Malcolm Pollack on 'Mass Formation'

Our old friend Malcolm Pollack has an article in American Greatness entitled "'Mass Formation' is a Two-Headed Coin." Pollack offers the following characterization of mass formation:

“Mass formation” . . . is a newish term for an age-old and long-studied phenomenon: the occasional, and usually quite sudden, arising of passionate and sometimes completely irrational fixations of attention, desire, hatred, or other affinities and aversions in crowds of various sizes, from local mobs to entire societies.

What I will call the COVID Craze is an example of a mass formation. Not everyone who takes precautions is a victim of mass delusion, but surely many are. We see them everyday: people alone on windy beaches wearing face masks, for example. Such behavior is completely irrational and oftentimes issues in hateful displays against people who do not subscribe to the ovine lunacy of the hysterical whose fear has so addled them that they cannot distinguish between efficacious prophylaxis, misplaced moral enthusiasm, and virtue-signaling.

Under what conditions is a social phenomenon such as the COVID Craze usefully referred to as a mass formation? Pollack, citing Dr. Matthias Desmet of the University of Guelph, cites four: free-floating anxiety, social isolation, lack of meaning and purpose in one's life, and anger and frustration.

When all these conditions are met, the collective psyche becomes like a supercooled liquid: given the right nucleus around which to coalesce, a “phase transition” can propagate throughout the system in a very short time. That nucleus is some object that can be plausibly identified as a cause of everyone’s anxiety and frustration, and the allure of attacking and eliminating it through collective action becomes, for many people, irresistible. The reason for [cause of] this is sensible [understandable] enough, because it [the attack and attempted elimination]  addresses [alleviates] , in a single stroke, all of the stress-conditions listed above: it offers, at last, a concrete object to which free-floating anxiety can attach, about which something can be done; it provides a much-needed basis for the reconstruction of social bonds; it puts before the group a great purpose toward which everyone can direct their energy; and, perhaps most attractive of all, it creates a common enemy toward which the people can channel their anger. (I added the words in brackets to aid my understanding.)

Those who stand in the way of this collective purpose, as well as those who merely lack enthusiasm for the cause, have consciously excluded themselves from this new social bond, and so they are easily, and usually eagerly, seen as enemies who must be isolated or eliminated. This polarization in turn encourages increasingly conspicuous signaling of one’s fidelity to the group and its cause. The more costly those signals are at a personal level, the more they signify commitment to the new social bond, and the more respect they purchase from the in-group—even if (or, perhaps, especially if) they do nothing that is actually effective in solving the underlying problem.

Malcolm mentions COVID, but I would have liked to have seen other examples. I will suggest one of my own. The President of the United States has recently made a delusional statement to the effect that white supremacy is the greatest threat the nation faces.  Because Joseph Biden is non compos mentis,  there is a certain risk in attributing this thought to him as something he himself believes. It is however safe to say that he is serving as the mouthpiece of a large group of  people who either believe it, in which case they are delusional, or merely pretend to believe it for their own personal gain, in which case they are not delusional but immoral both in their mendacity and in their willingness to put personal profit over the good of the country that has made their success possible. The latter bunch include the 'woke' capitalists and all manner of 'woke' careerists in government, academia, the churches, and elsewhere who seek to promote themselves by spreading lies and slanders.

Malcolm tries to be even-handed in his piece, as witness:

It is also a dangerous conceit to imagine, as many on the Right seem to be doing with this viral idea, that it currently manifests itself only with regard to the COVID panic, and only on the Left. 

It’s important to keep in mind that the four conditions enumerated by Desmet are amply met throughout modern society, across political and ideological lines, and that as long as our various factions struggle to live together, any mass-formation on one side is likely to increase anger and stress on the other, in a destructive feedback loop.

Pollack is right on the first count: the COVID Craze (as I call it) is not the only manifestation of mass formation 'psychosis.' On the second, however, he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism.  Left and Right are not moral equivalents. The Left is far worse. I grant that there are some extremists among those on the Alternative Right. But they are few and far between, and of little consequence, in comparison to the extremists who dominate the Left. The Left is morally and indeed intellectually inferior to the Right by orders of magnitude. The contemporary 'woke' Left in the USA, which controls the Democrat Party, is mindlessly extremist and destructive in respect of almost all issues of importance. To name just a few mindlessly extreme and destructive ideas and policy proposals: the ethno-masochistic notion that mathematics is racist, which of course implies that hard science (physics, e.g.) is racist as well; the Pelosian idea that "borders are immoral" and the corresponding Democrat policy of allowing anyone from anywhere into the country without any control or vetting; the absurd notion that defunding the police and eliminating cash bail are 'reforms' that will reduce crime; the incessant Orwellian subversion of language as for example the misuse of 'insurrection' to refer to trespassing; the erection of monuments and memorials to the worthless while tearing down those that commemorate great and worthy Americans. I could cite another dozen examples with ease. 

I'll leave it here. The combox is open for Malcolm's response and for any comments of anyone.

 

Comments

[Malcolm Pollack]

Hi Bill, and thanks for linking to the piece, and adding your thoughts above.

I think you are quite right that the essay was perhaps too even-handed to be published in the growing heat of what really amounts to a simmering civil war. Like it or not, in times like these, it seems that one must choose sides - or have one chosen for you. (I don't think I need to tell you, or anyone who has ever read anything I've ever written, which side I'm on!)

By way of explanation, though: when I began to write the piece my only purpose was to offer a simplifying summary of the idea involved, for those who might not have the historical or psychological perspective to have thought about it already. As such, I wanted to write from a "zoomed-out" perspective, and to think about it as an important, and apparently universal, category of human behavior, one that has manifested itself from every social and political angle during our fallen species' long and dolorous history - and I wanted to make the point that it wouldn't have such a general form, always and everywhere, if there weren't some reason for such a vulnerability to be "wired in" to our way of being. (That reason, I suggested, is that it 'mass formation' becomes a useful 'emergency mode' for sudden and potent cohesion during times of group-level threats.)

Alas, such are these awful times that for an observer to consider the phenomenon from such a remote altitude makes him seem almost blithely unconcerned with the bloody battle shaping up on the plain below - and I think you (and several others who have commented on the piece) are well-justified in yanking me back to ground-level where the action is.

Also, I agree of course that it is very obviously the Left that has gone insane in the current era: from COVID madness, to radical ethnomasochism, to hallucinatory universalism, to the denial of all naturally and objectively existing categories, to the wholesale rejection of the civilization that nurtured and fed them, to the bitter condemnation of the American Founding, and to the general sawing-off-of-the-branch-they're-sitting-on in a thousand different ways.

I should add too that the impression you (and commenters at AG) got about my alleged neutrality was not helped by the title that the AG editors chose, which singled out this aspect of the essay right from the start.

If I had it to do over, I'd have brought the piece back down to the battlefield at the end, and planted a flag. (Perhaps I should write a follow-up to do just that.)

[BV]

Malcolm,

I was so eager to link to and post about your AG article that I had no time to read the AG comments. I shall do so today.

I will also try to locate in my sprawling personal library my copy of Wilhelm Reich, The Psychology of Mass Fascism, to see what light that old book sheds on contemporary developments.

The problem of navigating between the ground-level and high-altitude perspectives is a fascinating and important one. One mark of a useful idiot -- which of course you are not -- is the foolish notion that one can remain 'at altitude' and not take sides. Rod Dreher, for example. I say that any so-called 'conservative' who doesn't support Trump in the present circumstances is a useful idiot and vincibly ignorant.

[Joe Odegaard]

In reading between the lines of Malcom Pollack's article, the obvious target of attack of the current mass formation would certainly seem to be the "un-vaxxed," which also includes the "un-boosted." They are constantly demonized by politicians and the elite. I have never seen anything like it, and I am entering my 8th decade. It is terrifying, and completely irrational: If you are vaccinated, aren't you protected and need not fear? Not so ! These forces are dangerous beyond belief, and I can only hope that the people I love have the means to protect themselves. Signed, Joe Odegaard, Architect and Barbarian.

[BV]

Thanks for the comment, Joe.

Some call for the unvaxxed to be killed; others that they should be put on a triage list; still others that they should be denied medical treatment altogether.https://www.dailywire.com/news/msnbc-medical-contributor-wants-a-separate-triage-list-for-the-unvaxxed-joy-reid-wants-them-to-pay-more

These extremists don't want to admit that the vaccines are not all that effective, and what is worse, cause severe complication in some. Adding to the problem is that our government cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the border, about crime, and other things. Fauci has been exposed by RFK Jr. and Rand Paul.

[Frank Attanucci]

I hope to be able to study the work of Dr. Mattias Desmet and the psychological phenomenon of "mass formation." While watching the video linked below, I could not help but recall the "Scapegoat Mechanism" as described by René Girard (1923-2015).

"People become radically intolerant towards dissonant voices."
-- Dr. Mattias Desmet

Note: Dr. Mattias Desmet is lecturer of psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting, Ghent University. He also has a master's degree in statistics. His preferred term is "mass formation" and not "mass formation psychosis" (a term which he deems unhelpful).

Four preconditions for the emergence of "mass formation":

1. A lot of people experience a lack of social bond and feel socially isolated.
2. A lot of people experience life as meaningless or senseless (e.g., the phenomenon of "bullshit jobs").
3. There is a lot of what psychologists call "free-floating anxiety" and "free-floating psychological discontent."
4. There is a lot of free-floating frustration and aggression.

Note (paraphrasing Desmet's thesis discussed in the video below):

Given these preconditions, what can happen is this: A narrative, a story is distributed through the mass media indicating an object of anxiety and at the same time providing a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety. Then the following (might) happen: All of the free-floating anxiety (which is extremely painful because it always threatens to turn into panic), gives rise to a willingness to participate in the proffered strategy for dealing with the object of anxiety because people feel that their participation gives them a way of controlling their anxiety and their psychological discontent. People feel suddenly connected again in a heroic struggle against the object of their anxiety. As a result of their participation, a new kind of solidarity, a new kind of social bond, a new kind of meaning-making arises in society. In fact, these psychological goods (quite apart from the truth of the narrative) is the reason why so many are willing to participate in the struggle against the designated object, regardless of other personal goods that may be lost.

https://youtu.be/IqPJiM5Ir3A

[BV]

Thanks for the comments, Frank. Would you agree that BLM and Antifa are currently the best examples of mass formations?