Steve Biko said, ‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.’ Welcome to The Soul Podcast. I’m Stacey Wheeler.

Biko was a South African anti-apartheid activist who was murdered in police custody in 1977 for daring to speak truth to power. Today we’re going deep on one of the most uncomfortable truths of our time: most of the chains holding us back aren’t around our wrists… they’re inside our heads. And the wildest part? We defend them more fiercely than the people who put them there ever could.

This episode is for anyone who’s ever stayed quiet when a friend or family member declared something as undeniable fact… while you sat there, heart pounding, knowing in your gut that it was just internalized propaganda they’d never once questioned.

Have you had one of those moments?
Maybe you’ve had dozens.
You’ve done your homework, you’ve seen the receipts, you know the real story… and yet everyone around you is nodding, repeating the lie like it’s scripture, and for some reason you just… swallow the words and stare at your coffee. That quiet sting you just felt? That’s what we’re unpacking today.

“Psychologist and professor Mattias Desmet – he’s the University of Ghent professor who wrote the book The Psychology of Totalitarianism that sent shockwaves around the world a couple of years ago – calls the large-scale version of this phenomenon ‘mass formation’ (basically a form of collective hypnosis). It only takes hold when four very specific conditions are already active in a society. Let me walk you through them slowly, because once you see them, you literally can’t unsee them.”

1. Social isolation
   Not just being physically alone; it’s having 800 Facebook friends but no one you could call at 3 a.m. when your life is falling apart.
2. Lack of personal meaning
   When the questions “Why am I here? What am I living for? What is worth sacrificing for?” have no living answer, life starts feeling like an endless to-do list with no story behind it.
3. Free-floating anxiety
   Normal anxiety has an object you can name and face. Free-floating anxiety has no object; it’s a smoke alarm going off in an empty house.
4. Free-floating frustration and aggression
   The first three conditions produce rage; raw, boiling rage; but there’s no acceptable target. So the pressure just builds and builds.

When those four are sky-high (and they were long before 2020), any narrative that walks in and says:
“Here’s the thing you were afraid of, here’s who to blame, here’s the simple thing you must do,
and here’s the bad people you finally get to hate…”
…gets swallowed like oxygen by someone drowning.

And the believers are sincere. They’re not lying. They’re hypnotized. You’ve watched it happen: 

• The food pyramid that turned butter into poison while heart disease exploded. 
• “College or you’re a failure” – $1.7 trillion in debt later. 
• “My body, my choice” flipping overnight when the screen told people to. During covid it became, “Roll up your sleeve and comply.” 
• The family scripts we all inherited: “Big boys don’t cry,” “Money is the root of evil,” “Good girls don’t get angry.”

Many of these became our 'truths.' 

Over time we become the enforcers (canceling friends, freezing out relatives, living in quiet civil war with the people we love most). And the deepest wound? We lose sovereignty over our own minds (like Steve Biko warned). 

But here’s the hope: the spell only holds while it stays unconscious. Six things that actually break it (I use every single one):

1. Regular media fasts. Seventy-two hours off screens and the fog lifts almost immediately. (For long-term results, quite media altogether)
2. Ask two questions for every “fact” that triggers an emotional response: Who benefits? Who funded the research? 
3. Keep a Belief Audit journal: write down five things you’re 100 % sure are true, then spend a week trying to prove yourself wrong. (the vaccine will prevent the virus... etc.)
4. Rebuild real-world connection. Mass formation collapses fastest over coffee, walks, and dinner tables. 
5. Speak the truth the moment you see it, even if your voice shakes. Desmet says continuous spoken dissent from just 5–10 % of people is enough to stop total formation dead. 
6. Anchor your meaning outside the system (faith, family, soil, craft, art, prayer) – things no narrative can hijack.

None of us are immune. I’ve defended plenty of these lies myself.
But the second you spot the propaganda living inside your own skull, it starts losing its grip.

Freedom isn’t just out there in the world.
It starts inside of you. So this week, pick one “undeniable fact” everyone around you treats as gospel… and question it like your soul depends on it.
Because in a way, it does. And the next time you feel that urge to stay quiet just to keep the peace, remember George Orwell’s line: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

I’ll see you in the comments.
And I’ll see you on the other side of one brave conversation.

Look for a link to Mattias Desmet's book The Psychology of Totalitarianism in the show notes.