Différences entre les versions de « Mattias Desmet/2024.02.15 »

| Welcome everybody to The Illusion of Consensus podcast.

I am Professor Jay Bhattacharya and today I'm delighted to have here with me my friend Mattias Desmet.

It's been difficult to get us together but I'm so glad we finally managed to do it.

So, Mattias is most famous for a book that he wrote during the pandemic called The Psychology of Totalitarianism.

We're going to talk mostly about the themes that he talked about in that book, but everyone should know that Mattias is a professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

and in in in psychology in clinical psychology a practicing psychotherapist but also Mattias you have a you have a background in statistics yes yes i also have a master degree in statistics and let's say the first eight years of my academic training of my academic of my work as a researcher i was working most of the time as a statistician doing research into

problems with academic research actually so when i made my phd i started in 2003 i think and two years later the replication crisis started a crisis which showed that as john ionitis describes in his wonderful paper why most published research findings are false

A crisis that showed that huge percentages of the published academic research actually

It's interesting because John is my colleague here at Stanford and of course he's famous for many many things but that launching of the replication crisis was maybe the most impactful thing that he ever did.

What it did in many ways is it punctured the illusion that there was

A lot of academic work, a lot of scientific work really was aiming at getting at the truth.

In fact, what it mainly seemed to be is just a way to climb the greasy pole of academic politics because you have to publish or perish.

And so a lot of the work that was published in psychology, in empirical economics and in a whole bunch of fields turned out not to be replicable.

up to 85% in the medical world in medicine too one of John's papers and that's extremely interesting I think because but you see that like scientific discourse initially let's say back in the beginning of the 17th century

It was a new discourse that emerged and that offered an alternative for the very dogmatic religious discourse at the moment in Europe.

but slowly as scientific discourse became the dominant discourse in society it lost its qualities of truthfulness and truth speech and in the end it just became a manipulative discourse in many respects I think and that's a problem we are facing now and that's something that is very typical

For every discourse that in the beginning was a sincere discourse of a minority and that became the dominant discourse, while becoming dominant, while becoming mainstream, a discourse loses its qualities of truthfulness.

From a psychological point of view, I think that this is a very interesting phenomenon.

I mean, the idea is that science, when it is an outside phenomenon, critiquing, seeking the truth, even if it is uncomfortable to people in power, is a very powerful thing.

And the way that you wrote about this, you write about it as this tool used by the powerful to control, to essentially, it's created a situation where people become disconnected from this.

Follow the science, trust the science as if it were itself a religious system rather than a humble set of tools trying to say, can I tell the difference between true and false?

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When it's the discourse of a minority, it cannot be used in an instrumental way.

But as a discourse becomes more dominant, it's typically used to be successful, to sell your products, to build a career and so on.

It's an excellent instrument to become successful in society and to become rich, to become famous, to become successful and so on.

And that's also what happened with science, I'm afraid, throughout the last two centuries.

It draws people who are less interested in using the tools for soul-expanding purposes to learn how the world works, even if it contradicts the ideas of how I now think how the world works, versus people who want to use it as a way to gain

Scientific discourse attracts a completely different type of human being when it's a discourse of a minority compared to the discourse of a mainstream discourse.

But you start with this corruption of science as the heart of the problem.

Now tell me, you move from that to this idea of the alienation of people from each other, from the activities that they do, and in fact it's just this science, this ideology that makes it possible to have this sort of alienated life.

Mass Formation Psychosis with Mattias Desmet, Jay Bhattacharya, Rav Arora titled Must-Watch Episode 32 Mass Formation Psychosis with Mattias Desmet

Many people believe it is the scientific view of men in the world, which is not true.

Most major scientists are not rationalists and they are also not believing that the universe is a machine, not at all.

But in a strange way, we became convinced that this rationalist, mechanist ideology is the scientific view of men in the world.

And as this view of men in the world became dominant throughout the last few centuries, we could observe a very strange phenomenon in society.

and which Hegel, the famous German philosopher Hegel, coined the term atomization for.

The social bond between people slowly deteriorated and more and more people throughout the last few centuries reported to feel lonely and disconnected and just before the corona crisis the number of lonely people really peaked in between 40 and 60 percent of the people worldwide reported not to have one meaningful relationship and only connect to other people

I think it was a Gallup World poll, I'm not sure, but I mentioned it in my book, which showed that the number of lonely people was very highly correlated to the level of industrialization and technology use.

to more and more loneliness and you can explain it in several ways the most profound way is situated merely at the psychological level like when we start to believe that the essence of life around us can be grasped in the categories of our rational thinking we inevitably

Isolate and alienate ourselves from the core of life because the core of life, the essence of life, can never be grasped in a rational way.

When it comes to atoms, he said, language can only be used as poetry.

And the entire complex dynamical systems theory is showing us exactly this.

which are most phenomena in nature behaves literally like an irrational number in mathematics which means that it is intrinsically unpredictable this phenomenon and science on the one hand is an impressive accumulation of rational knowledge but equally well it is a mental discipline which showed us that the essence of life

I mean that's such an important point and the Enlightenment thinkers understood this.

I remember in college I read Blaise Pascal's Pensée, a very famous actually scientist of the Enlightenment era and he was writing this book to justify his religious faith.

The professor that assigned it, I think he meant to show this contrast, that there was a limit to how soul-fulfilling our development of reason can be.

In fact, we're more than just head, we're also heart, and our being is tied up in the two of them.

and to say only the head matters is a mistake it's a scientific mistake as well as a human mistake and you can also see it actually you know Einstein also said in the introduction of a book of Max Planck this other famous physicist of the 20th century he said many people think

that science is born from a supreme capacity for rational thinking, but he said that's not true.

I believe science originates from a supreme capacity for Einfühlung, he said, which is a German term for empathic resonating.

of resonating with the phenomenon you are interested in, in an empathic way, with your heart.

In order to discover a phenomenon in this way, you have to have the courage not to know, to stop thinking.

A scientist, a real scientist, is someone who has the capacity to stop thinking and who has the courage to admit that he doesn't know.

So now the mechanistic worldview, you mentioned this as the source of atomization.

So I just want to explore that just a little bit because it's, I think, a central thesis of your book.

The mechanistic worldview, the idea is that the physical realities, atoms, physical forces, gravity, whatever they are, quantum mechanics, whatever they are, those physical forces are all there are.

and in a way, I think the thesis, maybe please correct me if I'm getting it wrong, but like the thesis that you put forward in the book is that this is alienating because there's no inherent meaning in just a random collection of atoms.

If you consider the universe to be like a dead, a material machine, then this machine goes around without meaning.

So that's one level at which you can see that this mechanist-fueled man in the world leads to a loss of purpose and meaning in life.

But there is a much more profound process, I think, like this mechanist thinking, this rationalist thinking,

even purely at the psychological level leads already to loneliness because for instance you can explain that in many ways but if you're confronted with someone who is

fundamentally convinced that he understands you in a rational way that he knows who you are that he knows you perfectly you will feel no connection just because in this case you feel completely it's as if you don't exist for that person because he believes that he

completely understands you in a rational way already so that's a very alienating experience but then beyond that beyond the psychological level you can see that this rationalist fuel man in the world led to the industrialization of the world to the mechanization of the world to the use of more and more technology and that in itself disconnected people from each other and you can i explain in my book like for instance even the invention of a simple mechanic device such as a watch

Mass Formation Psychosis with Mattias Desmet, Jay Bhattacharya, Rav Arora titled Must-Watch Episode 32 Mass Formation Psychosis with Mattias Desmet, Jay Bhattacharya, Rav Arora titled Must-Watch Episode 32

in this way the real communications are constantly replaced by technological communication and technology does connect us to each other but only at the level of the exchange of information but it takes away it destroys the physical resonance between people

if people meet in person in the real world while they are talking their bodies for instance and their soul actually constantly resonates with each other we constantly imitate each other's the tensions in the muscles on the other's face the bodily postures and so on we constantly without knowing it imitate each other and that's why we constantly feel

And this process of empathic resonance is reduced by, I guess, 90% or something when communicating in a technological way.

And that's exactly why people, for instance, during the first lockdown, many people reported that when you have to teach

and for eight hours straight online then in a strange way you feel exhausted and in a very strange way which is hard to pinpoint but the reason is that while you're talking in a digital way your body constantly tries to connect to the body of the other but it fails to do so

or maybe it can connect only for 10% and that's why you try time and time again to feel this symbiotic resonance with the other and you get exhausted because you constantly fail to do so I think it was

There was a certain guy on Twitter who said what makes digital communication so exhausting is the fact that we are constantly in the presence of the absence of the other when we talk in a digital way.

This devotion to the ideology of science, this reliance on digital connections, Zoom, essentially allowed us to disconnect from each other, thinking that we were going to do this in a safe way, in a way that's going to allow us to not get sick and still remain human.

That's the clue of the book, I think, that the rationalist view on men in the world in many ways led to loneliness.

And once people feel lonely, they spontaneously will feel that their life is without purpose or meaning because as a human being, we spontaneously have the feeling that our life makes sense, that our life has purpose and meaning when we see that we have an effect on the other.

and when we feel lonely we don't have these spontaneous experiences anymore of seeing

that we have an effect on the face of the other on the body of the other and so on and that's why spontaneously as soon as someone feels lonely he usually will start to feel that his life is without purpose or meaning and then in a second step something extremely important happens when someone feels lonely feels that his life is without meaning or purpose he will typically be confronted with very specific affective phenomena

and more in particular he will feel anxious frustrated aggressive without knowing what he feels anxious frustrated and aggressive for and that's an extremely aversive mental state if we feel anxious and we don't know what we feel anxious for we have the feeling that we are completely out of control so and and that's the state where a human being becomes extremely vulnerable for propaganda and that's the that's when when and when someone is in this state

and a narrative is distributed to through the mass media providing an object of anxiety like a virus or the Jews or the or the the aristocracy or the witches or the doesn't matter what when a narrative is distributed which

provides an object of anxiety, all this free-floating anxiety might suddenly connect to this object of anxiety and people might be willing to participate in a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety even if the strategy is utterly absurd.

I mean, what's very interesting about that is, I mean, COVID is a real threat.

It's a real virus, and it killed many, many people, and it killed, in particular, posed a major threat to older people.

So it's not that this is, that the threat, it has to be fictional, right?

What you're saying, and I think is very important, is that the threat is met with a population

that is psychologically primed to handle it poorly because of this anxiety, this disconnection, this loneliness.

Exactly, of course there was a virus and there was a certain danger associated to the virus but the problem is when as soon as this process of mass formation starts and as soon as all this anxiety, all this free-floating anxiety is connected to the object of anxiety, the field of attention becomes extremely narrow

and it is as if people see only one danger anymore and it is this virus and for instance all the adverse effects of the corona mandates the corona measures the vaccines and so on it is as if they don't exist just because all this anxiety is associated to this one object of anxiety and that's

That's the real problem with mass formation, that it focuses the attention so much on one object of anxiety that all the rest disappears into the background.

Matthias, I have to say that that was striking to me through the entire pandemic because my first reaction to hearing about the idea of a lockdown was to the damage it was going to do to the lives of the poor.

with Mattias Desmet, Jay Bhattacharya, Rav Arora titled Must-Watch Episode 32 Mass Formation Psychosis with Mattias Desmet

yeah exactly and so that's that's that's typically the effect of of such a mass phenomenon it it everyone is really literally hypnotized by this one object of anxiety all the attention is attached to it and to this extent that people just are not aware anymore of the rest of reality and and um and then in a second step something even more dangerous happens because many people at the same time

Participate in a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety, they feel connected again.

Loneliness which is always the most aversive state for a human being and they feel that they are fighting this collective heroic battle.

So I'm in public saying all of these other harms, these collateral harms are going to come of this strategy that we're following.

And my focus is on the children, on the poor, on working class people that their lives are being devastated by these policies, even not so much as by the virus, but the policies.

and suddenly I am the focus of attack by the press, by my colleagues.

If it only can get rid of me and you and a few other crazy people, then we can deal with the real problem, which is COVID.

That's what happens because mass formation seems to liberate people, seems to free people from all their problems.

which gives which connects them again to each other which gives them a new purpose in life and which allows them to control their anxiety and to take their frustration and aggression out

on all the scapegoats on all those who do not want to go along with the narrative that's what happens and the strange thing is that history has shown that if the masses go to the last stage of the mass formation and start to destroy each and everyone who doesn't go along with them well in that case as soon as everyone is destroyed that happened that happened so clearly in the soviet union for instance they they find a new enemy

which does not happen because people connect to each other from individual to individual, from human being to human being, no a mass is a group that emerges because each individual separately connects to a collective ideal meaning that

the famous solidarity in the masses is and is never a solidarity between individuals it's always a solidarity from an individual to a collective and the longer a mass formation exists the more every individual demands of every other individual that it sacrifices everything

The individual, my fellow human beings, my children, my wife, my friends, they're all biohazards.

with Mattias Desmet, Jay Bhattacharya, Rav Arora titled Mass Formation Psychosis with Mattias Desmet

In the context of this mimicry, we latch onto a set of things that not everybody can have.

In that competition, because everybody cannot have this thing that we've copied each other's desire to have, it creates conflict.

and there's social conflict because oh look the safety that I want is being threatened by the person who's walking down the street unmasked

It's being threatened by the man on the podcast or the TV saying, you know, we should care about the poor who are suffering because of the lockdowns.

And so the creation of a scapegoat then and the destruction of that scapegoat relieves the psychological tension created by the fact that the desires that we have in this alienated state cannot be fulfilled.

You always need a scapegoat and there are many reasons because you needed to take out your frustration and aggression on and you need it for many reasons and that's why indeed as you said history has shown it very clearly.

Once a mass formation starts it always needs new scapegoats when George Orwell also knew that very well.

that's exactly what he mentions in 1984 there always needs to be an enemy always you had a very interesting point in your book about measurability

and it seems like a detour but it's actually really central I think to your theme and to why your story makes so much sense.

Think back to the COVID crisis and especially think back to 2020, 2021 where we were all looking in the newspapers and elsewhere

And we attached a sort of narrative to us that if the curve is moving it's because of something we together did.

If it's going up, it's because there's some bad guys that are not listening to the measures.

While vast numbers of people were suffering from the lockdowns, from many, many other

Health conditions that afflict humans, psychological harm at scale and we didn't measure those, those are not put in front of the public and so they meant nothing.

Yes, I think that one of the big problems of our culture is an exaggerated belief in the objectivity of numbers.

We are under the illusion that numbers represent facts but they don't.

Then we were under the illusion that this was an objective representation of reality, but there is no objective measurement possible of the number of people who are dying.

and it takes a philosophical discussion to determine whether or not someone died of COVID and of course there are meaningful and less meaningful ways of counting the number of victims claimed by the virus and I believe that we counted them in a much too enthusiastic way that even the CDC admitted that from

I think April 2022 onwards, somewhere around 40% of the people who were registered as COVID casualties actually were not, or their death was not caused by the virus.

So the counting itself is a problem, because people always die for many reasons.

Dying of something, dying is always an intrinsically multidimensional phenomenon.

measuring something or counting something is always a unit is always comparing something with a unidimensional scale of the real numbers multiplied by a measurement scale and that's why measurement from most phenomena is not really objective so that's the first problem and then the second one is of course

If you see how the excess death increases, well, how will you interpret it?

If you see how the number of COVID patients dying increases, how will you interpret it?

Is this an indication of the intrinsic mortality of the virus or does it have to do with the medical treatment that is not optimal?

What's interesting to me is that in that sense is that it fed into this science as ideology kind of paradigm that you mentioned Mattias that if I can measure it therefore it's real well that's

like no one says in science no one in science says that i mean we measure things in science because we want to test theories we want to test ideas we want to we want to find the real but no one in science says that if i can't measure it therefore it's not real maybe i'll be able to measure it in the future right that's the ambition of science for something maybe but we also have this humility that there may be things that we are not thinking of

Must-Watch Episode 32 Mass Formation Psychosis with Mattias Desmet

It is, and that's the point, we are always under the illusion that measurement is an objective act, but it is a very subjective act.

And as soon as there are strong subjective forces such as mass formation who emerge in a society, the measurement is just following these phenomena.

The numbers will be constructed and interpreted starting from these strong subjective affective

social forces and that's why the numbers will just usually the numbers presented in the media for instance they will just be selected and constructed in such a way that they confirm this narrative that seizes control of of the masses that that's that's the tremendous psychological problem you're facing in such in such situations

Okay, so I want to turn from now, I think we now have the background for the psychological basis, the root that you've identified for much of the pathology that happened during the COVID crisis.

But I want to turn now to the role of leaders and the people in what transpired during COVID, right?

So on the one hand, you have this population, most of the population

atomized uh essentially focused on on a narrow set of outcomes very anxious with this idea that if we if we just follow the science this ideological version of science i can be free of this danger the scapegoating the and the and this this phenomenon as you've described it is is you call it a mass phenomenon what that means is that it happened to regular people

He said the higher the level of education, the more vulnerable for mass formation.

Which is why universities were such dangerous places to be if you were a rebel.

There are a lot of people looking at this in retrospect and they're saying, well, you know, our leaders tricked us.

In fact, I wrote a piece with Martin Kulldorff in 2021, I think, saying that Fauci fooled America.

The Illusion of Consensus featuring Mattias Desmet, Jay Bhattacharya, Rav Arora

But is it right to say that he just fooled the public or is there more to it than that?

Because the story you're telling is not just one or two leaders that take over.

It's a population prime to be taken over by these kinds of phenomena.

It's literally a complex dynamical phenomenon of which both the leaders and the population are part of.

And it's very interesting to consider this phenomenon from a broader historical perspective.

So mass formation and crowds and mass formation have always existed.

But throughout the last few centuries, the masses became stronger and stronger and stronger.

And that was the reason why in the beginning of the 20th century, a new kind of state emerged, the so-called totalitarian state, which is completely different from a classical dictatorship because it is based on mass formation.

People are just psychologically scared of a small group of people and they just do what they want because they are scared of them.

That's in a nutshell and a little bit simplistic what a classical dictatorship is.

But in totalitarian states something completely different happens.

The population becomes fanatically convinced of a certain narrative, an ideologically driven narrative and then the masses together with some leaders can seize control of society and install a new kind of state which has a huge secret police namely this part of the population

which believes so fanatically in the narrative that they are prepared to report everyone to the state who doesn't follow it so that's a totalitarian state and the big question of course is why did this totalitarian state emerge for the first time in the 20th century and not before and then the answer is that

Before the 20th century, the masses, the phenomenon of mass formation was not strong enough and didn't last long enough to be used as the basis of a state system.

how the masses become mass formation lasted longer and longer then you can clearly see that both the elite played a role and the population itself they both played a role like starting from the French Revolution onwards for instance there were more and more people at the level of the elite who became convinced that the only way to

Keep control of society was through constant psychological manipulation.

Immediately after the French Revolution, the first modern institute of propaganda emerged.

And what we see now is that most global institutions, like the UN for instance, I wrote an essay on that on my Substack, become convinced that it is their holy duty to mislead the population a little bit, or at least

to manufacture content ideological content and for instance during the corona crisis they hired 110 000 so-called digital first responders

to constantly put people who had a different opinion in a bad daylight.

And I'm sure that most people at the level of the UN who actually recruited all these digital first responders are convinced of their own good intentions.

They were convinced that it was their duty to make sure that the population went along, bought into this narrative.

I saw this too I mean I think it was and it's striking because let's just take someone working in a pharmaceutical company on a vaccine right I have friends that do this actually who work in for pharmaceutical companies they don't think that they're doing bad in fact quite the opposite they think they're doing good and they may be doing good right that's not that's not but and for them the crisis was something that they're that they're

Basically, it's hard to find too many people that are so cynical that I'm going to lie just for my own advantage.

Even when they're cutting ethical corners, even when they're putting forward things that they haven't really tested well, even when they are telling the public so-called noble lies and ignoring

and the public, much of the public was happy to let that happen because they thought it would address the crisis.

driving factor in emerging totalitarianism much more than money and power that's Hannah Arendt I think made a very accurate analysis there she said it's not the lust for money and power in the first place it's in the first place an ideological drive a blind ideological drive which that's the problem with these many of these experts not all of them we should differentiate between them but the problem is that they are so convinced

changes they want to impose to society that's the real problem and for most people and then we have to differentiate like most totalitarian leaders most leaders of the masses blindly believe their ideology but that doesn't always mean that they believe the narratives they use to maintain to to manipulate the population in such a way that they accept

This ideological reshaping of society they see as their end goal.

Totalitarian leaders and the leaders of the masses and people who make propaganda usually are blindly convinced of their ideology, but often they do not really believe the narratives they use to manipulate the population.

It's such an obviously, manifestly ridiculous thing to say or think, and yet he really honestly believes that.

He has bought into the entire program that we outlined over the last 45 minutes.

and but because he's bought into it because he and he's the high pope of the science he can in his own mind say things that he knows to be untrue because he thinks it will lead the public to do things that he thinks is wise exactly if you read the the books of the founding fathers of modern public relations and propaganda such as I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Edward Bernays

I have to say, propaganda is not among the set of things I've studied in my life.

I started to be interested in it since I studied the psychology of totalitarianism because it's one necessary ingredient of totalitarianism.

to constantly have an impact psychological impact or manipulate the the population and you need the population which feels lonely and so on so you need two things you need you need

a specific elite and a specific psychological state in a population Jacques Ellul has described this in a wonderful way how from the 20th century onwards so many people felt lonely that a new kind of mass emerged like ancient masses differed from the modern masses because the modern masses are not

And this kind of lonely mass can last much, much longer and can be controlled much, much better than the physical masses of yesteryear.

And that's why these masses, lonely masses, can be used as a psychological basis of totalitarian states.

that we are really at risk of being confronted with a new kind of totalitarianism now technocratic totalitarianism which in which the underlying ideology might be a transhumanist technocratic ideology that's the logical consequence of a radical mechanistic fuel man in the world if you look at the human being and at the universe

As a machine, a mechanistic entity, then it's only logical that you want a technical expert to be in control of the machine.

Why would you ask a democratically elected politician without rational knowledge to determine how the machine should function and so on and so on?

Guys, you could maybe at some point just let the machine itself take over.

Yeah, I mean it's quite striking and I think you're right, there's pointers in that direction.

We're no longer in 2020, and it doesn't feel as if the corona crisis is any longer causing the kind of mass formation that you describe in your book.

And so something happened between 2020 and 2024 when we were discussing this that caused so many people, maybe most of the population, to say enough, to wake up.