The thesis of Desmet’s (Prof. of Psychology at Ghent University) book is very simple and easily stated. The general official reaction to Covid was an instance of what he calls mass formation. Given the right social conditions which he points out are manifestly available in modern society namely alienation, high levels of anxiety, anomie, meaningless jobs, lack of a firm moral scaffolding, and the numberless worries generated by the agitations of social media, a significant proportion of the populace are ready to become ensorcelled by a single threat and form a crowd, an aggregation of headless chickens that devolves to the intelligence of the most stupid in the mob. Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book ‘The Crowd’ and Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ are precursors to this line of analysis which M.D. lays out with splendid clarity. Of the two earlier books Le Bon’s is the more readable, Arendt’s is turgid with footnotes flourishing like scholastic weeds.
To get a good resume of the book’s main thesis your best resource is to view one of the many youtube videos in which Mattias Desmet appears. There is much more detail in the book particularly about how the logico-empirical vision of science enables technocratic authoritarianism. In the end chapters of his book he maintains that even this version of scienctific method is wrong, science is as much an intuitive process as an empirical one. To discover the protophaenomenon (cf. Coleridge)
is not a matter of diligent searching but alertness to its presentation or knowing where to look. To alter Pater’s dictum about art, all science aspires to the condition of music. Desmet uses examples from Chaos theory to illustrate the inevitable harmony and beauty that underlies any apparent disorder.
Some readers may find this philosophical coda to be an add on and unnecessarily elevated compared to the practical aspects of the earlier chapters, hovering as it does in the thin
air of panpsychism. I think that it is a demonstration of the general need for a metaphysical superstructure that is resistant to the frenzies of popular agitation. Everyone needs something like this though it may be unlike the speculations of Desmet.
This is an excellent book. The central idiocy of Covidology is still going on and in one of his videos Desmet remarks that Totalitarianism always ends badly and worse may be on the way. The German health ministry reports that serious adverse reactions may have occurred in 1 in 5,000 injections (note not people, injections):
adverse reactions to innoculation
Dr. Doshi in a study conducted by the British Medical Journal found that the adverse reactions exceeded the reduction in numbers requiring hospitalization due to Covid.
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