It seems that a major part of the population and many leaders in society were inclined to accept that only technological control, which also controlled private space and private life, would be sufficient or would be necessary to deal with all the emerging problems in our society, either real or imagined. That means you are heading for a society which relies more and more on technological control to tackle the emerging objects of anxiety in society like terrorism and climate change. Not a fascist or a communist totalitarianism, but what we might call a technocratic totalitarianism. I noticed in 2017 that a new kind of totalitarianism was slowly emerging in our society. But in 2017, I started to take notes to gather all kinds of ideas and thoughts about totalitarianism. I started to think about it in 2017, actually, and maybe even before that. You’re writing about it in a context of what’s happening around coronavirus policy or coronavirus mania, as you describe it, but you were actually thinking about these things well before COVID was around. When I learned that you were writing a book,” The Psychology of Totalitarianism,” I was very excited to read it. Jekielek: Quite a number of people have been talking to me about your work. Jan Jekielek: Professor Mattias Desmet, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. “The real reason why they buy into the narrative is always because it leads to this new social bond, because it frees them from their anxiety, because it enables them to direct their frustration and aggression at something,” Desmet says.

I sit down with Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology and author of “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.” Desmet is one of the world’s leading experts on the phenomenon known as “mass formation,” which can occur when people are isolated from one another and free-floating anxiety is prevalent. Why did large swaths of society suddenly buy into masking toddlers or restricting people from visiting their loved ones, even as they lay on their deathbeds?

The rise of totalitarianism book