The underlying forces of human nature during the covid years
And the absolute necessity to have a shared understanding of the psychological and social mechanisms that were at play during this crisis
3 years have passed, almost to the day, since the now infamous lockdowns started in the spring of 2020.
In all honesty, I grudgingly decided to address this issue again in a short essay even though I promised myself multiple times not to go down that road in the last year. First, because of the antagonistic nature of the subject. Second, readers are probably fed up, with the multitude of articles, podcasts and videos on covid that are already out there to be consumed, commented and challenged.
Why bother, right ? What else is there to write about on the matter anyway ? Most probably nothing.
But in the end, something drove me to write on the subject once again even though I might risk loosing some subscribers here and there (for being off the usual topics addressed in this Substack). What we lived through since March 2020 is just too crazy to not write anything in retrospect.
In addition, it seems no sincere or honest post-mortem was initiated by civil society or institutional authorities, and I have an unsettling feeling the most important lessons have yet to be learned by a critical mass of citizens in our respective countries. Everybody just moved on.
In the summer of 2021, I launched
with a first essay that put forward the argument that the particularities of French Canadian responses to covid were no surprise, based on their inherent historical and socio-cultural traits. Since then, I voluntarily avoided the issue to focus on a variety of other subjects that include political polarization, the historical evolution of public discourse or historical interpretations of various contemporary Québec narratives.In any case, if you’re interested in that August 2021 piece, see link below:
What changed my mind in recent months were two books I read almost back to back. At first, I was not expecting these books would be quoted in the same essay but in the end, both exhibited eye-opening qualities and thought-provoking arguments that helped me in understanding the population wide reaction during the covid crisis.
Above and beyond all the talks and debate over the usefulness of masks and lockdowns, or the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, or the legitimacy of governmental mandates within a democratic framework, my main fascination during this ordeal lied elsewhere. It lied mainly in the rapid behavioral changes I witnessed of my fellow compatriots on a massive scale.
Since the onset of what we can now call the covid years, I was struck (even destabilized) by the cultish devotion of some people to apply the prescribed health measures imposed by our public authorities. From one day to the next (or so it seemed at the time), many colleagues, neighbors and family members traded a lifetime of nuanced sound judgments on health precautions, governmental overreach tendencies or economic principles for a simplistic world view that rapidly escalated in a series of contradictory mandates.
With a zeal equaled only by the most brainwashed members of bizarre cults, citizens even felt in some instances a moral obligation to denounce neighbors. What on earth could trigger such a phenomenon, I repeatedly asked myself ?
In the early days, when some observers identified such behaviors as earmarks of totalitarian states, most people were outraged, even disgusted by the comparison. How dare we compare the covid responses and attitudes of the population with 20th century totalitarian regimes ?
Turns out, as described so eloquently by psychology professor Mattias Desmet, leading expert on the theory of mass formation, what we experienced during the covid years have all the manifestations of a society being under a form of mass hypnosis. In the continuity to what Gustave Le Bon theorized in his concept of the psychology of crowds at the end of the 19th century, Desmet puts forward a pretty convincing argument with his theory.
For a detailed explanation from Desmet himself, I strongly suggest the following documentary.
Desmet’s argument, in short, stipulates that the population wide psychological characteristics which are prerequisites to the establishment of a totalitarian-style regime were present in most western countries at the start of the covid crisis: Atomization of society, isolated individuals, free-floating anxiety and agression.
My only advice to anyone reading this, feeling uneasy about such a theory being a possible framework to analyze the past few years, is the following. To honestly assess this theory, one needs a high dose of humility and openness to new ideas. One must be willing to be challenged in its core beliefs. And since we are dealing here with a discipline well beyond my normal expertise, I must stress that I landed here only by curiosity and a sincere willingness to learn and understand.
A single framework never offers a complete explanation of any phenomenon but can provide a useful angle to decode the world around us.
See the following excerpt from his latest book The Psychology of Totalitarianism on examples of behaviors inside this totalitarian state of mind:
“ … psychological characteristics of a totalitarian population: the willingness of the individuals to blindly sacrifice their personal interests in favor of the collective, radical intolerance of dissident voices, a paranoid informant mentality that allows government to penetrate the very heart of private life, the curious susceptibility to absurd pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda, the blind following of a narrow logic that transcends all ethical boundaries (making totalitarianism incompatible with religion), the loss of all diversity and creativity (making totalitarianism the enemy of art and culture), and intrinsic self-destructiveness (which ensures that totalitarian systems invariably annihilate themselves in the end).
, professor of psychology
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