A mass formation is the emergence of a large-scale group formation where a large number of individuals unite under common beliefs, sentiments, goals or ideology and form a group identity. Once a mass formation is formed this creates a kind of collective, uniform entity that operates like a hive mind and submits to groupthink. A mass psychosis is when segments of a population collectively lose touch with reality and is perpetuated by beliefs in untruths or delusions. The formation of mass psychosis among a population can occur whenever a sum of individuals lose their sense of identity in a crowd/group, a collective mind, which renders the individual who is a part of the crowd unable to reason independently as the weight of the crowd forces the individual to submit to its reasoning powers, objectives, and sentiments; whether they are rooted in reality or not. When formed, a crowd becomes its own collective mind with its own psychological traits independent of the individuals constituting it, as originally established by the French social-psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon. The establishment of a collective mind is what facilitates a mass psychosis to form and propagate. There will be more on the traits of a crowd later. But first, what conditions make an individual prone to a mass formation and thus mass psychosis? Dr. Mattias Desmet, professor of Clinical Psychology, lays out 4 conditions that lead to mass formation (https://zero-sum.org/mass-formation-psychosis-and-the-coronavirus-narrative/#CloseToMe). These are social isolation/ lack of social bonds, lack of sense-making, free-floating anxiety, and free-floating psychological discontent. Whenever these conditions are present, an individual is more vulnerable to mass formation and mass psychosis.
Social bonds serve a multitude of purposes for the individual. They help an individual make sense of his or her reality through converging with others on meaning. When you’re socially bonded with others it also establishes you with meaning and identity within those bonds. They attach us to a purposeful ecosystem. Without social bonds we have a tougher time feeling grounded in our own identity and making sense of our reality. When we feel socially isolated we are more prone to attaching to social bonds when the opportunity arises, which makes us more prone to enmeshing ourselves in a mass formation (crowd). We need social connections and physical engagement; it is essential to overall well-being. It establishes a sense of belonging and connection, which facilitates safety and comfort in one’s environment. In contrast, social isolation can breed feelings of helplessness, loneliness, and being unsafe and untrusting of one’s larger environment. One loses contact to different degrees with the outside world and may feel like they are on their own. In today’s society, when we are physically isolated our connection to the outside world is mainly facilitated by the media we consume. Depending on the messaging, the media one digests may amplify the intensity of the aforementioned feelings. One may develop an unhealthy fear of the outside world that compounds their social isolation. As in the case of Covid-19 and the messaging of the mainstream media, people grew to view others solely as dangerous threats to the health of themselves and loved ones. A person may start to feel helplessly alone against a threat that is bigger than them; which forces them to seek isolation out of fear. We can see how segments of the population who were already suffering from a lack of social bonds would already be vulnerable before a pandemic to a mass formation; and the isolation encouraged and imposed as a response to the pandemic amplified social isolation among even more people. Large amounts of the isolated population attached to the media’s sensationalized narrative and the social bonds provided by this narrative. It unified masses of people, leading to a mass formation around the Covid narrative provided by the mainstream media.
Sense-making refers to an individual’s ability to understand and make sense of their experiences and situations, especially when they’re complex and uncertain. It is also the meaning they apply to their world and life. A person needs to have a solid foundational structure for interpreting life and assimilating experiences into a cohesive tapestry of meaning. Whenever an individual lacks a coherent framework for understanding their experiences in an adaptive and meaningful way they are more vulnerable to become enmeshed in a mass formation that gives meaning to their lives. In today’s society, there is an epidemic of meaninglessness and purposelessness. As Dr. Desmet points out, some studies have found that 40%-70% of people experience their jobs as senseless (https://zero-sum.org/mass-formation-psychosis-and-the-coronavirus-narrative/#CloseToMe). In other words, a large percentage of people feel their jobs do not have much, if any, meaning. This captures the purposelessness many people feel overall towards their lives. When people are already suffering from a lack of sense-making, they will have trouble assimilating any large scale event like a pandemic and will be more likely to rely on outside sources of authority to make sense of the situation and provide meaning. Thus, making them more vulnerable to associating with the crowd and any mass psychosis that is prevalent.
The 3rd and 4th conditions of free-floating anxiety and psychological discontent are present whenever there is no clear cause or object that can be established in the mind as the root of one’s anxiety and discontentment. Thus, people are searching for an explanation they can label as the cause of their free-floating anxiety and psychological discontent. It is my view that the structure of industrial-technological society with its elevation of materialism, a digital lifestyle, and its mechanization of the human being contributes to breeding a population with these negative psychological traits. Because it is such a complex system people don’t realize this societal structure is what is causing much their anxiety and discontent. A population with high amounts of free-floating anxiety and discontent will be eager to adopt any object that can be used as a scapegoat. This is especially true if the population is continuously hammered by the media with a narrative about what they should be worried about and what they should do to stop it. Many people are more than willing to attach their anxiety to the object suggested to them by the media and follow whatever the prescribed plan of action is suggested no matter the costs. The narrative provided by the media and other institutions of authority provide a cohesive perspective that can unify the socially isolated in a fight against the object of anxiety. It creates a sense of connection and togetherness. Also, those enmeshed in the crowd can filter their frustration and aggression towards those who are dissidents to the narrative. The adopted narrative allows the individual to filter their anxiety and discontent towards a single cause and the prescribed plan of action provides comfort and relief in believing that putting trust in the plan will vanquish the object of anxiety. This results in what Dr. Desmet calls “mental intoxication”, which works like hypnosis. It narrows one’s focus to the point they cannot consider anything outside the reality of the mass formation. And this mental intoxication can drive a mass psychosis in a crowd.
Whenever these 4 conditions of social isolation/lack of social bonds, lack of sense-making, free-floating anxiety, and free-floating discontent are prevalent among individuals in a population, it makes fertile the grounds for creating a mass formation and mass psychosis. We see the dangers of when a powerful force like the mass media can provide a narrative to exploit these conditions and contribute to the forming of a mass formation, a collective mind. The crowd/group provides a solution to reverse all of these conditions. It creates social bonds, promotes sentiments that create meaning making, and provides an outlet for the object/explanation of free-floating anxiety and discontent. But the crowd is not objective, it can’t be, and often its solutions are promoted by untruths, exaggerations, and delusions. I will now further examine how mass psychosis spreads by briefly touching upon some characteristics of a crowd as mentioned by Gustave Le Bon in his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.
According to Gustave Le Bon there are several characteristics that define the sentiments and morality of crowds. The first of these is that crowds are impulsive, mobile, and irritable. This speaks to the fact that a crowd, or mass formation to reference the term used previously, is guided by affect and not rationality. They are moved by how something makes them feel. It is thus easy to mobilize a crowd once their emotions are stirred. A crowd becomes emotionally invested in a belief or narrative and this alone can account for the fact that they can be easily persuaded to take impulsive action. If one holds the power to irritate a crowd’s emotions, such as through the mass media, they can mobilize a crowd to take prescribed action. This makes a crowd vulnerable to mass psychosis if the narrative stroking their emotional impulses is a delusion, exaggeration, or untruth. Because a crowd is impulsive and irritable, it is typically useless to try to persuade them out of their beliefs using logic or rationale. This does not penetrate the collective mind. The impulsiveness, irritability, and mobility of a crowd can help facilitate the spread of a mass psychosis.
The second characteristic is that crowds are credulous and readily influenced by suggestion. Because of the sensemaking of the social bonds within a crowd, people are more than willing to adopt suggestions within the crowd. It is similar to in-group bias. This can facilitate a rapid spread of suggested belief, attitude, and action within the crowd. It is akin to a contagion of the mind that spreads rapidly. And, again, the media can be a powerful tool for exploiting a crowd’s credulity and infecting the collective mind with its suggestions and narratives. Although, this credulity does not apply to suggestions coming from outside of the crowd/group. It thus is a symptom of a type of hive mind mentality within an echo chamber. Another characteristic that can aid the contagion of mass psychosis.
A third characteristic is the exaggeration and ingenuousness of the sentiments of crowds. Crowds often utilize blank-and-white thinking. Nuance escapes them and they often operate in extremes. While individuals can examine their sentiments rationally and objectively, the collective entity of a crowd does not possess the same reasoning faculties. Their sentiments are often exaggerated and excessive because they lack the emotional, moral, and mental regulating functions an individual has. Crowds do not admit uncertainty or doubt. This inability to utilize introspection facilitates the contagion of a mass psychosis. Exaggerated and extreme sentiments can easily spread throughout and possess a crowd. This is especially true when the mass media is used to spread sentiments among a crowd.
A fourth characteristic of crowds is that they’re intolerant, dictatorial, and conservative. The crowd and its sentiments become an authority its members are simultaneously a member of and obedient too. There is an impulsive need and willingness to please the authority of the crowd among its members. An unquestioned loyalty is expected among the members. They therefore become hostile and intolerant to those not aligned with the crowd and who challenge its authority. We can think of totalitarian regimes and fascism to get an extreme picture of crowd dynamics. In totalitarian societies, power and control are maintained by the authority of the collective force of the mass formation by making enemies of those who do not follow protocol or who show, or are labeled as, opposition to the mass identity of the state/people. It is ultimately not the leader where the power lies in totalitarian societies, but in the force of the masses who become completely aligned and identify with the goals and sentiments of the leader through enmeshment in a mass formation. In other words, the masses enforce totalitarian tendencies because they become identified with them and their goals. The intolerance of crowds and their dictatorial impulses makes them very conservative and closed-off. Another reason they cannot be penetrated or made to compromise their positions by reason alone. These characteristics also impact the member’s ability to be empathetic to those outside of the crowd. The conservativeness, intolerance, and authoritarian nature of the crowd may allow a mass psychosis to take hold while denying in the minds of the members of the crowd consideration of challenges to their distorted sentiments and practices.
The 5th characteristic to consider is the morality of crowds. Crowds can be more or less moral than the individual depending on the suggestions that are leading them. They are capable of courageous and heroic action or destructive and evil action. What’s important to consider is that a crowd/group does not have the same moral conscience as an individual. An individual in a group does not have the same fear of consequences as they would by themself. They can avoid the level of accountability that a single person must deal with. They also share responsibility with others in the group. This makes it possible for a person to engage in behavior as part of a crowd that they would never engage in as an individual. This separation of an individual in a crowd from his moral conscience can lead to mass unethical, discriminatory, and oppressive behavior. There is a term in social psychology called risky shift that is used to label an individual’s capability to engage in riskier behavior in a group. Crowds may also feel what they’re doing is moral even when it is not. Members may be bounded by feeling they are warriors of justice engaged in a heroic fight or struggle that gives them a sense of moral superiority even if supporting immoral and oppressive sentiments. The suppression of individual conscience and association with crowd/group morality is another factor that helps facilitate the propagation of mass psychosis.
These characteristics of a crowd are all important factors in the creation and maintenance of a mass psychosis. A crowd becomes a self-insulated entity that is vulnerable to adopting delusions and exaggerations. A crowd is easily mobilized due to its impulsive nature by irritating the emotional components linked to its sentiments. It is readily suggestible and willing to adopt delusions, exaggerations, and untruths in alignment with its motives. It is immune to rational discourse and dialogue and unable to consider reason that is counter-intuitive to its sentiments. It lacks the objective faculties to be introspective and critical of its nature, attitudes, or beliefs. A crowd is an authority onto itself and possesses dictatorial qualities that make it intolerant of others and unwilling to change or reconsider its positions. When a crowd becomes attached to a narrative it does not question it. It becomes emotionally invested and resists all challenges. The self-contained and authoritarian nature of a crowd makes it vulnerable to mass psychosis spreading among its members in an unchallenged way. All of these attributes may be amplified if the mass media is being used to promote and spread the narrative and sentiments the crowd identifies with. Due to the suppression of individual conscience in a crowd, it becomes easier to engage in behavior and have views that a person would not individually. If members of a group are bound by feelings of moral superiority and justice, immoral and destructive behavior feels justified. Considering all these characteristics of crowd psychology, one can understand the elements that facilitate a mass psychosis to take hold among a crowd, a group, and a collective. They develop a narrowed focus that prevents them from considering or seeing truth outside of the sentiments of the collective. In today’s hyper-connected society, mass media and social media have an unprecedented ability to infect the collective with exaggerated, delusional, and untrue narratives and sentiments that can facilitate the formation of mass psychosis. We must be vigilant of this and the group dynamics at play all around us. Even if we can’t completely awaken those in the crowd who are in a slumber of psychosis through our calm reasoning and rationality, we can stop the contagion from taking over the population completely. We should not treat those caught up in the delusions of the crowd as enemies, but as patients who have succumbed to an illness. Give them the empathy and tolerance they are not capable of. Then, perhaps when the hypnosis starts to wear off, they will feel encouraged to leave the crowd and return to their autonomous human nature.
References:
(https://zero-sum.org/mass-formation-psychosis-and-the-coronavirus-narrative/#CloseToMe)
Gustave Le Bon. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. 1895
Also, here is a great interview with Professor Desmet on mass formation in the era of Covid:
Feel free to delete, but I referenced this post in my own Substack if you'd like to check it out. https://beverlyfields.substack.com/p/coming-soon. Thanks for the strong work