Cyber Avenger

Mattias Desmet (@DesmetMattias), Belgian professor of clinical psychology and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, analyzes how propaganda becomes effective once loneliness and free-floating anxiety have prepared a population to accept it. He argues that the rapid shift from the COVID narrative to the Ukraine war demonstrates the mechanism of mass formation, and that only a minority willing to keep speaking out can prevent the process from reaching its most destructive stage. “I do believe that modern democracy actually from the beginning was a state system where propaganda was the organizing principle. Modern geopolitical leaders have a huge machinery at their disposal, like the internet, to manipulate public opinion. That’s one important aspect of propaganda. But there is a second one. You need a population who buys into it, and to do that you need a lonely population. The Corona narrative was dominant at the psychological level in Western culture. Then suddenly the war in Ukraine started, and almost overnight you could see how the Corona narrative lost its power at the beginning of 2022. The Ukraine narrative, which in many respects I do believe was as absurd as the corona narrative, replaced that function. People found a new object of anxiety, and all the anxiety, frustration, and aggression switched from the corona virus to Putin. In the same way, we could see that first people were willing to self-sacrifice to fight the corona virus, and then in the same strange way they were willing to self-sacrifice to fight Putin. There is always a group of people, usually small, which is resilient to it and doesn’t fall prey to the mass formation. There are always three groups. You have one group who is really in a hypnotic stage, hypnotized by the mass formation. That’s about 30% usually. That’s the really totalitarian group—the group who really believes and blindly buys into the narrative. Then there is a very large second group, 50–60% of the people, who know that there is something wrong with the narrative but who will remain silent because they want to choose the easy way. And then there is a very small group of people, between 1% and 10%, who see that there is something wrong with the mainstream narrative and who choose to speak out, who refuse to remain silent. Gustav Le Bon remarked something very important. He said that when a mass formation emerges, there is always a group of people who try to speak out and who try to wake up the masses. They will usually be very disappointed, because they will see that the people don’t want to wake up, that they want to continue to buy into the narrative, and that they even become very aggressive against those who speak out. He mentioned this already in his seminal work The Psychology of the Crowd, but he also notes that this group of people, even when it doesn’t succeed in waking up the masses, nevertheless has a very important effect. When these people continue to speak out, the mass formation usually will not go deeper, and it will not go to the last stage where the masses start to destroy everyone who doesn’t go along with them. When this group chooses to continue to speak out, no matter whether the masses wake up or not, the mass formation usually won’t go to the ultimate and destructive phase.” The danger is not only propaganda from above, but a population conditioned to accept it. The duty of those who recognize the manipulation is to keep speaking out, even when the majority refuses to listen.