Rob asked why Peter Breggin was so critical of Matthias Desmet. I think it's because Peter sees individual citizens as victims of a system that gives big government and big pharma all the power. The individual is helpless to protect himself or herself against an onslaught of fear porn, constant valorization of vaccines, emphasis on vaccines as the only way to save us from a deadly and horrible infection that can kill, hospitalize, or disable (long Covid!) us.
Breggin thinks that focusing on the "mass formation" is a way of absolving government and pharma from responsibility. What enables some people to resist the constant stream of propaganda directed against us to force us to choose to be vaccinated? Keep your job! Keep your health! Avoid dying! Avoid infecting your parents, grandparents. Keep your friends! Avoid losing your medical license and the respect of your colleagues. Avoid excommunication from your social group and being consigned to second class citizensship.
To Peter, Matthias seems to be expecting "normal" people to be able to resist all these pressures. Matthias seems to be criticizing frightened, desperate people and blaming them for acting in irrational ways when they were clearly so mistreated and manipulated that they could hardly be expected to resist.
To me the issue is how to treat "victims." Clearly the unvaccinated man who loses custody of his children because of his vaccine status is a victim of the current Covid medical system. The mainstream press seems to foment outrage and rejection. (Misery sells more papers--even as it creates objects of pity and heroic defenders of the statis quo.
How can we support those soles tormented by their past traumatic rejections?
Desmet describes Mass Formation as an emergent phenomena that arises in a Complex Dynamical System under certain conditions. Without going into much detail, his work has definitely been misrepresented or distorted and that is typical when describing non-linear phenomena. Furthermore, Chapter 8 has certainly infuriated a lot of people.
I think it would have been help to carefully define 'Mass' in this context and how group think plays a role in ideological confrontations. Read 'The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion' by Jonathan Haidt.