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Mattias Desmet

Mattias Desmet is a professor of psychology at Ghent University and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. He articulated the theory of mass formation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

parent child state

Who Is Better at Raising Your Child, You or the State?

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Just as the state cannot trust the weighty job of parenting to parents, it cannot trust the job of childcare to childcare providers. They will therefore have to be subjected to strict protocols, as befits a good bureaucracy. And those protocols will be designed by experts who have scientifically determined which conditioning techniques lead to the best adapted little New Citizen.


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Desmet book burned

My Book Is Being Burned

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On January 25, 2023, Ghent University banned the use of my book The Psychology of Totalitarianism in the course “Critique of Society and Culture”. That happened in the aftermath of a media storm that erupted in September 2022 following my interviews with Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. I already wrote about that in a previous essay.  


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The Attempt to Burn Me at the Stake

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Perhaps for this reason: people might start to take seriously the idea that the corona crisis was primarily a psycho-social phenomenon that marked the transition to a technocratic system, a system in which the government would attempt to claim decision-making rights over its citizens and, step by step, take control of all private space.


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The Psychology of Totalitarianism

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A new totalitarianism is emerging in our society. Not a communist or fascist totalitarianism but a technocratic totalitarianism. A kind of totalitarianism that is not led by “a gang leader” such as Stalin or Hitler but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats. As always, a certain part of the population will resist and won’t fall prey to the mass formation.


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