Let’s Talk About Mass Formation

Since the fall of 2021, I became re-familiarized with the phenomenon of mass formation. Having graduated with a psychology degree from university, I tend to use a psychological lens when noting society’s response to current events. The response to Covid has effected many societies of the world so strongly, it’s intriguing to explore what psychological phenomena may be at play.

My curiosity piqued when I heard Dr. Mattias Desmet, a clinical psychologist from Ghent University, share about his knowledge of mass formation on a variety of podcasts. He described in more concise terms what I was sensing with regard to there being a predominant “blind allegiance” to a specific narrative around Covid.

Another way to refer to phenomenon could be crowd formation or groupthink. It involves looking at how a mass of people, the crowd, appear bound to one another due to their unprocessed generalized emotion connecting to provided script. The phenomena also speculates that there could be an element of hypnosis to it. Individuals hypnotized to a broader narrative or idea that being them into a collective, therefore appearing like participators in a shared collective mindset.

Discussions around the mass formation phenomenon can explore how much of the phenomenon is natural and how much of it is manipulated. But first, do you sense that the phenomenon is happening. If so, what are the basic contributing factors allowing mass formation to take hold.

As stated in his discussion with Dan Astin-Gregory, Dr. Mattias Desmet indicates that four conditions have to be fulfilled before a large scale phenomenon of mass formation can emerge. These are the conditions:

The first and most important condition is that there should be people experiencing a lack of social bonds, a lack of social connectedness.

The second condition is that there have to be a lot of people who experience a lack of meaning making. These first two conditions are closely associated to each other. People are human, humans are social beings and if they experience a lack of social connectedness, a lack of social bond, they will probably also experience a lack of meaning making.

The third condition is that there have to be a lot of people who experience a lot of free-floating…