Can an advanced present-day society not only be wrong, but do all in its power to avoid being right? Can it basically lose its collective mind? Psychologist Mattias Desmet believes it can, and has assembled the intellectual framework to evaluate a societal descent in which overweening governments not only robbed people of their freedoms, but the people gladly colluded in the process. In Desmet’s view, whole populations have fallen into the grip of a “group hypnosis that destroys ethical awareness,” one that also envelopes society’s (allegedly) best and (ostensibly) brightest, and one whose worst effects could still lie ahead. In her review of Desmet’s important new book, Margret Kopala explores how we got here and where we may yet go.
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Margret Kopala
July 12, 2022
Can an advanced present-day society not only be wrong, but do all in its power to avoid being right? Can it basically lose its collective mind? Psychologist Mattias Desmet believes it can, and has assembled the intellectual framework to evaluate a societal descent in which overweening governments not only robbed people of their freedoms, but the people gladly colluded in the process. In Desmet’s view, whole populations have fallen into the grip of a “group hypnosis that destroys ethical awareness,” one that also envelopes society’s (allegedly) best and (ostensibly) brightest, and one whose worst effects could still lie ahead. In her review of Desmet’s important new book, Margret Kopala explores how we got here and where we may yet go.
The moment Arendt had anticipated in 1951 seems to be rapidly approaching: the emergence of a new totalitarian system led, not by ‘ring leaders’ like Stalin and Hitler, but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats.
—Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism
One scene in Netflix’s noir detective series Babylon Berlin, set against the backdrop of Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s, struck a particularly uneasy chord for a viewer living through the government response to Covid-19. A player in the recently formed National Socialist German Workers’ Party proposes to a group of high-placed Nazi sympathizers that they use Germany’s youth to foment civil unrest. This, he foretold, would generate fear among the people, making them more susceptible to – or even welcoming of – authoritarian rule.
Tyrannical rulers wielding fear as a crude tool of control is an ancient and sadly familiar tale, but coldly planning the systematic application of fear to achieve sustained psychological manipulation is another story. It is one about which I had grown apprehensive since the appearance of Covid-19. Although fear is a sometimes useful emotion (among other benefits, it keeps most of us away from the edge of cliffs), the eruption of official fear in the weeks following the declaration of a global pandemic seemed greatly out of proportion.
And it was strangely combined with incomplete or contradictory factual information. Every information source blared that Covid-19 cases were proliferating, yet no one explained what a “case” comprised. People were dying and being hospitalized, we heard, but what about the rest? What was their status? And what categories were truly at risk? Statistics without context was fearmongering, some began to point out, but to little avail as fear quickly took over nearly everything.
