Tracing the Split, Mapping the Futures

Desmet’s insight into our social psyche is at once timely and timeless.

Where I grew up, there was a saying: “It is in a crisis that one’s true face is revealed.” The recent crises-ridden years have brought out a strange characteristic of our time: it seems that much of our society in the West has not only divided into camps, but rather embraced the possibility of tribalism almost as a moral duty. Both social and traditional media have weighed in to further this, making ‘bare news’ – ones just about information, and not its presumed moral implications – almost a rarity. All try to say what is ‘right’, and what is ‘right’ is presumed automatically ‘correct’. Hence it is not so much the truth but one’s affinities that have taken the centre stage of our societies, and as a result, we have almost reached a cultural impasse where either side is unwilling to yield, fearing, and perhaps rightfully so, its own demise.

Mattias Desmet’s “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”, first published in English in the spring of 2022, translated from Dutch by Els Vanbrabant, is therefore at once a very timely and yet timeless book. The author tries to take a step back from the immediate and view what is happening around us in a larger and more subtle frame of history and human psyche. The book is led by an understanding that all individual events and occurrences stem from the finer fabric of our inclinations and aspirations as human beings, and if history is to teach us anything, we will need to observe its patterns beyond the particulars. Thus, instead of politics and stating what is ‘right’, the work turns to psychology for explanation, and lays greater value to our individual moral compass and grasp of reality.

Mattias Desmet’s book takes a psychological deep-dive into the state of our world. The work would present a valuable addition to many academic curricula. Photography by Selina de Maeyer

Desmet, himself a professor of psychology at Ghent University, Belgium, came to wider international recognition in the Covid era, wherein he talked of what is called ‘the mass formation theory’. Roughly speaking, the term illustrates a state in the society whereby majority of people accept or adopt a communally promoted value without actually questioning of its premises, feeling group belonging to be more important than individual opinion or freedoms. As Desmet acknowledges, it was that period which gave him also a push to start writing the book. However, “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” is in no real way a book about the pandemic, but rather a query into where we’re at now as Western societies, how and why we got here and where could we potentially be going in the future, by the tint of our choices in one or other direction.

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Desmet’s book is organised into three large divisions with further subsections, so as to build up a comprehensive framework for the topics discussed. For him, the story of where we are today largely begins with the start of the Enlightenment era where by the discovery of science, a man could step away from the dictates and control of the church, into a world where he was free to establish his own truth by observation and experiment. It was about the discovery, or vision, that a number of worldly phenomena are calculable and quantifiable, and that hence a man does not need clerical dictates in order to tackle reality.

However, from the very start, Desmet claims, science branched in two opposite directions – one which took science for the new ideology of the day, and another which kept an open mind to arrive, scientifically, even at unsettling or unexpected conclusions. One dug ever deeper into a notion of the world as a random collection of dead, controllable matter – the mechanistic worldview; the other came eventually around to acknowledge, through the works of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, David Bohm and many others, that science “cannot be the guiding principle for man” (p. 16). This was science that concluded that “[i]t is not human reason that is at the heart of the matter, but man as an individual who makes ethical and moral choices, man in relation to fellow man, man in relation to the unnameable, which, at the heart of things, speaks to him.” (ibid.) This form of science arrived back at where it had, in some ways, begun: at the realization that even though scientific inquiry can free us from superstitions and dogmas, it is eventually still faced with unknowable, unpredictable, incalculable, and it is only in that acknowledgement that true science can really survive and not turn itself into a new dogma instead of the former.

Indeed, it is that very split that, to a large degree, seems to lie at the core of many of today’s collisions and confusions. For the wider public, the latter part of science doesn’t usually register as science at all. In the West, we have ever more bowed down to reductionist, mechanistic view of things, and insisted on its singular validity. If everything is subject to identifiable mechanics, everything should consequently be controllable and predictable. However, if reality doesn’t submit itself to that model – and ultimately, it hardly ever does – we just tend to push harder, so as to escape our fear. The fear of uncertainty, unpredictability, and perhaps even more alarmingly fear of personal query and liability in life. If the great minds like Einstein were right, what follows is that even if there are some detectable and quantifiable patterns in the universe, and science can tentatively ‘settle’ on them, we as human beings can never be settled, and, as an old Roman saying goes, we need to always either learn and grow, or else digress. Non progredi est regredi.

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Mechanistic science is, ultimately, the world made easy. It claims that the world at its most objective is measurable and quantifiable, forgetting that such a premise is in itself actually subjective. The more we try to control the reality, the more closed down we will become, and hence more lonely and isolated not only in social terms, but in view of our entire personal place in the world. For isn’t it curious that in the times when we are seemingly ever more ‘connected’, physical and geographical borders are supposed to stand less and less in the way of communications, and we talk ever more of unity and solidarity, there are more and more people struggling with depression, loneliness and a lack of meaning. If we accept that the world is ultimately a definable, predictable interaction of unconscious, unwilling particles, it is only natural that the world, and we ourselves in it, will lack deeper meaning and purpose, which in turn will lead way to hedonism and insensitivity. Shying away from uncertainty, we will inevitably compromise our creativity, Desmet warns, and hence we are bound to feel less ‘alive’ or driven in most of our undertakings.

Much like Paul Gauguin’s famous painting, Desmet’s book seems to ask “Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going?”, believing the latter can only be answered by asking the former questions as well.

And this is where, for Desmet, the core of totalitarianism seems to lie. It is not so much a form of governing or propaganda, but more an approach to life that wants to attribute truth to a singular concept, or view world as a singularly defined reality. “Totalitarianism is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society,” he writes. “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.” (p. 175) Totalitarianism is really possible in the society only if enough people accept its premises and will ultimately see the individual as subordinate to the collective. Thereby, all totalitarian regimes in history have evolved gradually and even if induced from the top, grown to be viable from ground up.

History is there to warn us: the rhetoric of totalitarianism has nearly always founded itself on an idea of improved reality, a future Elysium which makes personal hardships and sacrifices pardonable. “Nazism, and even more so Stalinism,” Desmet writes, “are the most ambitious historical attempts to put totalitarian ideology into practice. They would realize paradise, and to this end, everything was considered justified: exclusion, stigmatization, and ultimately industrial extermination of every population group that did not fit within the ideal image.” (p. 175)

Totalitarianism cannot take root if enough of us can remain aware and alert, and dare to be unique and different not only in the way we dress or by the social identities we carry, but by seeing the world as a personal reality and having the courage to detach ourselves from the crowd and popular opinion, if necessary. Desmet concludes: “To explore and tap into the possibilities offered by a more psychological approach to human beings, as an alternative to the biological-reductionist approach, is undoubtedly one of the great challenges of the future. If we fail to rise up to this challenge, we are unlikely to find a durable solution to current and future crises.” (p. 173)

[Mattias Desmet. The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Chelsea Green Publishing. White River Junction, Vermont / London, UK. 232 pp. 2022]