This, the article attached below, is a superb essay, completely true in everything it says.

What he, Mr.Desmet, the essay’s author, leaves out, two elements which are also critical to understanding the particular mass-psychosis he describes, is both

The former citizens are reduced to serfs without even knowing it. They are the defeated enemy of the unrepentant, incompetent in everything but its violence and destructiveness, always-usurping Marxist state and the bureaucrats who control its levers of power, those serfs constantly tricked into thinking that that state is acting on their behalf, when it is doing the opposite. It is their enemy, and they don’t even know it. That is its, the Antichrist’s greatest strength.

Because the very definition of a serf is someone who has no actual property rights, no freedom of contract, those being the most essential freedoms of all, absolutely essential to the pursuit of happiness, the rights/powers without which all other liberties are easily crushed by the Marxists because of the individual’s resulting powerlessness, the foundational liberties (not, as Marxists sneeringly dismiss them, “mere economic rights”), liberty of contract being the one individual freedom explicitly and textually preserved in the original text of the American Constitution – before and antecedent to the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments, were even created, with nothing in the Constitution granting the federal government any power to violate it in any way (and the federal government textually- forbidden from having any power not explicitly granted it in the Constitution), with the interstate Commerce clause and the Guarantee clause empowering the federal government to make sure the states don’t violate it either, and not to empower the federal government to destroy it, as the Supreme Court has been pretending since the 1930s.

Over time, if not actively prevented, more and more institutions become Marxist/collectivist (the inevitable outcome and mindset of every institution, every collaborative effort among people, every bureaucracy, every large corporation even, which is not explicitly foundationally-dedicated to opposing Marxism as its purpose) and are given the power of brutal enforcement over the former citizens, including threats to the rewards it previously bestowed on them, the former citizens reduced to serfs, the Marxist bureaucracies everywhere empowered to demand anything from them, through absolute control over society’s rewards and punishments – especially through threats of violence of one sort of another, threats of each individual’s destruction for any non-compliance, and the power to convince everyone of even massive frauds, to trick them into actually believing the lies which are the Marxists’ power’s invariable foundation, by deploying against the citizens all of the psychologically-overwhelming propaganda sources, all the things which “teach” us what we think we know (the schools and universities, virtually all entertainment, “newspapers,” cable and corporate network “news,” the social media platforms – in short, every mental input) as their allies whether the propaganda sources want to do it or not (in many cases, such as the professoriate, and the universities which they successfully defeated/destroyed beginning in the late 1960s – simultaneous with the Marxist defeat/destruction of the primary and secondary schools by the imposition of the teachers unions’ absolute control over them – that self-regarding professoriate being America’s first completely Marxist institution, The New York Times, corporate network news, etc., they are oh-so willing accomplices).

Specifically regarding the psychology of the conquered/defeated population, of the serfs (who, as part of their indoctrination, are convinced they are otherwise), he leaves out the fact that each time they experience themselves as being powerless in the face of what they experience as existential calamity (the actual magnitude, the magnitude that would be perceived by a sane person, of the calamity always being purely-imagined), each serf is so desperate for salvation from by the government and its self-proclaimed “expert” bureaucrats, the terror which they experience as a trauma, trauma which becomes increasingly traumatic each time they experience such, so that their experience of the initial trauma (whatever it was – a fall from a bicycle as a child, injustice at the hand of a teacher or a parent, graduating to politicized/socialized fears, such as fear of terrorists, of tobacco, of “pollution,” of ostracization or racism or “global warming,” fear of Covid – it doesn’t matter, they are all interchangeable, all of them being hysterical reactions to things which are inevitable in real life, things which simply are guaranteed both to occur and impossible, as the Marxists always promise them, to be completely-defeated by men at all, especially by any invariably-worthless bureaucracy) which may have required a much more violent incident than the subsequent ones, the calamitous trauma they experience which is incited increasingly based also on their memory of their previous such traumas.

So it gets easier and easier to traumatize and terrorize the people each time they experience that traumatic level of personal terror. And the Marxists’/bureaucrats’ promise of salvation from the terror, the trauma, is always a lie, their vehicle for usurping power.

Because the solution, for those subjected to what Mr. Desmet calls the mechanistic mindset, which could also be called the Thermidor or Marxist, or collectivist or servile mindset, is always MORE terror from the outside, terror from the state and its bureaucrats, terror the state is supposedly going to impose against, and so completely defeat, the terrifying presence the serf so desperately wants remedied that he is willing to sacrifice his individual liberty; but the bureaucracy, in fact, is always imposed, and with ever-increasing brutality, against the people/serfs themselves – especially anyone who dissents and sees through the lies and exposes himself as doing so.

And nothing is more frightening, more traumatizing, to the serfs than the thought that they themselves could become a dissenter (because they know the catastrophic consequences if that happens); and so the serfs increasingly need to destroy the dissenters, to silence those voices which they are always, secretly afraid have a siren pull on them themselves; because always lurking deep in their minds, the serfs always know (precisely because they have seen the ongoing failures of the Marxist/bureaucrats to ever fix anything, failures they have been tricked and conditioned into ignoring) that it is the dissenters who are speaking the truth, and because they know how existentially-dangerous it would be if they turned out to be a dissenter; and so they join in the persecution of the dissenters, desperate to show others – and themselves! – that they are not one of them.

Because underlying it all is the knowledge within the subconscious (and therefore invisible, acquiring additional power from its very invisibility) mind of everyone, every serf who becomes a captive of the totalitarian, mechanistic, servile mentality, that it is self-destructive to take on that mindset – and that subconscious knowledge is itself traumatic.

It is the constant, repetitive desperate seeking of salvation from the existentially-experienced terror, always experienced as internal, as well as external, totalitarianism/Terror, seeking that salvation in ADDITIONAL totalitarianism, always looking to and defining the state and its bureaucrats as the solution instead of as the problem, that is their real ongoing disease.

The hypnosis can be broken, but it takes great conscious effort – and the desire for truth to prevail – to do so.

In response to: The Psychology of Totalitarianism