Glimpsing Truth In The Dystopian Now
An insightful commentary from Matthias Desmet
Matthias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology, and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist at Ghent University in Belgium, was recently interviewed on Tucker Carlson Today. When I say ‘interviewed’ the hour long interaction took more the form of an occasionally prompted monologue, once beyond the introduction. Matthias Desmet is an exceptional intellect with an expansive and unusual interdisciplinary reach that spans the rigour of mathematics, models and statistics, across to the life science of psychology.
I was touched by this interview. While I was aware of mass formation and its pre-conditions I was less aware of the obsessive and profoundly noxious a-spritual, anti-human aims of the underlying ideology. Moreover, as a result of listening to this interview, I became hyper-aware of the monumental importance of our rather small and amazingly diverse proportion of humanity. We perceived and then rejected participating in the mass formation. In so doing, as Matthias Desmet suggested, we not only prevent an abject, unfettered descent into murderous insanity, if we get things right, we carry the spark forward to ignite a wonderful age.
These networked days things move very fast indeed.
I have endeavoured to précis the hour long discourse. Further, rather than it being a transcript, his discourse is at times truncated, edited or modified in a manner that hopefully enhances clarity and understanding, with the odd wry comment inserted.
This link, once again, recently interviewed, will take you directly to the hour long conversation.
Please forgive any typos, incompetent grammar or plain clumsy English.
The Psychology of Authoritarianism ~ Matthias Desmet
‘Mass formation is in essence a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically. This process is insidious in nature; populations fall prey to it unsuspectingly. To put it in the words of Yuval Noah Harari: Most people wouldn’t even notice the shift toward a totalitarian regime. We associate totalitarianism mainly with labor, concentration and extermination camps, but those are merely the final bewildering stage of a long process’.
Mattias speaks of the abject failure of the models that predicted a vast number of deaths from ‘COVID’ from which a narrative of fear and coercion was engineered. His statistical analysis quickly revealed to him their lack of validity. In turn, this led him to segue to the psychological dimension. Here he considered the distinction between totalitarian states and classical dictatorships. The former state emerges, he said, from a diabolical pact between the masses and their leaders, while the latter springs out of a small cadre of powerful aggressive individuals who impose a dictatorial regime at gunpoint, through fear.
In the case of our immediate experience of nascent totalitarianism, we experienced a mass formation event. In mass formation, approximately 30% of the population coalesce around an ideology. Although some 60% may not agree, they go along with it, a silent majority. A residual 5 - 10% will categorically not go along with the narrative, and will speak out against it. It is this latter group and what they do or do not do, that is critical to the persistence or subsidence of the mass formation. Therefore, it is crucial that the small group makes the right choices around purpose, action and words, but above all, speaking. If not they will be eventually be nastily eliminated.
Mass formation has the effect of suspending personal self-interest and instilling a blindness to anything that is counter to the belief and narrative. Radical self-sacrifice and intolerance toward dissident voices become an entirely ethical imperative. Mattias goes on to relate an acute example of this, describing a mother in the Iranian revolution who, on reporting her son to the State who sentenced him to death, proudly placed the noose around the neck of her own son.
The Specific Pre-Conditions For Mass Formation
Many people must experience social disconnection from the natural and social environments. Before ‘COVID’ an astonishing 40% of the population worldwide reported not to have a single meaningful relationship, only connecting through the internet. Loneliness is the real pandemic.
Lack of life purpose and personal meaning.
60% people reported their jobs to be ‘bull shit’; meaningless jobs.
Out of (1 & 2) arises free flowing anxiety, frustration and aggression that has no connection to a tangible provocation. People do not know why they feel that way, only that they feel that way.
A relentless media and government narrative creates an intense focus on an object of anxiety and provides the strategy to deal with it. People gravitate toward the solution, no matter how absurd.
Because so many people wind up participating in the narrative individuals once again feel connected, and their loneliness is eased. However, the connection is not between people, more it is to the collective. [think: “do it for the team”]
As each person connects to the collective and no longer connect to another individual, their disconnection becomes worse.
In summary, mass formation is extreme collectivism and it is a form of hypnosis. The attention of people and society is focused on a very small segment of reality, leading to the entire disregard (and uncoupling from) the wider reality leading then, eventually, to a loss of truth, freedom and autonomy, indeed of everything.
Speaking Out. Stopping The Hypnosis From Deepening
When people stop speaking out the atrocities begin.
Speaking out, while uncomfortable inhibits the continued descent into hypnotised insanity by the mass formation. It crucially depends upon dissident voices that perturb the hypnotic process. These may not stop the formation but they will, vitally, prevent its descent into atrocity and they will paradoxically protect their own well being and survival. As the world dehumanises, resistant individuals go through a rapid process of mental evolution, and in so doing they become mentally very much stronger.
A fundamental ethical principle of humanity exists, the duty to speak out. Historically, this was well demonstrated by individuals like Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The value of these fundamental ethical principles becomes ever more apparent as the mass formation continues along its trajectory.
In the end though, the mass is always self-destructive. It will exhaust and destroy itself before it destroys those that do not go along with it (as long as they continue to speak out). For while the mass formation might connect people to a collective, it sucks the life out of the social bond and in the end, it does not relieve individual loneliness. It is therefore the author of its own demise, or indeed the precipitation of yet another more powerful mass formation.
The Still Small Voice
A fascinating thing about the small group that are resistant to mass formation and who refuse to go along with the narrative is that it is an incredibly diverse and heterogeneous group. Predicting who its members will be is not possible. The incredibly diverse group is strongly united by a common decision to adhere to truth.
The reason why a mass of people buy into the narrative is not because they believe it but because it leads to a new social bond, and they feel connected again, their loneliness is temporarily relieved. Interestingly, no matter the absurdity of the measures promulgated in the mass formation, such measures frequently have no pragmatic meaning. They are in fact ritualistic and they demand a sacrifice; here think masking and anti-social distancing, or taking an injection for the team. Matthias suggests it is a kind of suicidal ritual. The greater the absurdity the more compelling it is.
Why Did The Elite And Governments Do This?
Matthias offers these comments.
The population on the one hand became more susceptible to mass formation, largely through an obsession with a mechanistic, rationalist, scientific ideology that disconnects people from the social and natural environment. It is a delusional belief to consider that the mystery and essence of human life may be completely understood from the perspective of a mechanistic construct. Such reductionistic thinking thoroughly only serves to disconnect humanity from a wider embrace of the essence and mystery of life.
The creation of a new elite that embraced the technocratic mechanistic fallacy of rationalism meant that the same elite would embark upon controlling the processes and thinking of society in order to achieve particular outcomes. Thus, propaganda and indoctrination emerged, and today continue relentlessly at peak intensity.
Current elites and leaders are no longer true leaders. In being elected or considered a leader the implication is that they have to follow the masses in order to remain leaders. Therefore, manipulating the masses has become the omnipresent and growing political and corporate imperative.
Matthias considers that power and money are not the pre-eminent driving forces behind the elites. Ideology is the obsessive, over-arching ambition.
Presently, there exists an explicit belief by the elites in a technocratic transhumanist ideology. [Humans are now hackable animals.] And these elites have an obsessional drive to impose their ideology.
Leaders and elites do not for one moment believe the peripheral narratives. These are simply vehicles to promote the ideology. [Look no further than virtue signalling private corporate jet setters attending Green-fest confabs, or unmasked political elites at soirées at No. 10 Downing Street at Christmas.] The elite use these lying cheating and manipulating [Trojan horses] to expedite their ideology. Narratives like COVID, climate, and terrorism are used as vehicles for this ideology.
The technocratic transhumanist ideology is the real enemy, which has nothing to do with science. If we want to dispense with the vulnerability to mass formation we must move beyond this limiting rationalist view of the world. As long as we continue to believe that we can reduce the mystery of life to a mechanistic view we will continue to disconnect from our environment and from each other.
We need to learn to connect to the World in a different way. Rational and technical knowledge should lead us into feeling and resonance. This happens slowly as technical accomplishment ultimately leads to a feeling, a sense of resonance with what is being done.
Matthias thinks this latter connection leads one to connect with the eternal ethical principles of humanity. Rational knowledge on its own is an illusion. It never really touches the real. Instead, it circles around the real. It cannot touch the truth of human experience.
But this illusion of complete rational understanding is nevertheless enticing and seductive. It confers an illusion of absolute control and as Yuval Noah Harari posits, it even offers a route to deification.
Matthias highlights how leading quantum physicists (Planck, Bohr, and Heisenberg) recognised that the essence of life escapes rational understanding. They recognised that in reducing life to the limiting construct of rational understanding one kills the essence of life, which is why the ideology is so destructive.
“Are you a man of faith?”
Matthias was asked, “Are you a man of faith?”
He answered that he slowly began to see how all the great scientists moved away from the rationalist ideology.
He cited Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize winning physicist who said,
“When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry. This behaviour of elementary particles is so intrinsically irrational that it transcends all rational understanding, that you need poetry or mystical discourse to resonate with it, to have a certain feeling with it.”
The essence of life is irrational, as illustrated oddly and paradoxically by highly rational complex dynamic system theory, which shows in a strictly rational manner that the essence of life is irrational.
Post Script
Continue to build a wall around oneself with rational reductionism and logical reasoning, one isolates oneself from one’s environment. As soon as one becomes humble enough to be aware that rational understanding is limited, all the logical building blocks of the wall that surrounds one slide apart a little. Then, the eternal music of life slips through the wall, and touches the strings of one’s body and soul and at that moment they start to resonate with the mysteries of life and the eternal spirit of life. Finally, one can only then start to tolerate the idea of death and dying.
He highlighted another paradox, namely how the rationalist ideology reduces life to meaninglessness biochemical process, yet we cling to life as if it is the only thing that counts.
“Do you have hope for the West?”
“Yes. The technocratic system and rationalist ideology will make life very difficult in years to come. The non-conforming excommunicated group, if it makes the right choice, it will survive and if it gets it right, will eventually be able to delivery the real ethical principles that have the potential to organise a society in which human beings may live a life worthy of a human being.”
“Truth is the only thing we should care about, and that we should never lose.”
Excellent summary. Thanks.