Of Locusts And Men
How Psychological Mass Formation In People Parallels Swarm Formations In Locusts, And What Can Be Done To Stop It
Upon completion of Professor Mattias Desmet's book: The Psychology of Totalitarianism, (his thesis covering psychological mass formation in people), I've probably be gifted with the premises for another dozen podcasts!
The book is so well done and speaks acutely to exactly what we've experienced at all levels of society over the pandemic. It's a must read...
This will be the first in the body of podcasts stemming from this reading that will expand on the ideas Mattias details. Particularly how mass formation in humans seems, to me, to mirror a similar transformation in nature that causes plagues of locusts!
In both the cases of people and locusts, certain prerequisites are necessary to the environment they reside to allow the transformation from civil, placid individuals into an unstoppable mass of universal devastation!
These are the 4 prerequisites of psychological mass formation according to Mattias Desmet:
- (1) a lack of social bonds
- (2) a lack of meaning in life
- (3) free-floating anxiety
- (4) free-floating aggression
Existing in the state where all of these prerequisites reside is a terrifying and confusing existence. And, it’s due to that vulnerability at the population level that allows for a leader or power structure to present the answer to each of these prerequisites.
They present the people with a cause to unite them at the social bonds level and at the personal meaning level. Then, they present them a target to attach all their free floating anxiety and aggression on and towards.
With this in place, mass formation occurs.
A mass, once formed, doesn't require coherence to anything but the cause.
Fact, rationale and morality are secondary to the cause that is believed to end their suffering from those 4 prerequisites.
Looking at some of the most memorable and destructive masses that were formed and wielded by leaders in the past, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were the most atrocious examples that most people are well aware of.
No one would argue the fact that both powers were totalitarian in nature during their reign of terror in the 2nd world war. But, the method by which they were able to not just subdue, but animate their people into carrying out those atrocities is what is poignantly illuminated by Desmet throughout the book.
Adolph Hitler caused his mass to form in a post WWI Germany that was primed by it’s previous defeat and subsequent humiliation.
The cause Hitler presented them: Reclaim the glory Germany unjustly lost.
The target he gave them: Those who took it, then, those who were considered less than fit to inherit it.
Joseph Stalin did this in a post imperial period after the Bolshevik revolution via extreme communism.
The cause he gave them: Create a utopia perfected for the proletariat, or, the wage earning common people.
The target: Anything resembling capitalism or was counter to pure communism/the party.
But what was it that these charismatic leaders did to allow them to animate and direct the destructive power of psychological mass formation?
Adolf Hitler supplied that answer in his own book, Mein Kampf. He referred to it as “The Big Lie”. Although, he blamed its use in that book on the Jews, he himself would use that scapegoating to perpetuate his own big lie upon the mass he formed within the German people.
Joseph Geobbels, the head of the German Ministry of Propaganda in the 2nd world world has been quoted as saying the following regarding the idea of ‘The Big Lie’:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
It becomes self evident, then, that the Big Lie not only animates the mass by giving it meaning and a focus for it’s rage and anxiety, but, it is required to maintain the mass that props up the leaders that guide it.
So, where do locusts play into all this?
Well, you may or may not already know that all locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts.
“What?!”
Stay with me…
Locusts are a biological transformation that certain species of grasshoppers can morph into if there exists a very particular set of necessary prerequisites in their environment.
Sound familiar?
What’s more, once grasshoppers make the transformation into locusts, they cease their existence as an individual and henceforth exist as a mindless mass called a “plague”.
They exist as a mindless super-organism that is driven in a self perpetuating feedback loop of consumption and destruction.
Watch this 5 minute video to get an idea of what that process looks like:
Forgetting the little plug for the WEF bug protein and carbon guided agenda at the end - with everything you know about human mass formation at this point, I’m sure you can now draw the fascinating analogy to this biological insect phenomenon by yourself.
The question everyone should be asking at this point is: How can we stop it once it’s started?
In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Desmet has two conclusions to that end. One is MUCH more preferable than the other.
Being that a mass formation at the population level is by it’s nature purely destructive, it will inevitably destroy everything that is outside of the mass before imploding upon itself and continuing it’s path of destruction inwardly until it completely collapses.
If you look to Goebbel’s own description of what allows leaders to use the Big Lie to control the mass, the antidote is right there in it’s formula: “… the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
If we, as those outside the mass that has been formed and is being directed by the state, continually present the truth; the TRUTH is the antidote to the lie.
And without the lie, the state cannot control the mass.
This is how people wake up to the fact that they’ve been played.
It’s going to be a painful realization. But it is necessary at each of the individual, person-to-person nodes that build up the superstructure of the mass.
At some critical point, the mass will lose support and become the minority.
I’m hopeful that we are coming ever closer to that point. That the state will fail as the mass that’s empowered it regains their personhood and individual sovereignty.
This is the goal. This is our cause, as the anti-mass that’s needed to end the insanity.
The Social Disorder Podcast: Of Locusts and Men
Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
Wikipedia The Big Lie