In junior high, a hypnotist came to my school. My mom told me that I would not be attending. I wasn’t surprised, just curious as to why. I remember her, in simple wisdom, telling me that Christians don’t put their minds into anyone else’s power.
This might have been one of the first times that I thought about Catholicism as being more than ritual and “religious” belief. It was about what it means to be fully human.
My children’s catechism asks, “What is man?” While our bodies are made to resemble God in their life-giving power, we are made in his image and likeness mostly through our souls and our will, with the ability to know and love what is right. To hand that greatest of all treasures into the hands of another is inappropriate, and actually dangerous.
Mankind has a sad history of offering up its will (and consequently, its freedoms) to corrupt leaders. How did Hitler or Stalin ever gain power in the first place? How did people come to a place where they would betray everything that made them human for the sake of corrupt ideologies?
Dr. Mattias Desmet is a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University, with a master’s degree in statistics. He has continued with the study of 200 years worth of research in the field of “mass formation psychosis” – how large groups of people are shepherded into an ideology – and the needed criteria to make entire nations ripe for mass psychosis.
The first condition is a general lack of “societal bonding.” So, imagine a nation of people in constant, promoted disagreement. A leader divides the people, perhaps calling some “racist, misogynist, and intolerable.” The people begin to distrust each other and end up isolated and in what has been labelled a “loneliness epidemic”.
The lack of bonding leads to a lack of meaning. People feel empty; they cannot find a sense of purpose in their work or their lives.
This void leads to high-levels of “free-floating anxiety;” they are anxious, but they don’t know why.
(The reported anxiety in our times, with the number of youth on anti-anxiety medications, is unheard of. Even our pets require anxiety intervention.)
The anxiety leads to unexplainable frustration, anger, and aggression. And this, finally, is the time when people are ripe for mass formation. Their wills have been weakened as they float about, angry, anxious, Godless, and looking for something to give them a purpose.
You, like me, may have asked yourself how the people of Germany or Russia could have been manipulated into ideologies that seem incomprehensible to us now. Standing by and doing nothing as people with different beliefs get arrested? Reporting neighbours to the authorities? Medical experimentation on unwilling subjects? Needing documentation to visit certain parts of town?
But before they ever got to that place, those frustrated individuals were manipulated with a narrative – something to focus their anxiety on – that gave them purpose. The narrative itself didn’t matter much, as long as it gave credence to their anxiety and a target for their anger: the frightening people who disagreed.
This new bonding provided to them made them willing to ignore absurd and contradictory elements within the narrative of manipulation. The more absurd it grew, the more convicted they became, willing to abandon their freedom, families, and health for the sake of their new purpose. In essence, the thing they were fighting for became a new religion.
These people could be shown in stark black and white that what they believed was an utter lie, and still they held firmly. Logical questions were answered with rote mantras. To suggest that they were wrong only increased their scorn and conviction.
Desmet says this psychosis is similar to hypnosis. The ideology of the times would be provoked and confirmed by a figurehead, “a voice,” that would regularly address the people, repeating what was said the day before, every day for months.
Imagine such a figure appearing daily on television, repeating and confirming the cause and generating the mantras. Then, hourly, news sources, pundits, and celebrities would repeat what had been announced in the morning. They would repeat the mantras. You would go shopping and the words would be repeated over the PA system. Posters would repeat the words. Your phone would send you unrequested updates and confirmations of what the voice said. You would go to bed, only for it to start again in the morning.
This is the work of hypnotists.
The history and development of these studies are absolutely terrifying. Statistically, they show that 20 to 30 per cent of a population will go into true mass psychosis. Forty to 60 per cent may have doubts but will follow those who they’ve been told are the majority. Fear and consequences keep them from questioning aloud.
Those who remain have the voices that are needed to break through the propaganda that is holding the other people imprisoned.
Love it or hate it, I don’t think it takes too much wisdom to find reasons for grave concern in these studies.
St. Augustine wrote, “Nothing conquers except truth, and the victory of truth is love.”
May we all wrap our hearts and minds in truth and courage as we unite ourselves to God’s holy will alone. Because truth rarely goes unchallenged.
