Interview: Dr Mattias Desmet
The Belgian psychologist who has cut the key to unlocking the Covid tyranny, is hopeful about a positive outcome and the chances that freeing ourselves will change our world for the better.
Transcending ‘The Science’
The recent green-eyed monster attacks on Dr Mattia Desmet from within the anti-Covid Cult Resistance, have been as dismaying as they have been fatuous, for, in their sheer indifference to plausibility and reason, they have cast far more doubts on his frequently eminent accusers than on Desmet himself. In fact, it requires just a few minutes’ conversation with Mattia Desmet in person to feel certain that the accusations against him are manifestly baseless, for he is a man of such striking straightforwardness that almost anyone might be a more legitimate target for suspicion of double-dealing. For anyone who has watched even one or two of his dozens of video conversations on the web over the past years and a half, this would already have been apparent. For anyone who has read his latest book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the particularities of the accusations will have read as absurdity upon absurdity — until, that is, it becomes clear that none of his critics show any evidence of having read it.
I don’t propose to go too deeply into the details of these accusations, not for fear of giving them legs — for as arguments they are as invertebrate gastropods compared to the elegance and poetic grace of Desmet’s own propositions: they neither walk nor fly. Rather, my fear is that dwelling too long upon them might bring disfavour upon several people whom I have admired in their own crusading against the current and continuing tyranny. Their interventions have done them no credit at all, and unfortunately have been all too obvious in their feebleness, as illustrated by one laughable accusation to the effect that Desmet is wrong about there being a Covid mass formation, because there could have been no mob during the Covid period since we were all locked down. Such a simplistic concept of what a mob is ought to attract nothing other than pity, as so also do the accusations that Desmet is a shill of the (presumably American) Deep State, has plucked the concept of mass formation out of thin air, and is seeking to ‘blame the victims’ for the tyranny of the past two and a half years.
Mattias Desmet has responded to the accusations in a typically coherent and good-humoured fashion. In the Substack post linked below, he responds to two of his critics, the husband and wife team, Peter R. Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, who accuse him of asserting that Covid totalitarianism arises not from violent evil leaders (the global predators) but from the people themselves ‘whose emotional needs create the dictator’:
{The next couple of paragraphs will be familiar to readers of my weekly diary, who may now move to just past ‘And proof of guilt is provided by denial.’)
There have been other critics also, and I expect there will be more to follow. Either they do not understand what Desmet is saying or they are deliberately twisting it. One of the accusers — Peter Breggin again — has even accused Desmet of alleging that people like himself who have awoken to the scam are as culpable as the perpetrators and the sleeping sheep. It is clear from everything Desmet has been saying that Peter Breggin — or anyone who has been awake to the Covid subterfuge — is not included in the ‘mass’ as defined by Desmet, who allows that perhaps 30 per cent are unaffected by the trance.
Mattias Desmet is not ‘blaming the victims’, but seeking to describe the symbiotic process by which the manipulators succeed in killing their spirits. He is certainly not ‘blinding us to the identity of the true culprits’. Rather, he is trying to convey a more complex, less binary point: that the contemporary kind of totalitarianism (because of mass media penetration, primarily) differs radically not merely from classical dictatorship but also from the twentieth century forms of totalitarianism. Being fuelled by an all-pervasive ideology, this form of totalitarianism co-opts the mass in what can seem an almost 'voluntary' collaboration with the tyrants. Desmet does not deny the existence of tyrants or their nefarious agendas, but makes the point that they are, as individuals, dispensable and interchangeable within the structure of the trance. The underfoot conditions in the society — mass alienation, free-floating anxiety, anomie, bullshit jobs — create an amenable 'mass' which readily embraces the ideology that seems to offer its constituent members some strange kind of relief, including a bogus form of solidarity, which makes it easier for the manipulators to exercise control. He does not rule out an orchestration, but simply emphasises that this 'top down' understanding is inadequate to grasping the nature of the total phenomenon.
There are a lot of misstatements in the Breggins’ analysis. They seem, quite shockingly in view of their venturing into the territory at all, to be unfamiliar with the work of people like Hannah Arendt, Gustave Le Bon and Joost Meerloo. There is a clear and solid line of scientific development for the thesis Desmet is postulating, which they show no signs of being aware of. Insofar as the mass formation idea is concerned, Desmet brings together various threads that have long existed in the field, but in a very convincing way that has long been regarded as axiomatic.
I believe thee is a great deal of substance in Desmet’s thesis that the totalitarianism we face is more of a symbiosis than a simple dictatorship — at least to the extent that many people are being suckered into going along with it, thus policing their fellows and making it possible for the authorities to use only a minimum of coercion (often, no more than the threat of coercion, a kind of feint that but rarely comes to total actuality) and in which the dissenter is essentially put under more or less constant pressure by his neighbours. His descriptions resemble very much what dissenters have experienced in encountering forms of ‘policing’ that erupted from their neighbours more often than from formal police forces. How scary is the individual with the weight of the mass and corrupted state behind him! Desmet’s point about the symbiotic nature of totalitarianism is a variation on Václav Havel’s idea that each person is ‘both a victim and a supporter of the system’: ‘Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialisation of his inherent humanity and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life.’
Mattias Desmet, likewise, is not seeking to reallocate blame in any exculpatory sense, but actually to show how the conditions of the mechanistic society make it easier for tyrants to operate without necessarily being seen as such by the vast majority of the people.
Envy will always be with us. But I have noticed that it has become almost obligatory for almost anyone who stands up against the tyranny and manages to gain a significant profile to be denounced as a 'shill' or a 'plant' — by their own supposed side. The ‘Shill!’ slur has become a kind of suicidal secret weapon of the Resistance, with some people on ‘our’ side of the argument persistently accusing others of being ‘controlled opposition’ as an alternative to mounting any kind of coherent opposition of their own. The result is that they play into the hands of the enemy, by damaging the morale of their own side. It really amounts to a kind of Catch-22: in order to avoid being ‘outed’ as a fraud, it is necessary to remain totally ineffective; the moment you begin to make an impact, the smearing begins. The ‘shill-finders’ remain on constant high-alert, recognising as a symptom of falsity any sign of someone breaking through to the consciousness of the public, and immediately they pounce. To insulate oneself against this risk, one has to remain under the radar, being spectacularly unsuccessful. And proof of guilt is provided by denial.
I met Mattia Desmet in person for the first time last Wednesday, prior to his public appearance at the Button Factory in Dublin’s Temple Bar, where I was to be one of the evening’s brace of interviewers. We had encountered each other remotely earlier in the year, when I interviewed him via Zoom about his recently published book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, having been a champion of his work for more than a year since I first came across him on YouTube. I brought along to lunch a gift of a book of essays, Open Letters, by the aforementioned Václav Havel, the late Czech dissident, playwright, philosopher and post-politician, whom I had mentioned to him in the course of our Zoom conversation. I suspected he would already have read one of the essays, The Power of the Powerless, as I had seen him writing furiously as we spoke about it, and so it proved. But, flicking through the book, his eyes lit upon a pulled quote at the opening of the Preface, extracted from one of the essays in the book, titled Thriller:
‘I am unwilling to believe that this whole civilization is no more than a blind alley of history and a fatal error of the human spirit. More probably it represents a necessary phase that man and humanity must go through, one that man — if he survives — will ultimately, and on some higher level (unthinkable, of course, without the present phase), transcend.’
Desmet nods furiously at this, affirming that Havel is correct: History throws us these curved balls so that we may play them and grow as a species — as I understand both men to mean. Havel is speaking in Thriller of the recent shift in human history from societies rooted in myth and reason to societies clinging to ideology and pseudoscience — the ‘necessary phase’ to which he refers there. But the word ‘transcend’ also crops up frequently in Desmet’s diagnostics and reflections, usually in the context of his exposition of the pathway of rationality petering out, to require a leap of transcendence into the realms of mystery, poetry, intuition, empathy, and even irrationality.
Interestingly, Havel proceeds as follows from the above:
‘Whatever the case may be, it is certain that the whole rationalistic bent of the new age, having given up on the authority of myths, has succumbed to a large and dangerous illusion: it believes that no higher and darker powers — which these myths in some ways touched, bore witness to, and whose relative “control” they guaranteed — ever existed, either in the human unconscious or in the mysterious universe. Today, the opinion prevails that everything can be ‘rationally explained,’ as they say, by alert reason. Nothing is obscure — and if it is, then we need only cast a ray of scientific light on it and it will cease to be so.’
And this, if his critics could but take the trouble to listen and read, is what Mattias Desmet is really on about. A central theme of the Czech resistance to which Havel belonged was the idea that a rationalistic totalitarianism derives in the first instance from a mechanistic automatism, by which rule-based social and political processes driven by a 'technoscientific’ worldview serve to eclipse the general capacity for critical thinking, giving life to an ‘absolutism’ that inevitably leads to amoral decision-making and despotic rule. This, really, is Desmet’s theme also, though he approaches it via the psychological route of studying the phenomenon of Covid mass formation and its effects on human beings.
In his book, he writes:
‘The discourse surrounding the coronavirus crisis shows characteristics that are typical of the type of discourse that led to the emergence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century: the excessive use of numbers and statistics that show a radical contempt for the facts, the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, and a fanatical ideological belief that justifies deception and manipulation and ultimately transgresses all ethical boundaries.’
His book, as I have written in reviewing it, offers a description of modern society in the drifts of an escalating mechanistic culture, of which totalitarianism is the ineluctable destination. Gummed up in a congealing mechanistic ideology, man is reduced to a biological organism and subjected to the positivist logic whereby every aspect of thought must be eminently demonstrable. The resulting destruction of the symbolic and ethical elements of human culture, he writes, results in the devastation of relationships and the isolation of the individual, turning the human person into an atomised subject, whose entire existence is as though reduced to elementary particles that interact according to the laws of mechanics. This provides the building block of the modern type of totalitarian state.
‘This epistemological point of departure,’ Desmet elaborates, ‘has bearing on the ideology's conception of the ideal society. Ideally, society is led by expert technocrats who make decisions based on objective, numerical data. With the coronavirus crisis, this utopian goal seemed very close at hand. For this reason, the coronavirus crisis is a case study par excellence in subjecting the trust in measurements and numbers to critical analysis.’
He frequently cites the great Jewish-German intellectual, Hannah Arendt, more than once highlighting her assertion that totalitarianism is ultimately the belief in an artificially created paradise: ‘Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.’
The destination-point of this process, Desmet describes with a wave towards Silicon Valley, is transhumanist man — the merging of the human being with the machine: We have arrived, he seems to be certain, at a studied attempt to unravel both our civilisation and our human nature.
‘Yes,’ he confirms, I think that it’s a process of radical dehumanisation that’s happening right now. And that’s difficult when there is a certain ideology which really imposes itself without limit on a society, and there is no other option — then that ideology dehumanises the entire society, because it leaves no space for . . . Yes, it’s immense, and at the same time — and that’s where I maybe differ from my father — my father had a rather pessimistic view on what would happen, and in the end I’m very optimistic. I think that it will be difficult, but I think that, if we make the right choices, at the strategic and the ethical, and even at the intellectual level — you have to start from the right analysis, and if you construct a correct analysis, you will automatically choose the right strategy. Well, perhaps not automatically, but there is a good chance that you will choose the right strategy and also and make the right ethical decisions. But I think that, if we do so — and I’m convinced that we will do so — that there will be a group of people who will really make the right choice in the situation; and, in the end, we will see what a beautiful process it actually is, and how necessary this process is. The old ideology —this delusional belief in human rationality — will be exactly what we need to bring to the fore exactly the opposite, namely that it will give birth to that which transcends mere rationality.’
When I interviewed him in June, I sought to get at something that seemed to me to be obvious about Desmet but which I had not heard him called upon to address: that he was possessed of, or by, some quirk of history or personality that had enabled him to see deeply into the Covid scam from the beginning, when most of his contemporaries in both psychology and science more generally were falling into their place in the mass formation. I somewhat puzzled him, I think, by asking if his ‘secret’ might have had something to do with the fact that he is qualified in two relevant disciplines — psychology and statistics — thereby giving him an edge over mono-focus colleagues, much in the way that someone who has learned two languages in childhood can figure out other languages much more quickly when older.
It was a clumsy and rather unlikely concept, but in my defence I submit that I was working off an intuition that now emerges as correct. Desmet does have a ‘secret’ inheritance from his childhood that has perhaps, more than any other single factor, enabled him to step up at this moment and see what is there more rapidly and coherently than others. I was on the right track but following the wrong trail. The ‘secret weapon’ of his insightfulness relates to his childhood, and in particular to his father, an autodidact small business-owner with an unusual suspicion of education.
‘My father was someone who studied a lot. He was someone who was interested in all kinds of things. But he didn't want his children to go to university, or to go to school even. Because he thought that, if you go to school, you try to gather knowledge not because you have a passion to know but rather because you want a certain degree, or a certain societal status or something. Well, I didn’t listen to him, and I went to university. And, after one year, I came back home and I showed him that I had passed my exams in an excellent way, and he said, “I knew you could do that, but I have no respect for it!” At first I was angry, but now . . . I went through my academic training and I was offered a PhD project, a grant, and I got my PhD after four years, and then I could stay at university for a post-doc, and that’s how I became a professor. And actually I learned a lot at university, but at the same time, in one way or another, I could understand my father better and better because, I when started to do my PhD, I was first doing a classical research project in psychology, but I immediately had a feeling that all these research methods that are used in psychology, they are not really valid and they will never lead — all these psychological tests questionnaires and so on, that are used to quantify psychological phenomena — in my opinion, they don’t really teach you a lot about the object that you are studying. In the first place, they are used, I think, because they make your research look scientific, and it makes your research appear to be objective, but I really doubt if that is the case. A really objective research project does not really have to express things in numbers or figures — it has to bring you in close contact with the object. That’s what objectivity is for me,. It allows you to approach your object, to bring you in close contact with it, and most research methods in psychology absolutely don’t being you closer to your object. If you ask someone to fill out a questionnaire, I don’t think that the questionnaire will tell you more about the person than if you just ask him and talk with him, have a conversation with him, and as open-minded a conversation as possible.
‘So I was very disappointed in the research methods in psychology. And then I decided to change the focus of my PhD and to investigate the research methods themselves, and after a while I published a small book, The Pursuit of Objectivity in Psychology, and, well, most academic researchers got really angry with me, because it exposed, in my opinion, the weaknesses, and the problems, and the limitations of classical research. I don’t say that all psychological research is bullshit. But a great deal of it is.’
What kind of man was his father? Was he politically minded, religious?
‘He was not a political soul. He didn’t identify with one or another political party. He was religious, but he refused to identify with any dogmatic or institutionalised religion. He was a very strong-minded person, someone who never hesitated to go against the group, and who tried to speak out in his own way. It was something that was characteristic of the family on my father’s side. He was fanatic in many respects. Too fanatic.’
About what?
‘Hmmm. About what? About his aversion for schools!’ (He laughs.) ‘Because I went to university against his will, but I learned a lot at university. I don’t think that everything is bad at university.’
Mattias Desmet is perhaps coming more and more to see how his direction was formed, even if sometimes in the form of reaction, by his father’s personality and its unconscious influence on his approach to thinking. In a way, his relationship with his father (who died a decade ago) mirrors his own historical thought process, in which, at the age of 35, he went on a journey upon the highway of rationality and found that, after a time, it deviated into a coherent irrationality, for which the language of scientific methodology was no longer any use. He followed the path with diligence and attention, until its rational surface began to disintegrate, and then he started to better understand his father’s position. Without either element — the exploitation of scientific rationalism or his father’s scepticism — he would not have grasped things as he has. Without one or other element he would not be the scientist he is. Never has this been clearer to him than in the past couple of years of his entanglement in the Covid saga.
‘Yes, I think that you have to walk the path of rationality. You have to walk it until the end, and then you have to transcend it, I think. I’m not against rationality — not at all — but I think that a lot of people think it is the goal of our human existence, whereas it is only a means toward the real goal, which is to transcend rationality. Yes! Well, I’m happy that I didn’t listen to my father, actually, and at the same time I really discovered the value of . . . [what he was saying]. I have been working at university now for 19 years, I think, and I — well! — in one way or another, I don’t think that a university really represents the true spirit of science. They really say that I can speak in my own way and so on — that I have freedom of speech — but at the same time, I feel that there is a huge pressure at university, and that many colleagues take a distance from me, that many colleagues just take for granted what is published in the newspapers about me. I always think that that is a very weak position as an academic.’
At the Button Factory last week, he said something to the effect that he had come to realise, after the spring of 2020, that his life up to that point had not been completely real, that he had been living a kind of artificial life, that only now does he see the point of his journey into psychology and scientific investigation.
In December 2019, he was on holiday with some friends at a chalet in the Ardennes, in Belgium, when he heard about ‘the virus’. He knew immediately that this life was about to change.
‘I had this feeling, this intuition that, one of these days — and I told it to my friends — that we would wake up in a different society. And it was very real, that feeling. And when I came back from that holiday I went to the bank and paid back my mortgage, and I didn’t know exactly why I did that because from an economical or a tax perspective it was probably not interesting to pay back my mortgage. But I wanted to be as independent as possible, to be free as possible. I wanted to liberate myself from the banking system which I believe to be responsible for many of the problems in the world. And two months later the coronavirus crisis started and I immediately had the intuition: this was the crisis that I had been anticipating.’
Yet, having in one sense foreseen what was happening, he was nevertheless shocked at aspects of what unfolded.
‘You know, I was also surprised when it all started, although I had been anticipating it in a certain sense. I couldn’t believe what was happening around me. When it all started back in February of 2020, I just expected that all my colleagues at the university would all object and say, “Look! This is unbelievable! We have to make a proper costs/benefits analysis! Don’t you see that there will be more victims claimed by the measures than possibly can be by the virus?” So I was very surprised myself. But very soon I started to understand that what we were dealing with was a very dangerous phenomenon, which was the beginning of the emergence of a totalitarian system, and at the same time it wasn’t that something came true that I hadn’t been expecting my entire life.’
Almost immediately, he published an opinion paper, The Fear of the Virus is More Dangerous than the Virus Itself. The die was cast, his future mapped out at this moment of coalescing between the emerging landscape of control and his intuition of such a calamity long before it happened — some understanding that these dark and dangerous forces were always right there in the hallway beyond his lecture room, on the next seat of the tram.
‘Yes, definitely. I often said that when the corona crisis started it was as if my entire intellectual training prepared me for it, because I had been studying science, scientific ideologies, and the way in which science ended up in a deplorable state just before the corona crisis started. We often forget the reputation crisis in 2005 reveals the terrible, deplorable state of academic research. I had alway had an avid interest in the limits of materialism, because I believed that this idea that the netural universe is a mechanistic phenomenon is the real problem we are dealing with here. And even more the idea that we can understand life, the universe, reality, and the human being, completely in a rational way — that’s the real problem — it’s the hubris of the human being that believes they will grasp the essence of life, crack the code of life, that it will show a rational understanding. That’s the real problem: people who are incapable of tolerating uncertainty, and who don’t see that the answers to the big questions of life will never be rational in nature, but will always be of a different nature.
‘For me the essence of the human being is humane as long as it can be a little bit uncertain, as long as it can really listen to someone and believe that maybe this other person also has something valuable to say. And if a human being becomes radically certain, so certain of its own perspective, then it will inevitably will destroy each and every other human being that thinks differently. And that’s exactly what happens in a mass formation: people become completely certain of their own perspective, so certain that they think that anyone who is not thinking like them is not a human being anymore, and consequently can be destroyed. Mass formation is dehumanisation of everything that goes against the masses, and consequently people in the masses become radically convinced that it is justified to destroy everyone who doesn’t go along with it.’
For related and other reasons, he has avoided political pathways. ’Just like my father,’ he says, ‘I am not a very political being. I don’t identify with on or other political ideology or orientation.’
‘Who am I? At that level, I’m a very rational person in a certain way. I always try to understand — stubbornly try to understand rationally, at all levels. But I’m also a very poetic person, I think, someone with a strong mystical sensitivity, And for me it was just so liberating when I suddenly started to understand that science itself shows us that the essence of life is not rational. It was as if, suddenly, the doors opened and I could walk out of the prison that rationality always is, I think. We need to be rational, and we need to go through all the tunnels of rationality, but I think that, in the end, the really profound experience of our existence as human beings, happens first when we transcend rationality, I’m sure of that. And I refused to do so before I could understand — rationally — why rationality was limited.’
Knowledge — of perhaps every kind — is contingent, not least because the language we use to acquire and explore it is itself a tool that traps us in its wires of logic. We use the least inadequate words when we speak of the unknowable.
‘Yes, I distinguish always between, on the one hand, rational language in which you try to convey a certain meaning, in as precise and systematic way as possible, and then the more evocative, or resonating type of language, such as poetry or mystical context — that’s something different. And in poetry you’re no longer imprisoned in language, because you touch something, you make something resonate in the other, without fixating it on a certain meaning. I think that’s the drama of the human being, that it constantly tries to fixate the meanings of the words in an attempt to grasp the essence of life, when the essence of life always escapes the meaning of words. And that’s why Niels Bohr [Danish physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922] said that, when it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry. I started really to understand that when I was 35 years old. I suddenly understood that what he was saying, literally, was that, really, logical language cannot grasp the essence of atoms — they behave irrationally. You can only evoke. You can just, through poetry, get in touch with, resonate with, this mysterious and sublime behaviour of atoms.’
I tell him about the beautiful definition by Peter, brother of the great Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, of the relationships between a poem and its words:
‘In a poem, the words are the least important part. In a poem, the words burn up in a tremendous thread of something unusual.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ Desmet responds. ‘That’s what I’m saying. And if you want to destroy a poetic experience, you have to try to rationally understand the poem. It’s immediately destroyed. It’s as if there is a string that is vibrating and you try to fix it. You try to take the vibration. But in the act of trying to grasp the string you actually destroy the sound of the string.’
I tell him that, although he does not come across as ‘left’ or ‘right’, he does however suggest himself as some class of a liberal, who clearly belongs to those post-60s generations who believed in people’s right to be let alone to live their lives more or less as they chose. He does not demur. He has been shocked by the responses of his fellow scientists and academics, and of the intellectual community in general, in the face of the greatest rights-grab in modern history.
‘It’s extremely strange. You know, Joost Meerloo coined the term “mental surrender”. He said that, if a totalitarian system emerges suddenly — he doesn’t use the term ‘mass formation’, but he refers to the emergence of the masses in totalitarian systems — and [he says] that this emergence of the masses is such a tremendously powerful phenomenon at a psychological level — such that even those intellectuals who really opposed the totalitarian ideology before the mass emerges might suddenly change their opinion, and suddenly begin to talk as if they support the totalitarian ideology.
(Dr Joost Merloo, who coined the word ‘menticide,’ was forced to flee the Netherlands in 1942, following the Nazi occupation. The focus of his work is on the techniques used in interrogation — mental torture, brainwashing, and the use of fear as a tool of mass submission. He focussed also on questions of loyalty and treason — the possibility that, through studied manipulation, anyone can be turned into a ‘traitor’. Meerloo’s phrases — ‘the rape of the mind,’ and ‘menticide’ — relate to what he characterised as the process by which a psychotic ruling class imposes on the collective mind of the population a programme for the achievement of its own aspirations to total power and control.)
Desmet continues: ‘That’s what he calls the ‘mental surrender’ of many intellectuals and many politicians, and so on. No matter how critical they were of the totalitarian ideology before the mass emerged, they might suddenly change their opinion, without even realising it themselves! Suddenly starting to talk in the opposite way. I’ve seen this with many intellectuals in Belgium — people who wrote books about the dangers of conformism, about bio-fascism, and so on. And suddenly, the corona crisis started, this mass emerged, and they suddenly took a completely different position and they started to attack in a very vehement way, a very avid way, the people who went against the totalitarian system.’
How does it work?
‘It depends a little bit. It depends on whether these intellectuals, these politicians, really fall prey to the mass formation, whether they are in this hypnotic state that is the real state of mass formation. In that case it just means that, psychologically, they bought into the narrative because it leads to all these psychological advantages, such as that the narrative allows the individual to control his anxiety, to let out all his aggression on someone, that it leads to this new social bond that is typical of mass formation. So, if these intellectuals really fall prey to the mass formation, it is because there are all sorts of psychological advantages situated at the more effective anti-personal . . . the social level. So there’s an instrumental, tactical choice not to go against the masses, who are such a powerful voice in the society at this moment.’
Isn’t this really a new kind of stupidity, possibly arising from too narrow a focus?
‘Yes, that is one of the mechanisms behind it. Like, a mass formation really makes the focus extremely narrow — that’s why it is identical to hypnosis. In hypnosis, someone’s attention is focussed on one small aspect of reality, and the rest of reality disappears. But, in mass formation, exactly the same happens. All these emotions are withdrawn from reality and they are freely floating in the mind of the person, and then suddenly all the anxieties and frustrations and aggressions are focussed on one small aspect of reality — like a virus — and that’s when all the rest disappears. And that’s why people were really not capable anymore of making a proper costs/benefits analysis. It was just impossible even to simply tell them, “Okay, there will be victims claimed by the virus, but there will also be victims claimed by the corona measures”. Even highly intelligent people were simply not capable anymore of seeing that there would be two types of victims. And that has everything to do with this narrow, hypnotic focus of attention.’
Giving the lie to critics who allege that he is a (by definition) carefully cultivated agent provocateur who spills out pat analyses of complex topics, Desmet is an extraordinarily open and honest interlocutor even on matters relating to his own areas of expertise, frequently hesitant before an unfamiliar question and pondering it openly for several minutes. This happens when I ask him if he can identify any of the clues he may have noticed previous to what he calls ‘the corona crisis’ in people that alerted him, even if unconsciously, to the potential dangers inherent in a mass of mono-minded people. For several minutes, speculates about various aspects of the question, as though racking his memory for connections and testing them with some unseen spirit level.
‘Ahh!’
‘Hmm.’
‘I think . . .’
‘Maybe . . . ‘
‘Wow! In a certain way . . .’
‘There’s a . . .’
He begins one possible explanation and then rejects it as peripheral. Then he returns to his father:
‘You know . . . [long pause] Maybe it also has to do with a certain religious . . . As I said, my father did not belong to any dogmatic or institutionalised religion, but he spoke Hebrew, he analysed many of the Jewish religious literature in the original language, and he explained to me the meaning of the religious metaphors and so on. And while I rediscovered that in my own way, he also mentioned to me, from when I was a small child, that in Jewish mystical literature, everything went through a cycle of seven steps. The first six steps were the rational steps, and the seventh step was the step to God, and that was the step that transcends rationality. He frequently told me that, in these times we are living in now, that we are dealing with a system that went through the first six steps, but refused to take the seventh step.’
I tell him that this is almost exactly what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, when accepting the Templeton Prize at the London Guildhall in 1983, about the reasons for the destruction of his country, Russia, by Bolshevism. Solzhenitsyn recalled that, when he was still a child, he would hear the old people saying that all the disasters befalling Russia were happening because God had been forgotten:
‘Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own towards the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”’
Mattias has not heard the quotation before. He nods vigorously. ‘Yes. Yes! It’s strange how, certain things you heard when you were a child . . . that your entire life seems to lead back to these simple things you heard when you were small.’
How, I wonder is he so hopeful that our societies, under the attrition of this horror show, will become ‘educated’ — ideally not in the way his father was suspicious of, but in a different way — about what human existence is really about, and what the natural human responses ought to be, or were, or would be if we didn’t interfere with them mechanistically all the time. How has he become to hopeful about that — that we can learn together?
‘Yes, I am very hopeful. And I have this feeling that it is happening already, this feeling that there is this new connections between people. I often feel that — as if people connect in a more direct way to each other. Like we are talking now. I would have never met you without this crisis, and I feel this connection with a new network, a new group of people. And I think that what needs to happen will happen spontaneously. We won’t have to do it ourselves. The only thing we will have to do is just stay true to these principles. We have to try to find the eternal principles of humanity. And from time to time I discover such a principle for myself. Like, talk with everyone. You know, there are all these people who have been stigmatised as ‘far right’, as ‘conspiracy theorists’, as ‘anti-vaxxers’, as ‘climate deniers’, and so on. And I think: Just forget about all these things and be willing to talk, to share words with everyone. That’s what we have to rediscover, and we have to follow these ethical principles — that’s crucial, no matter what we lose by following them. We have to be prepared to sacrifice a lot just to stay in touch with these ethical principles, and then all the rest will be done for us.’
For Václav Havel, and his mentor, the older dissident Jan Patočka, who died following an episode of police brutality in 1977, morality was its own objective and not something to be seen as a means to ends. You lived in the truth for its own sake, not to attain victory. The point of humane action was to remain human. Morality was not a construct of man’s need to create order, but — on the contrary — what defined the human being. The true dissident disposition is not instrumental, but carried out for the intrinsic value of doing it, as Patočka put it, ‘for the sake of nothing’ so as to achieve something ‘for the sake of everything’. Such action has, as its end, some sense of liberation, yet along the way is focussed solely on the moral power it is capable of generating, which is itself the key to its non-violent character. Mahatma Gandhi, too, insisted that the dissident must set for man a path independent of ends, centred on the raising up of his own consciousness to embrace a higher set of values, including personal responsibility and a willingness to live within the truth.
‘Exactly,’ Mattias responds. ‘And that’s exactly the opposite to a rationalist approach to life, because if you think rationally, you being to think, “If I follow that principle, I might lose my job”. “might lose this or that!” If you think rationally, in the end you always become a coward. I think rationality can help you a little bit to discover these principles, but these principle are always born from an experience that transcends rationality — sometimes an experience of the heart. It is this resonating knowledge, which is so important, and which I will try to write about in my next book. Just the crucial experience: What is the kind of knowledge that transcends this rational knowledge, and that’s what can bring us in touch with the principles of life. And, if we are then prepared — and that’s crucial — to follow those principles, to live up to these principle no matter what the cost, then that is all we have to do. It’s extremely simple and at the same time something extremely difficult. If you read the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, that’s exactly what he says. Gandhi was not a big intellectual, not at all. He was constantly thinking about what the nature of truth is. And every time he discovered something about truth, he tried to change his life and to revert to his new discovery about the nature of truth. He was not smart; he was not handsome; he was not a good speaker; he was not a good writer. But he was very loyal to truth, and that gave him the power to do something that nobody else could do: to get the English out of India. So that’s what we should realise — that, as Havel said, the power of the powerless, that even if you lose your power, you still have your full power as a human being, if you have the courage to live up to your principles as a human being.’
His optimism is contagious, oddly because its delivery is devoid of bombast. He speaks evenly and without affectation. His demeanour is serious, and yet warm, an unusual combination in a practitioner of science. His personality perfectly matches the philosophy he adumbrates.
In our conversation over lunch the previous day, he had linked from Havel’s view of the necessary lessons of twentieth century mechanistic rationalism, via the early incarnations of totalitarianism, to the idea that we have now entered into some kind of final phase of the learning phase. The twenty-first century brand of totalitarianism, he suggests, will be the culmination of that adventure, though not necessarily in a dark or fatal way. Again, he is hopeful.
‘All totalitarianism starts from the belief in human rationality. Whether we are talking about Communist totalitarianism in Russia, or fascist totalitarianism in Nazi Germany, in both case there is a certain pseudo-scientific theory, which is the historical materialism of Marx, or a certain neo-Darwinism race theory, as in Nazi Germany. There’s a certain pseudoscientific theory that is used to reshape society, and that is relentlessly imposed on society, a certain absurd logic [based on] this utopian pseudoscientific theory. So, in both cases, we see that totalitarianism always testifies to the delusional belief in human rationality. But this time we are dealing with a worldwide system, which is completely different. There is no hope that an external enemy will save us. We will have to solve it from within, from inside the system. When there are external enemies, they can destroy the system with aggression. This time, there is no higher authority — not on this earth. And that makes a huge difference, because in the kind of totalitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century, people could still hope that an external enemy could still destroy the system. Now, forget about that — that option simply doesn’t exist, so it will have to be solved from within. And from within, aggression is not an option. Aggression is always so destructive for any internal resistance to a totalitarian system. People like Hannah Arendt, and so on, described that. Non-violent resistance is by far the most effective resistance from inside the totalitarian system. So, we will have to walk that way. That is the only solution. And that makes a huge difference: There will be no other option than to go through that tunnel, the tunnel of non-violent resistance, no matter how difficult it is. And it’s in that tunnels I think, that people will truly change, will go through an enormous evolution as human beings. That’s exactly what Solzhenitsyn describes in The Gulag Archipelago. People in the concentration camps also couldn’t rely on aggression to defend themselves against the totalitarian regime, and the people who chose, in the concentration camps, to stay loyal to their ethical principles, they were the ones who came through this enormous transformation as human beings. And this might happen now, on a much larger scale, with all the people that choose to resist in a non-violent way. So that’s one major difference with the process of totalitarianisation in the first half of the twentieth century. And another major difference, I think, is just the ideology itself. Like, the fascist ideology had this cult of the hero, which was not very rationalist in nature, was very romantic in nature, and so on. So the typical totalitarian rationalism was merged with all kinds of non-rationalist elements. We don’t see that now. This transhumanism is a completely rationalist ideology. It’s more pure. What is surfacing now is like a pure mechanistic rationalist ideology, much purer than in the first half of the twentieth century.
‘The transhumanist ideology is just the contemporary and pure manifestation of the idea that the human being is just a machine — that it is a material machine, which is part of the larger material machine of the universe. That’s actually the basic ideology that slowly became more and more prominent throughout the last four or five-hundred years — this idea that the human being can be analysed as a machine, that it can be explained as a machine, that you can control it as a machine, that you can optimise it as a machine, and so on. That’s what transhumanism is: the manifestation in public space of this mechanist view on the human being.’
I note, superfluously, that the previous totalitarianisms lasted, respectively, seven decades and roughly a dozen years. The Nazi manifestation was accompanied by a war, which may have abbreviated what might otherwise have lasted decades as well. This suggests, doesn’t it, that the final Act could be a long battle, especially if pursued from our side in non-aggression fashion?
‘Maybe. It could also be a rather short battle — we don’t know — because this totalitarianism might be extremely self-destructive. We don’t know. Sometimes, the more means the totalitarian system has at its disposal the faster it destroys itself. And in the end it always destroys itself. But how long it takes, nobody knows.’
He thinks that, already, the plotters have made some fundamental mistakes which may rebound against them. ‘Here in this situation, I have never known of a totalitarian system injecting its population at such a scale with experimental vaccines. It’s an extremely dangerous thing. It might quite quickly resolve the situation.
‘And that is also a strange thing: The leaders of the contemporary totalitarian system are not people like Stalin and Hitler. Not at all. they are, as Hannah Arendt predicted, these dull bureaucrats and technocrats. That’s what she said: The ultimate totalitarianism will be led by dull bureaucrats and technocrats, people who function as a kind of robot.’
But nonetheless vicious . . .
‘’Yes! Nonetheless, very vicious. Yes!’