She was living in Iran during the revolution in 1979…And she said that she had witnessed with her own eyes how a mother reported her son to the state, and how she hung the rope around his neck when he was on the scaffold. And when he was hung, she claimed to be a heroine for doing so. That's a typical end stage of mass formation…we arrive at this dramatic end stage where people commit atrocities towards everyone who is not loyal enough to the mass.
- Mattias Desmet, recent remarks
They say we live in the age of big data, when processing systems can store and analyze larger amounts of information and at greater speeds than ever before. If the Machine is the entangling of power and technology, then big data is the brain of the Machine.
But what most people deal with in everyday life is not big data. We don’t see the brain of the Machine; rather, we hear its voice. We hear mass narrative. Mass narrative is the streaming of propaganda, the blitzkrieging of right-think through the ranks of digital media. The Machine speaks, and the masses believe.
I’ve said it before: The mind is the prize. The Machine can do many things, but it cannot function effectively for the purpose of control and manipulation until it captures our attention and our minds.
Mattias Desmet’s mass formation
Mass formation is a type of mind-capture, in which people fall under the spell of a narrative that gives them an apparent feeling of shared meaning, social connection, and energizing purpose, although in fact it isolates them from each other and drives them toward dehumanizing actions.
Mass formation is a throbbing symptom of totalitarianism, bloody revolutions, and witch hunts, and in that sense it’s nothing new. It’s a kind of group mind or hive mind that’s been compared to mass hypnosis. But in the age of mass narrative, when ideas can spread across the globe like viruses in a matter of days or even hours, understanding mass formation—recognizing the signs it’s taking place—has never been more urgent.
Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet has just published a book on the subject and has been doing the podcast circuit (links to follow). He suggests that before mass formation can occur in a society, people must be in the following state:
They feel lonely and isolated.
They lack a sense of meaning or purpose.
They experience “free-floating” anxiety—they feel anxious though they don’t know why or can’t connect it to anything specific.
They experience “free-floating” aggression and frustration—again, they can’t connect these feelings to a specific source.
According to Desmet, once these four conditions are met, mass formation can be triggered when the media provides a narrative that does two things. First, the narrative identifies a target, or “object”, that people can connect their anxiety with. Second, the narrative provides a strategy for how to overcome that object of anxiety.
Imagine an emerging totalitarian government in the mold of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, that labels group X as the “cause” of society’s ills (the object of anxiety), and then proposes that the solution to the problem (the strategy) is to deprive group X of their rights or property, or to eliminate the group.
By identifying an object of anxiety, the mass formation narrative helps people handle their free-floating anxiety, because now it’s no longer nebulous; now they can locate that anxiety somewhere specific and have a strategy for dealing with it. They have a place too, outside of themselves, where they can direct their free-floating frustration and aggression.
With enough people under the spell of the narrative (Desmet suggests at least 30% core believers), the formation solidifies. The individuals in the formation feel unified, involved in a collective and heroic battle against the object of anxiety. After having started off isolated, meaningless, and discontented, they’re now socially connected, with a sense of meaning and purpose.
But it’s all a dangerous sham. The isolation and disconnectedness that originally gave rise to the mass formation only seems to have been solved but isn’t, because all the separate individuals are not really connecting with each other, but with the collective. The result is that the social bonds between individuals are weaker, not stronger. Amid the dwindling of genuine person-to-person relationships, a paranoid atmosphere often develops.
And it all ends horribly
Mass formation tends to split society. On the one hand are the people caught up in the formation, whose energy is invested in the collective and the heroic battle against the object of anxiety. On the other hand are those who don’t believe the narrative (about 10% to 30%). These are the dissidents who question or reject the narrative and refuse to participate in it. (The other 40% to 60% just go along with the narrative to avoid trouble.)
Those in the grip of the mass formation are radically intolerant of dissidents, and in the extreme will commit atrocities against anyone who resists the narrative or who doesn’t show sufficient loyalty to it.
In fact, according to Desmet, such cruelties are carried out with a sense of ethical duty, and therefore aren’t considered cruel at all. Hence Desmet’s anecdote of the Iranian mother who saw herself as a heroine for betraying her disloyal son to the state, and who willingly slipped the noose around his neck for the hanging.
The acceptance of absurd ideas is also a feature of mass formation. Desmet notes that during the Iranian revolution, people believed that a portrait of the leader (the Ayatollah) was printed on the surface of the moon, and would even stand on the street pointing it out to each other.
But mass formation doesn’t only happen in the situations we usually think of, like revolutionary Iran, Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia. Desmet believes that mass formation occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a good portion of his book explores the subject.
Not everybody would agree with Desmet’s theory or its application to the pandemic. A variation of the same concept (mass formation “psychosis”) was dismissed by experts earlier this year after a Joe Rogan podcast. But Desmet himself would predict that people caught up in mass formation tend to be blind to anything that questions the narrative, and therefore tend to vehemently dismiss or attack challenges to the narrative.
Snare, shrink, and split
Notice that Desmet’s four conditions—free-floating anxiety and aggression, and social disconnection and a lack of meaning—are all characteristics of the people who succumb to mass formation. What about the characteristics of the narrative?
Desmet sees mass formation narratives as akin to a hypnotic suggestion that “focuses attention on a very limited aspect of reality”. Like the focused glow of a lamp, it illuminates only what lies in the circle of light and obscures what lies outside that circle. Still, Desmet doesn’t see narrative as powerful enough, on its own, to give rise to mass formation.
I found myself questioning that conclusion. After Desmet’s recent interview on The Manipulation Check Podcast, I spoke with one of the interviewers, cognitive scientist Dan Smilek, about whether a potent narrative, alone, might be capable of provoking mass formation. Smilek agreed, especially if the narrative triggered enough fear in a population.
That makes sense, though I’m inclined to question whether other emotions, like guilt, might do it too. So would a powerful identity narrative. Here’s a spinoff of Desmet’s theory that includes some of his elements, but in a way that emphasizes narrative alone as sufficient, as long as the narrative is ensnaring, constricting, and intolerant:
Ensnaring – The narrative captures attention and ensnares the mind through the convergence of psychological and technological strategies.
Psychologically, the narrative points to a threatening object that sparks fear and anxiety, or else guilt, outrage, or other intolerable emotion. In some cases, the emphasis is less on a threatening object and more on a certain kind of identity (“You should follow ideology X because it’s true” or “Good people behave in these specific ways”).
Technologically, the narrative is supported by continuous and coordinated media messaging, which ensures the narrative spreads in a manner that is rapid, widespread, repetitive, gripping, and easy to understand. Without the continuous amplifying support of technology, the narrative would be at risk of crumbling and losing its hold on a population.
Constricting – The narrative has a constricting effect, narrowing attention onto a very small focus of issues, at the same time distorting people’s everyday relationships or usual values and purpose to fit the narrative, and diminishing their view of the bigger picture.
This constriction proves the falsity of the narrative. Although some aspects of the narrative may be true and serve as evidence to convince those within the narrative, the narrative excludes significant information, as it encompasses only a very limited portion of reality. This constricted reality focus must be rigorously maintained to prevent the infiltration of information that would contradict the narrative.
Intolerant – The narrative requires intolerance toward anyone who questions or disagrees with the narrative. Intolerance toward dissidents might be explicitly stated in the narrative; in some cases, however, the intolerance is not an “official” part of the narrative but is implied. Intolerance may include shaming, stigmatizing, punishing, or other hostility. Some narratives that are initially tolerant may evolve and harden to a position of intolerance over time.
Another way of saying all of the above is that mass formation narratives snare a population, shrink attention, and split society.
Snare, shrink, split. Are these three narrative characteristics, alone, enough to cause a full-blown mass formation? Desmet would probably say no, but I’ve encountered individuals who seemed to have had strong social bonds, meaningful work and lives, and no apparent free-floating anxiety or aggression, and yet who still got caught up in a narrative that created a mass formation, or something that closely approximated one.
Possibly mass formation is not an all-or-none phenomenon, but one with degrees, like different hurricane categories, from weaker to stronger.
The Internet is a good lookout window for mass formation hurricanes of various intensities, from gale force ravings to category five hysteria. As Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, social media is filled with these storms, many of which have fragmented society, splitting it into polarized and mutually hostile tribes who are zealously focused on their narrative, with reflexive intolerance toward anyone who contradicts them.
With over four billion people on social media, the size of some of the mass formations may well have exceeded those of the Nuremberg rallies. And yet, as Desmet points out, one of the distinctive features of mass formation nowadays is that, because of technology, the enormous crowds can gather in isolation.
Of blood and motor oil
I don’t mean to suggest Desmet’s conditions don’t matter, but it’s possible his four conditions are not necessary conditions for mass formation, but rather enabling conditions, ones that increase the probability that individuals will get sucked into the vortex of the formation, and also increase the intensity of their intolerance and hostility.
If the characteristics of the narrative are indeed as important as the characteristics of the people, then, in this Machine age—when powerful stories can be crafted using big data and spread instantly across the planet through mass narrative—our susceptibility to mass formation is greater than ever before.
A central idea in Desmet’s thinking is that mass formation is connected to an excessively rational worldview, in which the universe is seen as a dead material machine. This perspective fits within the same frame that Paul Kingsnorth and others have explored: the Machine’s ravaging impact on spirituality and religion, replacing it with a mechanical view of life, at the same time uprooting us from the natural world and traditional patterns of living.
Human beings are natural meaning makers. We cannot exist in a meaning vacuum, and so the dissolution and instability created by the Machine and its simultaneous capacity for mass narrative puts us at the mercy of a diabolical pump: one that sucks natural meaning out of societies and injects them with synthetic meaning. Out with the blood, in with the motor oil.
Don’t be a mud brick
Desmet (and Kingsnorth) aren’t alone in seeing a connection between a materialist view of the universe and mass formation. Anthony Esolen, a Catholic writer and social commentator, puts it this way:
There is no reason, founded in materialism, for me to distinguish rubbing out a man from rubbing out the mud at the bottom of my shoe, because materialism is just a philosophy of mud…What we do with mud is also of no great moral import. Clump it into bricks and let them dry in the sun; why not? All the inhuman collectives of the twentieth century have been predicated upon man as mud. You can build many a pyramid from such. Consider the chasm in being that divides the collective from the community. Persons in the collective are submerged under numbers, nameless and faceless. If we regard the mass phenomena, we can see that the submergence of the person occurs in capitalist as well as in socialist countries, such as they now are. The great virtue that is both the foundation and the aim of the polis, according to Aristotle, is friendship. That can be conceived only among persons.
If the universe is no more than a physical thing, a cold skeleton, devoid of heart, devoid of any moral or ethical nervous system, then human beings are no different, without unique value. It doesn’t matter what the politics are, left or right. In a material worldview, each person is reduced to a mud brick in a wall of mud bricks, each at the mercy of the inhuman collective.
The idea that friendships among “persons” is a great virtue in a healthy society is, of course, much the same point Desmet makes in reverse: that a socially isolated society is at risk of mass formation. But as Esolen continues, he points out something else that dovetails with Desmet’s view:
The vice of the collective, by contrast, is either apathy or enmity: apathy, because the person, with a name and a face, with thoughts that reach far into the past and that long for the everlasting, is reduced to a thing, a counter, a clump of mud; enmity, because what is left of our God-endowed particular humanity rises up in resentment against the offense.
It’s easy to see how apathy for the “other” can arise in a collective, where real relationships between people are weakened by a focus on the abstract group and its homogenizing narrative. But it’s the point about enmity that I think is unique. What Esolen seems to be saying is that, if we cling to a materialist narrative that denies our spiritual origins—if we lie to ourselves about our true nature—then another part of us rebels against the denial with hostility.
Where does the hostility go? Esloen doesn’t say but it isn’t hard to guess: against those who reject the narrative. This enmity may be a different way of thinking about Desmet’s free-floating frustration and aggression. For Desmet, the hostility is a product of social and psychological factors, whereas for Esolen, it has an origin within an underlying spiritual reality and projects outward into the psychological and social reality.
I don’t want to suggest that Desmet himself lacks any spiritual dimension. The entire third part of his book is devoted to the subject, with reflections on chaos theory and quantum mechanics, and empathy as a non-rational way of knowing.
I’m not going into that here, as it’s a whole other topic, but I mention it to point out that both thinkers—Desmet the Psychologist and Esolen the Catholic writer—converge on the idea that resistance against mass formation, and the psychological processes that can enslave us, depend in no small measure on the extent to which our lives are interwoven with the spiritual and with embodied human relationships.
Breaking the spell
So, if we’re looking for a way to protect ourselves against mass formation and the mass narratives that come with them, we need to immerse ourselves in an alternative narrative that is fundamentally both spiritual and relational.
Mass narratives are actually rather small, zeroing in on an isolated aspect of reality. But the illusion is powerful. We each need a narrative, a true narrative, bigger than the illusion. We need real relationships and a sacred imagination, and a way of living that nourishes these things.
At the same time, the line between our devotion to a religion, spirituality or philosophy, versus mass formation, is probably thinner than we’d like to think. Our narrative must be tolerant, if it’s to avoid the possibility of itself becoming a mass formation. Tolerant, in that it can endure differences between people, even irreconcilable differences, with patience and kindness, and the strength to withstand our instinct for hostility.
What do we do if a mass formation takes hold in society? Desmet suggests that speaking out against the narrative is critical, though it must be done calmly and respectfully, and with sensitivity to the anger it may provoke in the people who are in the grip of the narrative.
Above all, Desmet warns that dissidents must not remain silent. Silence is not safe. “If the opposition is silent, the totalitarian system becomes a monster that devours its own children.”
As the clouds of the Internet spin and swirl, look for the signs of mass formation narrative:
Is a powerful story spreading with unusual speed and coordination across media and social media platforms?
Does the narrative constrict attention, ignoring or denying information and facts outside the narrative?
Does the narrative explicitly or implicitly encourage intolerance toward anybody who questions or opposes the narrative?
To put it another way, does the narrative snare a population, shrink attention, and split society?
Mass narratives do not willingly relinquish their grip on the human mind. They hold on, because the mind is the prize, the final triumph of the Machine. Unless we tell a more powerful story.
Here are links to Mattias Desmet’s book, and his recent interview on The Manipulation Check podcast. Photo credit: Bob Moran.