“If we make rationality the basis of everything,” Mattias Desmet says, “we arrive in a completely irrational society.”
In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek interviews Mattias Desmet, a clinical psychology professor and author of “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.” Desmet is a leading expert on the phenomenon known as “mass formation,” a prelude to totalitarianism that can occur when large numbers of people feel isolated and free-floating anxiety is prevalent.
Jan Jekielek: You wrote “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” in the context of the coronavirus mania, as you describe it, but you were thinking about these things well before COVID was around….