that these people started to believe their own. That's why, in particular with respect to the so-called elite, we have to speak out — in a very quiet, calm way, not because we are convinced that we know the truth, but just because we think it is our ethical duty and our inalienable human right to articulate what we feel is the right thing to say.
Glenn Diesen: Lippmann made the point — which I think is important — that the benefit of propaganda, when you frame everything as a simple binary of good and evil, is that it enables you to mobilise the public for conflict, for war. In his time, for example: this is a fight to make the world free for democracies, a war to end all wars — it's easy to get people on board. But he did make the point that what makes it dangerous is that you can't make a workable peace anymore. Because once you convince the public that you're fighting against pure evil, only the complete destruction of the opponent can produce peace. You can't compromise with evil — good compromising with evil only corrupts further.
And again, this is where I think we are now. In the case of Russia, whenever I make the point that this is suicidal — I can see where this is going. When Europeans say we have to send more drones, we have to permit deep strikes in Russia, we have to kill off its economy — I know what's coming next. The Russians have to retaliate. They have to restore their deterrent. So we're moving towards direct war with a good possibility of a nuclear exchange. It's predictable where this is going, and one can get out of this. But first you have to recognise that we have competing interests, that they see this as a threat to their survival. But that's impossible now, because then you're appeasing evil. That's essentially the argument that can be reduced to this one little thing: you're supporting evil, you have to fight it.
Science as the New High Priesthood
My last question was about the technocrats. They've formed this collective consciousness. In the Enlightenment we had the whole idea that we have to focus on method, we have to prove something, we can't just rely on the authority of high priests. But contradictorily, it seems like science is now becoming the new high priesthood. We saw this during COVID — "trust the science, trust the science." We do the same with our wars: "trust the experts, look, this general says this or that." Often the expert class is bought — that's a propaganda method. You buy your media, your NGOs, your think tanks, and you can produce the knowledge you want.
For me this seems very strange. We took science from a method of testing, of having critical analysis and critical thought about an issue, and replaced it with simply saying: it's already sorted out, we have an expert, we have this high priest who has now already told us that this vaccine — although it may not actually protect you now — will save the world. The same with these wars: it's unprovoked, the experts have spoken. Do you think this gets to the heart of some of the problems of the expert class?
Mattias Desmet: Oh yes, definitely. What you point out here is a problem that existed from the very beginning of science. There was always this gap between the seminal scientists — the people who invented science — and the people who followed them. They were always completely different people, literally completely different characters.
If you look at Pythagoras — you could say it's a little arbitrary, but he could be considered an inventor of Western science — you could see that he was a mystical type who hoped to understand nature in a better way using philosophies about numbers and mathematics. Later on you could see exactly the same: the people who were the founders of Western science in the 17th century — Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, and so on — were all mystical types, religious types who tried to understand nature. For these people, science was a kind of philosophy. They wanted to understand the language of nature, but they didn't want to conquer nature.
You could see exactly the same again later on in the 20th century with all the famous physicists — Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, Maxwell, Newton — they were all fascinated by understanding the language of nature, and only in a second place, and very often not at all, did they want to use their science to change nature.
The people who followed these seminal scientists were almost always the completely opposite type. They were not the mystical type, not the religious type. They were the people who hoped that all these scientific theories could be used to conquer nature.
You can see something very strange there. All the experts at university do not even resemble the seminal scientists. Einstein wrote a wonderful paper about that, titled "Religion and Science." He said in that paper that the real scientist is identical to the truly religious person, and he raises a lot of arguments to underpin that. He said: should you remove all people from academia who are not true scientists, I'm afraid academia would be almost empty.
Heisenberg had a wonderful paper as well, where he explores the concept of the soul, and where Pauli asks him the question: do you believe in a personal God? It's a wonderful paper, and there too Heisenberg says exactly the same. He says: the problem is that I gave a lecture last evening together with Niels Bohr — he was in Copenhagen at the time — and the problem is that while Niels Bohr and I were primarily interested in the metaphysical questions, all these physicists who came to the lecture had no interest in metaphysics at all. They were all interested merely in the practical application of our new theories.
It's a wonderful paper in which you can see that the people who call themselves experts now often do so on the basis of claiming a scientific attitude, while having a completely different attitude and position in life than the people who actually produced science.
Closing Reflections on Sincere Speech and Resistance
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, that's a great contradiction. Now I want to thank you for taking the time. I think this is a very important topic, and I tend to be very worried about how fear and moral righteousness are used to impose a very suicidal conformity on us. In this country we even have some politicians who have made the point that the greatest resource we have is trust in government — so if you criticise government narratives, you're now an anti-state actor undermining our democratic system. We are in a very weird place. I very much appreciate that you've helped explain the psychology behind what I think is a totalitarian movement that many people can now start to sense very clearly. Thank you very much for taking the time, and sorry for going a bit over time.
Mattias Desmet: No problem, Glenn. I really enjoyed our conversation, and thank you for having me and for helping — together with so many people. I believe we really have to try to continue to articulate our dissident opinion. I think it's good to be loyal to the government to a certain extent, but there should be a limit to it. There should be a point where people start to say: wait, okay, I want to be loyal to the state, but only if it answers these questions. And that's something that doesn't happen now.
Glenn Diesen: Well, I will leave a link to your book in the description. Thanks again.
Mattias Desmet: Yes, and maybe to my Substack as well if you want.
Glenn Diesen: Oh yes, my — I will ask my assistant to send it.