Mattias Desmet: Are you suffering from mass formation psychosis?

Summary

Professor Mattias Desmet presents his account of “mass formation”: how people can become absorbed into a shared narrative and collective cause, sometimes in ways that weaken independent judgment. He connects this process to propaganda, loneliness, social conformity, and the risks of totalitarianism. These are Desmet’s interpretations and claims, including his retrospective assessment of the pandemic.

How Desmet says mass formation develops

• A vulnerable social climate forms: Desmet argues that modern life can leave people isolated and without a sense of purpose. He points to loneliness and work experienced as meaningless as conditions that may produce diffuse anxiety, frustration, and anger.
• A narrative gives those feelings a focus: If a widely circulated story identifies a source of danger and offers a way to address it, people’s otherwise unfocused anxiety can attach to that threat and its proposed solution.
• Collective action supplies belonging and purpose: Taking part in a shared campaign can make people feel connected and engaged in a meaningful struggle. Desmet uses pandemic-era public displays of solidarity as examples of this dynamic.
• The group becomes bound by a shared idea: In his account, mass formation can initially feel like a cure for loneliness, but it may actually weaken relationships between individuals while strengthening their attachment to a collective cause or ideology.
• The process can become dangerous: Desmet describes mass formation as a kind of mass hypnosis. At its extreme, followers may dehumanize people who reject the dominant narrative and support excluding or eliminating them.

Desmet emphasizes the apparent paradox that extreme individual isolation may precede extreme collectivism. He distinguishes modern “lonely masses,” influenced by shared messages while physically apart, from crowds formed through people gathering in person.

Propaganda, conformity, and dissent

Desmet says propaganda works alongside pre-existing social vulnerabilities. He also argues that highly educated people may be particularly susceptible to conformity because education can reward social approval and teach people to think in similar ways.

He describes three broad groups in a society undergoing mass formation:

• A committed core, which he estimates may make up about 20–30% of the population and is strongly aligned around the same narrative.
• A larger, often silent group, which may have doubts but stays quiet out of fear or social pressure.
• A smaller group of dissenters, which he estimates at roughly 1–10% and regards as important because speaking out can interrupt the collective “hypnosis.”

On the pandemic, Desmet recounts that he initially criticized mortality estimates and lockdown policy, citing an early paper and projections for Sweden. He says that his statistical arguments did not change public opinion, and that he later focused on explaining the psychological processes behind collective acceptance of the prevailing narrative.

What Desmet recommends

His practical guidance is to resist mass formation without simply replacing one rigid group narrative with another:

• Speak honestly and sincerely. State what seems true to you without claiming exclusive access to truth or automatically declaring others wrong.
• Keep speaking, even if few people are persuaded. Desmet argues that dissent can disrupt a narrative’s hold and may help prevent the process from reaching its most extreme stage.
• Listen to people who disagree. Do not respond to exclusion or hostility by treating others as less than human.
• Stay loyal to ethical principles. Desmet presents preserving humanity and ethical conduct as the most important resistance to dehumanization.
• Be alert to alternative mass formations. Rejecting one dominant narrative does not make someone immune to being swept up in another, including one promoted by a charismatic political figure.
• Accept the cost of sincerity. Speaking candidly may damage one’s standing in the social “world of appearances,” but Desmet argues it can create a deeper sense of connection and stability.

Broader themes

• The pandemic as a possible warning and lesson: Desmet is cautiously optimistic that the experience made more people alert to propaganda and manipulation. He also warns that other political and international narratives could be used to encourage conformity or expanded control.
• Polarization in personal life: He says that, in his psychoanalytic practice, he has seen social division reflected in people’s lives. He worries that people with opposing views may stop engaging with one another.
• Religion, science, and shared experience: In response to a question about declining religious community, Desmet says returning to institutional religion alone would not solve the problem. He instead advocates recovering an experience of human unity, which he associates with both religious traditions and scientific curiosity.
• Reason and intuition: Desmet does not argue that rational thought should be abandoned. Rather, he says rational inquiry has limits and that deeper understanding can also involve empathy, intuition, and a felt connection with what one is trying to understand.
• Uncertainty and ethical steadiness: He anticipates possible social instability but argues that no one can reliably predict every outcome. In his view, ethical principles and sincere speech offer a steadier guide than trying to control events through prediction alone.

Speakers and sources mentioned

Speakers in the interview

• Florence Read — interviewer and UnHerd presenter.
• Mattias Desmet — professor of psychology at Ghent University and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism.

People, works, and institutions referenced

• Gustave Le Bon
• Jacques Ellul
• Hannah Arendt
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago
• Primo Levi
• Albert Einstein
• Max Planck
• Aldous Huxley — Brave New World and The Doors of Perception
• Yuval Noah Harari
• Donald Trump
• Theresa May
• The World Health Organization (WHO)
• The US Surgeon General’s office
• The UK House of Commons
• Sweden and the early pandemic projections discussed in the interview
• An unnamed Iranian woman interviewed by Desmet, who described events during the 1979 Iranian Revolution