The Psychology of Totalitarianism
Just over seven months ago, I helped introduce the world to Mattias Desmet and the concept of “Mass Formation” (aka Mass Psychosis). Nearly half a million people watched our video on our many social media channels and at the Peak Prosperity website.
Prominent voices like Dr. Robert Malone, Joe Rogan and many others quoted the show and Mattias, and the idea of a mass psychosis taking over our world became common knowledge.
I found profound relief at finally having a framework for understanding – and even having compassion for – my fellow citizens who seemed to be going, well, crazy. A light on a very dark path began to shine.
People who once relished freedom and Democracy, often sporting a healthy and well-earned distrust of government and pharmaceutical companies, suddenly became acolytes of those entities. They attacked anyone that questioned the obviously authoritarian actions of those same entities.
How could so many people turn into slaves of the very entities that they had shunned throughout their lives? They literally became the victims and the tools of totalitarian leaders…voluntarily?
Just so, how could so many so-called “trusted leaders” turn us – their constituents or customers or friends and family – down this horrid path? As I wrote for the original interview, these “dim actors” pull our emotional strings “to create fear and isolation in order to push their agenda of technocratic control of our lives, dreams of transhumanism, using vaccine passports as a first step on a path to overt totalitarianism.”
Early on, you might have justly given those bad actors a break; after all, it was a pandemic of a new virus. But it didn’t take long to see the truth behind actual science and data; yet these elites doubled down on their control.
In his newest book, “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” Mattias helps us understand how those we supposedly trusted are still trying to create a world in which they have full control.
As he writes, “Totalitarianism is not a coincidence and does not form in a vacuum. It arises from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script throughout history, its formation gaining strength and speed with each generation—from the Jacobins to the Nazis and Stalinists—as technology advances. Governments, mass media, and other mechanized forces use fear, loneliness, and isolation to demoralize populations and exert control, persuading large groups of people to act against their own interests, always with destructive results.”
While we may think the lies of the pandemic and authoritarians are being exposed, and there is a light at the end of the dark tunnel, the truth is that we’re still very much in danger. Climate change, Monkeypox, Ukraine, China, recession, supply chains…the list of emergencies are never-ending, and thus the excuses for more control are never-ending.
Take this to heart, the risks are as grave as ever. We few brave and courageous people must continue to stand up and say “No!” If we do not, Mattias shows exactly how throughout history good people ended up somewhere they deeply regretted. That could be us, soon.
The good news is that many more people are now waking up to the truth that government restrictions and mandates, seemingly endless fear-based public relations campaigns, lockdowns, forced medical procedures, and vaccine passports to travel in one’s own community were created not on the basis of sound science or firm data, but out of a desire to control.
Human misery and mass atrocities are always possible, but now more than ever, our “leaders” are pushing us in that direction. It is our solemn duty to resist.
As always, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” We can do better. Listen to this important interview so “they” can’t transfer their anger and rage at us.
Mattias tells us how it’s done, and what we can do. Of course, we must defend ourselves but never resort to unnecessary violence. Continue to be courageous. Hold everyone with compassion. Hate the sin, not the sinner. But most of all, we must speak up.
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Dr. Chris Martenson [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to the program. I am so excited for today’s guests. We are talking with one of the foremost leading authorities on something called mass formation as it pertains to COVID 19. This is, of course, Dr. Mattias Desmet. He is a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. Hey, it’s so great to have you back here with us today. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:00:25] Well, thank you for inviting me again. Dr. Martenson.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:00:28] And this is the book we’re talking about. This one right here, if you get it, which you absolutely should, it won’t come with all these note marks and everything. Matthias I marked up this book more than any other book I’ve read in years because you were just hit me with line after line. It’s the psychology of totalitarianism. What is totalitarianism? Very briefly, so we can set the stage. And is this something people need to be concerned about today?
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:00:54] No. Well, is totalitarianism. If we are talking about totalitarianism, we are thinking in the first place about communism, Nazism, the Soviet Union and so on and other were indeed the first book on Italian systems. So the first authoritarian systems in the in the first part of the 20th century, before 20th century, totalitarianism did not exist. That’s important to note. Many people confuse totalitarianism with classical dictatorships, but that’s something completely different. The classical leadership is very simple. The psychological structure of a classical dictatorship is very simple. It’s a group. It’s a population of a scared, of a small group of people, the dictatorial regime. And therefore it is the population accepts that the small group of people imposes unilaterally its social contract through the society. That’s classical dictatorship, totalitarian state, two states or something completely different. The psychological basis is completely different. It’s much more impressive, the psychological basis and much more profound. Totalitarian systems are based on the process of mass formation. That means a small group, a kind of group dynamic, which makes the other part of the population fanatical, who believes in a certain narrative or a certain ideology. And when this this group, this mass is led by a few leaders, they can easily seize control of society. And that’s when a new kind of social state system emerged. A totalitarian state, which does not only control political political space and public space, such as a classical dictatorship does, but which also controls private space because the totalitarian state has a huge secret police at its disposal, namely this part of the population that’s fanatically believes in the state narrative. So that’s a totalitarian state. Hannah Arendt warned us that in 1951 already that we’ve seen a communist totalitarianism, we’ve seen fascist totalitarianism, but that the new totalitarianism, the totalitarianism of the future would be a technocratic totalitarianism. That would that means a kind of totalitarian state, which is let’s not be gang leaders such as Stalin and Hitler, but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats. And that’s why I think around 2017, I had the impression that we were ready for such a new technocratic totalitarianism. And when the corona crisis started, I in my interpretation, we’ve seen this huge leap forward towards a technocratic system, which is a system which is led by technocratic experts rather than by democratically elected politicians. And well, that’s was when I started to think about the book on this new technocratic totalitarian system that might emerge now. All right.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:04:09] Well, absolutely has so many things to talk about, but I really want to make sure I have my my arms around this and the listeners can follow along. The idea behind a totalitarian system as opposed to a dictatorship, dictatorships, a strong person, they rule with fear. You understand what’s happening. But totalitarianism is a structure that people buy into fundamentally. Right. And that structures it’s an idea. It’s an ideology. And that ideology doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to be sensible often. Isn’t that actually a feature of it, that it’s kind of on some level provably nonsense, you know, that we’ll get to this great utopian ideal if we just kill all these people over here or something like that. Do I have that right?
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:04:49] Yes, absolutely. And that totalitarianism all starts with with this. Indeed. There’s this fanatic belief in the population that. A certain reshaping of society is needed to save the world for all kinds of dramatic problems from all kinds of objects of anxiety. That’s how I look at it, that in this starts, it starts from an ideological conviction, a blind and fanatic ideological conviction. And and so that makes that is completely different from a from a classical dictatorship, for instance, in a classical dictatorship. The point of gravity of the system is always situated at the level of the elite. If you eliminate a part of the dictatorial, indeed a substantial part, then usually the system of the dictatorship will collapse. But. And it’s authoritarian states. The point of gravity is not so much situates than the elite. It’s a rather situated in this part of the population that is in the grip fanatically, in the grip of this ideology. And ultimately, the root cause of the totalitarian system is always the ideology itself, the ideology itself, which has a grip both on the elite and on the masses. So it’s the ideology. In the Soviet Union, for instance, was historical materialism of Marx. The ideology that seized control of the of of of society in Nazi Germany was a kind of race theory, neo Darwinist race theory. And now I believe that the ideology that is imposing itself in society now is the rather a kind of transhumanist ideology, technocratic ideology. And then and then then you see that this ideology is becoming dominance or is taking control of society through all kinds of narratives. That’s important. You have to distinguish between the ideology and the narratives that are used often by the elite to convince people to go along with the ideology or to accept all these changes that all of this reshaping of society that is needed if for this new society to be created. And this these narratives, in my opinion, now, like the climate narrative, the order, the corona narrative, the narrative of the war on terror, all these narratives are, in one way or another, narratives that make people feel as if it is unavoidable, that we need more technological control, that we cannot rely on democratic decision making procedures, but that we need experts to take control of society through technological devices or with technological instruments, or that otherwise we will never be able to successfully deal with all these objects of anxieties the terrorists, the viruses, the anti-vaxxers, the no matter what a climate change and so on. So that’s that’s a little bit the mechanism you have to distinguish between the ideology and and narratives that are used to, to, to, to convince people that the ideological changes are necessary. But at the end, it’s the ideology itself, whether we are talking about the Nazi ideology or transhumanism or the historical materialist ideology, in the end, it always boils down. It are all different variants of the same ideology, which are all variants of mechanism ideology, the mechanistic view of man and the world. The idea that the entire universe is like a dead, immaterial machine, a set of elementary particles that interact with each other according to the laws of mechanics. And that’s crucial. That can be perfectly understood in a rational way. That’s the idea, the basic, the essence of mechanistic ideology, the belief that the universe is a machine and that everything can be understood in a rational way, controlled in a rational way, manipulated in a rational way, and that the essence of life can be reduced to the categories of Rome, of our own, our own logical understanding. That’s the core problem you’re facing now. It’s that kind of thinking, that kind of ideology that ultimately leads to the concentration camps. That’s what I describe in my book. I connect these two things to each other, and my book, this mechanized ideology. And the end result is that these totalitarian systems of the 20th and 21st century.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:09:54] Yes. And we’re talking with with Matthias Desmet, author of this book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. And I have to thank you for writing this. I’ve been coming at this from a slightly different angle for a while. But but this I love rotating the Rubik’s Cube and coming in from a different angle. So the idea that, hey, this all begins, you kind of pin this at the Enlightenment, good idea. We’re going to be very rational. We’re going to come out of our superstitious phase, but then maybe we just overdid it, right? We just went too far down that path. And of course, what I love that you connect here. I’m a scientist by training and I still read lots of science and physics and all this. And what’s amazing to me, you study some of the same people, listen to the same scientists is that good scientists, when they get right to the edge of what the known is, they almost invariably become spiritual in some level because they go, Wow, I rationalized my way all the way down to the heart of this thing. It is completely irrational and meaning, you know, it’s it’s it’s ineluctable. You can’t describe it and. Words. You can’t you can’t get your arms around it. The more you try to understand it, the less you can. So you have to come at it with the irrational side of us, which we could also call intuition. So. So connect those pieces for us. This is if I’m understanding this book, right, not to jump to the conclusion, but there’s an evolutionary process here. And that’s what’s before us right now. Nothing less than sort of maybe the heart of our species is really at a cusp of something here. And if we get it wrong, we go down a place. It ends in mass atrocity. Guess what? We’ve been there before. Probably not a lot more to learn from that. Accept it. It sucks, but there’s this other path we can take. But first we have to understand the dimension of the problem. Well, how is enlightenment led us astray in your view, or how is our rotation of it?
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:11:37] Yes, as you said, the strange thing is that we all believe that this mechanistic view of man in the world is the scientific view of the man in the world. But the strange thing is that this actually is not correct, because most seminal scientists, they almost all started more or less from this mechanistic view on the man in the world. But very soon they acknowledged that this view of man in the world is extremely limited. That’s something that was very well articulated by, for instance, Ronnie Thomas, one of the most famous mathematicians of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of systems theory. He said This part of reality that cannot be understood in a rational way, in the rational mechanism is very limited and the rest of reality we can only understand through empathically resonating with it. So he was talking about two different kinds of knowing the world. On the one hand, there is this rational way to know the world and on the other hand there is this other way of knowing the world, which is a resonating way and empathic way of knowing the world, which is hard to define. But there are two different ways to know the world. And he used two different words in French for knowing the used savoir, which refers to via to see what you can see with the eye. So there is a certain knowledge that you can generate by looking at the world with your eyes and thinking logically about what you see. That’s the rational knowledge of the world. But then you also referred to this different way of knowing the all this resonating knowledge. And that’s four words. He used the word connect, which means as much as if you look at it, go network means to be born together. That means that that means that this kind of knowledge is a knowledge that is revelatory and which makes you understand things in a new way as if you’re born again. So there are two different way of base of knowledge. There’s this rational knowledge and the resonating knowledge and also traditions such as a samurai tradition in Japan and every mystical tradition I think knew the difference. The samurai proposition in Japan said that every time you learn something, a knowledge or a craft, there is this first stage of the learning process, which is a technical, rational stage. You earn certain techniques. For instance, if you learn the martial arts, you will learn certain techniques in a rational way which make you understand what you should do if you’re under attack, for instance. And then but the first stage of learning an art is always practicing these techniques. That’s the rational stage. But if you practice for a very long time, you will start to develop a different kind of knowledge, a kind of feeling, a kind of the resonating knowledge. It’s that knowledge that is the. Aim the goal, the end result of a learning process. And the summary said. It’s difficult, they said, to learn the techniques of a martial art, but it’s even more difficult to forget them again. And if you don’t succeed in forgiving them again before you go to the battlefield, you will die on the battlefield. And that’s shows like it’s exactly the same with science. There is a first stage of science which is a rational stage, and then the sciences of the 20th century and even the centuries, the sciences of the 19th century as well, showed it so clearly. They showed that certain objects, for instance, certain phenomena in nature, can be rationally understood to a certain extent, but the core of the phenomena can never escapes all rational understanding. Niels Bohr said When it comes to atoms language. So Niels Bohr, the famous physicist, he said when he won the Nobel Prize, he said, when it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry. And he meant he was dead serious. He meant that when you try to grasp the behavior of elementary particles, you will understand a certain part of it and rational terms and logical terms. But in the end, the core of it is radically irrational. He said that no theory could be right if she was not completely absurd. And for me, it was it was a it was a complex dynamical systems theory which made me wake up at that level when I was about 35 years old. And when I when I dove deep into the mathematical basis of complex dynamical systems theory, I suddenly understood that the essence of life and of nature is irrational. That’s what it shows. This theory shows it paradoxically in a strictly rational way that the essence of every complex, complex dynamical system, that it always behaves irrationally, literally, like an irrational number. So science is, well, just like the samurai tradition or any every mystical tradition starts from rationality. But if you walk down the road of rationality to the very end, you will soon stumble upon a land that you can never enter with rational thinking. And then you have to switch. You have to develop this other kind of knowing the world. There’s much more resonating way of knowing the world, way to know the world of knowing the world. Which brings you in touch with the real, which brings you in touch. But the eternal principles of life, which are which which are ethical principles. That’s so, so. So you make the switch from an existence based on rational understanding to an existence based on the more resonating knowing and in which you feel become in touch with principles which can never be articulated in a definitive way, but which allow you to position yourself in life and in society towards other people. So I think that so I when I went through that process myself in a very concrete way, in which I was a very someone who very stubborn, trying to understand in a rational way. And at the moment where I started to do to to become aware of the fact that rational understanding is limited, then never capable of grasping the essence of life. It was like a true revelation for me. I started to feel that suddenly that if you are convinced that everything around you can be reduced to the categories of your own logical understanding, you actually constantly destroy your connection with life. You constantly destroy your awareness of the mystery of life. And I quite literally, I think that that this is if if we fanatically think in a logical way, if this is if we connect to one logical idea, to the other logical idea, that’s what logic says. It’s connects one idea to one other idea to another. They do one other thing. It is literally as if we build a wall around this, a wall through which we isolate ourselves from the music of life, from the from the vibration of life in the soon as you can start to accept. That your logical understanding will always be limited and will never deliver you the ultimate knowledge. It is as if all these logical building blocks slide the way a little bit from each other, and as if the eternal music of life can enter your being through the walls and can touch the strings of your being and can make you resonate with the eternal vibration of life. And that’s the moment as well, when you start to overcome the fear of death and dying just because you feel that you are part of something eternal. So that is my own experience. So it’s not I’m not against rational understanding. Not at all. You have to walk the path of rationality as far as possible to finally reach the limit and enter a country that is so much more beautiful than the rational country of rational understanding. The land of rational understanding. So rationality. Perfect. Very necessary. You’re not rational enough. But if we would be rational enough, we would soon arrive at the limit of rationality. And that’s the entire problem, of course. Science in the beginning was equal to open mindedness. It was like a discourse through which a minority went against a dominant discourse. And at that moment, science was thrown speech. Science was a discourse through which people, at the risk of their own life and the risk of their career are at risk of everything trying to articulate something that was new. But as soon as science, as a consequence of its success and success became successful, as a consequence of that, it became the discourse of the majority. It became a dominant discourse itself, and as such, it became the privileged instrument to manipulate the population to be successful. And it lost all its characteristics of true speech. And that’s where we are now. We are dealing with something that calls itself itself science, but which is actually has nothing to do with science anymore. It’s an ideology. It’s a prejudice, it’s a dogmatic system. It’s in many respects, a cheat alive. The replication crisis showed this so clearly it shows that up to 85% of the published research findings and will be reproduced under false.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:21:29] Thank you for saying all of that. This is why I love this book, because we come to many of the same places. One of my favorite quotes out there is Carl Jung says said, People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people. And when I trawl through the the biographies and autobiographies of a lot of these famous people, they are all very humble. And many of them express something along the lines of, it wasn’t me. I was a vessel. There was this idea and there was this. Knowing this gnosis G.A. know there was this knowing that I had to try and wrestle with and figure out what to do with. But it wasn’t my idea. They were very humble that there were almost like there’s an intelligence out there that they could they could grasp onto right where that comes from. We’ll have a bigger debate about that. But they all say kind of the same thing. And I can feel that in my own life. So to me, the number one critique where I would say, here’s why I don’t like totalitarianism is that it’s fundamentally to me, it is. It’s boring. It asks me to subsume myself into a collective ideology that itself is not complete. It’s small. It doesn’t want me to be my authentic self. It doesn’t want me to be different in any way. It just wants me to fit in. And it’s it couldn’t even possibly completely compete with nature and the beauty of the actual universe I’m in. So that’s, that’s my main critique is like progressivism, collectivism, totalitarianism. All those isms to me are just they’re boring. Fundamentally, I think they’re asking people not to live. And that’s a crime, actually, as far as I’m concerned, a sort of a soul crime, if you will. But you’re saying that. So this is really the totalitarianism. Let’s not go there. It ends badly, ends in mass atrocities. There’s things we can talk about. And I’d love to talk next about how we maybe we need brave people to avoid that, but we’re not here. I’m not here to talk with you so that we can find out how to avoid darkness. I’m here to find out. Like, the opportunity in this story is that actually this is a great moment for people to wake up and say, oh, actually, it’s not just a totalitarian ism. It was the whole subset of conditions that led to that totalitarianism. Those were so bleak that totalitarianism made sense. So I don’t want to return to the prior conditions either. The question is, where do we go forward? And to me, that’s why this story has so much energy. It’s so exciting because this is an opportunity for people to actually wake up in this life they have and and and find the idea that’s trying to speak through them or whatever their their arc is. Right. So that’s how I’m just. All the clues are there. And I love the way you’ve assembled them because the scientists who’ve who’ve probed at the edge are just people who saw and all the good ones I would submit to you have what you described as that that empathy. They they were in the system of study long enough that they developed the empathy. Jane Goodall in her chimps right takes decades but finally like they’re not chimps to her right. They are creatures being sentient, resonating in a different way, perhaps. So that’s what I think is the opportunity here is to wake up finally. And I don’t know, is that resonate with you at all?
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:24:31] Oh, yes, very much. I agree. What we are going through is a process in which something new is born. It’s what what we see now is a is a launch. If you take a little bit of distance, what we obviously know is a large organism, a dominant discourse, a dominant a mainstream society who puts a lot of pressure on a small group and who pushes this small group on a path. But it would never go without this pressure. And if this small group will go through a process and if it makes the right ethical decisions. It will become stronger and stronger and stronger at the mental, at the psychological, even at the spiritual level. And while the large group will exhaust itself, they’ll become weaker and weaker and weaker. And a small group will become stronger and stronger and stronger throughout the very difficult process. And it will be perfectly ready at the perfect moment to deliver the new principles for human living together. That’s what I believe. And the result will be so beautiful that we cannot imagine it now at the moment that I believe that. And let me. But first, you know, you said and I couldn’t agree more with that, that the problem of totalitarianism has to do with the fact that it believes that it knows everything. Somewhere it situate it central its knowledge inside the human being. While the seminal scientists you referred to, such as Carl Gustav Jung, you name the Karl Gustav Jung, they tended to situate knowledge outside themselves. It’s out there and it’s from time to time. You can receive it from time to time. It will be revealed to you. And that, in my opinion, is essential. It’s essential because the human being, it’s clear that if you compare I think I think to the entire tragedy of the tradition of enlightenment and of our currents of of the situation you’re now in, is exactly this that people were seduced to believe that they could explain everything, they could explain the essence of life. And it’s exactly this. Um, I think that indeed leads to a kind of dullness. A kind of deadness. It’s that in a strange way, I think that. You know, within this materialist world, which can be perfectly described and mechanistic in terms of classical mechanics, which can be perfectly rationally understood within this world, there is no such thing as a soul, or there is no such thing as no rich outside of our selves. A got a divine being or something. But the strange thing is that very as people declared God did very soon they seek to His throne and they installed themselves on the throne. So that’s what you see. No ideologies and ideologies, ideologies such as the ideology of Yuval Noah Harari, where that he describes in his book Homo Deus Ex. That’s exactly this. The human beings started to believe and much earlier than Yuval Harari. Even in the 18th and the 19th century, there were already these philosophers who declared that the human being could become a divine like being, that it could become godlike, that it could become God, that in the end, if it understood the material basis, the mechanized basis of life well enough, that then it would be able to live eternally, to earth, to suffer, to end all suffering, to go to be, to be at a constant state of happiness through the manipulation of the biochemical aspects of its of, of the human being and so on. So that’s the entire problem. This is doomed to fail. Of course, you can clearly see even the psychological and then analysis of the structure of our mental functioning shows very clearly that the human being will always be limited at the level of knowledge. For instance, we are always inclined to think that animals differ, that human beings differ from animals because they know more, because they have more knowledge. But actually that’s not really true in the first place. The human being differs from an animal because its existence gravitates constantly around something that it doesn’t understand about, something that it doesn’t know. For instance, you will never see an animal sitting on a, on a, on a, on a, on a chair or a bank breaking its head, thinking about what the meaning of its existence is and whether or not the other animals will love it or what will happen after it dies or something. Animals don’t do that. The human being does that. The mind, the mental system of the human being constantly gravitates around something it cannot grasp about, something that it doesn’t know. And that’s a consequence of its mental system. Animals communicate with each other. Animals. The mental system of animals is based on sign systems and other systems in which every sign refers to one specific object in which there is never substantial doubt. When an animal sees a sign, receives a sign of another animal, for instance, there will never be a profound, fundamental doubt about the meaning of the sign. There must be some doubt, but never very much. And human beings, it’s completely different when one human being say something to another human being. It must. But what is being said must always be interpreted that the words that are used always refer not so much to an object, not in the first place, to an object. They always refer to other words, meaning that the meaning of a world word is always dependent on the other words, the context that is delivered. And in that way, the human beat. The meaning of words constantly changes, and we are never really sure about what the other means of the other smiles others. Does it mean that he likes us? What does it mean? That he is the laughing of us? And so there is always a large part of uncertainty in a human being and that it’s just like that. The mental system of a human being is never capable to assign definitive meaning to words. And we will ever we will forever be unsure. There will always be a mystery in our lives and in the first at first sight, this might make us insecure and anxious because we human beings have a hard time dealing with uncertainty. But actually, it’s exactly because we can never be certain that we all have the right to live life in our own way and that we all have the ethical duty. We have no other possibility than to give our own or our own answers to in life. And that is exactly it’s the uncertainty that makes a human being truly humane. And every time someone tries to eliminate this uncertainty, he humanizes life. And that’s exactly what totalitarian leaders. The two together in the leaders belief that they have the ultimate answers, Stalin said, literally, my book, my population, he said, should react like a dog of Pavlov to what they say they shouldn’t think they should. They should react as machines. When I say this, they should. They should do that. And when they say something else, they should do something else. So he wants to exclude all uncertainty. He wanted to impose one way, one theory, one ideology. And the relentless way to society that’s so characteristic of totalitarianism is the core root of totalitarianism. The word totalitarianism in the first place means exactly that total. It means total a total theory of how society should be organized. It’s unity. It’s it makes life uniform. Everyone should behave in the same way, should wear the same clothes, should build the same houses, should and so on. That’s authoritarianism. It’s just a radical incapacity to experience the fundamental uncertainty of human existence as a as the precondition for creation, singularity and uniqueness in life.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:33:04] So as people are swept up into this certainty. Right. And many people willingly run towards that because they didn’t like whatever was going on before. And you’ve mentioned the condition, the atomization of self and people feeling alone and isolated and free floating anxiety, these things. Those are sort of the building blocks that allow somebody who says, hey, I know how to do this and people get swept up in it. I want to probe a word with you to make sure we have common meaning around this, and this is around the inevitability of it all. So there’s always to me, you went around that concept quite a bit. It’s inevitable. Right. So it was so inevitable that that Jews would show up at the cattle cars at the appointed time because it was inevitable. I guess I got to get on there. The people would show up for the train to go to the gulags. There’s this inevitability. So when I hear this inevitability of this of the transhumanists, right, the WEF, the Davos crowd, the Duval’s, there’s just this inevitability. Like it’s just inevitable. We’re going to get rid of cows, we’re going to eat crickets. You’re going to lose all your privacy. You’re going to end up with a chip under your skin that’s going to detect your state of being like this, just inevitable. This is where we’re going. And I think a lot of people are swept up in that inevitability that this is just the way things go. But that’s a feature always, I think, of totalitarianism. And it’s it’s never it’s never as total as they make it. They want to make it seem right. It’s actually there are exits off of that inevitability. But I feel that inevitability right now that there are a lot of people really pushing in. It’s not in my country alone. It’s across a big swath of humanity. And that, too, is a different feature for me right now, because a lot of your examples are country specific, culture specific. Now, it’s a little broader than that, I guess. What’s your reaction to that inevitability and the breadth of what we’re facing?
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:34:48] Yes, the inevitability the the the feeling of inevitability as a consequence of the psychological process that is going on. Of course, that’s exactly what this mechanism of mass formation explains. It explains why it seems to the most absurd theories seem inevitability. Right. I mean, when you’re in a mass formation, that’s that’s that’s the entire that’s exactly what the mechanism of mass formation shows. So clearly that that when you’re in it and you’re in the mass formation, your attention is so focused, you see only a very small part of reality. And you see only these things that confirm the narrative you believe in and all the rest you’re not aware of any any longer. So that’s that’s what that’s a strange fact. And indeed, that that that’s the explanation why people in the end start to become convinced that there’s a number of contaminations with the corona crisis increase a little bit, that the country should go into lockdown, that there is no other option and there is no you cannot make clear at that moment. That’s what Hannah Arendt said. Hannah Arendt said the the the the the the tragedy of totalitarianism is that as soon as you accept the starting points a then you also then you have to go to the end of the of the murderous alphabet. She said, as soon as you say you have to stay BCD until Z, until the end of the murderous alphabet. And it’s strange for someone who is not in the grip of the phenomenon, he sees very clearly how absurd of this. He sees like, okay, you want to save some people lives by going into lockdown, but these lockdowns will kill maybe 100 times more people than the virus could could kill. So but no matter how many times you will repeat that to someone, your mother, how much you will try to show them the absurdity of the of the of their line of reasoning, they usually won’t be convinced simply because they are in this state of mass from. Which which makes the focus of attention so narrow and which focuses all the psychological energy so much on a very limited set of representations that the other representations have no impact anymore. For for someone who is in the grip of the Corona narrative or who was in the grip of the Corona narrative, the only image of victims that was to which psychological energy was attached was the corona victim and the people who committed suicide, the children who starved, who died of hunger as a consequence of the lockdowns in developing countries. These images, there was no psychological energy any more attached attached to this image and to these images. And no matter how much you did your best to, to evoke them and to show them to the people, they had no impact any more. So that in the end, it’s something like that, this process that leads to this experience of, uh, in this capability. And the only way to save ourselves, the only way to deal with the problems we have is this, uh, totalitarian ideology. Uh, yes. Well, I think well, we, we, we discussed this mechanism of the process of mass animation in our previous conversation. Uh, but, but, but that, I think that is what explains that. That’s exactly why this theory of mass formation is important, I think because it makes you. Can make you understand that this shows why people are in this strange mental state in which they become completely blind for everything that shows that what they believe in is absurd, but can go so far. Like in Iran during the revolution in Iran in 1978, in 1979, which was the beginning of a very large scale process of mass formation in Iran. People started to believe that the photograph of the picture of their leader, the Ayatollah, was printed on the surface of the moon, and when there was a full moon in the sky, people were standing in the streets, pointing at the moon, showing each other when exactly you would see the picture of the ayatollah. So it’s it’s crazy how far mass formation can go. And it’s crazy how absurd ideas can be in which the masses start to believe, and also how absurd the cruelty can become, which follows from this complete blindness. So I’ve been talking with someone with the woman of Iran shortage, Dani, who lived in Iran during the revolution in Iran. And she said that she had seen with her own eyes of a mother who reported her son to the state and how she put the rope around his neck on the scaffold. And when he was hung and he died, she claimed to be ahead of him for what she did. That’s the end stage of mass formation, this sort of radical intolerance for everything that goes against this absurd theory the masses believe in and which the cruelties which are committed to everyone, even to the people whom they used to love most before the mass formation started, such as their own children, their sons and daughters.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:40:11] Yeah, I’ve received some of that myself because I’ve been reporting about the whole COVID 19 thing, and I do it based on data. And of course, now you said one of the elements that you see in that mass formation is this ritual, particularly the ritualistic sacrifice. And nothing gets more ritualistic, sacrificial to me than taking children who have no real. You can’t no no objective harm from COVID itself. And making them undergo a medical treatment is all I can say here. Live is, you know, we have this medical treatment that people are putting their children up eagerly. Yes. They eagerly wait in line to get their children with the magic juice put in. And even though there’s clear objective data that there was no harm that they were facing in the first place, but there is potentially harm on the second. The point wasn’t that they thought they were doing good and making society better and saving their children. The point was, I think it’s about the ritual of conforming to the ideology. This it’s that’s the energy behind it is how I experience it. Is that reasonable?
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:41:13] Yeah, I was I think for for 20 to 30% of the population going along with, uh, with all kinds of mandates and measures such as the, uh, the vaccines and, and, and mask wearing and also as a ritualistic function. I’m quite sure about that. Yes, it’s it’s because of ritual. Well, it’s clear, actually. And sometimes the experts, the virologists even admitted that, uh, that the measures in the first place had a symbolic meaning, had the symbolic function. They sometimes admitted that in Belgium you’re the Minister of Health sets a certain moment. Um, the closure of pubs and restaurants and hotels as a symbolic function in the first place. And then another expert, a virologist, said that the wearing of masks has a symbolic function that doesn’t help really to spread, doesn’t prevent the virus from spreading or not so much as in the first, but is a symbolic function to remind each other that there is a pandemic going on. So, uh, that’s exactly what ritualistic behavior is. So it’s the kind of behavior that’s, that has no pragmatic purpose or meaning, but that demands the sacrifice of the individual, a sacrifice through which the individual shows that it’s individual interests or less important than the collective interests. So I couldn’t agree more. We see it’s strangely enough, uh, totalitarianism, um, implies the resurfacing of ritualistic behavior within a few old men in the world that is profoundly materialistic and that actually denies that we need something like ritual. So totally totalitarian systems constantly impose rituals that are not recognized as such. And that’s exactly this. It’s it’s exactly this that makes them so dangerous as a human being. We are symbolic beings and as a human being, we need rituals. But if we do not recognize this, if we participate in the rituals without being aware that we are performing a ritual, then we can go so far in this ritualistic behavior, behavior that it kills us and then it becomes radically self-destructive. So that’s that’s one of the problems of totalitarianism. I think it testifies of the fact that the human being intrinsically is a symbolic being that needs of rituals, but it doesn’t recognize that we are symbolic beings. And in this way it destroys itself.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:43:55] Well, I see this a lot, and particularly, you know, that we see people who have extirpated God in religion from their lives thinking, Oh, I’ve taken this anachronistic thing and I have no use for it without realizing I think that that’s now a hole in them and it just gets replaced. So I’ve seen that same religious fervor be applied to science, which is not science or to foresee as an individual or to an institution like like the health authority of of a country. It just gets reattached without understanding that it got reattached, which means it gets imbued with something it should never be imbued with, which is a faith in its goodness or a faith that it’s somehow operating in my better interest. It’s a strange thing, which I see a lot, and it’s happened with this decline in religion, in practice and ritual it seems to be just have been replaced with was something I would not put my faith in personally.
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:44:47] No me neither is I think that the problem. Well religion at the end of the 15th century, I think was also estranged, alienated from its origins. The original, the seminal religious experience was not dogmatic in nature. I think it was a personal, authentic, fresh, uh, encounter with something that escapes all rational understanding and a logical understanding and which is the core of life. Uh, something that, according to Max Planck, was a personal ago. He said As a scientist, um, I sacrificed my life. I worked all my life in the laboratory trying to understand nature and trying to understand atoms. But in the end, he said, I believe that’s science. Arrive, arrives where religion once started in a personal encounter with something that escapes all rational understanding and a logical understanding, and which for me, he said, is a personal god. So that’s quite something for a scientist to say something like that. So, and indeed I believe that also religion, um, impoverished, deteriorated to regressed from this fresh, uh, seminal experience from this fresh, seminal encounter with. Something that transcends overarching and logical understanding, transgressed that regressed too to an institutionalized dogmatic in a practice that indeed became very problematic itself. And I think in the beginning, science represented a fresh, new way to look at the world. To to to to experience nature in the world. But now we are in a stage now. And also, on the one hand, we have small what I call small science in my book, which is actually not science anymore. It’s kind of an ideology which is which which has nothing to do anymore with open mindedness. It’s science became dogmatic itself, it became a set of prejudices itself and so on. But on the other hand, we have the science, the writers, the seminal scientists, the real scientists for me and these guys actually showed us the way they showed that when you walk on the path of rationality and you stay sincere and honest and you follow rationality as loyal as possible, as faithful as possible as as well as possible, then you will arrive at a new kind of knowing the world. The true encounter with the essence of life with went to the core of life. And that that that this what the challenge for for our society. Now it’s saying maybe we have to transcend rational understanding in a new way. We have to stick to the to to, to we all. I think I think on this way we will rediscover the the the land that transcends rationality. And we really I think that really will if we just in this situation, we will be confronted with, well, the pure manifestation of this mechanistic ideology. There will be a technocratic system will emerge, I think. And at the same time and the same movement, we will see how well mechanistic, mechanistic ideology really manifests, manifests in the open. It would also prove itself to be wrong, limited and incapable of delivering a fruitful basis for human living together. And that’s where this other kind of form of knowledge will take it overwriting and will show that a true human living together can only be based on the eternal principles of humanity, on ethical principles, and not so much on rational, almost, and rational understanding as only the preliminary face for true knowledge.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:49:07] I completely agree and very well said. So as we look down this rational versus irrational, the enlightenment through science. The other way I look at this when I rotate the Rubik’s Cube one other way is, is that there was a period of time right around the time of the Enlightenment where the masculine attributes this isn’t gender to the masculine attributes of rationality and determinism and mechanism sort of really got brought out and really explored and maybe overdone, but the feminine was completely violated. And this, I mean, just driven out like burned at the stake literally for doing something like daring to talk with plants and gather, gather plant knowledge and doing something other than what at that time the church wanted, etc.. So, so you look at the old temples, there’s zoos and there’s Athena. I mean, there was always this balance and it’s that God got ripped out of the system. So this unknowing, the feminine, the comfortable being comfortable with with not not only not knowing, but knowing that you’ll never know that we have to bring that balance back in. But that’s all of life, right? Anything in excess is bad. I love drinking water. Too much water is bad. Everything has to be in balance. So what you’re talking about is a great rebalancing that needs to happen. My concern is that if we don’t raise ourselves out of this ideology, trance in time, nature will solve that for us. And she’s rather nature bats last in nature just, you know, she’s shed more species than we even know about it happens so how do we go about and people listening to this dare I say most if not all people actually listening to this have lost family, lost friends, lost coworkers into this process. How did they go about what what role can they play to snap us out of this in time so that we can get back to the process of rebalancing and in living as maybe in a way that that would be nourishing and fulfilling for us.
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:51:00] Well. You know. I believe that. And this, you know, it depends a little bit if you mean what can we do in the present situation? I think that that is only the most important, uh, advice I could give. And that’s also what I bring in my book is that I always, I always come back to this, is that we all have to stick to the first and foremost ethical rule for a human being. And it is that it should try to articulate the words that emerge in itself. And that seems sincere and honest as the first and most important thing, I believe. I think that that we all should continue to speak out in our own way. We should in a dehumanizing world, we should stick to the principles of humanity. And the first and most important principle is the principle that as a human being, we should do our best to articulate the words that seem sincere and honest to us. We should claim our rights invisible to give our own opinion not. Trying to convince other people because that usually doesn’t work very well. The more you try to convince someone, the less you will be, the less you will convince someone else. So but just living up to the ethical duty of, of of articulating the words that seem honest and sincere to us. I think that’s the first and most important advice. I think that we also we all fall prey as well to this rationalist idea that we should try to understand what is happening around this. And then on the basis of this rational analysis, should make our decisions. That’s good. We all have to try to rationally analyze what happens around us to a certain extent. But I don’t think that our rational analysis will ever be capable of really telling us what to do. What we should focus on. I think, like in the nearby future, things will become so chaotic. Things will change so fast that we will never be able to predict what will happen, that we will never be able to base our actions on rational understanding. Instead, we better focus on our own principles. We better think about what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a human being. And if we stick to these principles, all these things that are now out of balance will slowly become more balanced. I think that as a human being, we have to be aware of the fact that it’s not up to us to control everything. That it’s not up to us to make change happen. It’s up to us to live up to the principles of humanity. That’s up to us. And the rest will be done for us. The rest, all balances that all disturbed will be restored. And I think yeah, I believe that. I try to know, you know, I myself, I’m someone very rational. I always try to I try to analyze in the rational way a very great understand and rational way. But the more and the longer I try to be rational, the more and the longer I become aware of the fact that the essence of life is not situated at the level of rationality. It’s not there. It’s not there. But what what what makes you live a life worthy of a human being is not your rational understanding. It’s your courage and your energy to to to stick to the principle of humanity. And it’s difficult for myself to be clear. I have it’s very difficult for me as well to to to to to do to stay true to to to to do my principles. But I’m sure that that is what really gives me a feeling of human satisfaction every time I do it. If you’re prepared to lose a lot in order to be able to stay close to your principles, that is what will be rewarding in the long term. I think that is what in the end will bring you the most important thing that the human being can experience, namely just a feeling of human, of humanity satisfaction, a feeling of existence as a human subject, a feeling that you are less dependent on your ego, on a on a, on on what others think about you and feeling that you’re closer to the real to what do to to this eternal spirit that trembles and everything around us and that that that we can only encounter every time we are humble enough to admit that our own rational understanding is only the very beginning of knowing the world. And and there’s never capable of of of grasping the essence of our life.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:56:12] Mm hmm. These are the best of times. Worst of times. And for me, the best of. Of this is that these times have revealed for me who standing tall and who are the intellectual giants and the moral courageous warriors of our time because they stand up and they’re counted. You’ve got your your Robert Malone’s and Peter Caray’s and Paul Merricks and these people who just stood up right. And lost their jobs and got attacked and they didn’t waver. They just said, this is what I know to be true. But like you’re saying that their power to me is that they talk what they believe to be true in their own words. Right. And of course, as circumstances and data changes, they’ll change, too, because that’s that’s who they are. So that’s I think, what these times are really calling for and is to ask us to if we choose to stand up and it’s not without risk. But as my daughter when she was seven said, Dad, it’s not an adventure if there’s not real danger involved. So yeah, that she was walking across a log and her mom was like, no. No, don’t do that. And she just calmly looked back and said from somewhere, pull that idea from outside and said, If there’s not danger, it’s not an actual adventure. So so these are these are the times, I think, that are really calling for us to stand up. I love what you’ve done in this book. Take to ground and Connect. It was not what I was expecting. I thought we were going to get a a thicker treatise on on mass formation and totalitarianism. And you delighted me. You started with the Enlightenment and you finished through with with where and what big science really needs to be. Which is the best that the rational can offer. But you didn’t stop there. You went further and said, and by the way, that’s only going to be half the story ever. We have to invite the other half of the story back in, and it’s time for that. And that’s our that’s our path and our salvation. So thank you for writing that. It was it’s been it’s just wonderful to read delightful and I can’t recommend it highly enough. And so for anybody thinking of getting it, just get it and you’ll probably mark it up like I did and go back because it’s just full of gems. So Mateas, thank you so much for writing this. I really appreciate that.
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:58:14] Thank you very much for inviting me again, Chris. And, well, I hope we see each other again in the future, because it’s always nice to meet you.
Dr. Chris Martenson [00:58:23] Oh, thanks. Likewise. Me too. I got a million more things to talk to you about. We’ll save that for another time, because the philosophy of all this is actually where my energy is at this point in time. And maybe that’s just my stage of life. But I think this is that’s where the real story actually is in this. So thanks very much for your time today and really appreciate the work you’re doing. Admired a lot.
Dr. Mattias Desmet [00:58:50] Thank you.
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