He writes to me that there has been a concerted effort to convince him that I am “controlled opposition,” and to convince that he should disassociate from me. But, unfortunately for the propagandists and chaos agents, that is unlikely to happen as we have spent these many hours building a collaborative friendship and have been through thick and thin together. I steadfastly supported him through the academic attacks he has had, helped him build his Substack following, and defended him when the Breggins maliciously attacked and defamed him.
These many concerted censorship and defamation attacks have taken a toll on him, as they have on me, but we both remain standing and continue our efforts to discern truth through the fog of the psychological war, the fifth generation warfare, which swirls around us.
Mattias is now focusing on his next book, which looks forward towards how we can win the PsyWay battle for our minds, thoughts, and souls being waged against all of us by globalist Elites. As I listened to his speech at the ICS IV, I was amazed at how his thinking has continued to mature, and by the clarity of his thought and insights.
As Mattias explains in this lecture, the continuing advancement of these propaganda capabilities has been considered necessary to prop up, “legitimize,” and provide cover for a wide range of nefarious, self-serving actions on the part of a very small group of hereditary “Elites” who have sought to control the peoples, governments, and economies of the world—at the expense of the interests of humanity at large. The rest of us have paid an enormous price in suffering and psychological damage, which is rooted in a sense of disaffection from each other and society—loneliness.
In his speech at ICS IV, Dr. Desmet provides a glimpse into his prescription for healing those of us who have been damaged, and his vision for how we can recover our sovereignty, personal psychological autonomy, and rebuild a more functional society devoid of the nefarious hidden hand of Elite-sponsored propaganda and psychological manipulation.
I heartily recommend reviewing and carefully considering his thoughts, and I eagerly look forward to his new book in which he provides further details.
Dear friends,
This time was no different—the text below and the actual speech are different. That being said, I hope you will read it. In the beginning I repeat some things about totalitarianism that you might be familiar with if you’ve listened to my interviews. But the rest of the text is all about the perversion of political discourse in our society and the need for a new type of politician who leaves propaganda and rhetoric behind and re-appreciates truth speech.
Warm wishes,
Prepared Remarks
Dear members of the Romanian parliament,Dear audience,
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
I have articulated my theory on totalitarianism on so many occasions. I will only present the gist of it here and move on to a problem which is particularly relevant for an address in a political institution such as this parliament: the perversion of political discourse in the Enlightenment tradition.
Here is in a nutshell what I articulated on totalitarianism throughout the last years: totalitarianism is not a coincidence. It is a logical consequence of our materialist-rationalist view on man and the world. When this view on man and the world became dominant, as a spontaneous consequence, a new elite ánd a new population emerged. A new elite that excessively used propaganda as a means to control and steer the population; and a population which lapsed more and more into loneliness and disconnectedness, both from its social and its natural environment.
People fall prey to mass formation to escape a pervasive feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness, induced by the rationalization of the world and the ensuing industrialization of the world and the excessive use of technology. They merge together in fanatic mass behavior because this seems to free them from their lonely, atomized state.
And that is exactly the big illusion of mass formation: belonging to a mass doesn’t liberate a human being from its lonely state. Not at all. A mass is a group that is formed, not because individuals connect to each other, but because each individual separately is connected to a collective ideal. The longer a mass formation exists, the more solidarity they feel for the collective and the less solidarity and love they feel for other individuals.
That’s exactly why in the end stage of mass formation and totalitarianism, every individual reports every other individual to the collective, or to the state, if they think that other individual is not loyal enough to the state. And in the end, the unthinkable happens, with mothers reporting their children to the state and children their parents.
The lonely masses distinguish themselves in several respects from the physical masses of earlier times: they can be much better controlled, they are less unpredictable than physical masses, and they last longer, in particular if they are constantly fed by propaganda through mass media. The creation of long-lasting lonely masses through propaganda was the psychological basis for the emergence of the large totalitarian systems of the 20th century. Only if a mass formation exists for decades can it be made the basis of a state system.
The emergence of lonely masses led to Stalinism and Nazism in the beginning of the 20th century and now it might lead to technocratic totalitarianism. I described the psychological processes involved in the emergence of lonely masses on many occasions, and I won’t repeat it here.
I am not so much accusing individual politicians here; I am addressing political culture in general. And even more, I am talking about a perversion that is inherent to the entire tradition of Enlightenment. Our society is in the grip of a specific type of lying, a kind of lying that is historically speaking relatively new, that emerged for the first time after the French Revolution, when the religious view on man and the world was replaced by our current, rationalist-materialist worldview. What am I talking about when I refer to this ‘new kind of lie?’ I am talking about the phenomenon of ‘propaganda.’
Propaganda is everywhere around us. Public space is saturated with it. Recent years have illustrated that abundantly, during the coronacrisis, during the Ukraine crisis, and now, even more clearly, during the coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict on both mainstream and social media.
The leaders cannot overtly impose their will anymore to the population. Nobody would accept that within a materialist-rationalist society. Hence, the only way to make the population do what the leaders want, is to make them do what the leaders want without them knowing that they do what the leaders want. In others words: the only way to control the population is through manipulation.
The people in favor of propaganda will argue that we can never tackle the challenges of climate change and viral outbreaks through democratic means. They will ask: ‘Do you think people will voluntarily give up their cars and flying holidays? To escape disaster, we need technocracy, a society led by technical experts, and to install technocracy, we need to mislead the population, we need to manipulate them into technocracy.’
To give up sincerity in order to create a good society is to try to build a good society by giving up immediately, from the beginning, the essence of a good society (!). Truthful speech is not a means towards an end, it is the end in itself; sincere speech is what makes us human and humane.
This is crucial to understand: propaganda is not a historical coincidence, it is a structural consequence of rationalism. If you consider the psychological structure of our current society, it’s fair to say that propaganda is the major guiding principle. In a remarkable way, the pursuit of rationality during the tradition of Enlightenment didn’t lead to more Truthful speech, as the founding fathers of this tradition believed. Science would replace questionable religious and other myths; society would finally be organized according to reliable information instead of subjective conjectures. Now, a few centuries later, this turned out to be an illusion. There has never been as much unreliable information as now in public space.
This materialist-rationalist view on man and the world—why do we actually cling to it? It loves to present itself as the scientific view on man and the world. Let me tell you that this is nonsense. All seminal scientists concluded exactly the opposite: in the end, the essence of life always escapes rationality, it transcends the categories of rational thinking. To name only one major scientist: in the preface of a book of Max Planck, Einstein claimed that it is a mistake to believe that science originates from supreme logical-rational thinking; it originates from what he called a capacity for ‘einfühlung’ in the object one investigates, which means as much as ‘a capacity to empathically resonate with the object you are investigating.’
Rationality is a good thing and we need to walk the path of rationality as far as possible, but it is not the end goal. Rational knowledge is not a goal in itself; it is a stairway to a kind of knowledge that transcends rationality, a resonating knowledge, the kind of supreme intuition the martial arts of the Samurai culture aimed for throughout their technical training. It is at that level that we can situate the phenomenon of Truth.
This brings us closer to an answer to the question: what is the remedy to the disease of totalitarianism? Can we do something about totalitarianism? My answer is simple and straight: yes. The powerless do have power.
Propaganda-induced mass formation is a fake, symptomatic solution for loneliness. And the real solution lies in the Art of Sincere Speech. My next book, which I am writing now, is all about the psychology of Truth. Truth, by definition, from a psychological point of view, is resonating speech, it is speech which connects people, from core to core, from soul to soul, speech that penetrates through the veil of appearances, through the ideal images we hide behind, the imaginary shells we seek refuge in, and reconnects the shivering and disconnected soul of one human being to that of another human being.
Here we observe something crucial: sincere speech is the real cure for loneliness—it reconnects people. As such, it takes away the root cause of the major symptom of our rationalist culture—mass formation and totalitarianism. And at the same time, sincere speech also inhibits this symptom in a more straightforward way. It is well known that, if there are some people who continue to speak in a sincere way when mass formation is emerging, the masses do not go to the ultimate stage where they start to think it is their duty to destroy each and everyone who doesn’t follow the totalitarian ideology.
At every moment we chose to speak out in a sincere way, no matter where this happens, in a newspaper or a television interview, but equally well in the presence of only one other person at the kitchen table or in the supermarket, we help to cure society from the disease of totalitarianism.
You have to take this literally. Society, as a psychological system, is a complex dynamical system. And complex dynamical systems have the fascinating characteristic of so-called sensitivity to initial conditions. To put it simple: the smallest changes in one minor detail of the system affect the entire system. For instance, the smallest change in the vibration pattern of one water molecule in a boiling pot of water changes the entire convection pattern of the boiling water.
Nobody is powerless. And hence, every single one of us is responsible. Each and everyone who speaks a sincere word and succeeds in truly connecting as a human being to another human being, in particular a human being with a different opinion, deserves to be mentioned in the books of history, much more than a president or a minister who engages in propaganda and fails to show the courage to speak sincerely.
The more I study the effects of speech on the human being and on humans living together, the more hopeful I become and the more I see that we will overcome totalitarianism.
We shouldn’t be naïve when we talk about the Truth. Endless are the atrocities in history committed by people who believed they possessed the Truth. Truth is an elusive phenomenon; we can enjoy its presence from time to time, but we can never claim it or possess it.
Sincere speech is an art. An art we have to learn step by step. An art we can progressively master. That’s exactly why I started workshops on the Art of Speech—workshops in which we practice that art in the same perseverant, disciplined way as any other art is practiced.
Truth-telling can make you lose something. That is for sure. But it also gives you something. To be more psychologically precise: Truth speech makes you lose something at the level of the Ego and win something at the level of the soul. I am quite fascinated by the way in which sincere speech leads to psychological strength.
I think Mahatma Gandhi provides us with a splendid historical example. A few years ago, I started to read his autobiography. I did so at the moment I started to realize that the only efficient resistance against totalitarianism is non-violent resistance. Of course this only applies to internal resistance, resistance from within the totalitarian system. External enemies can destroy totalitarian systems from without. That’s for sure.
But internal resistance, as I mentioned, can only be successful if it is non-violent in nature. All violent resistance will rather speed up the process of totalitarization, just because it is always used by the totalitarian leaders to create support in the masses to destroy each and everyone who goes against the system. Once I realized that, I became interested in what Gandhi had to say in his autobiography.
And here is something important: in the beginning of his biography, Gandhi mentions something magnificent. He says: I actually had no major talents. I was not handsome as a man, I didn’t have much physical strength, I was not intelligent at school, I was not a good writer, and I was not talented as a speaker. But he had this passion for sincerity and Truth. And this man, devoid of any major talents, but with a passion for sincere speech, this man did something even the strongest army in the world couldn’t do: he kicked out the English of India.
The better you start to see the almost endless horizon of possibilities offered by speech, the more you realize: it is words that rule the world. The human being can use words in a manipulative way, as pure rhetoric, indoctrination, propaganda, or brain-washing trying to convince the Other of something it doesn’t believe in itself. Or it can use words in a sincere way, trying to convey something to a fellow human being it feels inside itself. That is the most fundamental and existential choice human beings face: to use words in one or the other way.
Dear politicians of Romania and abroad, this is what I want to tell you today: it’s time for a metaphysical revolution. And you are ought to play a major role in it. The series of crises our society goes through are nothing else than a metaphysical revolution, which, essentially, boils down to this: the switch from a society that functions according to the propaganda principle to a society that is oriented towards Truth.
Transcript of Speech
Dr. Mattias Desmet (00:12):Some of you might know me. I wrote this book titled The Psychology of Totalitarianism, a book in which I warned about two years ago that we have seen the collapse of fascist and Nazi totalitarianism in the 20th century, but that we might be at risk of ending up in a new kind of totalitarianism now, which is technocratic in nature, technocratic totalitarianism. I’m sure I’m telling nothing new to the people here, but for some other people this was quite shocking. Meanwhile, they banned my book at the Ghent University where I work as a professor from using it in my classes. So it’s a little bit strange to ban a book on… In which there is one for totalitarianism at the university, but they did so.
Well, I will tell you in a nutshell what my final analysis was on totalitarianism. I concluded in my book that totalitarianism ultimately is rooted in our materialist rationalist view on man and the world, which emerged or became dominant in our society about two centuries ago, and which put in motion at least two processes, one at the level of the elite and one at the level of the population. The new elite that emerged starting from the French Revolution onwards, I think made excessive use of propaganda to keep control over society. And throughout the last 200 years, propaganda became ever and always more important for the elite to steer society, to keep control of the population. And you can explain that which I won’t do now.
But in a psychological way, this is a straightforward consequence of a rationalist view on man in the world, I think the fact that the elite used more and more propaganda. And at the same time at least as important, was that there was a very strange evolution at the level of the population, the psychology of the population. Throughout the last few hundreds of years, more and more people started to feel lonely. They started to feel disconnected, disconnected from their fellow human beings and disconnected from their social environment. And the combination of the two, the emergence of an elite which used more and more propaganda and the emergence of a lonely population reinforced each other in a strange way. The lonely state, if a population is in a lonely state, then she is extremely vulnerable for propaganda.
So we had on the one hand, an elite who used more and more propaganda, who relied more and more on propaganda to keep control in the population, which became more and more vulnerable to it. And it was this combination of this elite and this population that led to what Hannah Arendt called the diabolic pact between the masses and the elite, the diabolic pact that ended up in the emergence of a completely new kind of state in the 20th century, the totalitarian state. That’s in a nutshell my analysis of the problem we find ourselves in now. And at the moment, I’m writing a new book in which I do not so much focus on the problem, but in which I try to focus on the solution.
Can we do something about it? Can we do something about this emergent totalitarianism? I think we can. I really believe we can. And the longer I think about it, the more convinced I am that we can and that we shall find a solution. I think to put it in a nutshell, very concisely, totalitarianism in the first place is a psychological problem. It’s a psychological problem and the solution at a psychological level for totalitarianism is the rediscovery and the reappreciation in our culture, which is sick of propaganda, this new kind of lie that emerged about two centuries ago. Before the French Revolution, there was no such thing as propaganda as we know it now. Well, the solution for the disease of this society in a certain way, it’s very logical, is the rediscovery and the reappreciation of what I call truth-telling, true-speech, sincere-speech. My new book is about the psychology of truth, psychology of sincere-speech, and you can clearly see that truth-speech in the first place is resonating speech.
It’s a kind of speech that connects people from soul to soul, from core to core. I will describe this in a very technical and concrete manner in my new book. So in this way you can see two things. If you consider mass formation and totalitarianism to be the ultimate symptom of our enlightenment tradition, the ideology of reason, of our rationalist view on men in the world, then you can see that truth-speech or sincere-speech both inhibits the symptom and takes away the root cause of the symptom. And there’s a respect that it’s well known since the 19th century that if a mass formation, the crowd formation emerges in a society. And there are people, there are some people who continue to speak in a sincere way and they will usually not succeed in waking up the masses, but they will make sure that the masses don’t go to this ultimate stage where they start to be convinced that they have to destroy and eliminate each and every one who doesn’t go along with them.
That’s the first thing. Sincere-speech, you can understand that logically and you can prove it empirically inhibits the symptom, it inhibits mass formation. And at the same time, true-speech as a kind of resonating speech, as a kind of connecting speech takes away is the real solution for the root cause of the problem, namely the loneliness. True-speech, sincere-speech is what really connects people to each other. Mass formation in the first place seems to take away the loneliness. Lonely people become sensitive and vulnerable for mass formation because as soon as they start to belong to a mass, they feel not lonely anymore. But that’s an illusion.
A mass is a group that is formed not because individuals connect to each other, but because they all connect to a collective ideal. And the longer the mass formation exists, the more solidarity is sucked away from the relationship between individuals and injected in the relationship between the individual and the collective, meaning that in the end people feel much, much more love and solidarity for the collective than for other individuals. And in the final stage, this leads to this jarring situation in which parents start to report their children to the state. And the other way around, children start to report their parents to the state just because even the solidarity with their parents becomes less strong than the solidarity with the collective. So you can understand that perfectly if you understand the psychological mechanism of mass formation.
I think that the better you understand the psychological mechanisms involved, the better you see that truth-speech or sincere-speech indeed is the solution and that we are all responsible for contributing to the solution to the problem of totalitarianism. Society as a psychological system is always a complex dynamical system, literally. And complex dynamical systems in nature always have this fascinating characteristic of sensitivity to initial conditions, meaning that at a small change in a minor detail of the system has an impact on the entire system. For instance, a small change in the vibration pattern of one water molecule changes the entire convection pattern in a boiling pot of water. And in the same way, a minor sincere word spoken will have an impact on the entire society.
So we all have the responsibility to speak out and no matter where. We can do it in a television program, in a newspaper, but also at the kitchen table and in the supermarket. Also there, we will have an impact on the entire system. We can all contribute to the solution. We shouldn’t feel powerless. We all have power and that makes us all responsible. We should all do our best no matter where we are to speak out in a sincere way and maybe to really try to learn the art of truth-speech. I don’t think we should think in a naive way about truth. Thinking in a naive way about truth has caused a lot of trouble in this world, I think. Truth is something elusive, something that we can be in the presence of for a moment, but that we can never possess. Truth-speech is an art, an art we can learn and we should try to learn it because I think it’s the only way out of totalitarianism. If you want to… One of the best examples, I think one of the most inspiring examples at that level is Mahatma Gandhi, I think.
A few years ago I started to be interested in nonviolent resistance because I know that resistance inside of a totalitarian system can only be successful if it is nonviolent. That’s something very typical for resistance against totalitarian systems. And that’s why I started to read the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. And the first thing I learned there was that Mahatma Gandhi considered sincere-speech to be the core and the essence of nonviolent resistance. And he mentioned something wonderful in the introduction of his book. He says, “I had no major talents at all. I was not handsome, I was not physically strong, I was not intelligent at school. I was not a good writer and I was not a good speaker, but I had this passion for truth-speech,” He said, for sincere-speech. And time and time again, day after day, he tried to become more honest and more sincere every evening, admitting for himself. If he lied that day or if he could have been spoken in a more sincere way, then he did.
And in this way, this man, without any great talent became the most powerful man of India. He did something that even the strongest army in the world couldn’t do at that moment. He kicked out the English of India and that’s what we can do as well. Even a small minority of us is sufficient if we are determined and dedicated to truth and to sincerity, to break the power of the most impressive propaganda system the world have ever seen. We can and will and must do it. I think there are very hopeful historical examples of minorities, of people who changed the world, who changed the world.
I’d like to give only one example, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher thought that 100 people had been sufficient to change medieval society in the society of the Renaissance. The same can happen now. We are at the verge of a big metaphysical revolution, I think to use a concept of Michel Houellebecq. A revolution, which in the end boils down to this. We have to change from a society which is based on the organizing principle of propaganda, to society which is based on the organizing principle of sincerity. And I think each and every one of us who is here can contribute to it. And I hope we will all do so. Thanks.
