Mattias Desmet

Mattias Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium and a practising psychotherapist. He is the author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022), in which he develops his theory of mass formation — a psychological process he argues explains why large populations comply with authoritarian measures they would ordinarily reject. Desmet's ideas entered mainstream global discourse during the COVID-19 Pandemic after fellow sceptic Robert Malone cited his work during a widely-shared podcast appearance in January 2022. He has since become one of the more widely-discussed academic voices in debates over pandemic policy, technocratic governance, and the psychological roots of modern compliance.

Background

Desmet trained in clinical psychology and statistics at Ghent University, where he subsequently built an academic career spanning both quantitative research methodology and psychoanalytic theory. His academic profile is unusual in that it bridges hard statistical analysis — he has published on research methodology and statistical errors in the empirical sciences — and the more interpretive traditions of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Before the COVID-19 period, Desmet had already developed a sustained critical interest in what he terms scientism — the philosophical position that scientific and technical methods are, in principle, capable of solving all human problems, including social, political, and existential ones. He viewed this ideology as fundamentally different from science itself, and as a distortion that had come to dominate Western institutions, universities, and public policy.

His earlier academic work explored the relationship between statistical modelling, prediction, and human behaviour — areas that gave him an early scepticism toward epidemiological models and the certainty with which they were being applied to governance decisions. This background informed his later analysis of the COVID-19 response as a case study in the pathologies of technocratic management.

Mass Formation Theory

The centrepiece of Desmet's work is the concept of mass formation, which he defines as a specific psychological process in which a large group of people become collectively and hypnotically fixated on a single object of anxiety, bonding tightly around a shared narrative that names and addresses that anxiety. The process produces intense social cohesion within the group — but simultaneously generates intolerance, and sometimes aggression, toward those outside it or critical of it.

Desmet identifies four pre-conditions that make a population susceptible to mass formation:

Social atomisation and loneliness — a widespread breakdown of genuine community bonds, leaving individuals isolated despite nominal social connection.
Lack of meaning or purpose — a generalised sense that life lacks coherent direction or value, often linked to the decline of religious, cultural, and communal frameworks.
Free-floating anxiety — pervasive anxiety that is not attached to any specific, identifiable object. The anxiety is real but diffuse, and people are unable to name its cause.
Free-floating frustration and aggression — similarly unanchored feelings of frustration and anger, present in the population but lacking a clear target.

When these four conditions are simultaneously present, Desmet argues, a population is psychologically primed. The emergence of a dominant narrative — one that names a clear enemy or threat and proposes collective action against it — channels the accumulated anxiety into that object. The result is a powerful, quasi-hypnotic group bond. People experience relief, solidarity, and renewed purpose through participation in the collective struggle. The psychological reward of this bond makes dissent feel intolerable, and dissenters are experienced as dangerous rather than merely wrong.

Desmet draws an analogy to hypnosis: the mass formation process creates a narrowed field of attention, in which the fixated object dominates perception and alternative information is systematically filtered out. Those under mass formation are not simply deceived — they have undergone a genuine psychological transformation in how they process reality.

The implications for compliance are significant. Under mass formation, populations will comply with measures — prolonged isolation, masking, experimental medical treatments, surveillance, suppression of dissent — that they would, under ordinary psychological conditions, recognise as disproportionate or oppressive. The compliance is not primarily coerced; it is psychologically motivated by the need to sustain the group bond and the sense of meaning it provides.

Desmet links this framework to broader concepts explored in Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Subliminal Programming, while insisting that mass formation is a distinct, population-scale phenomenon rather than an individual-level manipulation.

The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Published in Dutch in 2020 and in English translation in 2022, The Psychology of Totalitarianism extends the mass formation theory into a broader historical and philosophical argument about the origins of modern totalitarianism.

Desmet's central contention is that totalitarianism does not arise primarily through top-down force. Rather, it emerges when a population has been sufficiently stripped of meaning, community, and authentic experience that it becomes psychologically receptive to — and actively participates in — its own subjugation. Totalitarian systems, in this reading, are enabled by the very populations they oppress.

He draws on several intellectual traditions:

Hannah Arendt's analysis of the banality of evil and the role of atomised, rootless populations in enabling totalitarian regimes.
Gustave Le Bon's crowd psychology, which identified the regressive and suggestible qualities of collective mental states.
Psychoanalytic theory — particularly the Freudian and Lacanian traditions — to explain how unconscious anxiety and desire become channelled into political movements.

Desmet argues that modern technocratic society has industrialised the production of precisely those psychological preconditions that enable mass formation. By reducing human beings to data points in administrative systems, undermining traditional communities and meaning-structures, and promoting an atomised consumer identity, technocracy creates populations that are chronically lonely, anxious, and hungry for collective purpose.

The book is not solely a diagnosis. Desmet also proposes that the antidote to mass formation lies in speaking the truth, maintaining authentic relationships, and sustaining genuine community — not in counter-propaganda or political opposition alone.

Technocracy and Scientism

A recurring theme in Desmet's work is the distinction between science and scientism. He defines science as a rigorous method of inquiry characterised by openness, falsifiability, and intellectual humility. Scientism, by contrast, is an ideology — the belief that scientific-technical management is the appropriate response to all human questions, including those of meaning, ethics, and politics.

Desmet argues that the institutions of modern governance — including those promoted through frameworks like the Great Reset, Agenda 2030, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution — embody scientism rather than science. They treat populations as systems to be optimised, and present political choices as technical necessities, removing them from democratic deliberation.

This critique connects directly to his account of the Technocratic Agenda: that the concentration of decision-making in expert bureaucracies and supranational organisations does not represent an advance in rationality but a pathological narrowing of the human world that generates the very anxieties and disconnections that make populations vulnerable to mass formation.

In this sense, Desmet frames technocracy not merely as a political problem but as a psychological hazard — an institutional structure that produces the conditions for its own totalitarian escalation.

COVID-19 and Mass Formation

Desmet applied his theoretical framework directly to the global response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, arguing that it exhibited the classic features of mass formation at civilisational scale.

In his analysis:

Pre-existing conditions — widespread loneliness, declining religious and communal life, a pervasive but unfocused sense of meaninglessness and anxiety — had been building in Western societies for decades before 2020.
The pandemic narrative provided a named object of anxiety (the virus) and a collective response (lockdowns, masking, vaccination campaigns), channelling diffuse anxiety into a specific focus.
The result was intense group cohesion among those who accepted the narrative, combined with striking intolerance toward dissenters — sceptics of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, or official casualty figures were treated not as people with different risk assessments, but as morally dangerous enemies of the collective.

Desmet cites specific pandemic-era phenomena as evidence: the voluntary compliance with prolonged lockdowns, the social ostracism of the unvaccinated, the enthusiastic enforcement of restrictions by ordinary citizens, and the suppression of dissenting scientific voices within institutions.

He is careful to note that mass formation does not require a conscious conspiracy at the top — elites may themselves be subject to the process, or may exploit pre-existing conditions without having engineered them. This distinguishes his framework from simpler top-down conspiracy models, though he does not dismiss the role of coordinated institutional behaviour in shaping narratives.

Academic criticism of his framework has included challenges to the scientific basis for mass formation as a distinct psychological category, and scepticism from psychology associations about its empirical grounding. Some critics have argued that ordinary political psychology — motivated reasoning, authority compliance, fear — is sufficient to explain pandemic behaviour without invoking mass hypnosis. Desmet has responded that these critiques often miss the specific mechanism he is describing.

His work intersects with debates over COVID Vaccines, Bodily Autonomy, and the ethics of mandate-driven public health policy.

Reception and Influence

Desmet's mass formation theory reached a mass global audience in January 2022, when Robert Malone — the mRNA researcher and prominent vaccine sceptic — cited it during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The episode became one of the most widely-watched podcasts in the platform's history before being removed by Spotify in a widely-reported controversy.

Following that appearance, Desmet was interviewed on dozens of independent media platforms, cited by politicians and physicians in the United States, Europe, and Australia, and invited to give public lectures in multiple countries. His book was translated into multiple languages and became a bestseller in several markets.

Several prominent figures in the Targeted Individual and medical freedom movements have cited his framework as explanatory of the social dynamics they encounter — particularly the difficulty of communicating their experiences to people under conditions of strong narrative consensus.

In the academic world, the reception was markedly cooler. A group of prominent social and clinical psychologists published rebuttals arguing that the concept of mass psychosis was not supported by mainstream psychological literature and risked stigmatising mental illness. Desmet engaged with these criticisms publicly, maintaining that his critics were addressing a straw man rather than his actual theoretical claims.

He has continued writing, speaking, and teaching since 2022, and has broadened his public critique to include commentary on digital identity systems, surveillance infrastructure, and the psychological dimensions of the Great Reset agenda.