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Professor of psychology and author Mattias Desmet is the world expert on mass formation psychosis, a condition he observed during the pandemic years. He joins UnHerd’s Florence Read to unpack the links between herd mentality and totalitarianism.
Watch the full interview above.
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SubscribeChapeau
Chapeau?
“I tip my hat to you, sir”
Absolutely brilliant.
I didn’t watch all of this, but several things Desmet says seem highly questionable. For example, he says in the last 200 years there has been the rise of an elite using propaganda. But wasn’t that actually more the case earlier on, during the Middle Ages? He says during the last 2 centuries, people became more susceptible to propaganda and he attributes this, ultimately, to the rise of rationalist world views. But shouldn’t reason actually make people less susceptible to being taken in by propaganda?
For all I know, he may also make some good points, but If we’re going to resist herd mentalities, I think we should question all speakers. Including this one.
You are right that neither information manipulation nor crowd hysteria are new.
As Desmet himself says, crowd psychology was already theorised at the end of the 19th century by Gustave LeBon. But that crowd – or mass – psychology required a physically present crowd.
Propaganda is a step up from manipulation in that it is scientific. The Brits already had very sophisticated propaganda operations in WW I. Between the wars, Edward Bernays – a nephew of Sigmund Freud – further developed the field.
The interesting thing about the “CoViD” hysteria was the mass was virtual. You had people united by nothing more than TV and the internet enthusiastically shouting “crucify him”. Centuries of science were tossed overboard, facts were banned, actual experts cancelled, constitutions suspended, and the floor given to manipulative apparatchiks and snake oil salesmen. It was truly amazing.
Boy, UnHerd did not want me to post that comment – I couldn’t count the reCAPTCHA verifications I had to go through…
Proof, if it were needed, that we have to ‘sacrifice something’ – even the ability to be heard on a platform that purports to uphold freedom of speech & expression – in order to hold on to your own integrity…
The events you describe for COVID are entirely paralleled by the net zero movement.
Matthias loses credibility by failing to mention the biggest mass formation of our time: the “climate crisis”. It has prophets, it excommunicates non believers, it dehumanizes “deniers”, legitimizes unethical conduct (art vandalism and road blockages) and it brings totalitarianism (ICE bans, levz, etc).
I guess the difference between Covid and climate is that as a society we had much more time to iron out the details for the latter. We have this clear causal chain:
Humanity is significantly raising the amount of CO2 in the atomsphere by burning fossil fuels – CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas by absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation – Indeed we observe a significant increase in the Earth’s temperature – This increase in temperature goes along with increased sea levels and more extreme weather phenomena.
And I have not actually heard any scientific argument that is able to cut off that causal chain. Where would you say is this causal chain disrupted? I guess there is some discussion if part of the observed climate change is not anthropogenic (and that it is just a coincidence that it happens simultaneously with industrialisation). And there is some discussion if scientific progress might help us overcome all eventual downsides of climate change. But I don’t see how people argue that it is not happening.
In the case of Covid you have mainstream scientists and doctors using established scientific methods to point out loopholes in the way Covid was dealt with. In the case of climate change I have not seen any of that. Anything I heard is in the form of random anecdotes:
“But there was still snow in West Minnesota in the April of 2022 … so global warming can’t be real.”
“But sea levels in Vodice on the Adriatic coast have actually gone down between 2021 and 2023, so it must all be a hoax.”
The point is that these are anecdotes relevant to very specific places and times. I don’t think anyone is credibly disputing the bigger picture I painted above.
I have heard many contradictory views on climate change, so don’t know what to think. One of the things can makes me question the establishment narrative is that the pattern of rise in temperature over the last century, or more, doesn’t seem to correlate with the rise in CO2 emissions. For example, between the 1940s and about 1980, CO2 emissions were rising quite a lot, but temperatures were falling slightly. The same applies between about 1850 and about 1918.
I’m not an expert on this subject, and may well be missing relevant information, but this suggests to me that the normal theory may not be adequate to explain what’s going on.
My feeling is that in the case of Covid the dissenting voices are people that really know what they are talking about. Those are experts and established scientists, also by mainstream standards. Climate change is different. I have never heard anyone, who actually seems to know what they are talking about, argue against climate change. I am sure places like UnHerd or The Free Press would feature such people, if those people actually had anything coherent to say.
There are lots of factoids and anecdotes being thrown around. But the problem is: Science does not work via factoids and anecdotes. We need people that are able to analyze the big picture.
Are you talking about something like this figure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate#/media/File:Global_Temperature_And_Forces_With_Fahrenheit.svg
Yes, there are two tiny dips but the trend after 1980 is overwhelming. It seems to me very much like “wishful thinking” to use those two little dips to explain away everything that happened after 1980.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
The first graph on this site shows the same information presented differently. The period after 1980 is a part which fits with the normal theory. But the other periods, I mentioned, don’t. Are they tiny? They take up quite a lot of the graph – about half the time period. Yes, both temperature and emissions rise overall over the period, but they don’t follow the same pattern or correlate well.
The graph doesn’t look to me like a proof that that the cause of temperature changes basically come down to emissions. At the very least, some other significant factor is also affecting temperature. Given the lack of good correlation with emissions increase, it looks unclear to me how much of it is due to emissions and how much to other factors.
I don’t know the answer, but this evidence doesn’t seem to give it clearly.
For some reason, my earlier reply has not appeared.
On this link the first graph shows the same information, presented differently.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
The periods I referred to, when the temperature trend was downwards, occupy about half of the total time that the graph covers. But emissions were climbing for all that time. So there does not seem to be a good fit between emissions and temperature change . For example, in the interwar period temperatures were rising, while in the post war period up to the 70s they were falling. But emissions were higher in the second period.
Given all of that, it seems to me that the graph fails to show that the temperature change is mainly due to the level of CO2 emissions. It’s possible that it is, but the graph doesn’t demonstrate it. Presumably emissions have some effect and some other factor or factors also have some effect. Without more information, we can’t know how much of the temperature change is due to which factor.
At least, that’s my conclusion, but, of course, I may be wrong.
It was a nice discussion! But I think the important point here is that there was a mass hypnosis on the other side, too. What I mean is all the flat-Earth-adjacent denial that Covid is a thing at all. How it’s all made up by Bill Gates to put nanomachines into our bodies. How we know without clinical trials that drug X is the miracle drug saving us from Covid (even if Covid was not a thing in the first place).
So, my problem during Covid was that I had the choice between ludicrous denial of basic facts and the admittedly too authoritarian government mainstream. Between the “Covidiots” and the “Covidians” as it was nicely put. I chose the second and joined team Covidian. Looking back, I would have liked to be somewhere in between.
But what was the main thing holding me back from a more nuanced view? It was all this incessant noise and ludicrous conspiracy theories on social media. For every nugget of truth I would have had to dig through 10 mutually contradictory conspiracy theories to find something that actually made sense. Any reasonable objection to Covid that I might have heard I just put instinctively into the flat-Earth camp and did not think about it any longer.
So, in my opinion, the main thing holding us back from finding truth and compromises on Covid and so many others of today’s topics is the incessant noise coming from X and other social media holding us back from any nuanced and free discussion. X is the ultimate herd mentality driver in today’s world. So, if anyone wants to “unherd”, then we have to rethink the role of X in our society.
Perhaps the ideal is to just resist herd mentalities, whichever direction they come from. Always think critically but with an open mind and be honest about any doubts you have about any ideas, no matter which side supports them. it’s not easy, though. We’re naturally tribal.
Thank you Florence for this excellent interview