In the first of an occasional series of of conversations with noted international figures, I speak here to Professor Mattias Desmet, the Belgian psychologist who has become the world’s foremost commentator on mass formation/mass hypnosis and totalitarianism in the context of the Covid tyranny of the past 27 months, and more broadly in our escalating culture of mechanistic alienation. The occasion of our exchange is the publication in English on June 16th — Bloomsday — of