The Psychology of Totalitarianism

This review was first published in Spanish in Fe y Libertad, published by Instituto Fe y Libertad, Guatemala City, Guatemala.

In the years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the near-global, government-imposed lockdowns of human social and economic activity there has been growing concern that we are witnessing the emergence of a new era of totalitarianism. Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet, who endured the censure of colleagues and the media for his own challenges to the epidemiological models used to justify the lockdowns, had already been puzzling over the growth of censorship, the erosion of privacy, and regulatory expansion emanating from a growing desire of people en masse to ensure greater security. As for many of us, the COVID-19 crisis increased his desire to understand what was driving the growing willingness of people “to sacrifice their own personal interests out of solidarity with the collective” and thereby give rise to “a profound intolerance of dissident voices, and pronounced susceptibility to pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda” (2). 

The Psychology of Totalitarianism is the product of Desmet’s inquiry. 

Desmet is concerned to understand through dynamics of social psychology how a population may become ripe, so to speak, for the rise of totalitarian rule. The book offers a timely exploration of the psychological factors involved in social control. He presents his concept of “mass formation,” the psychological process by which a population becomes “totalitarized” long before we witness the emergence of the more familiar institutional manifestations of totalitarianism, such as psychological reeducation and concentration camps. The book is presented in three parts. The first explores “Science and Its Psychological Effects”; the second unpacks his key thesis about “Mass Formation and Totalitarianism”; and the third calls for a de-“technologization” and de-“mechanization” of the world and a recalibration of the role of science in society. 

Desmet’s focus on science is key to both his diagnosis and his prescription. He argues that our current societal challenges have been exacerbated by the failure of Science and Enlightenment rationality to ease our existential dilemmas. An important backdrop of Desmet’s reconsideration of the scientific enterprise as a cultural cornerstone of modernity is the replication crisis that became a matter of public concern earlier this century. Desmet’s field of psychology was especially rocked by the revelation that so many published research findings proved unreplicable. The depth of the replication crisis underscores Desmet’s claim that science has become an ideology resting on a “fundamental epistemological crisis” (19). He contrasts “great Science (the science that maintains an open mind an pursues Reason)” with “small science (the science that degenerates into ideology)” (22). He attributes the drift from great Science to small science to the ascendance of the mechanistic worldview and the utopian overtones that accompanied the expansion of positivist vision of science that became ascendant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Desmet, the mechanistic ideology peddles a “discourse of numbers, data, and statistics” that when combined with utopian hopes and technocratic administration has profound psychological effects on society. In sum, he argues, the promise of Enlightenment science and its promise of ameliorating the inevitable risks and uncertainties of life led societies toward increasing technocratic management and “a naïve belief in the measurability of reality and the excessive use and misuse of data and statistics” (48).

Desmet argues that, far from expanding people’s ability to cope with the ups and downs of life, technocratic hopes actually create “the desire for a master” and diminish our tolerance for suffering. This has led to a widespread increase of fear, anxiety, and social isolation that may explain why during the COVID-19 pandemic people seemed so readily to submit to government mandates—and in many cases voluntarily to participate in their enforcement. 

Likening the societal changes that prepare the way to such “mass formation” to the stages of psychological development of a child who fails to develop healthy relationships with Others, Desmet applies a psychological explanation of narcissism, where the child never transcends his desire to be the center of the Other’s (usually the mother’s) attention, to the social psychology of modern culture. He believes expanding fear and insecurity have generated both a pattern of expanding narcissism that depends on social attention (think populist politicians, influencers, and the way we cultivate our social media pages) and a growing “regulation mania.” Once at a tipping point within a society, these developments reinforce one another resulting in the emergence of a “a new morality” that is “stricter, more vagarious, more irrational, and more hypocritical than the prior religious morality, which the Enlightenment sought to obliterate in order to set people free” (75). Desmet suggests that climate alarmism, woke culture, and the COVID-19 lockdowns—distinct phenomena that have each demanded enforcement of increasingly precise moral standards and been intolerant of dissent—have created a perfect storm for the potential of mass formation in our current age. In such a storm, the leader of the mass is also merely a part of the mass hypnosis, one who usually arises from the mass and gives voice to the psychological needs of the mass.

In Part II, Desmet explores how such a psycho-social moment rooted in the impossible promises of a mechanistic ideology can make a population susceptible to totalitarianism. The consequences of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationalization and mechanization created cultural conditions that actually increased the anxiety of people who have simultaneously become increasingly isolated from one another. This prepared the soil for the “mass formation” that precedes a willingness to comply with increasing totalitarian controls of society. The four conditions for such mass formation include 1) generalized loneliness and social isolation, 2) lack of meaning in life, 3) widespread free-floating anxiety, and 4) widespread free-floating frustration and aggression. The increase of free-floating anxiety, anxiety which seems to arise without a concrete object of concern (such as illness, a broken relationship, or money worries), seems to be the critical condition. 

Desmet observes that the mass will often turn to a leader who can point to an object for their free-floating anxiety and then offer “a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety” (96). It is curious that Desmet does not reference the compelling work of René Girard on the scapegoat mechanism as he goes on to explain how mass formation can be accelerated by “a suggestion in the public sphere” that offers an object for the growing free-floating anxiety, much as the Nazis made the Jews the object of German discontents in the interwar period. 

Such a “suggestion” typically takes the form of a new cultural narrative that tends to generate two types of responses from a population increasingly susceptible to submersion into the mass: “one trusts the leaders blindly (and disappears into the mass), or one completely distrusts them and sees them as people who knowingly carry out an evil plan (i.e. conspirators)” (105). Either choice tends to embue the leaders of the mass with absolute knowledge and significant power. Eventually the dynamics of conspiracy and ideology and of ritual stigmatization and oppression of the new targets of generalized anxiety are woven into the logic of totalitarian parties and leaders who begin to institutionalize the new narrative and to more aggressively suppress dissent. 

In the final section of the book, Desmet tries to formulate a solution, a way to harden people against the hypnotic allure of the mass. He proposes that this will require us to find a way to overcome the mechanistic worldview that created the soil that fertilized the anxieties of modern men. His solution, however, seems to offer little in the way of concrete mechanisms by which we might break an accelerating mass hypnosis. He urges science to move away from the hubris of the Enlightenment toward its more authentic empathy with the world and its sense of humility before an immeasurable universe. He urges man “to come to know himself as a psychological being” and thus a being that can make meaning only as we come to sense our own experience in relationship to the outside world and “to put it into words and to express it in relation to another” (185). How we come to do this is left largely unexplored. 

This unsatisfactory solution reveals that his critique of “science” requires a much deeper elaboration. “Great scientists,” he tells us, “have left the logical-factual discourse of science behind and returned in an enlightened way to the type of discourse that during the Enlightenment was initially deemed subordinate: a poetic or mystical discourse, a discourse that shows an original respect and a genuine awe for the unnameable, for that which time and again eludes the human mind” (180). The Great Scientist is one who has presumably utilized the tools of science to deepen our understanding of nature in some aspect but who has arrived through that journey at “a kind of Socratic modesty” rather than adopted the technocratic hubris of “superior knowledge” (178). Even if the technocratic scientist could reverse course and engage in Great Science, how does this help the totalitarian subject already caught in a mass formation that has worked to diminish curiosity and empathy in favor of conformism and survival? 

By reducing Enlightenment thought to its most positivist expression—perhaps because of the positivist influences in psychology itself as well as the cultural context of European scholarship—Desmet fails to grapple with a deeper history of the contests between “matter and spirit” (the title of Chapter 10) and “science and truth” (the title of Chapter 11). While he identifies important psychological patterns, and his openness to questioning the scientific foundations of his discipline is illuminating, Desmet’s framework ultimately lacks the epistemological and historical depth found in earlier analyses of totalitarian technocracy such as Michael Polanyi’s Science, Faith, and Society (1946) and F. A. Hayek’s The Counterrevolution of Science (1952).

Seeking to understand how totalitarianism had distorted science during World War II, Polanyi offered an eloquent call for a more serious attention to the relations of science, truth, and, crucially, man’s transcendent obligations. He observed that “the moment a community ceases to be dedicated through its members to transcendent ideals, it can continue to exist undisrupted only by submission to a single centre of unlimited secular power.” Desmet and his readers may find much insight by grappling with Polanyi’s re-examination of the institutional dynamics of science and his suggestion that science ultimately rests on a form of faith. As Polanyi wrote:

It would thus appear that when the premisses of science are held in common by the scientific community each must subscribe to them by an act of devotion. These premises form not merely a guide to intuition, but also a guide to conscience; they are not merely indicative, but also normative. The tradition of science, it would seem, must be upheld as an unconditional demand if it is to be upheld at all. It can be made use of by scientists only if they place themselves at its service. It is a spiritual reality which stands over them and compels their allegiance (Polanyi, 54).

For Polanyi even political communities are ideally held together through a shared acknowledgement of the transcendent obligations of their members. This means there must be both effective transmission of cultural traditions as well as protections for the conscientious choices of men and women, for the mutually adjusting, polycentric patterns of cultural consensus form much more resilient and humane bonds than the coercive pressures of external power.

Desmet’s concerns about the excesses of the positivist form of science can likewise be more deeply illuminated by F. A. Hayek’s classic exposition in The Counter-Revolution of Science. Many of the essays in this collected volume were published in the 1930s, as the clouds of war began to descend on Europe, as part of what Hayek called his “abuse of reason” project. Where Desmet overgeneralizes the problems of positivism and seems to criticize Enlightenment science in toto for transforming science to ideology, Hayek sought to rescue the foundations of reason laid down by a different branch of the Enlightenment: the Scottish. 

Hayek’s differentiation of science and scientism (which he describes in both historical and methodological detail) was deeply informed by his broader concern to understand the methodologies by which we best understand social phenomena. The errors of scientism (positivism) were many, but Hayek especially was concerned with the attempt to apply methods suitable only for the natural sciences to questions of the social (or humane) sciences. This mistake, he believed, was “a direct result of the inability, caused by the lack of a compositive theory of social phenomena, to grasp how the independent actions of many men can produce coherent wholes, persistent structures of relationships which serve important human purposes without having been designed for that end” (Hayek, 142).

Hayek observed that the rise of socialism was thoroughly entangled with the abuse of reason created by this inability to perceive the reality and nature of spontaneous orderings of social phenomena. Hayek contended that “[w]hile in a sense this movement represents thus a sort of superrationalism, a demand for the direction of everything by a supermind, it prepares at the same time the ground for a thorough irrationalism” (Hayek, 158–59). Such irrationalism culminates in “the ideal of conscious control of social phenomena” common to engineers and planners and in “the hubris of collectivism.” 

Desmet tells us, in a similar vein, that totalitarianism “is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society. It aims to create a utopian, artificial society led by technocrats or experts who, based on their technical knowledge, will ensure that the machine of society runs flawlessly. In this view, the individual is completely subordinated to the collective, reduced to being a cog in the machine of society” (175). But his conclusion that to avoid a technocratic totalitarianism requires us to turn from rationalism and science toward a sort of psychological mysticism seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The reader baffled by this solution will benefit from engagement with the deeper tradition of classical liberal thought on science and society represented by Hayek, Polanyi, and many others working principally downstream from the Scottish, rather than from the most radical side of the French, Enlightenment. Psychologists such as Desmet may benefit as well from this deeper encounter, for contrary to the malign accusations that liberalism is inherently an atomizing social force, the classical liberal tradition offers a more humane (non-positivist) approach to exploring how our “interindividual” relationships help shape “the life of the human mind and of human society” (Hayek, 160). The classical liberal approach to the study of social cooperation may help shape a more methodologically sound approach to social psychology and thus can help us to find more satisfactory and successful solutions to the questions Desmet poses about how social anxieties ebb and flow and how people and their communities may be more resistant to the technocratic dreams that often fuel outbreaks of social anxiety and political terror.