The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Mattias Desmet
The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Mattias Desmet
7 Rating(s)
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The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Author: Mattias Desmet

Narrator: Dan Crue

Unabridged: 7 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Chelsea Green

Published: 06/16/2022

Synopsis

We bear witness to loneliness, free-floating anxiety, and fear giving way to censorship, loss of privacy, and surrendered freedoms. It is all spurred by a singular, focused crisis narrative that forbids dissident views and relies on destructive groupthink. Totalitarianism is not a coincidence and does not form in a vacuum. It arises from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script throughout history, its formation gaining strength and speed with each generation?from the Jacobins to the Nazis and Stalinists?as technology advances. Governments, mass media, and other mechanized forces use fear, loneliness, and isolation to demoralize populations and exert control, persuading large groups of people to act against their own interests, always with destructive results. In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, world-renowned Professor of Clinical Psychology Mattias Desmet deconstructs the societal conditions that allow this collective psychosis to take hold. By looking at our current situation and identifying the phenomenon of “mass formation”?a type of collective hypnosis?he clearly illustrates how close we are to surrendering to totalitarian regimes.

About Mattias Desmet

Mattias Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology in the Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Ghent University and a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist. In 2018, he received the Evidence-Based Psychoanalytic Case Study Prize of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and in 2019, he received the Wim Trijsburg Prize of the Dutch Association of Psychotherapy.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Todd on July 02, 2022

This is one of the best books I’ve read on the current global situation regarding Covid, The Great Reset, and the seemingly psychotic state of a large portion of the world’s population. Where we are headed is frightening, and this book explains how this all happens (and how it has happened numerous......more

Goodreads review by Darius on July 13, 2022

The book is for those who lived the last two years asking themselves, "What the hell is happening with people's sanity". Mattias Desmet did a great job explaining the current state of the psyche of the masses from a psychological point of view. The book is not an easy read. Concentration is needed.......more

Goodreads review by AJ on December 15, 2024

First, the positive, the two chapters that gave this book an extra star: chapter 4 on the CoVid-19 response and chapter 8 on conspiracy theories made many valid, if unoriginal, points and even contained some real insights. Now…here’s where my review will be a choppy mixture of sarcastic “things I le......more

Goodreads review by Bjorn on March 22, 2022

Dit is een rotboek. Echt. Toch voor recensenten, het soort lieden dat zich bezighoudt met boekbesprekingen. Die mensen kunnen namelijk nog zo positief zijn over wat je bij mekaar gepend hebt, ze moeten toch iéts negatiefs kunnen zeggen over je werk. En daar slaag ik niet in wat De psychologie van to......more

Goodreads review by Kit on July 19, 2022

The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet is three things: - An impressive continuation of the work of Gustave Le Bon, Hannah Arendt, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the field of socio-political psychology. - A strikingly well-articulated perspective on the objective and subjective nature of our e......more

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