“As Hannah Arendt states, totalitarianism is ultimately the logical extension of a generalized obsession with science, the belief in an artificially created paradise: “Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”28 In the”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The first thing totalitarian leaders do is make sure their voices are the only ones left.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Conspiracy thinking inflates the sizableness of the perceived enemy into infinity so that in the end one can only feel powerless compared to such a giant. In this way, conspiracy thinking also embodies an aspect of self destruction.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The great minds who followed reason and facts most rigorously came to the conclusion that, ultimately, the essence of things is beyond logic and cannot be grasped.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“With its sign system, totalitarianism tries to imprint its logic on reality, to permanently link it to the real world. Importantly, the assignment of signs and stigmas is usually the first step in the process of destruction.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Totalitarianism and technocracy like to present themselves as the pinnacle of rationality and science.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The phenomenon of bullshit jobs (see chapter 2) is perhaps the best illustration of this: In the second decade of the twenty-first century, half of the people were of the opinion that their job was meaningless.19 A 2013 Gallup World Poll found that only 13 percent of people worldwide were truly engaged in their job; 63 percent said they were not engaged”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“for example, the aristocracy under Stalinism, the Jews under Nazism, the virus, and, later, the anti-vaxxers during the coronavirus crisis—and at the same time offers a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety, there is a real chance that all the free-flowing anxiety will attach itself to that object and there will be broad social support for the implementation of the strategy to control that object of anxiety.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Experimentation on humans is the prototypical activity of totalitarianism. It is the ultimate submission of reality to the pseudoscientific ideological fiction.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Social connections were also transformed beyond recognition. The invention of radio and television led to the rise of the mass media and a corresponding decline in direct human interactions with a merely social function. Evening meetings between neighbors, pub gatherings, harvest festivals, rituals, and celebrations—they were progressively replaced by consumption of what the media presented.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The rapid emergence of -woke- culture and the growing climate movement was giving rise to the call for a new, hyper-strict government that emerged from within the population itself.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“When society as a whole is in the grip of anxiety and the accompanying images of illness and death, those images in themselves become a causal factor.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The coronavirus crisis did not come out of the blue. It fits into a series of increasingly desperate and self-destructive societal responses to objects of fear: terrorists, global warming, coronavirus. Whenever a new object of fear arises in society, there is only one response and one defense in our current way of thinking: increased control. The fact that the human being can tolerate only a certain amount of control is completely overlooked. Coercive control leads to fear and fear leads to more coercive control. Just like that, society falls victim to a vicious circle that inevitably leads to totalitarianism, which means to extreme government control, eventually resulting in the radical destruction of both the psychological and physical integrity of human beings.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“People perturbed by loneliness, lack of meaning, and indefinable anxiety and unease generally feel increasingly irritable, frustrated, and/or aggressive and look for objects to take these feelings out on. The sharp increase of racist and threatening language on social media during the last decade (tripling between 2015 and 2020, see chapter 5) is a striking example. What accelerates mass formation is not so much the frustration and aggression that are effectively vented, but the potential of unvented aggression present in the population—aggression that is still looking for an object.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Totalitarian systems have always been maintained primarily by systematic indoctrination and propaganda, injected into the population on a daily basis via mass media (without mass media, it is not possible to generate such long-lasting mass formation as that which gave rise to Stalinism and Nazism). This way, the population is literally kept on the vibrational frequency of the voice of totalitarian leaders.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“This process yields a psychological gain. Firstly, the anxiety that previously roamed through society as a tenebrous fog is now linked to a specific cause and can be mentally controlled via the strategy put forward in the story. Secondly, through a common struggle with “the enemy,” the disintegrating society regains its coherence, energy, and rudimentary meaning. For this reason, the fight against the object of anxiety then becomes a mission, laden with pathos and group heroism (for example, the Belgian government’s “team of 11 million” going to war against the coronavirus). Thirdly, in this fight all latent brewing frustration and aggression is taken out, especially on the group that refuses to go along with the story and the mass formation. This brings an enormous release and satisfaction to the masses, which they will not let go of easily. Through this process,”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“I refer to Arendt who argued that this first condition is the most important: “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”18 This deterioration of social connectedness leads to the second condition: lack of meaning in life. This second condition follows mainly from the first. Man, as a social being par excellence, lives for the Other. Remove the bond with the Other and he will experience his life as meaningless (whether he sees the connection with his loneliness or not).”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence. In the fynal analysis, it is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“We tend to think that humans distinguish themselves from animals by -greater- knowledge and awareness, but the most typical difference is that, unlike animals, we are almost constantly tormented by a -lack- of knowledge.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The new norm has become so stringent that even suggesting that there is a physical difference between a man and a woman can be considered a violation of sexual integrity.
The Black Lives Matter movement is captured in this as well. The tendency toward increasingly exhaustive standards with respect to racism intensified to little productive end: The chances that such rules truly contribute to the overcoming of the narcissistic superiority feelings that are involved in racism is, in fact, rather small.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The ability to sense one's own experience and to put it into words and to express it in relation to another is what constitutes the core of our existence as human beings.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“It is also throught this art that we, as human beings, and more broadly as a culture and society, can relate differently to death. Within a mechanistic and biological-reductionistic view of man, suffering, decay, and death can only be meaningless; they cannot be seen as something that has something to say and teach us as human beings. This is perhaps the biggest problem with the Great Mechanistic Narrative: The ultimate master of the sublunary -death- has not been given an acceptable part in it.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Operation Lockstep from the Rockefeller Foundation”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The ability to empathize also plays a role in relation to our own body. Our bodies are in essence foreign to ourselves. It responds to all kinds of stimuli -food, other people, all kinds of situations- and they do so autonomously, without our knowledge of volition. We can learn to feel our body throughout our lives, for example through certain movement-based arts or meditation, by attentively observing the effects of all kinds of factors (nutrition, exercise, etc) on our body, possibly by repeatedly putting our physical experiences into words during psychoanalytic therapy. Whoever listens to his body and learns to understand its language holds the key to health. The feeling with one's own body is more important than any medicine and also more important than any "objective" rational knowledge, of for instance, healthy food.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The essence of things is not rationally knowable, and reality cannot be reduced to mechanistic frameworks. When realizing this, we can finally start to look for the essence of life where it truly can be found: in that which always escapes rationalization and mechanization, in that which dissapears from a conversation when you digitalize it, in the difference between the mother's womb and an artificial plastic womb, in the difference between the heat of an electric heater and that of a wood-burning stove, and so on.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The fact the the human being is like a flower that only blooms when it can enjoy the shade of privacy once in a while is of minor importance in a technocratic worldview. Anyone who refuses to go along with the system lacks civic sense, considers oneself more important than the collective. Your health is no longer your personal business, because some diseases are contagious.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“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 being a cog in the machine of society.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“If one focuses too much on the superficial appearances of life and loses touch with the underlying principles and figures, life will increasingly be experienced as a meaningless chaos, just like Lorenz's waterwheel.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Speaking leads to experiences of meaning and existence, at least if the one who speaks tries to express his subjective truth as honestly and sincerely as possible.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Dissident speech doesn't have to be primarily tactical or rhetorical in nature, but it should be authentic and honest.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism