The Totalitarians Won’t Stop Until One of Us is Destroyed
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One of the most dangerous myths in our society is that people want to be free. People absolutely don't want to be free. That's the problem. They don't want to be free. The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content.

Hello everyone, Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity. Really excited to sit down and have this conversation you're about to see. This is with Matthias Desmet. We had him on a couple of years ago. Before I fully introduce him, here's the context. We're at this Brownstone conference.

And in three days, it's going to be Tuesday elections in the United States. So who better to talk to about mass formation, about totalitarianism? Nobody. And I'm really excited to be able to do this in person. We stuck some time in here amongst a very packed schedule. So, Matias, thank you for being here. So good to meet you and be here in person. Thank you for having me on. Yes. So where do we start? You know,

I was really taken by that, your framework. Well, that's three years ago now, I guess. It must have been close to. And the idea that mass formation, roughly speaking, 30% fall for it, 40, 50% don't know which way to go, some percent don't fall for it. Would you change that framing at all? And what does this mean, fall for it? Fall for the mass formation. What does that mean? Yes, well, it actually means that you...

You buy into a narrative of which, for certain reasons, emotional reasons, of which you could see that it's absurd. That's what happens in a mass formation. Like people just buy into certain narratives, usually spread or disseminated through the mass media, which usually even a child could see that they are wrong.

and still lay by end to it and are completely blind for everything that could show them that the narrative is wrong. It shows, I think, that the human being is not a rational human being. And that's something I mentioned in my talk here. I think that's like a major mistake of the Enlightenment tradition, the ideology of reason, that we started to believe that

The human being is a rational being which it is not which it is not. Yeah Is that a surprise to you? Yes and no to be honest. I'm I'm a very rational person I always try to understand and until my until I was 35 years old I actually believed that life is rational and that you can I got everything in nature and

can be understood in a rational way. And strangely enough it was while I was taking a deep dive into the mathematical underpinnings of a complex dynamical systems theory when I suddenly understood that it is not rational. That was something very important for me. And then you can start to open your mind. Stop thinking. Look in a much more open-minded way without falling prey to this illusion that

Ultimately, you might be capable of forcing everything into the categories of your rational thinking. That's where life begins, I think. That's where life really begins. When you start to understand that rationality can never be the guiding principle in life. And in the best case scenario, you start to understand that the essence of life is ethical in nature.

Ethical, yes, ethical. It's ethical principles that can be a guiding principle for our society, for collective life. And then if people ignore that, and if people continue to believe that rational theories and rational understanding, rational knowledge should be the guiding principle in society, I think, strangely enough,

they soon lapse into complete irrationality and absurd beliefs. And that's what happens, for instance, in the Corona crisis. Then you could see that the human being is not a rational being. So, interesting detour, because I had the similar arc, but I didn't go into it as deeply as you did. I'm trying to, this is early on, it's like 2008, 2009, I've created this thing called the Crash Course, and I'm looking at systems level stuff.

and I'm trying to figure stuff out and it gelled for me. I read this book by Eric Beinhocker and it's called The Origin of Wealth. He talks about how at the Santa Fe Institute in 1984 they bring all these Nobels and PhDs, top of the top, top physics, chemistry, sociology, economists, all this. The economists sit down across from all the other hard scientists and they start explaining their science. These guys were horrified. They said, "You're using open form equations?

Walrus did that in 1794 in Poland and they didn't know about the second or third laws of thermodynamics and you are now… What they were trying to do was they wanted to find the equilibrium point for an economy which is a complex open system and they wanted it to be closed, so you had all these closed form equations and they hadn't bothered to update them because they don't work if they tried to update. So they were clinging to their 18th, maybe 17th century beliefs, right? Just hang it on.

creating PhDs and formulas and all this stuff. And I looked at the irrationality of it, and that's when I realized how screwed we were if we were going to be guided by these experts. Because they were trying to force reality into their equations because they couldn't do it the other way around. Because if that was the case, then they would have to open up to this idea that you can't model it, you can't predict it, you would then have to understand its guiding principles. It would be like raising a child, right? I want an opera singer. Well, you don't always get one, but you can...

So it was just fascinating and that's where I understood the first thing about complex systems have these emergent behaviors and that's irrational, it's uncertain and humans hate that. Exactly, yes, exactly. That's what makes humans different from animals. Our human existence constantly gravitates around something our rational mind cannot understand, cannot grasp. Animals don't have that and it has to do with their

communication system. The animal communication systems can be very complicated, but there is always a one-to-one relationship between a sign and what the sign refers to. That's why an animal doesn't have to go through an interpretation process when it receives a sign from another animal.

It doesn't. It instinctively knows what the sign means. In human language it's different. Human language refers to something only through one word refers to something only through another word. You need another word to determine, to define the meaning of the first word and then you need another word to define another word and another word and that's why you always lack one word literally.

And that's why the meaning-making system of a human being is always changing and always uncertain. That's why we constantly wonder, like, what will happen after we die? What do we have to do to be loved by someone? What do other people think of us? That's so typical for a human being, that its life is always circling around, gravitating around something he or she can never rationally understand. And that's why uncertainty is the most significant

crucial, central problem in human life and something that we constantly try to convince ourselves that we will overcome it. That's why this rationalist human man in the world, like which Harari, for instance, is the literary prophet of, I think. Harari

and the other transhumanists and all the mechanist thinkers, that's what they try to convince us of. That one time our rational knowledge will be perfect and we will be able to eliminate all uncertainty in life. We will be able to eliminate every glitch in the biochemical machines. We are, we will live forever, we won't get sick anymore.

all because rational knowledge will be perfect and we will live forever in a technological new paradise. That's what makes this rationalist worldview, this mechanist worldview, so attractive, I think, because it pretends that this perennial or this eternal uncertainty of the human being

will be overcome, that we can eliminate it. And there is, while so many mystical and religious traditions have shown us a different path, they have shown us like, yes, maybe your head, your brain, your rational thinking can never overcome or eliminate uncertainty, but there is a certain knowledge

Some would call it an intuitive knowledge. Some, like Samira culture, would call it the sixth sense of the warrior. Some would call it the knowledge, like Pascal would call it the knowledge of the heart. There is a certain knowledge that can give you certainty, but it's not the rational knowledge. And that's like, I believe that that's ultimately the essence of this revolution, which is a metaphysical revolution, I think.

We are going through at the moment, our society is about to find out that all these pseudo-rational experts in the end are completely irrational and that they will lead us straight into destruction. Because that's the human hubris of rationalism. Ultimately, it's an instrument, I believe, of a metaphysical destructive force. And that's what we see now. The more

We fall prey to this rationalism, the more we see that we are destroying life and that we are destroying the essence of the human being, the soul. The soul disappears. I wrote a Substack article, I think the title was "The de-souling of society", I think six months ago. Look around you, that's what you see. Young people, they almost behave like robots or machines.

making almost no social contact anymore. They merge with the technology they are using. They are like slowly becoming a cog in the technological machinery that absorbs first their attention, their mind, their soul, their body. They are ready for Harari's technological paradise, of which Hannah Arendt would say, Hannah Arendt had a wonderful quote, she said,

There is only one problem with this totalitarian paradise, and it is that it looks so suspiciously a lot like hell. Well, I got to confess, it sounds boring to me. You know, my daughter, youngest when she was seven, Grace, caught me short at one point. She's running on some rocks in Maine, and you know, Dad, like, hey, careful, you know. And she said, Dad, there's no danger. It's not an adventure.

The human soul needs to be tested, right? Particularly for men. When we talk masculine, I understand men because I'm one.

I'm so glad I grew up at a time where me and my friends, out of sight of our parents, egged each other on and we did some dangerous stuff. I have 10 fingers, which is a miracle, right? Still walking. But for me, I had to find my edge, right? And then as an adult, you still have to find your edge, right? It might be different. How do I communicate more effectively? How do I wrestle this thought out into words? How do I play this piece of music more perfectly, right? Whatever your edges happen to be. What you're describing sounds like a place where they want to take all the edges away. Mm-hmm.

So then how do you develop? It's a rested development to me. Exactly. So we're enshrined in some immature state of development. Definitely. I think how I interpret your words is in the following way. Human beings feel threatened by uncertainty, and that's why they try to overcome it with this rationalist illusion

of a perfect knowledge, rational knowledge, which would end all uncertainty. But when you look at it from a different perspective, this uncertainty, this edge or this limit to our rational knowledge, this fundamental uncertainty is the precondition for our existence as a human being. It is exactly because no one in the end knows the rational answer

to the big questions of life that we all have the right and the duty to articulate, to formulate our own answer to the big questions of life. And that's where life really begins, where we say, "Okay, I will have to try to get in touch, get a feel myself for what is sometimes called the eternal music of life. I'll have to resonate with the real spirit of life

and rediscover it myself, rediscover the eternal principles of humanity, the ethical principles, articulate them in my own way, and exactly this is my life, articulating in my own singular way the universal principles of life. And that's what you discover at the edge. Yes. Yeah, you know, I...

Not religious my whole life, but he's Protestant. That was Christmas and Easter in church. That was it. No, Sunday school.

Never had any use for it. And then I read this tweet that said, I turned to God not because he spoke to me, but because evil made itself known. And I found evil to be sort of this decent organizing principle, right? If you define it the way Naomi Wolf did, which is evil likes to wreck stuff. So that's his point. I don't know if it's personal, but it likes to wreck stuff. So I was looking around because I see these things as highly destructive. So

At the age I am, I can tell you that the amount of wildlife and insects and birds out there is a fraction of what it was when I was a kid. And we're killing it. And that's God's beauty or however you want to frame it, but we're doing something that ecologically you'd say, don't do that. Fish and the ocean disappearing, all that stuff. It's terrible. Yeah, and it's coming from a profound lack of sense of the beauty of it. And also it's right to exist just because, you know.

So I look at all of that and I really see that the dominant culture... I have a hard time, Matthias, it feels like a death cult because everything it does is in the service of wrecking life. The beauty of life coming into your full potential as a soul, insects. That's how I see it now, right? Yes, yes, I believe that people in a hypnotized way participate in rituals of death.

and they don't know that it are rituals. They denied that a human being is a symbolic being, that it needs rituals. And that's why without knowing it, they started to perform rituals which they do not recognize as such. And it's all rituals of death. You could see it in a corona crisis a little bit. All these, the way in which people followed these corona measures, in my opinion, was ritualistic behavior. They participated in it to

regulate and control their anxiety and other emotions without these behaviors having any realistic necessity or effect at all. But they wanted to participate in it. It's ritualistic behavior. It's actually suicidal behavior, I think, at the deepest level. Our society is a suicidal society in many respects. While people, in a strange way,

This entire materialist, and I use that word in a philosophical sense, not in the vulgar sense, but while people reduced themselves, while people started to believe that they are merely biochemical, material phenomena, they slowly started to get tired and started to long, to die, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that whole we're just a bag of chemicals thing is very nihilistic.

How do you engage? I once believed in it myself, very much. When I was 17 years old, I really had a feeling like, okay, I didn't like it, but I had really this feeling like, yes, but what would the universe be? What would it be if not a set of atoms and molecules? It is a set of atoms and molecules, and

very slowly like by reading some very accessible books on quantum mechanics, later on chaos theory, complex dynamical systems theory, starting to understand something like that. But that's not what science showed us. Science showed us exactly the opposite. The universe is not a big machine. That's exactly what it showed us. This metaphor of the machine

It's something completely wrong and it's even not rational as I said. It behaves like an irrational number, literally. Someone like Niels Bohr had this wonderful quote. If it comes to atoms, he said,

language can only be used as poetry. They are fundamentally irrational and only poetic language can allow you to really feel something about the reality of what we call matter, the material world. So at one time, once when I was 17 years old, I was like, well, of course, there is only matter and there is nothing else. Our soul, our spirit

must be an illusion that emerges somewhere in the biochemical machinery of our brain. And now I'm so happy, I'm so happy that I see how stupid that was. We all grow and mature. I think I held the same view. And then I ran across the thing that took me years, and I don't think I have it yet,

was every derivation of the double slit experiment. Where you have that wave particle duality, and the deciding factor seems to be if consciousness is observing it. So then you get back to, well, what's consciousness? It's consciousness, best I can figure, is some form of awareness. Maybe awareness of self. We could have turned it inward, but it's awareness. And with that awareness, things go from a probabilistic, I could be anywhere, to, oh yeah, I always went this way. You know?

Just thinking that through, what are the real implications of that? It tells me that I'm here to interact with things that were probabilistic until I brought my attention to them. In which case, something happens. I don't know what that's all about, but it feels important somehow. Exactly. And my consciousness, something at the level of my consciousness, has an impact on

reality around me, on the constitution of matter around me. Like this entire idea of the collapse of the wave function. It's so miraculous almost. Is this possible? Yes, it's our mind to a certain extent constructs the material world around us. And also like complex dynamical systems theory which

shows that with this wonderful characteristic, well it's quite technical, but with this wonderful characteristic of sensitivity to initial conditions, like shows us that at every moment a reality might reorganize itself and a situation which seems completely hopeless, suddenly

might be full of hope and that's for me that's so important in the times we live in like as soon as we start to understand that we start to understand that every human being for instance without going too deep into it but we all have power for instance everyone who speaks in an authentic and sincere way changes the world i believe

Every one of us, no matter where we speak, where we act in a sincere way. Maybe what we think. What we think, yes, of course. Every change in a minor detail of the system

has an impact on the entire system. That's like literally in a complex dynamical system, like take a pot of boiling water and if you change the vibrational state of one molecule, it will change the entire pattern of the boiling pot of water. Well, our society is a boiling pot of water. And if we change something at the level of the real, at the level of the essence of life,

We changed the entire boiling pot of water. That's why he didn't approach it from that angle, but Vaclav Havel, everyone pronounces his name differently, the dissident Czech...

intellectual, he said like the powerless do have power in a totalitarian system. They do have power. They have the power to live in truth. That's what he said. And that's how they have an impact on the system and that's what...

the system is so scared of, of these people who do not participate, use the words of Solzhenitsyn, in the lie. Yes, do not participate in the lie. I have a hypothesis that what we're witnessing, and COVID just sort of put it on steroids or maybe just made me more alert to it, but is a hypothesis, is that we're at the, potentially the tail end of a multi-thousand year system of control.

The humans came out of Dunbar number tribal nomadic sort of things, come into agriculture, spent thousands of years, but that a certain class cast of people have kind of figured out how to manifest power, if you will. And it's kind of ridiculously easy. They put the population into a fear state, and then these people can't actually access their agency and their power as effectively as they might if they were

fully actualized, right? Epicureans said that the path to wisdom was pleasure. And what they meant by that to me was that if food, shelter, safety, warmth are all taken care of. If what? Food, shelter, safety, warmth, the bottom of Basil's hierarchy of needs, you know, then your physiological needs, then it's sort of like your basic needs. And then, you know, they're saying once you can get all that taken care of, if you can exist up here on the fourth, fifth rung up,

Well, now you have access to real information. By the way, the Epicureans figured all kinds of stuff out that were astonishing to me, right? Atomics, up through about to, you know, they didn't go to string theory, but that may be false anyway. They got chemistry. They got evolution. Like, they got it all by sitting around and living in truth. But to do that, they had to bravely get rid of all the stuff they thought they knew. After that was to get to a state where humans are open,

Then we can receive or be open to insights was their path, right? I see everything like we could look out this window and we'll see these people walking around kind of half dead my culture has a way to distract demoralize deflect me from Engaging with life to having that power alcohol guarantee five minutes away max porn everywhere you know

turn on the TV, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. So I feel like that's an old system of control. And I think that's why we're experiencing so much urgency in the West to keep everybody in this mass formation state. Yes. Some have a limitless

striving to dominate and control, definitely. And if you look at the structure of our society now, you can see that it is not a democracy. That's what Aldous Huxley, in his book that few people know, Brave New World Revisited, a book he wrote much later than Brave New World,

says, like, he says, very soon we will live in a, I don't know if you know that quote, it's wonderful. I mentioned that somewhere in an article. It's wonderful. He said, like, very soon we will live in a society which at the surface looks perfectly like a democracy. There will be a parliament and every television broadcast, he said, will be about the importance of democracy. But below the surface, beneath the surface, he said, it will be a fully fledged totalitarian system

controlled by a few oligarchs and an army of mind manipulators. And if you read the quote, it's uncanny the way in which it describes the situation we were in ourselves and then of course we could see how it developed. It started with this, as soon as rationalism emerged, the money system,

Gold and silver were replaced by paper money. Then that system of paper money got completely perverted. Some people gathered a lot of money. They started to buy the congressmen. These congressmen voted laws that actually put the oligarchs above the law. And then the intelligence services emerged. The regime change operations started, and they actually basically were the kind of...

predatory democracy conquered the entire world and subjected the entire world. So of course these people exist and they at the moment they own the media to a large extent I believe and they more or less spread the narrative they want to, they shape public opinion and so on and so on. These people exist. But that's one thing that some people refuse to see. They refuse to see

that there are some people who pretty much control the entire public narrative and public opinion. But there is something else as well, I believe, that we should not forget. That's the one kind of tyranny we live in. But there is a different kind of tyranny as well, I think. There is also people, there is people who want to control, but there is also a huge mass of people who want to be controlled. And that's... Yeah, there it is. Yes, people...

One of the most dangerous myths in our society is that people want to be free. People...

absolutely don't want to be free. That's the problem, that they don't want to be free. Maybe it was even you who said it during your talk. I immediately recognized it. - Freedom comes with responsibility. - With responsibility. You have to take responsibility. You have to think for yourself. You have to try to find out

what it means to lead a good life and a bad life, and so on and so on and so on. Freedom comes with responsibility. Freedom is something that is time and energy consuming, and so on and so on. So, I mean, the situation we find ourselves in now in this state system, which is definitely, which has a structure of a totalitarian state, I think, can best be described, again, with the words of Hannah Arendt. She said,

totalitarianism is always, in contrast with a classical dictatorship, totalitarianism is always a diabolic pact between the elite and the masses. It's a diabolic pact. Without the masses who buy into the propaganda, there can be no totalitarianism. That's the point. And if we refuse to see that, if our analysis of the current problematic situation

only focuses on the elite, we will soon fall prey to the enticing idea that we have to destroy the elite and that the problem will be solved, which would be both an intellectual, an ethical and a strategical mistake. An enormous mistake. A fatal mistake. That's not the point. What we have to think about is what does this situation come from? And then

The root cause, I believe, is always this rationalist human in the world. It's this delusional idea that this reality here is a kind of mechanistic reality which we can manipulate in a rationalist way and which we can control. Yes, control it, we'll do what we want, but it won't, of course. There is a certain predictability, but not a fundamental one. And...

I want to go back to the point. I'm a huge fan. There's this one quote. If I was only allowed one quote to live by in life, it would be, "If you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome." That's from Warren Buffett's writing, Charlie Munger. "If you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome." The older I get, the more I realize

Humans, it's just incentives, right? So we have competing incentives, right? We've got our biological incentives, brain stem we want to reproduce. We've got the social stuff, which is very complicated. How far apart do we sit? What's on my face? What kind of tone should we use? What are we dressed? All these cues, very complex, right? And so for a lot of people, they're at that level, which is like they care about what people think about them. They need more resources. They did it, all that stuff. Now,

That stuff I can plug as a biologist into reproductive fitness and standard stuff. Okay, but you and I both know there's a bigger deal going on. Money, which we talked about briefly, you mentioned, it's the most brilliant system of self-slavery I've ever seen. We're our own slaves.

You're responsible for your health care. You've got to figure out how to keep your house warm. You have to buy all your own food and all that stuff, right? So our system of money is a very incentive-based system. And the reason I bring that up, because as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, I live, you live at the most abundant time ever in human history. Mm-hmm.

I know billionaires who are scared, anxious, because they don't have enough or it could go away. So we have a money system, its incentive model is fundamentally scarcity based, even though there's really no scarcity. You can't find scarcity on this planet right now, but we could manufacture it. It's an interesting thing. Keeps people in that fear state the whole time. Yes, but even without someone keeping people in a fear state,

If you think in a rationalist way, you inevitably end up in fear and anxiety because you try to control something through your rational thinking which cannot be controlled through rational thinking because you never can have certainty. You will always, people who think, people who try to take decisions

on the basis of rational thinking, they will typically end up in a very anxious state in which they, for instance, do not sleep anymore. The more rationalist personality types almost always struggle with insomnia. Almost always. Yes, yes. And the interesting thing is, like, okay, you know, many people believe that what's happening in the world right now can all be explained

on the basis of money and power. Follow the money and you will understand what's happening. Okay, to a certain extent that's true. If you see how Goldman Sachs in 2008 succeeded in making people pay, the taxpayers pay for the situation they created and the situation which made them rich or even much richer, then okay, there is a lot to do about the money. But at the same time, at the same time,

I believe that ultimately it's even not about the money and even not about... It's not about human beings who want more money. It's even not about human beings who want more power. There is something more fundamental. In the end, what happens can only be explained on the basis, I will use the word again, of a metaphysical power, a destructive power, which makes people believe...

that it will give them power, bring them money, but which in the end will make also these people slaves, which will also destroy them, which will destroy basically every human being and all humanity. So it's like Freud would call that power the death drive. In religious discourse, you would prefer the term evil or the devil or something, but it doesn't matter.

It's a power that is intrinsically destructive and that always tries to make you believe that it will bring you something, that it will bring you to paradise, and in the end, that's what Hannah Arendt said, very beautiful, it will bring you to hell. The only problem with... I believe that's the essence of...

of what's happening now. We see a clash. We see more than ever before in history, we see the pure manifestation of something that will destroy the essence of nature, of life, of humanity, of everything. Is it a human thing?

Yes, yes. It lives in humans? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. I believe that if you look at... I believe that technically speaking we are confronted with a newly emerging globalist, technocratic, and in the end also transhumanist totalitarian system. And this totalitarian system has the same structure as the totalitarian systems

in the beginning of the 20th century, Nazism and Communism and stuff. And they all have one thing in common. All these totalitarian systems try to take away

This small window, this small space of freedom in a human being. A totalitarian system, that's where the name comes from, total. It tries to impose its ideology completely total to the human being. It uniformizes society. Everyone has to wear the same clothes. We will have to...

or they will try to make us drive the same cars, live in the same small house, CO2 neutral houses, and that's exactly what communism did, what Nazism did. Everyone had to, it uniformizes everyone. It eliminates every individual.

A space where a human being can make its own subjective choice in relationship to a certain ethical awareness. A human being can never be entirely free. It always has to stay in touch with a certain ethical awareness, ethical values,

and it has to try to find out what these ethical principles impose to its life, and then it will have a certain freedom where it can create, to a certain extent, its own life and where it can become what it is. And that's what totalitarianism takes away. It eliminates that. Totalitarianism.

Leaders make the decisions for you in every aspect of your existence and at every level of your existence. In your private life, they will tell you what you can eat. They will tell you which clothes you can wear and so on. Can I add one more thing? That's why it is a system that destroys the essence of the human being, the very essence.

But it's not a superior economic system because history is complete on that. But what it is good at is putting a very small number of people in control. So they like to control all of that. But I think we're down to where I've arrived. So I'd like some help getting more fully there. Never read a Bible until I was 60. Now I've read it. I'm like, oh, we've done this before. There's wisdom in there. And the story is like this. It's full of it.

Humans got on the path, things were cool for a while, then they lost the path, and then wrath happened. And so you can, one quick example, like you can flip through it, it says,

I think it's a problem, but you should leave your fields fallow once every seven years. It's a way of regenerating the soil because that's the actual abundance. We don't need that anymore, Matthias. We're smarter than that. We have drones. We can surface map this. We can apply chemicals at a certain rate. We've converted vibrant soil to dirt and we're doing outdoor hydroponics. It's all going to be great, but someday the fertilizer won't be there and we'll find out that this stuff is not a growing medium and famine will start.

You know? So it feels to me like we've been here before as a species. We lose the plot. We try this wackadoodle stuff out. But the number one thing that the Bible's clear on is that if you're going to approach God, it's with free will. He doesn't come knocking on your door, right? You have to free will. So this whole thing sounds like they just want to destroy. It's not that they care about you living in this apartment eating what they tell you. They want to destroy your free will. Right?

They want you disconnected from that thing that makes you a human, like a full authentic human. That feels like the goal to me. It's not an economically viable model. It's crappy. Okay, but this goal, this intention, I believe that the people who try to control, who try to impose their will, at the same time, themselves are complete slaves.

They're extremely scared, anxious. The more predatory they behave, the more they steal everything from everyone, the more scared they become, of course, and the more they feel in need of control. So it's strange. It's a system where in the end everyone falls prey to this kind of destructive system.

deceptive force. But I agree, I agree that at least that as the end result that it is a state in which the human being, in which they try to take away human freedom, the space where a human being has a free will. Of course they never really can. In the end

We always are free, but we have to be prepared to lose a lot, sometimes to lose our lives. And then nobody can make us a slave. And I think that's exactly what we have to realize in this situation, that speaking sincerely, articulating what you believe is sincere and true,

Now, just like always before, will make you lose something. It will make you lose something. That's the essence of truth and of truth speech. The one who tries to speak the truth destroys illusions. He breaks through the wall of appearances.

That makes other people angry with him, of course, because most people live in this world of appearances. They find their stability in the illusion. So speaking the truth, inevitably, the ancient Greeks knew that very well and so many other people. You put yourself at risk when you speak the truth. You always lose something in the world of appearances. In my case, yeah.

When I started to speak out at university in the academic world, well, they more or less believed that I was a stupid moron who didn't understand that vaccinations are good and so on and so on and so on. But still I did. And I did. I lost something. But at the same time, speaking sincerely makes you lose something in the world of appearances, but it makes you win something in the real world.

And that was something that I experienced in a very profound and real way. I noticed how there was this soft, warm power in me that slowly got stronger. While time and time again I tried to do my best to articulate what I thought I had to articulate or what I thought was sincere in the situation we found ourselves in. And every time again,

I tried to stay calm and quiet. I tried to react to people who attacked me in a humane and human and in the quiet way. And I really noticed that to my own surprise. Like, oh, you become much calmer. And then there's a certain new kind of strength I started to feel.

Most of the time I absolutely didn't care about what I had lost in the world of appearances. Let me say it like that. So that's the beautiful thing. The more difficult they make us, the more they try to impose and manipulate us. If we refuse to participate in it, they only make us stronger. I've experienced the same arc.

It imbues my life also with a new sense of meaning and purpose. I'll be the first to tell you I don't know what it is I'm doing, but it's important. Yeah, one day I like that. I don't know what I'm doing, but I feel it's important. That's an honest statement. The same applies to me. From time to time I think, what am I actually doing? And why am I doing it? And then suddenly there's someone who tells me, thank you for what you do.

Because of what you said and wrote, I started to be able to love my family again. Stuff like that. And then I know, now I know, that's why I'm doing it. Oh, wonderful. Sorry I interrupted you. No, no, please, it's perfect. So, I get this a lot from people, which is they don't get along with their families anymore. Like real fractures have resulted.

And in many cases, I'll put words in their mouth. But me and my own family, I haven't changed. I've always had the same dedication to truth. But my mother and my sister really fell for what I'll call Trump derangement syndrome. And now I'm just a very bad guy. I haven't changed. So a lot of people report similar behavior, real fractures, because the people, let's call it the mind virus. I don't even know what it is.

But they are absolutely certain of their moral certainty about something that, from my perspective, they don't even know what they're talking about. Right? Because I don't really care about Trump, per se. I care about the truth. But somehow this has become anathema to their worldview now. And I've become a threat to it. So this feels like part of this whole mass formation, right? When people fall down this, I could imagine, I hate to say this, but I could imagine my own family turning me in if we ever get to that point.

Yes, that's exactly... That's so typical for mass formation, of course. Once people control their anxiety, regulate their frustration and aggression through a narrative, they become typically extremely intolerant for dissonant voices. Of course, because these dissonant voices

might wake them up, they feel it, might wake them up and they don't want to wake up because they would wake up and be confronted again with all this anxiety that they cannot control and so on. So history has shown us the dramatic end stage of these processes where indeed as you

I suspect exactly that happens, that mothers report their children to the state, children report their parents to the state. Once you understand the mechanism of mass formation, it's just logical. It's just like, that's what a mass formation does. A mass formation is not a normal group. In a normal group, people are connected because all the individuals love each other a little bit. They are, and that's,

Weaves like the fabric of a normal group in a mass formation, that doesn't happen in a mass formation. A mass formation is a group that is formed because all individuals separately connect to a collective ideal, a collective ideology, the virus narrative or the communist narrative or the racist narratives of Hitler. All individuals connect to this collective ideal, this collective ideology,

And the longer that lasts, the longer the mass formation lasts, the more all the energy, all the love between people is sucked away and it's

And it's all injected in the bond between each individual and the collective, meaning that in the end, the bond between the individual and the collective is much, much stronger than the bond between the individuals, even the strongest bonds between individuals. And that's why mothers decide to report their child to the state. I often refer to this conversation I had with a woman who lived in Iran during the revolution in Iran,

revolution where a mass formation happened and where this woman, Sheref Eshtali, witnessed how a mother who had reported her son to the state hung the noose around the neck of her son and when he died, when he was killed,

She was very proud to receive a medal for being a heroine. That's the dramatic end stage of a mass-formation. It can happen again, definitely. If the mass-formation lasts long enough, mothers will be convinced that their child is a danger to the state and to...

And then they will turn the child in. And then the children will report it to their parents because they do not live up to the climate narrative or something. Well, this is the only frame that helps me understand

the vaccine issue. Right. So I wasn't anti-vax before COVID, but now, because I didn't know, now I've studied them enough to go, well, you can't, they don't have appropriate studies to claim what they claim. So it's become like a religion, but I can't like, there are parents who will scream at you if you dare to question their vaccine orthodoxy. Right. Because they just have to all be good, but they would have certainly a dark night of the soul, right. To have to,

Square up to the fact that maybe they've injured their child. No or done something that could have injured their child No, because they bought into something where they had misplaced trust and had failed in their duty With their freedom and responsibility to really investigate something properly. No. Yes, you know the problem is once someone goes along with a mass formation once someone

really buys into a mass narrative, when someone really goes into the hypnotic mass formation state, that person actually committed already suicide. And it is also willing to kill everyone who doesn't go along. That's so typical for mass formations. It's just surrendering to the dead drive. That's what happens. That's what you see. Even when people are confronted with the extremely destructive

corona mandates and stuff. It seems as if they don't see it. They actually just tell you: I don't care what happens. If I die from being, from conforming, from following the measures, I just don't care. I prefer to die while I am asleep. I will not consider the possibility that the bus driver, my drivers,

might crash us. No. Please let me die while I'm asleep. That's the only thing I ask. That's what happens in a mass formation. Of course. We can see it time and time again. The strange willingness to self-sacrifice in a mass. Everyone suddenly becomes willing to self-sacrifice. Completely.

and not only sacrifice himself, also the future of the children, the health of the children, the lives of the children, their entire family. They want to sacrifice everything that used to be of individual interest or importance before. Do you think that it's possible that people have studied this and figured out how to do this and that the mass formation we're seeing is not organic at all?

that in fact it's being engineered by people who've got tools? Of course. Well, yes, of course. Both are possible. Sometimes it emerges in a spontaneous way, like in Nazi Germany in the beginning stage, it was a spontaneous phenomenon. That's what most really interesting and smart scholars concluded, like Hannah Arendt. She said in the beginning it was a spontaneous emerging mass phenomenon in Nazi Germany.

And then of course very soon propaganda. Some people saw the possibilities of this mass movement and they used propaganda to steer the masses, control them, manipulate them.

make the mass formation continue because if there is no propaganda and indoctrination, mass formation usually will stop very soon. It never lasts long. But like in the Soviet Union, from the beginning it was provoked in an artificial way. So from the beginning, through propaganda. So both are possible. It can happen in a spontaneous way. But if nobody...

takes advantage of it and uses it and uses propaganda to continue it and manipulate it, it will very soon stop the mass formation. But of course, well, propagandists started to... Most absolutely do not really understand how mass formation works.

but they don't need to understand it. They just, on the basis of their experiences with propaganda, they know what they can do with it. And then, well, yes, of course, definitely like in the 20th century,

In the 19th century, society started to be atomized. I don't know if you're familiar with that term. Hegel, the German philosopher Hegel, was the one who coined that term in the beginning of the 19th century because he noticed that for one reason or another, society was falling apart. People started to feel more lonely. And now we are confronted with a society where everyone is disconnected from everyone. Look at the train, on a train or something, people are all...

staring on their iPhones and the screens of their iPads and stuff, and they almost do not connect anymore with each other. So this loneliness increased, and that was the reason, of course, why propaganda became so successful.

and then a new kind of mass emerged that didn't exist before. The Crusades were mass formations, the witch hunts were mass formations, but the new masses are different. They are different, they are what Jacques Ellul called the lonely masses, where to form a mass or a crowd, people had to meet physically.

And then they could get in the grip of this narrative that someone was articulating and a mass phenomenon emerged. But now because of the mass media and technology people can perfectly sit isolated in their living rooms all, never meet each other and form a mass because they were infused with the same narratives and that's the kind of mass, the lonely mass, can be much better controlled

manipulate it and can last very long and in this way become the basis of a state system. If a mass formation lasts only two days or six months or even one year, you can never base a state system on it. But if you can make it last 10, 20 years, you can use the mass to seize control of society. And that's what happened starting in the beginning of the 20th century. So of course usually now

Most mass formations are provoked artificially now through a kind of propaganda. Public relations they sometimes call it. Yeah, marketing they call it at one point. But it's gotten so sophisticated. I'm a skeptical guy, so I know all about the Milgram experiments and the ash conformity experiments. And then it just occurred to me a couple days ago, I was like, I gotta talk to Matthias about this if I can, because we all like our fame and notoriety. What, people just decided to stop doing these experiments?

Those were in the 60s, right? Yeah. We all still know Milgram's name and Nash's name. Would they stop doing this? No. I don't think so. I think they just took them underground.

Yes, you know the Milgram and the Ash experiments. The Ash experiments were methodologically sound and good, interesting experiments. The Milgram experiment was garbage, I think. But anyway, it doesn't matter. But of course they are doing these experiments. I'm sure you know the MKUltra project, for instance, all these other projects. Everyone can find them if you want. And if you...

Freedom of Information Act of 2000. I talked to somebody who was one of their victims, as it were. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know that since the Freedom of Information Act all these secret documents were made publicly available, 13 million documents of the CIA. I haven't seen them yet though. I can send you the website. Everyone can find it there. All the regime change operations, like everything is described there, or most of it. There are certain files who are exempt from publication. They could say

select a set of files which they didn't have to publish, but what is published is quite enough to show you what happened. Like, out of 248, out of the 248 military conflicts in between the Second World War and the year 2000, 201 were provoked artificially by the CIA. Not surprising. And it's there on the Internet. I mean, and strangely enough,

If you talk about that, most people will say that you are a conspiracy theorist. It's there on the website of the CIA. So, of course, I don't know if they really conceived it as a scientific experiment, but the art of the manufacturing of public opinion

Well, they didn't stop practicing that art. They continued with it. You can see it with the internet also. Google is a propaganda machine. I used to really love going to Reddit because you could find your own sub-community there and they talk about stuff. But about five years ago, I got taken over by the hive mind. It's all bots. It's just narrative control stuff. Try dropping it.

Anti-vax or even a fax questioning thing out there and just get swarmed in study right auto bodied and everything so so I mean the only interesting thing that's happened in my life so far in that regard is I think Musk did shake it up by allowing Twitter to talk about stuff So that's the only place I actually get news now. Yeah for me. Yes, it's the the new censorship Is the

Yes, it's the worst censorship that the world has ever seen and it will get even worse of course with AI. It's subtle now. Yeah, with the AI, right? It's interesting, one of the first times Brett Weinstein and I met, we're comparing stuff and then we introduced our groups to each other and both parties were like, I didn't know about this guy, right? So here we are, we talk about very identical things. Our groups would have a lot of algorithmic cross-checking.

They were kept completely ring fenced, kept apart from each other. So it's subtle now. I liked it when I got YouTube strikes because I could wear them proudly and people said you must be over the target, right? But now, you know, you put something out and it gets just a few views and they, I don't know, you know, it's much more subtle now. Yeah, yeah, probably. Yes. And I...

I was watching this interview with Bill Gates a few weeks ago on CNBC, I think. He was explaining that it might be a good idea, even necessary, to create an AI platform to control the internet and public speech on hate speech

And he said, for instance, he said, freedom of speech is important. It's essential. It's crucial. But of course, he said, we cannot tolerate that there are people who try to recommend, who try to convince others not to take a vaccine, for instance. He said, did you really learn nothing of the coronavirus? Yes. So that, but that's exactly, that's what will, that's what they will try to do, of course. AI, it's a must.

self-evident almost, AI will be the next. That will be the ultimate end stage of the mechanization of the human being because AI, a machine, or at least that is what they pretend, will be more moral and ethical than any human being. A machine will decide what you can say

And or not. And that's of course, and behind the machine, there will be the people who train the machine. Yes, yes. We'll have mass customization was this thing that came out a while ago in manufacturing, but we'll have atomized mass formation, right? So, we'll still be in a mass formation, but your experience will be different from mine because AI is going to know you, right? It's going to know how long you dwell to go scrolling past a certain image and what you clicked on and where you've been, what you're susceptible to and all of this.

We're in a real fifth generation warfare right now. That's how I see it. So in the time we have left, which isn't much, how do you see this playing out? What's your sense of the next 1, 3, 5, 10 years in this story? Well, I'm trying to be realistic in the short run. I mean like this technocratic system.

will be imposed to society, I think. Like the digital coins, the digital ID, and even much more than that, like this entire idea of five-minute cities and climate lockdowns and AI, an AI tool that screens and scans public space. And we've seen in the UK how

They moved from the stage of indoctrination propaganda, in my opinion, to the stage of terror, where they started to put people in jail because they made these posts on social media, of which they actually acknowledged that they did not transgress any law. But still, we have to show what happens when we think that you spread hate speech or something. So we see, I think, that the years before us,

will be quite difficult. I think so. But still I'm very optimistic actually, because I believe that I see, I really notice, I travel a lot, like almost every week, sometimes two times a week, going abroad for talks and lectures and so on. And everywhere I noticed how we all, how a certain group of people all go through the same process. They are very determined, like, okay,

While the world around us is dehumanizing, we will represent the human being. We will stay loyal to certain principles of humanity. And so many people start to become aware that there is something about truth and sincerity. Like in this world which lies in manipulation or everywhere, there on the one hand is

a large group of people decides to collaborate and to buy into the manipulation, go along with the manipulation because it's too difficult to go against it and so on and so on. Or maybe because even they don't see it. But there is this other small group of people which says, like, no. The more manipulation around us, the more sincere we will become. And that's what we need. That's what we need. We do not have to think too much and we don't have to understand everything. I like to understand a lot of things, but the most important thing

always will be in a world that loses all ethical awareness. You have to be the one. Just focus on this thing. Stay loyal. Try to, as well as you can, as good as you can, try to feel what it means to be an ethical being and try to represent these ethical principles. Try to stay loyal. The rest will be solved for you, I think. And maybe, you know, you know,

Nobody can guarantee us what will happen. I think it might be really difficult times. But I'm quite confident that in the end... That's exactly why a lie is a lie. Because it does not have the structure of the real. And in the end, the people who stay loyal to something they believe is true... ...do their best to be sincere...

And the end will be on the winning side, I think. Brilliant. Inspiring. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. It was very nice to meet you here in person. My pleasure.