On Mass Formation Psychosis

Mass formation psychosis provides a framework for understanding how in the face of a novel situation, two political parties can have drastically different strategies and solutions, even when there is not sufficient data to say one way or another. While each screams and pressures to push the other out, limiting discussion, limiting/blocking research, thereby destroying possibilities for creative synergistic thinking.

The framework does a great job explaining the rise of Trump, and how/why so many people were fooled by him. I had recently been going over the work of Victor Frankls' Man Search For Meaning (his experiences in a nazi concentration camp), as well as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's work The Gulag Archipelago (his experiences in the forced labor camps of the soviet union) and I find Dr. Mattias's framework to do a fantastic job of explaining how both the perpetrators and victims went along with the lies, even when it meant their own demise.

Dr. Mattias Desmet is the author of the framework.

Books: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19024766.Mattias_Desmet

Articles: https://biblio.ugent.be/person/F94DD30A-F0ED-11E1-A9DE-61C894A0A6B4

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mattias-Desmet-2

All information and frameworks can and will be weaponized by ill-intended social actors. Discard the noise, find the signal.

You are going to hear a lot of people from all backgrounds and motives bastardizing Mattias's work to suit their own needs and agendas, and so I would like to try to provide an objective exploration and layout of the framework.

Mass Formation Psychosis is distinct from Mass Hypnosis by means of the mechanics and implications at play. In other words, although the effects of each may observably be similar, that which causes and fuels them are distinct. So too are their results.

Mass Formation Psychosis required 4 factors:

1) large numbers of individuals who feel isolated and lacking in social meaning/engagement.

2) An excess of free floating anxiety in the community at large. Free floating anxiety can be understood as a general feeling of uneasiness, without any particular object or situation with which those feelings are tied to.

3) large numbers of individuals who are unable to make sense of, understand, or come to general consensus about the world.

4) A lack of meaning, or an excess of free floating Psychological Discontent.

According to the framework, once 30% of the population meets all four criteria they are 'primed'. Once they are in their "primed" state, if an object of great anxiety appears in the environment, either naturally or by media influence (or both), then all of that free floating anxiety, uncertainty, and unrest ties itself to the object of anxiety.

The implications of this projection leads individuals to narrow their attention so much so that they lose touch with reality.

Video of Mattias giving a brief overview of the framework:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vIDh5KrLBo

Mattias's work is based upon the work of Gustav Le Bon, you can find a pdf of "The Crowd" here: https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125518/1414_LeBon.pdf