The October Revolution in Russia officially plunged the world into the totalitarian era. It was preceded by an intense political, social, and ideological struggle, spearheaded by terrorism. A "witness to history", imagined by a Russian novelist, revealed the psychology of the young activists who sacrificed themselves to establish a dream of freedom that ended in nightmare. Is it a coincidence that the novel was subtitled "the book of endings"?

How can we explain mass adherence to ideologies in totalitarian systems, and the irrational actions they command? More than ten years ago, in my business consulting work, I coined the notion of "delusional contagion" [1] for the literature on psychosocial risks and suffering at work.

A specialist in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ariane Bilheran helps us understand the idea of "comfort health" through an observation she makes about the crisis we are experiencing today: "so many people agree to give up their freedom under the cover of a lie, without having a knife to their throat, far from it. Quite simply because many of them aspire to the preservation of their comfort and their privileges, and because they have been chained to them little by little.

All totalitarian islets create their own "newspeak", for example within companies that operate by terrorizing, harassing and persecuting their employees. All totalitarianism lives off the conquest of "ideological pretension" (Hannah Arendt) and the "rectification of thought" (Mao). To overcome these ideological levels, which are increasingly moving away from the search for truth and knowledge, and to persecute opponents, the instrumentalization of language is necessary.

This summer of 2021, I had the opportunity to visit France, a country I hadn't visited for several years. It was an opportunity for me to observe a serious deterioration in human relations and values, undoubtedly fertile ground for the ongoing paranoiac decompensation.

Paranoia is "a place of quiet horror" that is one that nobody wants to listen to. Only a few professionals are brave enough to call it by its name: paranoia.