I was hesitant about Desmet when he first came on the scene as I didn't find a lot in his published papers that indicated he was an expert in this area. But from your summaries it sounds like he's got a good handle on the topic and maybe even advanced it (as I think you intimated last time).
So I'll have to get his book and put it in the reading schedule.
Thanks again Harrison.
Love to know where you think the gaps are (or where he's missed the mark) at the end of your survey.
I don't know for sure, but I get the impression he's an expert in his own field of clinical psychology and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and that his work on mass formation is an extension of that, kind of like a professional hobby. He was thinking about these issues for a number of years before covid.
My biggest disagreements will come in the next 2 chapters. Not sure about the final section yet, because I haven't read that far yet. So far my plan is (probably) to do an installment on each of the next two chapters focusing on the ideas I disagree with, one more on the final section (three chapters), and then a final one on what I perceive to be the gaps.
Aug 15, 2022·edited Aug 15, 2022Liked by Harrison Koehli
Excellent suite of articles. This information has helped me immensely as I've battled several situations in recent years with close friends and relatives who have fallen victim to this psychoses. I've attempted unsuccessfully to make sense of their perspectives, which has been quite a painful and confusing process for me. However, the information you're laying out is spot on from what I've experienced and concisely reconciles so many of my questions. Thank you so much for expending the time and energy in creating these articles and placing them into the public sphere!
I have to use the left side of my brain to read/understand Desmet and McGilchrist....to find out I should not be overdoing it with the left side of my brain!
"There’s a scientific consensus, after all." The trouble is that most of what is purported to be science is junk science, especially in the "social sciences" which have attained an entirely undeserved respectability. A lot of the "numbers" come from those fields, in which cases the conclusions are often assumed and then "numbers" are cooked up to back those conclusions. Thus you get critical race theory and wokeism - go back in time and you get the Frankfort School and "scientific socialism", all of them games to demonstrate the desirability of one totalitarian system or another. The conclusion that individual freedom must be subsumed to the "needs of the collective" - usually determined by a very small group, an oligarchy or "leadership vanguard" - is the driving force behind the creation of these "numbers", and the "research" is paid for by the beneficiaries. And people are trained to accept and back this by systems of public education - government schooling - the basis for mass formation in every society in which this has occurred since the 1880s:
"Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers." http://wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
People coming out of such a system are ripe targets for mass formation. In the US, forty and fifty years ago, they were targets for authoritarian cults, many of which used the same Thought Reform techniques as seen today. I don't recall seeing references to Singer, Lifton, or Gatto in Desmet's work, and their work in explaining this phenomenon and the propensity for people to get caught up in it would be of great explanatory use.
"A conclusion thus rejected remains in our subconscious and in a more unconscious way causes the next blocking and selection of this kind. This can be extremely harmful, progressively enslaving a person to his own subconscious, and is often accompanied by a feeling of tension and bitterness."
In my youth, I knew a man who had been Parentally-Alienated as a child (though I did not have the terminology for it then). He had been taught under this Family Totalitarianism to hate his loving mother. She was the designated target. The alienation, btw, was carried out between his father and the father's Narcissistic adult sisters. Not in a divorce situation.
This alienated child grew up to be quite eccentric. Good job, but a loner. Married a rather delusional woman, had several children together. The rent was never paid, the children were seldom fed properly. He became a chronic gambler. One bad situation after another. He and his wife eventually withdrew into reclusiveness and several cats. Their son became Schizophrenic, which I do not think was out of the blue.
Totalitarianism -- family version or society-wide version, comes with a very hefty bill to pay.
"Desmet observes that while totalitarian leaders implement strict censorship, it also happens spontaneously, 'due to a paranoid informant mentality'”
Loyalty to the group narrative is very imporant to a totalitarian group. Anyone who questions or dissents will be shunned/smeared/punished. See modern Cancel Culture.
Spying on family and friends is prevalent in totalitarianism to make certain that everyone is following the narrative, and to report non-followers for punishment. Even Parentally-Alienated kids in Family Totalitariansim will spy regularly on the normal targeted parent, in the expectation that parent will be punished.
Mass formation is the hive-mind. Is it anxiety that makes people vulnerable to this ? Or does the anxiety indicate a larger lack/loss of Self? If so, you could expect any indicator of lack of Self to be found in the members of the Mass Formation. Seems to me the main issue is the lack of Self, and not the anxiety coming from it.
I thought that Mattias Desmet put too much emphasis on anxiety, specifically, making it appear as if the condition of anxiety was at fault. Presumably the anxiety was caused by something larger. I thought he needed to widen the picture and talk about the "larger something" which caused this anxiety.
Of course he does discuss the mechanized society, but if he meant a society leaning too heavily on left-brain thinking, it would have been helpful for him to point that out. To use it as a frame of reference. I find his work too abstract at times, even though I deal well in theory myself. All of his discussion about the Enlightenment and mechanization would still fail to point many readers to the conclusion of left-brain/right-brain thinking here.
Whereas I grasped that connection immediately with McGilchrist.
This was all a new concept to most readers. I would have liked to see Mattias Desmet give a good introduction of the dovetailing aspects of totalitarianism, not just Mass formation, and then offer a somewhat more concrete explantion of what is going on. I think he lost a large number of his readers through using too much abstraction. Many came to the end of the book and said, "what?"
I don't know whether anyone else has noticed, but Cluster-B types will triangulate with one another when they share a common scapegoat.
For instance, the PLO and the Nazis in WWII, both scapegoating Jews.
Or employees at an office who have nothing in common apart from sharing the same scapegoat (under different circumstances) will suddenly be best buddies. As if their venom draws them together.
Or, a more recognizable example would be the various ex-spouses of a Narc target, who were once spousal competition to one another -- but after divorce will come together to attack the target husband/wife they once shared at different times. This happens despite the fact that wife #2 will be entirely against wife #1 and on her husband's side while married to him. Then, even in an amiable divorce, the second Narc married to the target spouse will seek out and collude with the first Narc who was married to him. They often indoctrinate their (his) children together too. And live in a hatred stew.
This is all a very good explanation of how mass formation operates. But Desmet is keen to say that mass formation during Covid occurred because of our prior dehumanization (he implies) that only needed a little propaganda to get it going. The truth, however, is that we were basically normal people in terms of social connections and even spirituality prior to Covid (even if Christianity itself had fallen off, other spiritual beliefs replaced much of it) and it was massive propaganda and censorship that induced mass formation during Covid: the "steering," as Desmet puts it, was indeed intentional and not more-or-less spontaneously arising, like a Sierpinski triangle.
Do "de-humanized" people unconsciously attract undifferentiated masses under the authority of Cluster-B figures? Or do Cluster-B power-mongers arrive on their own initiative and the mind-virus spreads from there?
Very much enjoying your summary!
I was hesitant about Desmet when he first came on the scene as I didn't find a lot in his published papers that indicated he was an expert in this area. But from your summaries it sounds like he's got a good handle on the topic and maybe even advanced it (as I think you intimated last time).
So I'll have to get his book and put it in the reading schedule.
Thanks again Harrison.
Love to know where you think the gaps are (or where he's missed the mark) at the end of your survey.
I don't know for sure, but I get the impression he's an expert in his own field of clinical psychology and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and that his work on mass formation is an extension of that, kind of like a professional hobby. He was thinking about these issues for a number of years before covid.
My biggest disagreements will come in the next 2 chapters. Not sure about the final section yet, because I haven't read that far yet. So far my plan is (probably) to do an installment on each of the next two chapters focusing on the ideas I disagree with, one more on the final section (three chapters), and then a final one on what I perceive to be the gaps.
I find that the Mass Formation aspect of totalitarianism is just one part of it. Cannot really be removed from the whole phenomenon.
I think Harrison has done an excellent summary in this series.
Excellent suite of articles. This information has helped me immensely as I've battled several situations in recent years with close friends and relatives who have fallen victim to this psychoses. I've attempted unsuccessfully to make sense of their perspectives, which has been quite a painful and confusing process for me. However, the information you're laying out is spot on from what I've experienced and concisely reconciles so many of my questions. Thank you so much for expending the time and energy in creating these articles and placing them into the public sphere!
I'm very glad to have helped, Peteo!
I have to use the left side of my brain to read/understand Desmet and McGilchrist....to find out I should not be overdoing it with the left side of my brain!
"There’s a scientific consensus, after all." The trouble is that most of what is purported to be science is junk science, especially in the "social sciences" which have attained an entirely undeserved respectability. A lot of the "numbers" come from those fields, in which cases the conclusions are often assumed and then "numbers" are cooked up to back those conclusions. Thus you get critical race theory and wokeism - go back in time and you get the Frankfort School and "scientific socialism", all of them games to demonstrate the desirability of one totalitarian system or another. The conclusion that individual freedom must be subsumed to the "needs of the collective" - usually determined by a very small group, an oligarchy or "leadership vanguard" - is the driving force behind the creation of these "numbers", and the "research" is paid for by the beneficiaries. And people are trained to accept and back this by systems of public education - government schooling - the basis for mass formation in every society in which this has occurred since the 1880s:
"Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers." http://wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
People coming out of such a system are ripe targets for mass formation. In the US, forty and fifty years ago, they were targets for authoritarian cults, many of which used the same Thought Reform techniques as seen today. I don't recall seeing references to Singer, Lifton, or Gatto in Desmet's work, and their work in explaining this phenomenon and the propensity for people to get caught up in it would be of great explanatory use.
"A conclusion thus rejected remains in our subconscious and in a more unconscious way causes the next blocking and selection of this kind. This can be extremely harmful, progressively enslaving a person to his own subconscious, and is often accompanied by a feeling of tension and bitterness."
In my youth, I knew a man who had been Parentally-Alienated as a child (though I did not have the terminology for it then). He had been taught under this Family Totalitarianism to hate his loving mother. She was the designated target. The alienation, btw, was carried out between his father and the father's Narcissistic adult sisters. Not in a divorce situation.
This alienated child grew up to be quite eccentric. Good job, but a loner. Married a rather delusional woman, had several children together. The rent was never paid, the children were seldom fed properly. He became a chronic gambler. One bad situation after another. He and his wife eventually withdrew into reclusiveness and several cats. Their son became Schizophrenic, which I do not think was out of the blue.
Totalitarianism -- family version or society-wide version, comes with a very hefty bill to pay.
"But mass formation not only affects cognition and affect; it can also take sensory forms, leading to actual hallucinations (PT, p. 103)."
See the account of the Moving Statues of Ireland, in Ballinspittle, in July 1985. Group Dissociation, in formal terms.
"Desmet observes that while totalitarian leaders implement strict censorship, it also happens spontaneously, 'due to a paranoid informant mentality'”
Loyalty to the group narrative is very imporant to a totalitarian group. Anyone who questions or dissents will be shunned/smeared/punished. See modern Cancel Culture.
Spying on family and friends is prevalent in totalitarianism to make certain that everyone is following the narrative, and to report non-followers for punishment. Even Parentally-Alienated kids in Family Totalitariansim will spy regularly on the normal targeted parent, in the expectation that parent will be punished.
Mass formation is the hive-mind. Is it anxiety that makes people vulnerable to this ? Or does the anxiety indicate a larger lack/loss of Self? If so, you could expect any indicator of lack of Self to be found in the members of the Mass Formation. Seems to me the main issue is the lack of Self, and not the anxiety coming from it.
I thought that Mattias Desmet put too much emphasis on anxiety, specifically, making it appear as if the condition of anxiety was at fault. Presumably the anxiety was caused by something larger. I thought he needed to widen the picture and talk about the "larger something" which caused this anxiety.
Of course he does discuss the mechanized society, but if he meant a society leaning too heavily on left-brain thinking, it would have been helpful for him to point that out. To use it as a frame of reference. I find his work too abstract at times, even though I deal well in theory myself. All of his discussion about the Enlightenment and mechanization would still fail to point many readers to the conclusion of left-brain/right-brain thinking here.
Whereas I grasped that connection immediately with McGilchrist.
This was all a new concept to most readers. I would have liked to see Mattias Desmet give a good introduction of the dovetailing aspects of totalitarianism, not just Mass formation, and then offer a somewhat more concrete explantion of what is going on. I think he lost a large number of his readers through using too much abstraction. Many came to the end of the book and said, "what?"
I don't know whether anyone else has noticed, but Cluster-B types will triangulate with one another when they share a common scapegoat.
For instance, the PLO and the Nazis in WWII, both scapegoating Jews.
Or employees at an office who have nothing in common apart from sharing the same scapegoat (under different circumstances) will suddenly be best buddies. As if their venom draws them together.
Or, a more recognizable example would be the various ex-spouses of a Narc target, who were once spousal competition to one another -- but after divorce will come together to attack the target husband/wife they once shared at different times. This happens despite the fact that wife #2 will be entirely against wife #1 and on her husband's side while married to him. Then, even in an amiable divorce, the second Narc married to the target spouse will seek out and collude with the first Narc who was married to him. They often indoctrinate their (his) children together too. And live in a hatred stew.
This is all a very good explanation of how mass formation operates. But Desmet is keen to say that mass formation during Covid occurred because of our prior dehumanization (he implies) that only needed a little propaganda to get it going. The truth, however, is that we were basically normal people in terms of social connections and even spirituality prior to Covid (even if Christianity itself had fallen off, other spiritual beliefs replaced much of it) and it was massive propaganda and censorship that induced mass formation during Covid: the "steering," as Desmet puts it, was indeed intentional and not more-or-less spontaneously arising, like a Sierpinski triangle.
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Do "de-humanized" people unconsciously attract undifferentiated masses under the authority of Cluster-B figures? Or do Cluster-B power-mongers arrive on their own initiative and the mind-virus spreads from there?
Desmet vs. Breggin, I suppose.
Stay tuned....