Grim warning Britain is 'sleepwalking into totalitarian state' as top psychologist fears Brit Card will pave way for social credit system

“Mass formation is a kind of group formation,” he explained. “People who fall prey to it become incapable of taking a critical distance from what the group believes. No matter how absurd the narratives are, they just buy into them.”

Yesterday (Wednesday 15 October) Professor Desmet addressed the European Parliament at a meeting of the not-for-profit group Make Europe Healthy Again, warning that the same totalitarian forces of fear and technocratic management seen during Covid are now shaping everything from climate policy to digital surveillance.

Desmet said he recognised the phenomenon during the Covid crisis, when Governments imposed sweeping restrictions while suppressing dissent.

“From the beginning there was no proper cost-benefit analysis,” he said.

“There was no real debate between people pro and contra the measures. People started to become radically intolerant of dissonant voices — they didn’t want debate anymore.”

As both a psychologist and statistician, he examined the data himself.

“The statistics used to calculate the mortality rates were dramatically wrong,” he said.

“They over-estimated the mortality rate by a factor of ten. Even the people who constructed the initial models admitted they were much, much, much too high. You would expect that at that moment society would reconsider the measures, but nothing like that happened. That was the moment where I was sure we were in a major mass formation.”

He said fear and isolation created the perfect conditions for control. “Once people are in this state and someone circulates a narrative pointing to an object of anxiety and a strategy to deal with it, all this free-floating anxiety can connect to that object,” he said. “Then people will participate in the strategy to deal with it — no matter how absurd it is.”

Prof Desmet said modern control doesn’t rely on force but on technocracy — rule by data, experts and bureaucracy.

“A totalitarian system is completely different from a dictatorship,” he explained.

“In a dictatorship the population is scared of a small group. In a totalitarian system a part of the population — usually twenty to thirty per cent — believes fanatically in an ideology and starts to seize control of society.”

He links this new mindset to the Enlightenment belief that everything can be measured and rationally managed.

“As long as we believe the universe is a machine that can be understood and controlled in a rational way, we will inevitably end up in a technocracy,” he said. “We stop choosing democratic leaders and start believing we need experts to lead society.”

Desmet warned that Labour’s proposed Brit Card fits that pattern.

He told the GB News Originals podcast: “As soon as you start from this materialist worldview, the complete digitalisation of society is a logical consequence,” he said.

“But it will be dramatic if we really go to this digital society where we have a China-like digital social-credit system… It will destroy the very essence of the human being.”

He warned that the system could be introduced through economic crisis or promises of convenience.

“All that is needed now is the right psychological conditions to convince people,” he said.

“If we are confronted with a major crisis, it will be very easy to convince people that we need a fully controlled digital system — a digital identity, central-bank digital coins.”

“They will offer a universal basic income, take over their mortgages… People will lose their house but they will enter a digital system and, without knowing it, they will be a slave of a control system as the world has never seen before.”

Asked if this could happen in Britain, he replied simply: “Yes, definitely.”

Prof Desmet said Britain’s Online Safety Act, which allows regulators to remove posts that are “legal but harmful,” marks the rise of a new kind of censorship.

“During the corona crisis millions of posts were deleted — not illegal, but critical about the mainstream narrative,” he said.

“Now they are building artificial-intelligence platforms that will screen the entire public space and make sure people spread no disinformation or fake news. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

He said artificial intelligence will not protect truth but distort it further. He said: “AI has nothing to do with truth,” he said. “It will make the line between what’s fake and what’s real even more problematic. We will find ourselves even more lost in a world where nobody knows anymore what’s true and what’s fake.”

Although he believes people must respect nature, Prof Desmet said the climate narrative is being used “in an instrumental way by globalist institutions.”

“They constructed this climate-change narrative… an ideal global problem for which we need a global strategy and a global solution,” he said. “No matter how true it is, it’s used as an instrument to overrule the authority of national governments.”

He said that many of the solutions on offer “make human beings even more alienated from nature.”

“They tell us we have to live in fifteen-minute cities, drive electric cars, eat artificial food, stay inside and don’t travel,” he said. “It’s an attempt to solve the problem with the same discourse that caused the problem.”

Prof Desmet said the only defence against mass formation is to keep speaking out about your beliefs. “In a classical dictatorship it can make sense to go underground,” he said.

“In a totalitarian system, when the resistance stops speaking out, the system becomes radically destructive. The only way to avoid that is when dissonant voices continue to speak out — as quietly as possible.”

He urged people to express honest doubt rather than certainty. “We shouldn’t try to convince too much,” he said. “We shouldn’t be too sure. Just testify to what we feel inside: to me, what happens now feels wrong.”

Despite his warnings, he said he remains hopeful. “I am realistic in the short term and optimistic in the long term,” he said. “Totalitarian systems always destroy themselves. The challenge is to make them destroy themselves before they destroy you.”