Speaking Truth Stops Totalitarianism And Loneliness –The millennium’s most important speech was Nov. 19, 2023, before the Romanian Parliament in Bucharest at International Crisis Summit IV.
Giving it was Mattias Desmet, the author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism and a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University, Belgium.
Conditions are ripe for totalitarianism, Desmet says. Especially, a technocratic one in which the rulers excessively use propaganda to control the people.
People will be coerced to give up their wealth and comforts. No more cars. No more vacations. The state will be worshipped. Mothers will turn their children to the state for violations and children their parents.
The world is vulnerable today because people are disconnected, Desmet says. Encouraged loneliness is a tool of control.
An elite that uses propaganda and a lonely population reinforce each other. The lonely state is exactly the state in which a population is vulnerable for propaganda.
He points out that political discourse is perverted. Politicians never do what they promised to do in their election speeches, he says.
Pennsylvanians might laugh and respond with a meme of Captain Obvious or Josh Shapiro. That makes Desmet’s point, though. We are not supposed to accept it.
“How far are we removed from political virtue as described by Aristotle,” Desmet says. “For Aristotle, the core of political virtue was the courage to speak the Truth . . . bold speech, in which someone says exactly this what society doesn’t want to hear, but which is necessary to keep it psychologically healthy.”
Desmet says the West is gripped by a type of lying that is new in history.
It’s called propaganda.
“Propaganda is everywhere around us,” he says. “Public space is saturated with it. Recent years have illustrated that abundantly.”
He cites the response to Covid, Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He says it occurs in mainstream and social media.”
The propagandists have money and power and control governments. They think they are good people. They know they are lying but believe that their lies are beneficial.
Desmet points out that it is anything but.
“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,” he says. “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 not a coincidence but a consequence of rationalism, he says.
The trend began with the Enlightenment 250 years ago.
“The pursuit of rationality during the tradition of Enlightenment didn’t lead to more truthful speech, as the founding fathers of this tradition believed,” he says. “Science would replace questionable religious and other myths; society would finally be organized according to reliable information instead of subjective conjectures.”
This was but an illusion.
It became unfashionable to speak truth when humans started to be thought of as mere “mechanistic, biological” entities whose highest goal was survival.
Speaking the truth does not maximize one’s chances. No one is more hated than he who speaks truth, as Plato says.
“Within a materialist-rationalist tradition, speaking the truth is something stupid to do,” Desmet says. “Only idiots do it. That’s how the fanatic pursuit of rationality led us astray, straight into the dark wood of Dante, ‘where the right road is wholly lost and gone’.“
Why do we cling to this philosophy? Because it calls itself science.
Desmet says this is nonsense.
“All seminal scientist concluded exactly the opposite. In the end, the essence of life always escapes rationality, it transcends the categories of rational thinking,” Desmet says. “. . . 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’.”
Desmet and Einstein are not dissing reason.
“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,” he says. “. . .It is a stairway to a kind of knowledge that transcends rationality.”
We can stop this creeping totalitarianism, however. We, the masses, don’t have to sterilize our children and let our elderly die alone. Our future does not have to be a miserable where we survive on bugs and live in Matrix-style pods.
What’s required to stop this looming hell on earth is sincere speech.
Truth telling will let us connect to each other and that will stop the monsters who wish us enslaved.
“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,” Desmet says.
It’s well understood that if there are some 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 all who dissent from 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,” he says.
Desmet’s was the 18th speaker on the Summit’s second day and the speech can be watched here. The quotes above come from his prepared remarks which can be found here and might not match his spoken words.
Thank you Dr. Robert Malone for bringing this to our attention.
Speaking Truth Stops Totalitarianism Before It’s Established
Speaking Truth Stops Totalitarianism Before It’s Established
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