Is Mattias Desmet 'controlled opposition'?

Deflection Away From The Personal To The Ideological. A Critique And Arguably Further Valuable Insight

Developing somewhat upon my previous commentary in October 2022,

The following authors, Daniel Broudy PhD, David Hughes PhD, and Valerie Kyrie PhD have published a further exhaustive and fascinating commentary on the subject of Mattias Desmet’s Mass Formation, The Psychology Of COVID-19 Atrocities (Rumble video ~ 40 mins). In their discourse, they highlight that ‘the chief danger in stretching the Mass Formation theory to cover the realities of Covid-19 is its potential to engender passive bystanding’. They do not dismiss Desmet but raise questions and cast doubts on his thesis.

The linked video visually highlights the atrocity and brutality instigated and incited by colluding politicians, civil servants and medical bureaucrats and by the police. The sting in this tale (pun intended) is the idea that ‘mass formation’, as described by Mattias Desmet, is advanced as a theoretical means by which mass atrocity may be explained.

Here I will not personally use the word ‘legitimize’ as it strikes me as an illogical oxymoron when juxtaposed to ‘mass atrocity’. The word ‘explain’ would suffice in its place, and these authors’ conclusion offers an alternative, arguably more nuanced explanation while at the same time raising some wider questions around Desmet’s thesis.

Broudy, Hughes, and Kyrie maintain:

Mattias Desmet’s theory of Mass Formation attracted a great deal of attention in 2022. In this review of Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, we argue that it manifests the psychology of atrocity – and that “Mass Formation” paradoxically serves to legitimize the mass atrocity perpetrated during the Covid-19 era.

Let us not forget that the COVID policies were widely applauded by those State sponsored actors previously mentioned (colluding politicians, civil servants and medical bureaucrats and by the police), comfortably ensconced as they were in a Plato’s COVID Cave manipulating the shadows on the wall or in some cases simply following the shadows, and then later the grandest of ironies, seeking to ‘apologise’ for doing just that, merely adding insult to injury:

Fostering Passive Bystanding

Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty ~ Let’s focus on the future, and fix the problems we still need to solve.

Like any virtue signalling ‘apology’, it betrayed itself, bereft of that vital and necessary characteristic, the one that ensures an apology is genuine ~ the accompanying offer of restitution.

A meaningful apology therefore, reflects an explicit effort to embrace a measure or sense of the suffering that was inflicted upon the injured party. While a public or noisy apology (whether offered or demanded) is fashionably de rigueur the virtue signalling apologist or demanding recipient is demonstrably uninterested in the genuine article.

Such apologies are either ignored or deemed meaningless. Ask anyone at the wrong end of a social media mob lynching. The apology and amends are meaningless to the mob.

On the other hand, when the virtue signalling apologist proffers an apology, it is invariably without restitution, let alone token restitution. The exercise appears an empty, manifestly selfish act manipulatively demanding of displays of further submission (forgiveness and the acceptance of the empty apology). In the latter circumstance, an implied threat hovers over the proffered ‘apology’ that is not accepted, for acceptance is socially demanded, deemed impolite if refused. It is a deft political way to both displace the attention away from the responsibility for the inflicted injury and to promote attention toward the coerced submissive acceptance. In this imboglio, psychological co-dependence may also feature as a further unhealthy feature ~ the addictive element being the manipulative power, control and dominance of a relationship or person, and the gain of co-operating with the manipulation.

Emily Ostler’s one sided polemic of October 2022 in the The Atlantic on the subject also has some memorable quotes, actual red flags that appear as deflective as they do dishonest, for example:

But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

I’m sure Kalus Schwab, Albert Bourla, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows would agree most emphatically.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.

Recently resigned PM New Zealand, the self-proclaimed singular source of truth, and her supra-governmental ‘Disinformation Unit’ managed by the NZ Intelligence Services with a purported glimpse of ministerial over-sight from time to time, would doubtless emphatically agree, notwithstanding the extant record breaking percent change from the average weekly excess mortality data, and the national infliction of utterly pointless, economically ruinous policies, and mandates.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

The WHO International Health Rules Review Committee is heavily invested and committed to solving any and all future problems ensuring a well directed, choreographed and tightly managed ‘long march’ through the next and everlasting ‘pandemic’ into despotic disaster.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well.

Perhaps this exists in the head of those incapable of insight or simply unwilling to learn and correct or, perhaps those possessed of an overly generous supply of hubris and confirmation-bias. The aspirational Thousand Year Reich seems a fair example. The protagonists would not stop ‘doom looping’ until they were stopped ~ therein lies a message.

The Psychology Of COVID-19 Atrocities (Rumble video).

The written article is here:

Covid-19 – Mass Formation or Mass Atrocity?

There were those who saw that the sharp turn away from democracy, due process, and human rights had nothing to do with empirical science whatsoever. And those who did not. The former have been mystified by the latter, and increasingly so as time has passed. Why can’t they see what’s going on?

Today, many still scratch themselves in vexation and perplexity. The polarisation is as strong as the powerful conditioning applied relentlessly by psy-ops conditioning, media and nudge units, not to omit outright thuggery and mandates, ongoing stonewalling and the relentless obliteration of a counterfactual narrative.

Let Us Visit A Précis Of The Conclusion Of Broudy, Hughes, And Kyrie:

The Psychology of Totalitarianism [Mattias Desmet] works to normalize key aspects of totalitarianism. Desmet announces early on that totalitarianism represents, “the defining feature of the Enlightenment tradition” (p. 7). Not liberation from the Divine Right of Kings. Not the birth of modern republicanism. Not the spirit of free and independent scientific inquiry. But totalitarianism, a politically and intellectually backwards phenomenon that did not emerge until the 1930s, as per Arendt (2004), upon whom Desmet (2022) draws. 

Broudy, Hughes, and Kyrie suggest that it is,

‘[significant that] Desmet reads history backwards to make the technocratic totalitarianism currently seeking to install itself seem inevitable. The latter is rooted in what Desmet calls “the mechanistic ideology” … “an ever-present, totalitarian undercurrent that consists of a fanatical attempt to steer and control life in far-reaching ways on the basis of technical, scientific knowledge” (p. 176).

‘The “mechanistic ideology” [is blamed by Desmet] — not a vampiric transnational ruling class apparently waging undeclared covert war against the people.

Blaming the ideology is the rhetorical move that divorces the responsibility of bad actors from their bad intent’.

A worldwide revolution in which 90 percent of the human race asserts its claim to a just world against the other 10 percent is inconceivable to Desmet. Seeing an “evil elite” as “the one and only cause of the misery,” he claims, leads to the “inevitable conclusion” that … this elite must be destroyed through a violent revolution.

Such a revolution, however, would most probably lead to the radical destruction of the ‘freedom movement’ itself. It would, indeed, rather be a Godsent gift for the elite, as it justifies destruction of the opposition through harsh repression.

The questions arise, is Desmet wittingly or unwittingly manufacturing a deflection away from the conspiratorial individual / corrupt Davos Cult/WEF/WHO crowd responsible for all of the “COVID” phenomenon, its alleged consequences and the associated subsequent developments, displacing a potential focus on such people by instead highlighting the implementation of the personless technocratic means of control, a faceless ideology beyond us all?

Is Desmet also articulating a threat of ‘harsh repression’ from these elite, who are terrified that their tenuous fragile and highly dependent grasp on the levers of power that could so easily be removed ?

Broudy, Hughes, and Kyrie go on to say,

It is entirely unclear why violence is the “inevitable” outcome of a line of reasoning that pins blame for COVID mass atrocity, not on the victimized and abused masses, but rather on a proportionately tiny ruling class responsible for worldwide crimes against humanity.

The numerical odds are overwhelmingly in favor of humanity. Violence is not a prerequisite for emancipation: it simply takes a critical mass to see what is happening and to refuse to comply with its own enslavement.

Note Desmet’s claim that “harsh repression” and “destruction of the opposition” by the “elite” is “justifie[d]” in case of insurrection. This sounds fascistic on its face. Extreme violence is permitted to the ruling class to defend itself, but Heaven forbid that the people, repeatedly subjected to the devices of mass atrocity, should entertain similar ideas about their own self-defense.

The quasi-mystical solutions proposed in the final part of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, titled “Beyond the Mechanistic Worldview,” reflect the book’s detachment from actually existing (i.e. empirical, as opposed to media-induced) sociopolitical realities. In three chapters titled “The Dead versus the Living Universe,” “Matter and Spirit,” and “Science and Truth,” Desmet offers some philosophical reflections on how to overcome scientism. But, as Marx (1969) famously writes, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” 

Solutions to totalitarianism do not lie in the philosophy of science. They lie in the outcome of class conflict. Desmet himself recognizes that, should leaders not be able to sustain the levels of manufactured “anxiety and aggression” necessary for Mass Formation, “the masses will wake up and become aware of the damage they have suffered, whereupon they will turn against the leaders in lethal fashion” (p. 116). Predictably, however, he leaps to the defense of the system:

The problem cannot be solved by the violent elimination of an evil elite. The essence of the problem of totalitarianism lies in enormous mass dynamics. This means the elimination of totalitarian leaders will be to no avail; they are utterly replaceable (p. 139).

This is true if the predatory practices of the present capitalist remain intact.

[think, crony capitalism, corporate technocratic globalism, ESG scores, the surveillance State, the erasure of free speech, the elimination of dissent and debate, the adoption of neo-Marxist critical race theory, endless wars and Trojan horse hobgoblins, the UNEP, media, academe and supra-governmental control - Rudi Dutschke reformulated Antonio Gramsci's philosophy of cultural Marxism with the phrase the long march through the institutions].

But given the world-historical events that have unfolded since 2020, this is far from certain. The ruling class appears intent on replacing present forms of capitalism with technocracy — a system of direct bio-digital enslavement that does not rely on secondary forms of control such as debt slavery (Broudy & Arakaki, 2020; Fitts, 2022). In the opposite corner, a rapidly awakening global population will surely have other ideas.

This is an interesting discussion that adds a significant element to and further consideration of Desmet’s thesis. It concerns me that Broudy, Hughes, and Kyrie should feel a necessity to lapse into ad hominem: “Predictably, however, he leaps to the defense of the system…” and in addition, be apparently supportive of a Marxist ideological polemic, ‘Solutions to totalitarianism do not lie in the philosophy of science. They lie in the outcome of class conflict’.

It may turn out that they are a pedantic stalking horse to weaken Desmet’s thesis? Perhaps we’re over thinking all this? Both discourses appear valuable and both highlight an existential threat to life, freedom, values, culture, customs, ethics, tradition and identity from a fluid threat that appears to originate from a rarefied cult that transcends a simple Left/Right framing and misdirection.

The corporate globalist technocratic goal, oblivion of the sacrosanct and sovereign individual apparently embodies Marxist/neo-marxist fascist jackboots and rainbows as it does the corporate exploitation of crony capitalism.

Resolving the worst of Left and Right into an technocratic amalgam appears the worst of all worlds combined into one.

Post Script

www.bobmoran.co.uk at his inimitable best