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What is mass formation actually ?
It’s a specific kind of group formation that makes people radically
blind to everything that goes against what the group believes in. In this way,
they take the most absurd beliefs for granted.
To give one example, during the Iran revolution in 1979, a mass
formation emerged and people started to believe that the portrait of their
leader—Ayatollah Khomeini—was visible on the surface of the moon. Each time
there was a full moon in the sky, people in the street would point at it,
showing each other where exactly Khomeini’s face could be seen.
A second characteristic of an individual in the grip of mass formation
is that they become willing to radically sacrifice individual interest for the
sake of the collective. The communist leaders who were sentenced to death by
Stalin—usually innocent of the charges against them—accepted their sentences,
sometimes with statements such as, “If that is what I can do for the communist
party, I will do it with pleasure.”
Thirdly, individuals in mass formation become radically intolerant for
dissonant voices. In the ultimate stage of the mass formation, they will
typically commit atrocities toward those who do not go along with the masses.
And even more characteristic: they will do so as if it is their ethical duty.
To refer to the revolution in Iran again: I’ve spoken with an Iranian woman who
had seen with her own eyes how a mother reported her son to the state and hung
the noose with her own hands around his neck when he was on the scaffold. And
after he was killed, she claimed to be a heroine for doing what she did.
Those are the effects of mass formation. Such processes can emerge in
different ways. It can emerge spontaneously (as happened in Nazi Germany), or
it can be intentionally provoked through indoctrination and propaganda (as
happened in the Soviet Union). But if it is not constantly supported by
indoctrination and propaganda disseminated through mass media, it will usually
be short-lived and will not develop into a full-fledged totalitarian state.
Whether it initially emerged spontaneously or was provoked intentionally
from the beginning, no mass formation, however, can continue to exist for any
length of time unless it is constantly fed by indoctrination and propaganda
disseminated through mass media.
If this happens, mass formation becomes the basis of an entirely new
kind of state that emerged for the first time in the beginning of the twentieth
century: the totalitarian state.
This kind of state has an extremely destructive impact on the population
because it doesn’t only control public and political space—as classical
dictatorships do—but also private space. It can do the latter because it has a
huge secret police at its disposal: this part of the population that is in the
grip of the mass formation and that fanatically believes in the narratives
distributed by the elite through mass media. In this way, totalitarianism is
always based on “a diabolic pact between the masses and the elite” (see Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism).
I second an intuition articulated by Hannah Arendt in 1951: a new totalitarianism is emerging in our society.
Not a communist or fascist totalitarianism but a technocratic totalitarianism.
A kind of totalitarianism
that is not led by “a gang leader” such as Stalin or Hitler but by dull
bureaucrats and technocrats.
As always, a certain part of the population will resist and won’t fall
prey to the mass formation. If this part of the population makes the right
choices, it will ultimately be victorious. If it makes the wrong choices, it
will perish.
To see what the right choices are, we have to start from a profound and
accurate analysis of the nature of the phenomenon of mass formation. If we do
so, we will clearly see what the right choices are, both at strategic and at
the ethical levels.
That’s what my book The Psychology of Totalitarianism presents: a
historical–psychological analysis of the rise of the masses throughout the last
few hundreds of years as it led to the emergence of totalitarianism.
The coronavirus crisis did not come out of the blue. It fits into a
series of increasingly desperate and self-destructive societal responses to
objects of fear: terrorists, global warming, coronavirus. Whenever a new object
of fear arises in society, there is only one response: increased control.
Meanwhile, human beings can only tolerate a certain amount of control. Coercive
control leads to fear and fear leads to more coercive control. In this way,
society falls victim to a vicious cycle that leads inevitably to
totalitarianism (i.e., extreme government control) and ends in the radical
destruction of both the psychological and physical integrity of human beings.
We have to consider the current fear and psychological discomfort to be a problem in itself, a problem that cannot be reduced to a virus or any other “object of threat.” Our fear originates on a completely different level—that of the failure of the Grand Narrative of our society.
This is the narrative of mechanistic science,
in which man is reduced to a biological organism.
A narrative that ignores the psychological, spiritual, and ethical dimensions of human beings and thereby has a devastating effect at the level of human relationships.
Something in this narrative causes man to become isolated from his fellow man, and from nature. Something in it causes man to stop resonating with the world around him.
Something in it turns human beings into atomized
subjects. It is precisely this atomized subject that, according to Hannah
Arendt, is the elementary building block of the totalitarian state.
At the level of the population, the mechanist ideology created the
conditions that make people vulnerable for mass formation. It disconnected
people from their natural and social environment, created experiences of
radical absence of meaning and purpose in life, and it led to extremely high
levels of so-called “free-floating” anxiety, frustration, and aggression,
meaning anxiety, frustration, and aggression that is not connected with a
mental representation; anxiety, frustration, and aggression in which people
don’t know what they feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive about. It is in
this state that people become vulnerable to mass formation.
The mechanist ideology also had a specific effect at the level of the “elite”—it changed their psychological characteristics. Before the Enlightenment, society was led by noblemen and clergy (the “ancien régime”).
This elite imposed its will on the masses in an overt way through its authority. This authority was granted by the religious Grand Narratives that held a firm grip on people’s minds. As the religious narratives lost their grip and modern democratic ideology emerged, this changed.
The leaders now had to be
elected by the masses. And in order to be elected by the masses, they had to
find out what the masses wanted and more or less give it to them. Hence, the
leaders actually became followers.
This problem was met in a rather predictable but pernicious way. If the masses cannot be commanded, they have to be manipulated. That’s where modern indoctrination and propaganda was born, as it is described in the works of people such as Lippman, Trotter, and Bernays. We will go through the work of the founding fathers of propaganda in order to fully grasp the societal function and impact of propaganda on society.
Indoctrination and propaganda are
usually associated with totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union, Nazi
Germany, or the People’s Republic of China. But it is easy to show that from
the beginning of the twentieth century, indoctrination and propaganda were also
constantly used in virtually every “democratic” state worldwide. Besides these
two, we will describe other techniques of mass-manipulation, such as
brainwashing and psychological warfare.
In modern times, the explosive proliferation of mass surveillance
technology led to new and previously unimaginable means for the manipulation of
the masses. And emerging technological advances promise a completely new set of
manipulation techniques, where the mind is materially manipulated through
technological devices inserted in the human body and brain. At least that’s the
plan. It’s not clear yet to what extent the mind will cooperate.
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