Mattias Desmet is author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022), which explains the process by which people surrender their freedom by mass formation, a collective form of mass hysteria or hypnosis. Fear is the key, leading to the road of loss of freedom, privacy and ultimate censorship and cancellation. This is exactly what was experienced with the Covid lockdowns, although the book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, is wider in scope than its leading contemporary example. It describes as well how past totalitarian states operated.
Following an exposition by Dr Robert Malone on the Joe Rogen Experience show, where Dr Malone detailed Desmet' theory, applied to the Covid mandates, the system, especially the Left went even more insane, and wanted Rogen's show cancelled.
In the transcript below, Professor Desmet addresses the US Senate and makes some general philosophical points about how social anomie leaves vulnerable populations open to mass formation, and ultimately totalitarian control. To counter this there needs to be a revolution in thought: "This is the point I make: it's time for a metaphysical revolution, a revolution, which, essentially, at the psychological level, boils down to this: the switch from a society ruled by lonely masses in the grip of propaganda to a society guided by a group united through sincere speech."
The next issue is how to achieve this.
https://words.mattiasdesmet.org/p/my-speech-at-the-us-senate
Dear members of the American Senate,
Dear audience,
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
Somewhere back in the seventeenth century, humanity embarked on a courageous project. Until then, it had relied on mythical and religious narratives to organize society. Now it would leave these illusions behind. Science relied on the world as it appears before our eyes. It objectively described phenomena and rationally described relationships between them. This approach of life was expected to be a royal way to Truth and to liberate humanity definitively from the dangerous illusions of religion. The era of Enlightenment and Reason was about to begin.
A few centuries later, this expectation turned out to be an illusion itself. The tradition of Enlightenment all but led to a reign of Reason and Truth. Never before, the elites relied more on a manipulative type of speech called 'propaganda'. And never before, people followed so blindly even the most absurd narratives distributed through the mass media. Kant believed the tradition of Enlightenment would produce a new citizen who could think for himself, but until now, the opposite turns out to be true: it produced the ideal citizen of the totalitarian state, which Hannah Arendt defined as a citizen who cannot distinguish between reality and fiction.
After the communist and fascist totalitarianism of the twentieth century, we currently witness the emergence of a technocratic and transhumanist totalitarianism. It manifest in the typical way totalitarianism does: as a diabolic pact between the elite and the masses.
The elite is situated at the level of the global institutions. The ideological program of these institutions – as it is articulated for instance in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals – is imposed to public space through an impressive propaganda apparatus. To give only one example: the UN recruited in 2020 no less than one-hundred-and-ten-thousand (!) so-called digital first responders to fight 'disinformation' on the internet.
The rationalist view on man and the world also had some unexpected psychological effects at the level of the population: the focus on rationally understanding the outward appearance of phenomena alienated people from inner experiencing and the ethical dimension of life and disconnected the human being from its fellow human beings and from nature around it.
These two evolutions, the emergence of an elite that uses propaganda and a lonely and disconnected population, reinforced each other. The lonely state is exactly the state in which a population is particularly vulnerable for propaganda. In this way, a new kind of masses or crowds emerged throughout the last two centuries: the so-called lonely masses. This process of mass-formation makes people radically incapable of taking a critical distance of the narratives spread through media, it makes them radically willing to self-sacrifice and it makes them radically intolerant for dissonant voices (think about the aggressive censorships of dissonant voices during the coronacrisis and throughout the 2020 US elections).
As society falls prey to propaganda, it becomes ever more clear that there is an urgent need for what the ancient Greeks called Parrhesia or sincere speech. From a psychological point of view, it can be argued crystal clear that Truth Speech both inhibits mass-formation (and hence also totalitarian systems which are always based on mass-formation) and the root cause of mass-formation, which is the disconnectedness and loneliness.
This is the point I make: it's time for a metaphysical revolution, a revolution, which, essentially, at the psychological level, boils down to this: the switch from a society ruled by lonely masses in the grip of propaganda to a society guided by a group united through sincere speech.
The complete roundtable discussion can be found here:
https://rumble.com/v4fpw4c-federal-health-agencies-and-the-covid-cartel-what-are-they-hiding.html