Class Formation Psychosis

Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism is available today. Let’s get to it by first taking a short detour. Take 37 seconds to watch a video:

SportsCenter @SportsCenter

This fan caught a baseball and gave it to a kid. Later in the game, the kid got another ball, so he returned the favor 🥺 (via @MLB)

That just happened. There are a couple of mask cultists mixed into the middle, there, but mostly what you see is bunch of happy people watching baseball together, talking to each other, interacting freely and without fear. They even exchange a physical object without dousing the thing in hand sanitizer. (Remember the county government press conference on the question of how to handle your balls?)

Now, here’s a picture of a recent panel discussion among public health experts in Los Angeles County, which I wrote about here:

So the normals are just living their lives, and appearing to enjoy it, while the status-projecting elite are engaged in an effort to signal fear and control.

I encourage you to read The Psychology of Totalitarianism, especially as an account from an early adopter of the view that our pandemic hysteria has been irrational. But I’m surprised to find myself not buying the argument. Desmet gets the dynamic, but misses the subject: He sees what’s happening, but not who’s doing it. The book is about “the masses,” as in this passage from Chapter 6:

We have to add one more important characteristic to the problematic psychological properties of mass formation: radical intolerance of other opinions and a strong tendency toward authoritarianism. To the masses, dissident voices appear 1) antisocial and devoid of solidarity, because they refuse to participate in the solidarity that the mass formation creates; 2) completely unfounded, as critical arguments are not assigned any cognitive or emotional weight within the narrow circle of attention of the masses; 3) extremely aversive because they threaten to break the intoxication, and in this way confront the masses again with the negative situation that preceded the mass formation (lack of social bond and meaning, indefinable fear and unease); 4) extremely frustrating because they threaten to remove the venting of latent aggression.

This radical intolerance ensures that the masses are convinced of their superior ethical and moral intentions and of the reprehensibility of everything and everyone who resists them: Whoever does not participate is a traitor of the collective.

As someone who spent every moment of the pandemic traveling all over the place, family camping our way through a dozen states and visiting national parks and other tourist-centered destinations, I’ve never met the masses who were consumed with this fearful aggression. In South Dakota in the summer of 2020, I was sitting next to my tent in a state park when some dads on another campsite saw my license plate, then marched over and said that holy shit, man, did you really drive all the way here from California? I hadn’t seen a mask in days, and no one maintained six feet of social distance. As I experienced all over the state, we shook hands and talked. A few days before, at a state park in eastern Wyoming, the couple in the neighboring campsite walked over and offered us dinner, then got trashed on Bud Light — which I didn’t know was possible, on the grounds of “making love in a canoe” — while they hung out by our campfire.

But where we found intolerance and enforced fearfulness was in space controlled by government, as when we got in line outside the Jenny Lake store and quickly drew the attention of the, I am not making this up, line monitor. Masks! Masks! Masks! she helpfully explained, pointing at her masked face to show us what a mask was. Maskless people swarmed around us on all sides, a fact I mentioned to her. “But they’re not in line,” she explained, finding the explanation complete.

Our mass formation psychosis didn’t form in the masses; it formed in policy, and as a social performance among people who wish to be perceived as cultural elites, sniffing at the trash who don’t believe in science. Professors and politicians were highly mask-compliant, and wanted you to know it. My impression is that a quarter to a third of the population locked arms with them and fought proudly for their fear performance, while another third-plus went along to get along, and the balance — especially outside the Blue Zones — just completely ignored the whole mess.

I agree with Desmet. Mass formation happened. But it happened much more narrowly than I think his description allows. It happened in government, media, academia, and among Blue Zone status performers. It was a class movement, not a mass movement.

What’s most striking now is that the decliners are on the ascendant, and critical voices are becoming loud and insistent. Despite a relentless scorched earth campaign from the media, academia, and public health officials against heretics, doubts are growing about Covid-19 vaccines. This remarkable development happened inside the academy:

Finally, the brutally stupid and breathtakingly evil authorization of Covid vaccines for very young children, with the CDC recommending vaccination down to six months, is slamming into a wall of popular opposition. Companies that provide vaccination in their pharmacies are announcing that they won’t vaccinate toddlers, and the available evidence suggests that parents mostly aren’t on board with the plan. All of these people, pharmacy operators and parents alike, are about to run into a storm of vituperation from government scolds and media idiots — but here we are, in the third year of a calculated, organized campaign to inculcate fear, and look at the effect on the masses:

Planned compliance of three in ten isn’t evidence of the psychology of totalitarianism. Thank God. Mass formation psychosis is real. It happened in Brooklyn and Santa Monica, Madison and Berkeley.