Professor Mattias Desmet - Psychology of Mass Formation Totalitarianism.

Professor Matthias gets straight to the point!
The world is in the grips of mass formation―a dangerous, collective type of hypnosis―as we bear witness to loneliness, free-floating anxiety, and fear giving way to censorship, loss of privacy, and surrendered freedoms. It is all spurred by a singular, focused crisis narrative that forbids dissident views and relies on destructive groupthink.

There’s a great deal of hope in the truth that totalitarian regimes ALWAYS implode.

We can’t crush totalitarian regimes (global or local). Nor can we “take back” anything. That is fact. Once the totalitarian regime is established, it must exhaust and extinguish itself. On the other hand, we are not powerless. Our honorable and effective contribution to the implosion process is to remain dissident, hold ground, and remember that even little acts of speaking out are poignant and magnified in these times.

While much of the analysis here is set out as the mass vs. the truth-speakers, in a more primitive sense it’s the fearful vs. the fearless. Specifically, those who dreadfully fear death vs. those who, for whatever reason, don’t. (Not that any of us are free of fear, but the old adage applies: courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the determination to keep going anyway.)

As fear burgeons and becomes the organizing principle of the mass, compassion plummets. Multiply that times a million individuals in various positions of power and authority—all in an intensely enforced positive feedback loop—and the mass becomes ruthless and brutal indeed.

Thus, it should come as no shock that those who integrate into the mass fear are stripped of their humanity first. Then they strip the Other.

But, again, the good news here is that no matter how overwhelming the mass may appear, history proves its vulnerabilities. There’s value in buying time and delaying the atrocities. There’s moral and practical value in speaking the truth in ways large and small, matter-of-factly declining to go along, in love, in living without fear of death. Light, no matter how small, does extinguish darkness.

STAY HARD!