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@ StackSats.IO
2025-05-24 14:10:12
My latest review for #bookstr is Desmet’s “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”.
This has been on my list since Covid when it was frequently referenced by those trying to explain the collective insanity societies were seemingly going through, it’s where Robert Malone got “Mass Formation Psychosis” from.
It starts off interesting with some psychological analysis of what Desmet calls “mechanical ideology” in which humans degenerated into dogma and blind belief through the enlightenment, which led to social isolation as people were disconnected from community and meaning through work, and how science became ideology despite enormous evidence of incorrectness.
And then once he’s set things up through the first 5 chapters and begins his explanations in chapter 6 “The Rise of the Masses”, things fall apart.
Everything Desmet is describing is statism but he is never able to put his finger on that.
He constantly refers to “Nazism and Stalinism” as his examples of the masses being overcome with this totalitarian streak which anyone with an interest in history will just see as weak.
Lenin isn’t mentioned once, nor Mao. China’s only mention is in the context of Covid. There’s nothing on pretty much any other totalitarianism other than examples from Nazi Germany and the Soviets under Stalin.
He goes from dismissing scientism and making a strong case for not trusting peer reviewed studies due to the amount of inaccuracies, underproduceability, and outright fraud, to invoking points like “the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that one in five people worldwide has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder” when he wants to support his own arguments
(like how TF can you rely on that kind of point, how would the WHO possibly know?).
I found myself constantly waiting for the crescendo, for the examinations of other regimes and deeper insights into how they bought out the worst in people. Instead I had to slog my way through a heavy reliance on Hannah Arendt quotes, and other than some random facts unrelated to the title theme, came away with very little from this book.
The worst book I’ve read this year, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. You’d get more value out of listening to Dan Carlin or Darryl Cooper putting themselves in other people’s shoes than this third hand account which basically explains nothing.
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