Tucker Carlson - Tucker Carlson - Mattias Desmet - Totalitarianism interview transcript

Tucker Carlson Today - Mattias Desmet - September 1, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZltdPfal5x0

Tucker: Welcome to Tucker Carlson. Things have changed so fast in the United States that it's hard to understand exactly what is happening and one of the reasons it's hard to understand what's happening is that we don't have words for what is happening. You can't understand something unless you can describe it. Words are the first step to understanding. So the country became begin to change in very obvious ways. Right around the time George Floyd died, Memorial Day two years ago in Minneapolis. And all of a sudden you saw large groups of people acting in what seemed to be perfect synchronicity with one another as one and then trying to enforce a uniformity of opinion on the rest of the country. And the rest of the country, for the most part, went along with it. Nothing like this had ever happened in America, certainly not in our lifetimes. What were we watching? Something new and different, for sure. Also something self-evidently threatening to our most basic freedoms and to our human dignity So what was it? Well, it wasn't really until December of 2021 in a broadcast on Joe Rogan Experience, that a doctor called Robert Malone described in words what we may have been watching. Here is that clip which instantly became famous:

Rogan clip: What the heck happened in Germany in the twenties and thirties, very intelligent, highly educated population and they went barking mad and how did that happen? The answer is Mass Formation, Psychosis. When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free floating anxiety in a sense that things don't make sense, we can't understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.

Tucker: So Malone goes on to attribute that idea at the core of his description, something called Mass Formation to an academic in Belgium called Matthias Desmet, who wrote a book on it actually called The Psychology of Totalitarianism. I want to put a quote up on the screen that gets to the nut of what he's describing:

Mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individual's ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically. This process is insidious in nature, populations fall prey to it unsuspectingly. To put it in the words of Yuval Noah Harari, Most people wouldn't even notice the shift toward a totalitarian regime. We associate totalitarianism mainly with labor concentration and extermination camps, but those are merely the final bewildering stage of a long process.

So those words come from, as we just said, a Belgian academic called Matthias Desmet, who we are honored to have join us on the set now to describe what all of us have been watching for the last two years. Professor, thanks so much for coming on.

Mattias: Thank you for inviting me.

Tucker: Is it a little strange to find out that you're famous in the United States?

Mattias: Yes, a little bit. A little bit. Yes.

Tucker: Yes. So ten years ago, I think this would have been considered a kind of esoteric academic theory relevant to your specific study, but not really relevant to the society that we live in. And all of a sudden, you've so perfectly described what the rest of us have been watching. So before we get into it, if you just tell us who you are and where you're from and how you wound up concluding this.

Mattias: Yes, well, I'm from Belgium, as you said. I'm a professor at in clinical psychology at Ghent University. I also have a master's in statistics. And that's actually how. Statistics and statistics. Yes. Yeah, I did a PhD on methodological problems in academic research. I started my PhD in 2003 when it became clear that up to 85% of the academic papers are seriously flawed. That's what my PhD was all about. And then when the Corona crisis started, I immediately started to study the statistics a little bit, and I immediately got the impression that the mathematical models and statistics that were used dramatically over rated, the dangerousness of the virus. And then in my opinion, a few months later, by the end of May 2020, this was actually proven beyond doubt. At that moment that the initial mathematical models on which the corona measures were based, the models issued by Imperial College predicted that by the end of May 2020, in a country in a small country such as Sweden, about 60,000 people would die if the country didn't go into lockdown and Sweden didn't go into lockdown and only 6000 people died. And at that moment, for me, in the first week of the Corona crisis, I published two opinion papers in which I tried to warn people that there was something dangerous out there, and I wasn't referring to the virus. The title of the first paper was The Fear of the virus is more dangerous than the virus itself. And strangely enough, I tried to show people in what way the statistics were wrong, but nobody really seemed to care about it. And everybody continued to buy into the narrative.

Mattias: And even when by the end of May 2020, it was proven beyond the shade of a doubt that the mathematical models had been dramatically wrong. The narrative continued and the society continued to behave as if the mathematical models had been right.

And that was the moment for me when I switched my perspective. At that moment, I decided to focus on the psychological mechanisms that could explain why an entire society couldn't see anymore. That the narrative they believed in was blatantly absurd in many respects. And it took me one or two months before I could, in my opinion, pinpoint it and before I started to understand that what we were dealing with was a large scale process of Mass Formation, which is like a kind of group formation, which has some very strange effects at the level of individual psychological functioning, the most important being probably that people who are in the grip of such a process in one way or another lose all capacity to take a critical distance of what the group believes in. And this can go extremely far. Like during the revolution in Iran in 1979, which was a large scale process of mass formation in Iran, people started to believe that the portrait of the ayatollah, whom they considered their leader, was printed on the surface of the moon. And when there was a full moon in the sky, they typically were standing in the streets, showing each other where exactly you could see the portrait of the ayatollah. That's the first strange effect at the level of individual psychological functioning of the process of mass formation.

Tucker: The second one and Iran in 1979 was not a backward, remote country. It was a very westernized, very well educated, sophisticated country.

Mattias: Of course, the level of education doesn't play any role, even not the intelligence. Even more, the higher the level of education, the easier, the more vulnerable people are for mass formation.

Tucker: Let me just back up a step. So you said in 2003, you begin your PhD and your main focus was the fact and you describe as a fact that 85% of academic papers had serious flaws within them. Now, 85% is the overwhelming majority in academic papers or the basis of academia. So, I mean, that's shocking. Maybe that was the first example you saw of mass formation, because how could they not fix that?

Mattias: Yes. Well, I published a small book about that in which I tried to show in a very tangible and concrete and simple way why most research methods impossibly can lead to valid results. And what I noticed was my examples were really clear and tangible. Everyone who wanted to see it could see that the methods could only lead to flawed results. And to my surprise, only about 5% of my colleagues wanted to open their eyes and wanted to see what they were shown and the rest didn't want it. And that was the moment when I started to think about what could possibly explain why people became so blind. And that was the moment when I first started to be interested in mass formation and exactly the same process repeated itself in the corona crisis. I immediately noticed like, look, the statistics and these mathematical models can be right. I tried to show it didn't work, and then I started to think about what psychological processes could explain that. And I stumbled upon over. I tried to re-articulate material mass information in public space then.