Mattias Desmet Quotes Page 2

“When people experience mental intoxication, it doesn’t matter anymore whether the narrative is correct or wrong, even blatantly wrong. What matters is that it leads up to this mental intoxication. And that’s why they continue to go along with the narrative, even if they could know by thinking for one second, that it is wrong.

That is the central mechanism of mass formation. And that makes it so difficult to destroy it. Because for people, it doesn’t matter when the narrative is wrong. And what we try to do is we all try to show constantly that the narrative is wrong. But for people that’s not what it is all about. It’s all about the fact that they don’t want to go back to this painful state of free-floating anxiety.”

“Whenever I see a graph in the news, I always fall prey to the illusion that that graph represents the facts. I always have to break free from it and force myself to think: wait a minute, how is that graph constructed? How were the measurements taken? And then I usually see that those numbers create a fictional world, which imposes itself as the absolute truth.”

“Why did we as a society get in this state in which a large part of the population feels anxious, depressed, experiences a lack of sense, feels socially isolated? That is the real problem. And if we do not succeed in finding out where this problem comes from then the masses will always be susceptible to leaders who try to lure them into a mass formation.”

“Why do so many people still buy into the narrative?”

“A simple hypnotic procedure is sufficient to focus the attention of someone so much on one aspect of reality that a person will never feel that someone cuts into his flesh. It’s a procedure that is used in some hospitals when the patient is allergic to a chemical anaesthesia. Sometimes a simple hypnotic procedure is used which focuses the attention on a positive thing, and then the surgeon can cut straight through the breast bone. The patient will not feel it.”

“A totalitarian state is radically different from a classical dictatorship. And that’s very important. And the difference is this psychological process. Classical dictatorship is not based on mass formation, not at all. Classical dictatorship is based on a very primitive process of fear that a human being has for someone who is stronger, who is in power.”

“All this free floating anxiety is attached to, connected to, the object of anxiety indicated in the narrative. And there is a huge willingness to participate in the strategy to deal with this object of anxiety because in this way, people feel that they can control their anxiety and their psychological discontent better.

So all this anxiety connects to the subject of anxiety, and there is a huge willingness to participate in the strategy and that leads up to something very specific. People suddenly feel connected again in a heroic struggle with the object of anxiety.

So a new kind of solidarity, a new kind of social bond and a new kind of meaning emerges in society. And that’s the reason why people follow the narrative, why people buy into the narrative and why they are willing to participate in this strategy, even if it is utterly absurd.”

“Around the end of February 2020, I took the perspective of a statistician. I started to study some numbers and some figures and some mortality rates, the infection fatality rate, the case fatality rate, stuff like that. And I immediately got the impression that most statistical models overestimated the dangerousness of the virus.”

“Besides other things of course, something that also struck me at the beginning of the crisis was that political leaders never seem to have taken into account the collateral damage caused by the measures. In my opinion, if you take measures against the virus, the first thing that you would consider is whether the measures you take, for instance, the lockdowns, will not claim more victims than the virus could claim.”

“Classic dictatorships can exist for thousands of years, such as in Egypt with the Pharaohs, for instance. But totalitarian systems usually destroy themselves and usually quite quickly.”

“Exactly, this mechanistic ideal, this mechanistic thinking, this transhumanist thinking is the cause of the problems, because if we wonder why we ended up, before the Covid crisis, in this terrible mental state in which people felt socially disconnected, in which they experienced this lack of meaning in which there was all this free floating anxiety, all this frustration, then we can clearly see that all this free floating anxiety and this frustration that it started to increase once the world became industrialized and mechanized.

So this is very typical. While the mechanistic view on men in the world started to become predominant at the same pace, the free floating anxiety and also the social disconnectedness started to increase. And that’s why Hannah Arendt says that the phenomenon of mass formation became increasingly strong throughout the last century because more and more people ended up in an isolated state. More and more people dealt with this free floating anxiety.

So, I believe that the people, the large institutions who are in charge now and who actually tried to shape the future according to their own ideal image, well, I think that these people propose a solution exactly like the kind of discours, the things that caused the problem.

Einstein said something very nice about that. You can never solve a problem by the same kind of thinking that caused it. That’s exactly what people try to do now, I think.”

“For certain people, their fatal flaw is not that they hate the world or hate society. It’s not the Batman villain Bane that just wants to watch the world burn. They actually are more like the Bond villains that are like, oh, well, or Thanos, for example, yes. Except for an ordered universe, we need to kill half. We need to blink half of the people out of existence, and then the universe will be fine, and then I’ll retire.

The motivation was pure in a way, it’s just a delusion. The delusion in the hubris to say, I can be God, and I accept the knowledge and I can decide. So it’s very interesting because the actions themselves are evil, but the intentions are often not evil. So when we project these, like demonic reptilian things upon them, it’s not that, they’re just overconfident and they just think they’re doing something good, but they’re actually not.”

“For one reason or another, the process of mass formation become stronger throughout the 19th century.”

“Gustave Le Bon, who is one of the major scholars on the phenomenon of mass formation, warned us in 1895 already that if the process would continue to become stronger – the process of mass formation – we would soon end up in a state in which the masters of the crowd would take over control in society. And that we would, according to Gustave Le Bon, experience the emergence of a new kind of state, a new kind of political apparatus.

And that's exactly what happened in the beginning of the 20th century in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany. We saw this immense, large scale process of mass formation there. The objects of anxiety were the aristocracy in the Soviet Union and the Jews in Nazi Germany. We saw how the masses emerged and how the masses were grasped in this specific narrative. And then how suddenly a totalitarian regime took advantage of this mass formation and started one of the most cruel episodes in modern history.”

“Hannah Arendt says the monster of totalitarianism and mass formation always is a monster that devours its own children. There’s something very strange. In the end, it starts to kill among its own members.”

“I think this kind of totalitarianism we are in now, like Hannah Arendt warned already in 1953, she said, we’ve seen the decline and fall of Nazism, and we've seen the decline of the Soviet Union, of Stalinism. But she wonders that that does not mean that a trend towards authoritarianism will stop. Very soon, she said, a new totalitarian state will emerge and it will be a worldwide system. And it will be a system that is no longer led by mob leaders such as Stalin and Hitler, but by dull technocrats and bureaucrats.

And I think that’s what we are about to see now and just like the totalitarian systems of the first half of the 20th century, this system will destroy itself, and it probably will destroy itself much quicker than the systems of the 20th century. It will be more intrinsically self-destructive because totalitarianism and mass formation are always self-destructive.

You can explain this very well from a psychological point of view, but it’s quite complicated, but they are always self-destructive. And once you realize that you know that the only thing you have to do is in one way or another, you have to try to survive outside of the system in a parallel structure and just wait until the system destroys itself.”

“In a country such as Belgium, each year, 300 million doses of antidepressants are used in a population of about 11 million. And then we are talking only about antidepressants. There are also antipsychotics and sleeping pills.”

“In a process of mass formation, the individual disappears and the collective becomes absolutely predominant and erases all individual characteristics. It doesn’t make a difference whether the people involved are very intelligent or not. It doesn’t make any difference.

The same thing always happens. Everybody becomes equally 'stupid' in a mass, and it doesn’t matter how smart or how intelligent they were before they lose all capacity for critical thinking. They lose all individual characteristics because they are really absorbed in this process of mass formation.”

“In mass formation, the attention is focused on the virus, for instance, in this case, and then people are not aware that they lose their psychological health or their physical health. Or they lose their wealth, their material well being, and so on. That’s one of the most problematic aspects of the phenomenon of mass formation.”

“In the beginning of the crisis, institutions such as the United Nations warned us immediately that there could be more people dying from hunger, from starvation in developing countries, then there could possibly die from the virus if no measures were taken at all.

So it shows immediately that the remedy could be far worse than the disease in this case and also that in one way or another, nobody seemed really able to take into account both the victims that could be claimed by the virus on the one hand, and the collateral damage caused by the Coronavirus measures. Never during this crisis we saw one mathematical model that calculated both the number of victims that could die from the virus and the collateral damage of the measures never happened.”

“Mass formation arises around an object of anxiety, and that object always has to be destroyed. So if the population is too small, the mass formation will take less long than in a large population. That was exactly the reason – according to Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German philosopher – why totalitarianism was only successful or emerged only in countries with a very large population, such as the Soviet Union.”

“Mass formation in one way or another will make that after a while, people feel even more socially isolated. That was exactly what happened in Nazi Germany and then in the Soviet Union as well. After a while, people didn’t dare to come together anymore with more than two or three people because they were always scared of being accused that they were conspiring against the state. So in that way, they became even more socially isolated than they were in the beginning, and that in itself made them more susceptible, more vulnerable to mass formation.

So the phenomenon of mass formation, indeed, in one way or another makes that society ends up in a vicious spiral. It always goes down, and it always goes down faster, and in the end, it always leads to its own destruction.”

“Mass formation is a kind of hypnosis. And just like in hypnosis, the attention is focused on this very small part of reality that is indicated by the story. And just like in hypnosis, people are not aware of everything that happens mentally outside of this small focus of attention. That’s something very striking.”

“Mass formation is a kind of hypnosis. But there are differences with classic hypnosis. For instance, in the process of mass formation, the hypnotist is hypnotized himself. That’s the most important difference. Like in a classical hypnosis, the hypnotist is awake. His field of attention is not narrower than normal, but the person who is hypnotized suffers from a narrow field of attention. But the hypnotist doesn’t.

And in the process of mass formation, usually the opposite is true. The field of attention of the person who hypnotizes is usually even narrower than the masses themselves. So that’s why the experts in this situation, make mistakes that ordinary people wouldn’t make, and that was very clear to me from the beginning.

If you look at the statistics and the numbers that are presented through the mass media, they are often so blatantly wrong that even a child can see it. And still it is as if many of the experts do not realize it. And that’s because in one way or another, they very often are hypnotized, or their field of attention is even narrower.

So we could talk for days about the leaders of the masses. It’s very complicated because in one way or another, they are hypnotized. In another way, they often manipulate and cheat and lie to the people, and that’s because they do really believe in their ideology and the ideals they are striving for. That’s something they are usually hypnotized by. But usually they do not believe in the narrative that they are presenting to the people. They feel that it is justified to lie to the people and to manipulate them. So you have to make a distinction there.

They are hypnotized in this sense that they really believe in a megalomaniac way, that their ideology will create a kind of a paradise for humanity. But that doesn’t mean that they believe everything they are telling, because usually they know that they are manipulating the population. So it’s double, I think.”

“Mass formation is a specific kind of group formation, and it emerges in a society when very specific conditions are met. And the most central of these conditions, the most important of these conditions, is that there should be a lot of people who experience a lack of social bond. A lot of people who feel socially isolated, and then the second condition immediately.”

“Maybe some of the measures have a certain practical effect. That’s possible. But in the psychological function, I think that we should not expect that because the measures are absurd, in certain respect, people will stop to follow them. Not at all. The more absurd they are, the more the 30% of people who are under hypnosis will be willing to cling to them and to follow them.”

“On the other side, there is a very similar process in which people are confronted with a lot of anxiety because they feel threatened by the process of the mass formation. They also deal with a lot of free floating anxiety, and they connect to a different object, to the elite, to the Illuminati or a small elite that would threaten them.

They dehumanize this small group of people, so they have a different enemy. While the masses have as an enemy the people who refuse to conform with the masses, the other side also creates an enemy, an object of anxiety. And in a similar way, they want to destroy this enemy. They believe that if we destroy the elite, the problem will be solved, which, of course, is not true.”

“People do not commit suicide under very severe conditions. For instance, in the concentration camps and the Gulag people did not commit suicide. And it was because there was a clear external danger they were focused on and which made their psychological system very coherent, very coherently focused on one point.”

“People often say that we are dealing with psychopaths but I think we are dealing with megalomaniac plans, with people who believe that they will solve all the problems in the world by imposing a new social system, which is transhumanist in nature. People who believe that problems can only be solved through technological control.

I truly believe that this is what drives these people. This is their view on man and the world. And this is their idea on how the problems of humanity can be solved, which is delusional thinking, that’s not true at all.”

“Professor Graeber in Great Britain wrote a book titled Bullsh*t Jobs, and he describes how research shows that when you ask people whether they think their job is meaningful, 50% of the people answered 'not at all'. 50% feels that their job is not meaningful at all. That it doesn’t mean anything to anyone.”