Your Daughter And This Subject
Your daughter was a smart girl. It makes me think that young kids sometimes have a better grasp on life and living than we adults do!
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The article is well worth reading.
His name rang a bell. After searching in my “to read list”, I remembered why this was the case. Peter wrote a book “ COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey”. Btw, psychopaths are also described as “interspecies predators””, that is, we are the prey.
His main thesis of the book is that a nefarious cabal planned all this well in advance. In the article that you linked, he claims that fear of predators is sufficient to explain that most of us, the prey, “ a flock of goldfinches huddled silently together in the bushes hiding from the hawk circling above”. Mattias Desmet’s “Mass Formation” doesn’t require this however type of central “central planning”.
Apart from the fact that Peter has a point imo wrt Freud’s psychoanalysis, I struggled with three other aspects of his criticism.
Firstly, Peter approaches our predicament from a personal perspective —a perfectly understandable position for a psychiatrist— while Mattias approaches it from the group psychology point of view. Peter doesn’t seem to acknowledge that that is a “thing”.
Secondly, Peter identifies the “Mass” with the oppressed, not the oppressor: “ The victims of COVID-19 totalitarianism were not and are not energized and potentially violent, which is the model for the madness of crowds.”
It seems that Peter does not acknowledge that the “pro jab” crowd is actually perpetuating the current madness. He regards everyone as victims. Imo he is not wrong about this, but even victims can become perpetrators.
The third aspect I found shocking: Peter flatout misinterprets Mattias:
“Desmet believes all the scholars, journalists, scientists, and other people who are, in fact, unearthing and documenting conspiracies behind COVID-19 are suffering from a variant of mass formation or mass hypnosis. They are emotionally disturbed — intensely “anxious,” “confused,” and “bewildered.” “
This is clearly nonsense for everyone who read the book and/or listened to interviews. This is not what Mattias claims, actually, it’s the complete opposite.
I do not want to speculate as to where this rather voilent attack comes from. It saddens me however.
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Desmet’s Initial Theory Was Agile But Also Far More Complete Than It Is Today. What Happened?
Am I the only one who feels Mattias has allowed his initial concept to run away with his rapidly growing popularity? It was a fun thought experiment last summer in the heat of the craze. He used to be able to take his theory and apply it to the witch trials or the town that danced as if they were possessed but he rarely mentions either and his whole view now contradicts their existence. He’s become consumed with totalitarian governments and has this obsession claiming their’s an over abundance of rational thought and materialistic behavior and pairs that with an absence of spirituality that’s been replaced by worshiping the previous two.
I’ve been following him for a very long time now and he just seems like he wants to pander to a spiritual view. In part two he even polishes religion to present something that sounds almost incorruptible. That’s fine if that’s his thing but he claims to have an all encompassing view on what’s happening with our society yet over time he’s actually able to explain less. The only thing he’s increased his the confidence he uses to deliver his narrative.
He also fails to acknowledge bad actors in a meaningful way and interchangeably addressing both the scientists running things with the citizen simply trying to survive. It seems unfair to ignore big pharma’s unlimited budget that pays for the very studies he noticed can’t be reproduced. Most of the scientists are only able to be scientists by embracing the previously mentioned studies or going through whatever’s required to receive a grant. How about the government psychological warfare (aka nudge) units who team up with the mainstream media and then reek terror and fear upon the population, many of whom have grown up trusting in the mainstream media for their entire lives…
I seem to recall 20 years ago the very early “nudge” units were able to use the broadcast television series “24” and convince people to openly support torture. Did they have too little spirituality, too much materialism? Or perhaps they were force-fed a steady stream of fear and were convinced adopting torture was the only way to survive? I’m not claiming to understand but I am aware there’s much more going on than what Mattias is willing/able to discuss.
I appreciate how Chris is able to rotate what he’s read to interpret in in a way he finds useful. I just wouldn’t discount the very real and tangible manipulation being applied to society. I encourage everyone create a new browser profile and pretend you’re busy working and caring for a family then attempt to find answers. You’ll quickly realize how negative big tech’s role in the coverup is. That’s just one more layer of mess the average person must navigate through even though they’re completely unprepared.
Zac
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How would you explain what happened during the witch trials? I would assume they had an over abundance of spirituality then and yet they ended up with nearly the same totalitarian scenario.
I’m of the view it has more to do with the bad faith actors pulling the strings than it does with the makeup of the people being abused. Perhaps at some points in time or in some environments you might be able to escape or wake up quicker depending on how your, and your societies makeup reacts with the surroundings but overall it’s the fact that we’re all human, regardless of our particular beliefs, which leaves us vulnerable to manipulation.
If I’m correct, that’s a good thing because it would show an importance of uniting in any way you can rather than everyone having certain beliefs. The main requirement would be empathy, care and an understanding that together us humans, as messy as we can be at times, are stronger when we work together than when we’re fending for ourselves.
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Hi Zac,
I understand where you are coming from, and I think it helps to remember that English is not Matthias’ first language. My interpretation is that he meant there are certain influential segments of society (elites, some scientists etc) who see nature as mechanistic, and that man can effectively control the machines of nature. That ideology has been purposely transmitted to much of the general population- especially the University educated - via education and culture and TV and the media etc. Religion and spirituality has been denigrated in these arenas, and replaced with rationality and Science TM. So people have been manipulated into seeing the world in the same way as these elites see the world, or at least how they want us to see the world. Because only with such a world view can a Technocracy come into being.
Science has revealed to us in more recent years, however, that the world only behaves in a mechanistic and logical way on one level. If you go deeper into the subatomic particles, they do not follow Newtonian laws of physics. It is the same with medicine - medicine may be able to concentrate the active ingredient it takes from a plant, but often there is a synergistic action of other molecules in the plant that make it more effective. And then there is psychoneuroendoimmunology and energy medicine which take things to a whole other level. But the elites have not updated their ideology to incorporate the importance of being holistic, of looking and complex systems and realising we cannot wield the level of control over them that it once thought possible. It seems one requires a certain empathic intuition to be able to grasp these things, that such psychopaths and ideologues do not possess.
I do not think Matthias is promoting religion per say - not organised religion. Rather I think he means humans are innately spiritual and we see things as narrative with symbols and metaphors, and we need rituals to help us regulate our emotions or to help us feel connected to something bigger. That need did not go away after people started becoming atheists because they thought belief in God irrational. Some are able to find spirituality in other ways, but some have a hole in side of them that makes them easily possessed by ideologies they are manipulated into accepting.
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I was already thinking this was some kind of mass hysteria before Matthias went public, largely from listening to lots of old Jordan Peterson lectures. When he used to point out that most people you know and probably even you would have been a Nazi back in the day. Well it seems we here wouldn’t have been, but we all know plenty who would have.
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What a coincidence, I just listened to the conversation between Bret Weinstein and Mattias Desmet (link).
Bret made a striking comment. He mentioned, in my words, an hierarchy between:
- personal
- group
- evolution
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You’re saying that during the witch trials there was “an over abundance of spritiuality.” when it’s plain from the trials themselves, that there was an extreme lack of spiritual awareness at those times.
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ehh, you mean turdeau?
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“The truth is perceived and not reasoned”. “There are things known and there are things unknown and in between there are doors.” The Doors of Perception. We’ve been howling at the same moon for a long time treebeard. Enlightenment only comes when you find the courage to open those doors. It’s always been socially unacceptable to be right too soon.
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Imagine what the world would be like if most of us understood that “The truth is perceived and not reasoned”.
Well said.
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Fully agree with your clear exposé. As a Dutch person, I noticed that he sometimes uses Dutch (~Flemish) words. I also struggle often with finding the right words in English to convey certain subtle thoughts.
My understanding of Mattias’s thoughts:
- His observation is that we are witnessing mass psychosis in real time.
- He asserts that the direction we are forced into is that of an technocratic authoritarian regime.
- His explanation is that this is caused by the limitations of mechanistical thinking, and the reductionist scientific approach. In our current society, science has become a religion. Leading to an unspoken belief in the universality of the reductionist approach.
- Non-predictability and emergent behavior are inherent to complex dynamical systems [davedd: there is a common misunderstandaing that many interacting components are needed for chaos and emergent bahavior to arise. Actually, a system of three components is sufficient]. This emergent and chaotic behavior is fundamentally unpredicable.
- In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle can be proven to be a fundamental aspect for "conjugate variables". This has nothing to do with "interpretation" or lack of knowledge, it is embedded in the way we describe the laws of Nature, as Mattias suspects [daved: Bret Weinstein disagrees with this, but Bret is wrong. This was the first thing we had to prove during the first semester of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Electrodynamics. It simply follows from Fourier analysis].
"In quantum mechanics,Conjugate variables also called Fourier variables or complementary variables represent a pair of quantities which show a trade-off relationship. It means if one of the variable is known with absolute certainty then uncertainty in knowing the other variable becomes infinite."
- Great scientists nearly always arive at the conclusion that Reality is essentially unknowable. This is nicely captured by the remark of one scientist that "Science arrives at the conclusion where religion starts". In this case, religion should be interpreted as "spirituality", not our dogmatic religious institutions.
"I do not think Matthias is promoting religion per say – not organised religion. Rather I think he means humans are innately spiritual and we see things as narrative with symbols and metaphors, and we need rituals to help us regulate our emotions or to help us feel connected to something bigger. That need did not go away after people started becoming atheists because they thought belief in God irrational. Some are able to find spirituality in other ways, but some have a hole in side of them that makes them easily possessed by ideologies they are manipulated into accepting."
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i think you are making a common mistake, it seems you might be equating religion with spirituality. the 2 are diametrically opposed. there was an over abundance of superstitious religion. if we are talking about salem if there had been an overabundance (not even sure that is possible) we would still have the original inhabitants among us.
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Such Interesting Parallels
I was struck by the discussion about the notion that the human race is at a fork in the road, that we either go to a very dark place or down a path of incredible beauty. I’ve been reading Australian blogger Caitlin Johnstone who arrives at the same notion from a different direction.
Also, I always had it in the back of my mind to write a book called “You Can’t Control It” that would expound on nonlinear systems theory and why we will never be able to completely understand, let alone control, systems like the economy, society, or the weather. It’s so interesting to hear Mattius talk about exactly the same thing!
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i have been asking that question for decades. the left of the 60’s first and foremost distrusted government. now the so called left embraces government to the extreme. ie. support of war, support of the war on terror, support for big pharma, support for every alphabet agency out there. what desmet does not say explicitly is that there are 2 motivating factors in the world, love and fear. big fist uses fear.
big fist actually used the rope a dope on the population lulling it into a sense of having righted the ship. we ended the war in vietnam, we gor rid of nixon, we elected carter (an honest man) we weathered the gas crisis, and high inflation and perhaps most importantly we ended the draft and sanitized war. it was no longer on the evening news, it was in some far away place most amerikaans couldn’t locate on a map.
and of course all those hippie communes failed the hippies had kids and the drop outs had to drop back in. the mantra of the mother culture is powerful “get a job, get a job, get a job”
the generation of the 60’s made the fatal mistake of thinking it was a battle when in fact it is a neverending war. it is a war for individual sovereignty. corporate amerika co-opted the culture of the 60’s and the collective became more important.
the political pendulum was cynically manipulated to use fear of the other to keep the mass formed populace vacillating from on political “savior” to the other while the big fist system itself hummed right along.
the clintons were the classic manipulators of the charade. they spoke the language of the old left and then instituted some of the most neo liberal policies ever enacted. they sold the party of fdr out to corporate amerika.
the populace got caught up in the political burlesque of the cult of personality. on the right reagan ,bush and trump, and on the left the clintons, and obomba. the rhetoric is brilliant the actions catastrophic on many levels.
anecdote. i was recently on a thread where people were bashing trump. so i asked “what policies of trump don’t you like” the response “he had policies”?
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amen. anyone new here is invited to dive back into the old posts (mine and others , to see what many here were “barking” about 14 years ago. a dive into the controversial topics could prove illuminating. unfortunately many of the early "paul revere’s are gone.
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ever been to a ut football game? or go to jerry’s world? amerika is rife with ritual.
what i see at these events are mandalas. if one has ever watched tibetan monks create a sand mandala it is absolutely unforgettable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBrYUlOYK0U
when i look at mass events like sporting events i see the patterns of the lines drawn on the field/court. i see the participants coming together to perform and when it is over everyone leaves (the ceremony of impermanence. instead of sweeping up the sand of the mandala the janitors come in and collect the empty beer cups and empty popcorn boxes.
these are the unconscious rituals of amerikaan consumer culture.
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you might wish to read “the princes of ireland” it is a pretty amazing chronicle of what the english did to the irish.
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“religion is the opiate of the people” karl marx