#40. The psychological value of truth

Excerpt from: Neutrality Studies May 3, 2026: “EU in Grip of Deadly Mass-Formation” | Prof. Mattias Desmet¹, ²

Mattias Desmet: […] The problem started when modernity got alienated from the act of sincere speech. Meaning that as a human being we constantly are confronted with a choice like will we take the easy way and buy into all these narratives that everyone shares? Will we take the easy way and buy into all these social illusions and shared narratives? Or will we take a difficult road and say like look okay this doesn’t feel good to me and I will try to articulate why I feel this isn’t right.

So the act of sincere speech at all levels from the lowest to the highest level always boils down to this. It means that you decide to articulate words that go against certain ideal images that are projected onto us. Like most people even never realize that they buy into all these social norms and ideal images. They just constantly do.
They never think for themselves. They always think as others want them to think. They speak the words that other people want them to speak and they never speak their own words. That’s what happens in a mass formation. Suddenly the mass emerges.

There is this huge pressure to conform, to go into it and then there is like a few percentage of the people who decide to say that they do not agree and Gustave Le Bon³ in the 19th century already mentioned: every time a massformation emerges you have three groups:

First 20 to 30% of the people who buy into the massformation they just are completely hypnotized, literally hypnotized, it’s hypnosis, mass transformation, is mass hypnosis. And then you have a large group, 60% maybe 65%, who knows that there is something wrong but who chooses to remain silent because they feel the tremendous pressure of the massformation. And then there is a few percent of the people, sometimes up to 10% sometimes even 20%, who doesn’t go along with it and who decides to speak out, to try to to say like look there is something wrong with this narrative here of the Ukraine war, of the corona crisis, and so on.

The 3 groups in massformation [summarized by this blog’s admin].

1. 20 to 30% of the people are completely hypnotized, literally hypnotized (mass hypnosis)
2. 60% maybe 65% know that there is something wrong but choose to remain silent because of the tremendous pressure of the massformation
3. 10% sometimes even 20% do not go along with it and decide to speak out

Gustave Le Bon in the 19th century already observed, he said like this small group of dissident people when they speak out, they will almost always be very disappointed because they will feel that the people in the masses refuse to wake up because once someone is in a mass formation is hypnotized and no matter what you say, no matter how clear your arguments are against the narrative, they will have no psychological impact because they refer to a part of reality to which no emotions are attached anymore.

Meaning that at a psychological level all these arguments have not the least, no impact at all. Gustave Le Bon said already: when these dissident people speak out they are very disappointed because they see that the masses refuse to wake up, and that’s crucial. He said like: but that doesn’t mean that their words have no impact. When there are people who continue to speak out in a quiet and sincere way not claiming that they know everything but just saying like: look I do not agree, there is something wrong according to me. When these people continue to speak out, they will not be able to wake up the masses, but usually they will prevent the masses from going to the last stage of the mass formation where they typically will try to destroy everyone who doesn’t go along with the masses.

So, and that’s what we need. When the masses do not go to the last stage, they will destroy themselves before they destroy everyone who doesn’t go along with them.

And to the contrary, when the people who do not fall prey to the massformation choose to be to remain silent, the masses will first destroy the people who do not go along with the masses⁴ and then they will destroy themselves as happened in the Soviet Union for instance. We could go give a lot of historical examples.

Pascal Lottaz: Yeah, it’s a very good point. So the act of resistance is actually also the the act of helping the mass, is actually of preventing, just through resistance, and and through saying like no, there’s something wrong here, even if you don’t go along with it, I want it to be registered.

Mattias Desmet: Exactly. You know, the only cure, I could analyze this from 20 perspectives and you would see it’s always the same conclusion:

The only cure, the only remedy for a society, sick of lies and manipulation, sick of propaganda, is sincerity. That’s the only cure. We have to rediscover the psychological value of truth for a human being. Truth is fundamental for a human being. It’s fundamental. It’s fundamental for every human being, every individual, and it’s fundamental for humans living together. There can be no society truly humane which is alienated from the act of sincere speech.

Footnotes

1. Professor Mattias Desmet is the author of the book: The Psychology of Totalitarianism. ↩︎
2. Professor Mattias Desmet publishes essays on Substack ↩︎
3. “Mass formation” (psychosis) was theorized by the French sociologist and anthropologist Gustave Le Bon at the end of the 19th century. More: ResearchGate, MDPI, Goodreads ↩︎
4. Playlist: 59 Europeans, who are speaking / writing truth, have been sanctioned. ↩︎