Does History Repeat Itself? Bret Speaks with Mattias Desmet
Bret Speaks with Mattias Desmet on the subject of mass formation, a topic Mattias has spent a great deal of time exploring and has written a recent book on (The Psychology of Totalitarianism), linked below. They tackle this process from their differing backgrounds of expertise and discuss what it suggests about our path into the future.Find Mattias’ book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Totalitarianism-Mattias-Desmet/dp/1645021726/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1657654629&refinements=p_27%3AM...
I am sitting today with Matthias Desmet, who is a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University.
He also holds a master's degree in statistics.
Professor Desmet, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you, Brett.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Excellent.
Well, I am pretty excited about this conversation.
I have been steeped in your work, not for very long, but I have looked carefully at it and I have found a tremendous amount that resonates for me.
There is one element that I think I don't know that I would say that I differ with you on it, but there is a way in which when a psychological perspective and an evolutionary perspective meet, there is a lot of potential gain to be had if we can figure out how the two stories intersect, but that's not always an easy process.
I'm hoping it will happen here.
But I think to begin with, it would make sense.
You have erupted into the public eye for your work on what is called mass formation.
Some will have heard it discussed as mass formation psychosis, but I don't think that's the general term.
So, what I would like is for you to describe the process of mass formation and what it has to do with certain patterns of history that everybody who watches this will already be familiar with, even if they don't realize that they are, in fact, patterns.
Yes, yes.
Indeed, I never use the term mass formation psychosis, because I think both from an intellectual and an ethical point of view, and even a strategical point of view, it is better to use the term mass formation, which is a more neutral term, less stigmatizing, which doesn't enter the domain of individual psychodiagnostics and so on.
So I prefer the term mass formation.
Excellent.
I think that's right.
The one downside to it is that it does not immediately call anything to mind for most people.
Psychosis obviously does, but I agree with you.
Psychosis is prejudicial and counterproductive.
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This process of mass formation is a specific kind of group formation, which has very specific effects at the level of individual mental functioning.
For instance, if people are in the grip of a process of mass formation, they tend to become radically blind for everything that goes against the narrative the group believes in.
It is as if they don't have any capacity anymore to take a critical distance of what the group believes in.
And this holds even for people who are extremely intelligent.
And highly educated.
So that's one of the strangest things of mass formation.
Even the higher the level of education, it has been observed time and time again, the more vulnerable people become for mass formation, which is quite strange, of course.
Then a second characteristic, a very important characteristic of mass formation, is that as people are in the grip of it, they typically become willing to self-sacrifice.
It is as if they are no longer aware of their own individual interests, as if they are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of the collective interests, and to a very extreme extent.
And a third crucial phenomenological characteristic of mass formation is that people who are in the grip of it typically become radically intolerant for dissonant voices.
And in the end, this goes quite far.
In the end, people who are in the grip of mass formation typically start to commit cruelties and atrocities towards the people that do not go along with the masses.
And, even more specific, they do so as if it is an ethical duty to do so.
That's typical for masses of all times, whether we are talking about the crusades or the witch hunts or the French Revolution or the emergence of the masses in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany.
Every time you see the same characteristic, after a while, when the mass formation becomes very deep, People typically start to commit cruelties towards those who do not go along with them, and they do so as if it is an ethical duty.
To give only one example, two months ago I was talking with this woman of Iran, and this conversation is available on the internet, who lived in Iran during the revolution in 1979, which was the beginning of a large-scale process of mass formation in Iran.
And she described how she had seen with her own eyes how a mother reported her son to the state, and how she hung the rope around his neck when he was on the scaffold, and how she claimed to be a heroine for doing so.
That's a process that The typical end point of mass formation is that, in a strange way, people are willing to commit cruelties towards everyone who doesn't go along with the masses, and they do so as if it is an ethical duty to do so.
That's purely the phenomenological characteristics of mass formation.
But as soon as you... I think that shows how extremely important it is.
Well, let's pause there for a second.
I want you to complete describing the model.
I think it's very important that you get the whole thing on the table.
But I want to point out that what you've described so far is a series of paradoxes where things that do not appear to make sense become apparent driving forces of important historical processes.
And what I hope we will get to is an explanation for why those things are in fact not paradoxical, why they make sense in an evolutionary context even though they seem utterly absurd to an observer.
We will try to.
At least I can describe the mechanism of mass formation.
That's what I did in my book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which was recently published.
I go into the mechanism, the psychological mechanism, and I'm very curious to your ideas about the biological mechanisms of mass formation.
But I go into the psychological mechanisms of mass formation in order to show, actually, that these strange, seemingly utterly absurd characteristics at the phenomenological level can be explained in a psychological way and start to make sense.
And maybe, well, it's important to stipulate from the beginning that mass formation exists as long as mankind exists.
It exists as long as mankind exists, but the modern masses are not the same as the ancient masses.
There are very important differences, very important differences that are crucial from a psychological perspective.
For instance, the ancient masses were masses that gathered physically.
They gathered physically.
The individuals that constituted the mass were physically present or were physically together.
And the modern masses Or what is sometimes called lonely masses.
Modern masses are very often created through the mass media.
Modern masses are groups of people that all share the same ideas, that are all in the grip of the same images, that are all in the grip of the same narratives and myths, but that never physically gather, that often live in a rather isolated state.
And that is exactly, it is exactly this state of individuals in a lonely mass, what makes them extremely susceptible and extremely vulnerable for all kinds of propaganda.
It's a perfect state in which you can reach someone with propaganda and take in the grip of propaganda.
So that's an important thing.
And as soon as you start to understand that, the phenomenon of mass formation, is the basis of what we call totalitarian states.
You start to understand how extremely important it is to understand what mass formation is and how it works.
And also why it's only the mechanism of mass formation that allows us to explain Why totalitarian states emerged for the first time in the 20th century?
Before the 20th century, there were classical dictatorships, but there were no totalitarian states.
And the difference between a classical dictatorship and a totalitarian state is exactly, at the psychological level, that the totalitarian state is based on mass formation, on the emergence of a mass or a crowd.
Which, led by certain leaders, can seize control of society, while a classical dictatorship is very primitive in its psychological mechanism.
In a classical dictatorship, the population is just scared of a small group, of the aggressive potential of a small group, and accepts, therefore, that the small group imposes its social contract unilaterally.
And a totalitarian state is based on a completely different psychological process, namely the process of mass formation.
Is it okay, Brett, if I just, in a concise way, in a nutshell, describe the process of mass formation, the mechanism?
Yep, before you do though, I just want to highlight something that you said there about the difference between this process in ancient masses versus modern masses, and point out that what you're really describing is the perfect storm that emerged in COVID, where people who were literally
confined to their homes more than they had ever been before, had intense opinions about people they had never met, would never meet, they had opinions about technologies that they did not understand.
In fact, some of the, you know, the few excursions that they made were to source these technologies that had biological implications they couldn't hope to fathom.
And so there is something about this modern technological moment reflected, of course, in the conversation that you and I are having.
We're having a face-to-face conversation thousands of miles apart.
And so those kinds of technologies, I would argue, have simply interfaced with this apparently ancient mechanism, and they have actually facilitated and amplified its power in a modern context in a way that Absolutely.
I couldn't agree more.
The COVID situation was the perfect situation for people to To get in the grip of this process of mass formation and in the grip of a narrative that was distributed through the mass media.
And, you know, the audience of this podcast will be highly non-random, and they will be people, overwhelmingly, who have, over the course of the last couple of years, had A large number of interactions where people that they thought they knew appear to believe perfectly bizarre things and to be immune to the detection that those things are not supported by the evidence.
It's the most remarkable experience to look someone you know well in the eye And to not be able to understand how they could possibly believe the things that they seem to.
So, anyway, that's what we're discussing here.
And I think the next thing you were going to do is you were going to describe the characteristics that lead to mass formation.
Is that right?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
That would be good, I think, yes.
So, mass formation, this very strange kind of group formation, emerges when large-scale mass formation emerges in society.
The population is in a very specific mental condition.
And the first and most crucial characteristic of this condition is that many people have to feel disconnected from their natural and social environment.
That's the most crucial condition.
Many people have to feel lonely, disconnected from their natural and social environment.
And that was something that was very clear just before the corona crisis.
Worldwide, Over 30% of the people worldwide claimed not to have one meaningful relationship and to only connect to other people through the internet.
So it was a very strange situation.
And the number of people feeling lonely and disconnected was increasing Throughout the last few hundred years.
And that also explains why throughout the last few hundred years, the mass formation actually became ever stronger.
And in the end, the masses became so strong that they could seize control of society and create a new kind of state system, namely the totalitarian state.
That was something that was anticipated.
by Gustave Le Bon in 1895 already.
He warned the world then that mass formation became increasingly strong and he said, if we continue like this, the masses will seize control of a society led by certain leaders.
And that was exactly what happened about 20 years later.
Gustave Le Bon describes this In his book, The Psychology of the Crowd.
The most crucial precondition for mass formation to emerge on a large scale in a society is always that there is a high number of socially disconnected, isolated people.
Disconnected people.
Okay, so that's your first characteristic.
When you argue that this became especially prominent as a precondition at the beginning of the 20th century, is this because people were moving away from their natal homes to work?
Is it connected to the Industrial Revolution or what caused that extra disconnection?
It's definitely connected to the industrial revolution, definitely, because it's clear even, you can see in two ways, that the level of loneliness is connected to the level of industrialization and technology use.
At this moment in the world, then you will see that the problem of loneliness is almost perfectly correlated to the level of industrialization and technology use in the world.
For instance, in Northern America and Western Europe, you will see that the levels of loneliness are much higher than elsewhere.
In the United Kingdom, Theresa May appointed the Minister of Loneliness in 2017, just because she realized how she acknowledged the number of people who felt lonely.
And also in the US, The US surgeon mentioned that there was a loneliness epidemic.
So it's generally accepted that the problem is connected to industrialization and technology use.
And you also see throughout the ages that as the level of industrialization increases, and as the level of technology use increases, we also see this increase.
And the number of people who feel lonely.
So it's definitely connected to each other.
Okay.
All right.
So your first characteristic is the disconnectedness and loneliness of people.
What's the second?
Yes.
And then from the first one follows the second one, which is that many people I have to experience a lack of meaning-making in life.
But the two are inevitably connected, because as the social bond between people impoverishes or deteriorates, then you will automatically see that people start to be confronted with lack of meaning-making.
And that's just because people are intrinsically human social animals.
Social beings, and that they experience meaning every time they see that their existence has an effect on the other.
If people notice that their existence has an effect on the other, then they will spontaneously experience meaning and purpose in life.
And if this connection, if the social bond deteriorates, then In the same way, the experiences of meaning-making will drop away from existence.
And people often don't connect the two to each other, but they are connected.
Psychologically, they are very strongly connected at the psychological level.
If you look at the number of people reporting that they consider their job a bullshit job,
At the end of summer in 2018, there was this Gallup World Poll, which indicated that 60% of the people worldwide considered their job to be a so-called bullshit job, which is only logical because if people make something, if they produce something with their work, they almost never know the person who will use what they produce, meaning that they never see the effect.
Of their own labor, of their own work on the other.
And that's probably one of the reasons why so many people have the experience that their job is a boob surgery.
Yeah, this is a really important fact.
And of course, before COVID and
Before the woke revolution many had noticed the collapse of our capacity to make meaning which I also take to be I mean, there's a lot to discuss and maybe we'll come back to it, but the fact of people Largely partnering with other people that they don't grow up with that They don't know especially well that our adult lives are interfacing with a lot of people we may like them but we don't know them means that our language is impoverished because
We don't know the very precise meaning of a term as somebody else uses it.
We just sort of have the general, you know, English version in my case.
And so that bluntness of every term we might wish to use means that the highest quality meaning we could possibly make is pretty low, right?
It's just a bunch of dull tools in the shed and you can't make a fine piece of furniture with them.
But anyway, I interrupted you.
So you have disconnection and loneliness as the first characteristics, a failure of meaning-making as the second characteristic.
What's third?
Yes.
As soon as people start to exist in a disconnected state and confronted with a lack of meaning-making in life, something very specific happens at the affective level.
In that condition, people typically start to experience so-called free-floating anxiety, frustration, and aggression.
That means all kinds of negative effects that are not connected to a mental representation.
In plain terms, just people feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive without knowing what they feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive for.
All their anxiety and negative affectivity is disconnected from the environment and from the mental representations.
And that is an extremely aversive mental state, because if you feel, for instance, anxious, and you don't know what you feel anxious for, you will typically feel completely out of control, just because you cannot protect yourself from something you don't know.
And in the same way, if you feel a lot of frustration and aggression, but you don't know what you feel frustrated and aggressive for, there is no way you can direct your frustration and aggression at something in the outer world, so it remains in yourself.
And it is this condition, this state of disconnectedness, the state of lack of meaning-making, all this free-floating negative effectivity.
If a population is in this mental condition, then it's ready.
It's ready for large-scale mass formation.
Well, so free-floating anxiety, and I know from reading your work that what you mean is that it's not about something concrete, and you point out here that people have a general sense of foreboding, and that that is particularly frustrating, let's say, because it doesn't suggest a proper course of action, right?
No, exactly.
Usually, this leads to the development of individual psychological symptoms, like a phobia or one or another obsessional behavior is typically one way in which all this free-floating anxiety can be connected symptomatically to a certain representation.
And this allows a subject to have a minimal level of control over its anxiety.
Because when you feel anxious but you have no idea what you feel anxious for, you're completely out of control.
But if you can symptomatically connect your anxiety to, for instance, a spider or a snake, then You made a huge progress, because in this way you only have to avoid the snakes and the spiders in order to have a minimal control over your anxiety.
So, very often this state leads to individual symptoms, but sometimes, when many people in the population are in this state, it leads to a mass formation.
A mass formation which is exactly the same as an individual symptom, but at the collective level.
Because what happens in a mass formation is the following.
When many people are in this state, With a lot of free-floating anxiety, for instance?
If at that moment a narrative is distributed through the mass media, indicating an object of anxiety, and at the same time providing a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety, then all this free-floating anxiety might connect to the object of anxiety, And there might be a huge willingness in the population to participate in a strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, even if it is utterly absurd.
Because most people even realize that their individual symptoms and their collective behavior is absurd, but it won't take away that they will continue to go along with the narrative as if it is true.
And that's what happens in a mass formation.
All this free-floating anxiety connects.
To this object of anxiety, there is this willingness to participate in a strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, no matter how absurd it is.
And in this way, people experience like a first important psychological process or advantage.
They will have the feeling that they now can control their anxiety a little bit, and they also anticipate the moment when they can direct all this frustration and aggression at the object of anxiety or at the people that do not want to go along with the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety.
So that's the first step in every major mass formation in history, every large-scale mass formation.
That's the first step.
The object of anxiety can be the Jews, or the witches, or the Muslims, or no matter what.
The dirty unvaccinated.
The dirty unvaccinated, yes.
Yeah, that one just feels very personal to me because I see it in people's eyes.
Anyway, it's a very scary phenomenon to witness.
All right, we've got disconnectedness and loneliness, meaning failure, free-floating anxiety, all of these are preconditions, and then the fourth.
Yes, yes, well, the fourth condition is actually the free-floating frustration, and I usually split them in two.
The free-floating anxiety is the third condition, and the free-floating frustration and aggression is the fourth condition.
Yes, and then, because you should distinguish them from each other, actually, because Some people, for some people, the anxiety is the most important factor.
For other people, the frustration and aggression is the most important factor.
But no matter what, it leads to this first important step in the process of mass formation, meaning the coupling or the connection between A certain mental representation of an object of anxiety that is presented through the mass media and then the participation in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety.
For instance, the lockdowns to deal with the virus.
That's the first step in the process of mass formation.
But there is a second step, which is even more important.
And it is that Because many people participate at the same time in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety.
People have the feeling of fighting a collective heroic battle with the object of anxiety, and that makes them feel connected again.
It seems to create this new social bond, meaning that in this way, it seems as if the mass formation Eliminates the root cause of the problems, namely this lack of connection, this disconnectedness between the human being and its environment.
But that's the point.
You could say, well, what's the problem?
What's the problem?
People felt disconnected and now they feel connected again.
They feel reunited.
But the problem is that the process of mass formation leads to a very specific social bond.
A mass or a crowd is a group that is not formed because individuals connect to each other.
A mass is a group that is formed because each individual separately connects to a collective ideal or to the collective, meaning that this solidarity in the masses, which is so typical for the masses, as soon as a mass forms,
The masters will typically talk about solidarity and citizenship, but this solidarity is never a solidarity between individuals, it's a solidarity of every individual separately, towards a collective, and even more, the longer the mass formation exists, The more the social bonds between the individuals will be destroyed and replaced by a very strong social bond, a very strong solidarity of every individual separately with the collective.
And that is what explains why, for instance, in Iran, a mother in the end reports her son, someone with whom she used to have a very strong individual bond, To the state, for the sake of the collective.
That also explains why, for instance, in the corona crisis, everybody was full of solidarity and talking about solidarity.
And at the same time, strangely enough, people accepted that if someone got an accident on the street, We were no longer allowed to help that person.
Everybody was talking about solidarity with the elderly, and at the same time they accepted, strangely enough, that if their father and mother were dying at home, they were no longer allowed to visit them.
So that's the strange
destructive mechanism of mass formation, that it sucks all the energy away from the bonds between the people and injects all the energy in the bonds between the individual and the collective, leading in the end always to a radically paranoid atmosphere in which everyone snitches each other and in which there are in the end no relationships anymore between individuals and individuals are all completely isolated from each other.
Okay, so this leads, and I will confess up front, there's so much to be said about how, you know, if you take the picture that you've just painted and you stand and you look through the evolutionary lens at it, I think a lot of things resolve and then it raises different questions.
I don't know how to present that picture in a short period of time.
It's going to take a bunch of hashing out.
But one thing that is true is that some of what you have described is the pathological version of a process that clearly has a highly functional and desirable version.
And some will find this off-putting, but A religious community is obviously highly effective at getting through what I would call bottlenecks, at resisting confrontation with other groups, at resisting the fashions and whims of a society.
Those religious communities Have the structure you're describing, right?
Where, you know, person A and person B have a bond that comes from the fact that they both feel they have a personal relationship with someone who died 2,000 years ago and whose origin story conflicts with what we understand of biology.
Right?
That's an interesting fact, but it is an also undeniable fact that two people who do share a belief in that story can find a kinship very quickly just simply upon knowledge that they have subscribed to the same book.
Right?
So, I have argued many times that religions, long-standing ones, are evolutionarily adaptive.
That they are adaptive in spite of being literally false.
That their purpose is what I call metaphorical truth.
Metaphorical truths are truths that are functional.
That is to say, even though they're not literally right, if you behave as if they are right, it benefits you evolutionarily.
And so the question then is, what do we make of mass formation?
If mass formation is a variation on a theme that is adaptive, is mass formation adaptive?
In which way?
And so this leads us to the paradoxes that you point out.
Why are intelligent people equally, if not more, vulnerable to participating in mass formation, right?
That's a good question.
You haven't said it yet, but I know from reading and listening to your work that you believe that these totalitarian regimes that arise out of mass formation always fail.
I also believe they always fail.
The question is, does that mean that this pattern is like a tumor which kills its host and it has no evolutionary meaning, or is this something more than a tumor?
And the fact that the totalitarian system fails does not mean that this is an evolutionary paradox, but you have to stand somewhere else to see it.
I don't know how clear those questions are, but what do you hear so far?
They are clear, but they are very, very difficult.
Maybe and maybe not.
Yes, because the masses, there are different types of masses.
And indeed, I do believe that the modern masses are always self-destructive.
And together with me, I think that almost every A scholar who studied the modern masses throughout the last 200 years concluded in the same vein.
They all concluded in one way or another the masses are only capable of destruction.
And as soon as they destroyed everything around them, everything that doesn't belong to them, they start to destroy themselves.
You could never see this more clearly than in the Soviet Union.
In the Soviet Union, which was the most totalitarian system that has ever existed, much more totalitarian, or it was much further in the process of totalitarianization and mass elimination than Nazi Germany, for instance.
In the Soviet Union, you could see that first.
The masses, led by Stalin, started to eliminate everyone who didn't belong to them, or who could not belong to them.
For instance, the aristocracy, the small farmers, the large farmers, then the goldsmiths, the Jews, and so on.
They were all considered incapable of giving up their private property, and hence they could never become good communists.
They had to be destroyed.
But after that, after everyone was eliminated, that couldn't join the masses according to the masses themselves, they just started to eliminate the one group after the other without any logic in it.
Nobody understood anymore why suddenly this group had to be destroyed or had to be deported to the gulags.
Nobody understood it anymore.
So that's the blind, irrational destructiveness that is typical for the masses and that in the end leads to the fact that, to use the words of Hannah Arendt, the masses in the end typically become a monster that devours its own children.
The problem is the monster devours its own children.
I totally agree with this and I'm a big fan of Hannah Arendt.
The problem is that the people who constituted the mass continue.
And so evolutionarily speaking, the fact that the mass does not persist does not mean that the mass was counterproductive to the evolutionary, I'm going to use the term loosely, objective.
And this is what I hope we can wrestle out of this, is that there are There are two processes in human beings that are hereditary.
One of them is genetic, and the other is cultural.
There are more, but those are the two biggies.
A dual inheritance system.
And the problem is, the genes are the driver, from the point of view of the objective of being a creature, including a human.
But in humans, the much more interesting part is the software level, right?
And that software level can believe different things at different times.
But in some sense, if you were to go back through the history of belief of your own lineage, And you were to trace it back, you know, obviously this becomes impossible before the invention of writing, but let's say you could go back a million years into your own lineage and look at all of the things that your ancestors believed.
None of them were a failure.
They were mostly wrong, literally, but they did get you here.
And so that's the question, is mass formation to me looks like an adaptive pattern and it is confusing to us because the content of it is so upside down that we think this just has to be madness, which is in fact why people put the term psychosis on, right?
This appears to be a madness.
But the problem is a true psychosis is a dysfunction, right?
It is a failure to understand the world.
And while the individual wrapped up in the mass fails to understand the world, to be certain, they may well be in the better position to get to the next chapter than the person who says, hey, wait a minute, what are you talking about?
Right?
And that is, I think, the most disturbing thing about this is that the evolutionary story does not offer us comfort just because the mass fails, right?
The mass doesn't really fail.
That's not what happens.
And just a couple more things.
In fact, there's no reason that you would necessarily know, but do you know why I ended up in the public eye or how that happened?
Do you know the evergreen story?
Yes, I think I know it.
But please... Well, I won't say terribly much, except that my wife and I were extremely popular professors at a small, very liberal college, and we had a very devoted and wonderful community of students that we taught evolution.
And as the woke revolution took over the college, I initially ended up in a confrontation with my faculty colleagues, and that confrontation with my faculty colleagues resulted in a group of students that I had literally never met arriving at my classroom and demanding that I be fired for racism.
Now, I'm no racist.
I'm quite the opposite.
But it didn't matter to them.
It was quite clearly a little a little mass.
But here's the reason I raise it.
Two days before that happened, I put a model on the board.
And the model, this was something that I was generating in my own head as I was watching myself turned into the witch in preparation for a witch hunt by my colleagues.
And And so I was hashing this out with my students and trying to explain to them what I thought was unfolding.
And I wrote this model on the board.
That every witch hunt has four groups in it, right?
One group is the tiny number of people who will initiate a witch hunt.
Then there's a small but substantial group who will go along with the witch hunt, right?
Then there's a large number of people who will say nothing.
And then there is a small number of people who resist, and those are the witches.
Now, as I was going through your book with my wife, Heather Hying, last night, I found you have that model, you have it divided in three, but it's the same model and it has the same punchline, right?
The punchline is, Your source of witches is the resistors to the mass formation.
Now, when I wrote that on the board, I didn't know anybody else had a model like that.
I didn't know what mass formation was.
But the point is, in facing one, it became apparent that this was its inherent structure.
Right?
I faced a little tiny mass, right?
Inside my college, a few hundred people were highly animated by a nonsense story that our college was being taken over by white supremacy, right?
Which couldn't have been farther from the truth.
So anyway, I got to see a little miniature version of it.
I mean, I was literally hunted on this campus.
They were looking for me.
I was the witch in their eyes, which was a completely bizarre experience.
I heard a story before.
I heard a story before.
Yes, yes, yes.
It must have been a terrible experience.
And indeed, it's like an experience of a mass formation, a small-scale mass formation.
Well, a terrible experience.
On the other hand, how lucky was I to get to experience it at that scale before COVID?
Right?
Having seen that up close, I knew it was like a training camp for how you look at such a bizarre phenomenon and grapple with its meaning.
Anyway, we don't need to get lost in that story.
My point was the model that came out of it.
Can I respond to your question?
Please, please.
So, in my opinion, I do believe that mass formation in many respects should be considered a state of madness.
And I know that I just said that I don't use the term psychosis, but if you mean with madness, a process in which an individual participates in something that might lead to his own destruction, then I would say that it is a kind of madness.
And I think it is even important to consider it like that.
Because I think that whether you go along with the masses or whether you defy the masses, in both scenarios you might very well become the victim of the masses.
And, you know, Stalin, for instance, started to eliminate, he eliminated in the end 60% of the members of his own Communist Party without them having The possibility to prevent them from being eliminated, because it was almost at random that he picked them and that he condemned them to death.
And in the same way, I think that that is exactly what is so important to realize, that you never have to try to destroy the masses.
In the end, they will always just exhaust themselves, potentially destroy themselves.
But what you should focus on is preventing that they destroy you.
And that's if you look at the psychological, from a psychological perspective, if you look at the mechanism, then you soon Then you can see that the most crucial thing, I always repeat that, that's the most important message I can bring at this moment, is that the better you understand the psychological mechanism of mass formation, the more you understand that it is just crucial that dissonant voices continue to speak out.
And why?
Because by continuing to speak out you exactly prevent that the madness of the masses and their leaders becomes complete and that the masses end up in the state in which they become so fanatically convinced that everyone who goes against them is actually inhumane, lacks solidarity, lacks citizenship, is irrational and so on and consequently should be destroyed as a
Exactly because he is so inhumane.
So this, I think, the entire process for me shows that we are dealing with a process which leads people to a complete blindness, a complete self-destructiveness and a complete absurdity in which you should always consider as a kind of a state in which people, in which the mental capacities of people are very limited.
I think that many people try to explain mass formation from the perspective of that just follow the money and you will understand why they do it or just realize that there are power-hungry individuals who want to be in charge of everything.
I agree with Hannah Arendt that that is not right.
The typical characteristics of totalitarian leaders is not that they are after the money or not that they want more and more power.
The typical characteristic of a totalitarian leader is his radical ideological blindness.
The radical ideological blindness which pushes him to impose his ideology to the collective and to society, no matter what the cost is, even If it means that he will be killed himself, that he will lose everything.
The typical totalitarian leader will typically continue trying to impose his ideology to society.
And then at the lower levels, at the lower levels of a totalitarian state, you find psychopaths, perverts, people who are after the money, people who want power and so on.
But the top level is characterized by ideological blindness, I think.
Okay, here is the crux of our disagreement, and let me just say, I hope the better argument wins, right?
If it's your argument, that will in one way be comforting to me, and I'm happy to go there, but I am going To try to persuade you that what is madness at the individual level is not madness at the collective level, and that evolutionarily speaking, that collective level matters more, which is why we see the pattern.
First, I want to go back to something you said, and I want to pressure test it a little bit.
So you said that the indicator, tell me if I've got your meaning wrong here, I'm paraphrasing you, but you said that the indicator that this was madness was that people were willing to engage in behaviors that put them in danger of destruction.
Is that effectively right?
Yes.
Okay.
But if we take that same logic, if I say, well, you know, is a player of American football, are they engaged in madness?
Because they are taking substantial risks of harms to their cognitive capacity, to their ability to move around in the world.
They might even sustain a very serious injury, a crippling one.
That's a good question, yes.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I'll just fast forward.
Obviously, they're not crazy.
We can explain their behavior from the point of view of the rewards that they get outweigh the risks that they take, or at least in their mind, it seems likely that they do.
Is that fair?
Yes.
Okay.
What about a soldier?
Who goes into battle, right?
Knows that they may not come back, right?
This is a person engaged in a very dangerous behavior.
Yet, you know, obviously in wartime, you can be shot for deserting.
In peacetime or something like peacetime, the rewards that are offered to your family make it sensible.
We can say the same, we can say something similar in the even more radical case of a kamikaze pilot or a suicide bomber, that there is an analysis whereby, I mean, if we just take the trivial version, if Is it worth taking a substantial risk or maybe even volunteering for a suicidal mission if it puts your family at sufficient advantage?
Let's say that your family was very jeopardized and you engage in some behavior and you're gone, but the position of your children is so much better than it would have been that the rationality is apparent.
It's brutal.
Right?
We may not like that it's there, but it's comprehensible.
Right?
So, are you with me so far?
Yeah, yes, I am.
Definitely.
Yes.
Okay.
So, I have one other piece of my history that I want to introduce here.
When I was an undergraduate, I was working with one of the great 20th century evolutionary biologists, a guy named Bob Trivers.
I wrote a paper, the final paper that I wrote in his class was on the Holocaust.
And the purpose of my paper was to Look into the claim that Hitler was a madman.
This was something I heard very often as a young person growing up far closer to World War II than I realized at the time.
I mean, I obviously knew how many years it was, but it seemed a long time ago.
And now, obviously, we're more than twice as far out.
The upshot of that paper was that Hitler was a monster, as everyone knows, and I believe that as strongly as anyone, maybe more strongly.
But what he did was not evolutionarily irrational.
From the point of view of his gene pool, It may very well have been rational.
And when I raise this point, it always puts me in an awkward position with people because they hear some kind of defense of it in there.
And I mean the opposite.
What I mean is, if you're going to prevent this, you have to understand why it happens.
And so in any case, my point here is, I've been interested in the question of why this takes place for a very long time.
Until I ran into your work, I didn't know that there was this body of thought that apparently goes back to before the beginning of the 20th century on mass formation.
And so I've been looking at it from an evolutionary perspective almost strictly.
But these two things collide, right?
It's a question of consilience, I think.
Consilience meaning when you happen onto the same story from different disciplines and there's a way to reconcile them and suddenly you have a much more complete picture because You know, what you're describing is a process of individual psychology in which an individual appears to be utterly mad because they're saying things that cannot be squared with reality and they appear to be completely committed to them even though they are putting themselves in great danger by subscribing, right?
You know, in psychology, you can see, well, okay, but psychology is an individual phenomenon, but there is a group manifestation.
There is something about group psychology that is also very real, even though we can't put it in an fMRI machine and scan it, right?
But it's there.
It clearly is a fact.
And then what I'm saying is, from an evolutionary perspective, We have the same dichotomy.
We have the individual and their fitness.
And what we fail to do well is understand the lineage and its fitness.
And I believe that the solution to the puzzle that you're pointing to, the madness of these immense numbers of people, is actually a diabolical rationality.
And that, you know, I'm sure you and I are completely aligned in being terrified by this process.
And the question is, is it worth discovering the nature of lineage psychology?
Discovering that Hannah Arendt's correct belief that these ideologies destroy themselves isn't really comforting if this is the mechanism a lineage uses to get through a historical bottleneck.
Is that making sense? - I think so, yes.
But I'm interested in learning more about this diabolic rationality of the masses.
Can you… Yes.
Is it rational?
Because I still don't understand in what way you consider it rational.
Well… You mean rational in the view of this supra-organism, this larger organism that the masses Rational, so I must tell you.
You will be well aware of the naturalistic fallacy, right?
If I describe that something is a product of evolution, I'm not defending it.
And in fact, although humanity's best characteristics are all products of evolution, so are all of our worst characteristics.
And I think it is our obligation to augment and amplify the honorable characteristics and to banish the evil ones.
But I don't want to pretend that they're not comprehensible.
They're quite comprehensible.
And so, You know, the point is, look, let's say that Hitler had succeeded, right?
Let's say that he had exterminated the Jews and then maybe he branched out and, you know, he had left the continent of Europe Aryan, maybe left the world Aryan, right?
From the point of view of the genes in his genome, that would have been a massive win.
5,000 years after it had happened, he might have been largely, you know, forgotten, right?
The average person might have the same relationship with Hitler that, you know, that I have with Caligula, right?
I can barely explain who that is.
And so the point is, the genes are not overly concerned About what the people who have those genes are saying or thinking at any moment.
The question is, how do I get into the future?
And one way to get into the future is to eliminate people who share fewer of those genes and to promote people who have more of them.
And so, you know, if Hitler had gone after people who parted their hair on the left versus the right, that would be a paradox.
But because what he did is he went after people who would, if they were eliminated, be replaced by people who were more closely related to him.
This is a genetically comprehensible strategy, right?
It is, in fact, highly effective.
And so I don't want us to get lost in the fact that Hitler was dead wrong about the genetic superiority of the people that he was advancing, but genes don't care about this.
Genes want their particular spellings to get into the future, even if the gene, you know, if we're talking about two genes for a respiratory enzyme.
And one of those genes is 50% more efficient.
The one that's less efficient still wants to get into the future and destroy its competitor.
I use want very loosely.
Obviously, they don't really want anything, but they behave as if they want these things.
And both versions of the gene want to get into the future.
They're not really interested in finding out which gene is more effective.
They don't care.
Okay.
Can I respond to that?
Please.
Yes.
In my two-cent word opinion, you now think that you imagine a Hitler who acts and thinks in a rational way and who indeed starts a program of protecting genes and so on and so on, and who succeeds in implementing this rational program.
But the problem is, I think, that this process of mass formation seems rational sometimes, but it isn't.
In this respect, for instance, Hitler started eliminating the Gypsies, the Jews, then he wanted to eliminate the Polish people, the Lithuanians, all the people with limitations in Germany, and also all the people with with heart problems, lung problems, were on his list.
All the Germans with heart problems, lung problems.
And I think that history has shown us that if this process continues, it starts to become completely irrational, wait, also from the perspective of the ideology of the one who is leading the masses.
And exactly because the real function of this process of mass formation is not ultimately is not so much imposing a rational ideology to the world, the real function of this process is to handle and to control anxiety, frustration and aggression.
And this process continues.
There is something in the process of mass formation which makes that it can never stop.
Because first the masses, as the masses emerge, they They have one object of anxiety that is indicated in a narrative, and they try to eliminate, to destroy this object of anxiety.
But as soon as they succeed in destroying this object of anxiety, what they will find out is that they need a new object of anxiety, simply because the masses themselves don't want to wake up, because they would be confronted again with all this disconnectedness and all this frustration, aggression, anxiety.
If the masses want the mass formation to continue, the leaders know that the mass formation must continue because otherwise they will be killed by the masses themselves.
If the masses wake up, they will typically destroy their leaders.
So both the masses and the leaders know that the phenomenon of mass formation should not stop.
Meaning that after they have destroyed the first object of anxiety, they have to find the second object of anxiety which can be destroyed, and then a third, a fourth, a fifth, and so on.
And now we see that, in the end, this process of mass formation, in my opinion, is not so much, while it seems, As if the masses and their leaders and the totalitarian state try to impose a rational ideology, for instance, the selection of the optimal genes, to the population.
What really drives them is their own anxiety and their own problems at the level of disconnectedness, meaning that, and their attempt to deal with their anxiety and their attempt to create a new connection is always a symptomatic one, and in the end always fails, just because the masses do not create new connections between individuals.
As I just explained 10 minutes ago or something, they create a connection between the individual and the collective, meaning that in the end I think that mass formation is always a kind of a symptom.
It's a symptom which develops in an organism, for instance in a society, in which The initial stage seems to solve a problem, but which in the end becomes fatal and destructive for the organism that develops a symptom.
So I think you can perfectly compare it to a tumor.
And in this respect, I think that the selection of genes It could be fruitful and selective if it happened outside a phenomenon of mass formation, in a truly enlightened mind.
There it could be something rational that leads to good results.
But the problem is that as soon as it becomes the ideology of a mass, it will, I think, always be counterproductive and in the end lead to the destruction of also the masters themselves.
So that's my first initial reaction to your...
Yeah, I know why we're tripping over this stage of interaction.
Yeah.
It has to do, remember at the beginning of the conversation, I said that when people who don't really know each other very well meet, they have only the blunt version of language.
The problem is the word rational.
Right.
I don't mean what I think almost everyone will take from that term here.
And I just realized what the distinction is.
Right.
Let's say that hypothetically we have some friend and they've fallen madly in love.
In fact, the term madly in love, right?
This person becomes hard to interact with.
They are very difficult.
You know, the person, the object of their love is something that they can't be objective about in the slightest, right?
It would be fair to say that this is a state of madness.
Right?
It is inconsistent with reality, right?
The chances that they've actually fallen in love with somebody who's that perfect are zero.
And yet, even though they rationally know that, they still feel it, right?
Is it irrational to fall in love?
To be honest?
Yeah.
I think it is.
Oh, then you're not doing it right.
By which I don't mean.
I think I agree with Freud who said, if you don't lose your rationality from time to time, it means you have not so much to lose.
I believe we should be rational all from time to time.
Okay, okay.
No, this is perfect.
We're now finding out how you use this term, right?
Your use of this term runs into what I would say is a failure mode at the point we encounter somebody who's madly in love, right?
Because I would say, look, There's a reason that you are wired to lose your cognitive rationality and it has everything to do with your long-term well-being, right?
And your long-term well-being isn't even your long-term well-being.
It is directly involved in your lineage's well-being going forward, right?
So that irrationality serves an evolutionary purpose very clearly.
Yes, I see.
But you need irrationality to transcend yourself from time to time.
Yeah.
Yes.
But I do too.
I mean, I use that, you know, and in fact, I know that you and I are going to agree here because one of the things that caught my attention and Heather's attention in your work is your deep understanding of the problem of reductionism, the hazard I know that you and I are going to agree here because one of the things And so what does it mean not to fall into that trap?
What it means is that you have little mechanisms for allowing yourself not to be able to answer what connects A and B and say, well, I'm sure there's something there and it could look like X.
Maybe I'll come up with something that I don't really think does connect them, but is in principle a proof that something could, right?
And And then with that spackle covering that hole, I can go and build a model.
And it doesn't mean I think it is or it isn't true, but the point is a scientist who thinks in an emergent way and works on things complex enough that they don't understand every element has to allow themselves leeway in places, right?
You have to not hold yourself to a perfectly high standard for every step in the thing that you're trying to understand or you'll be paralyzed.
So anyway, that is a kind of irrationality that is essential to high quality work.
Is that fair?
Yes, it is.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, I don't know if you're eager to respond, in which case I don't want to stop you, but No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead, I'm listening.
So I just want to, I want to now connect the picture that we've got, right?
We now understand that we're using rationality in specialized ways, right?
I'm arguing that sometimes selection has us do something that if we zoom in too close is perfectly irrational, right?
We have people saying perfectly irrational things in a mass formation.
Is the behavior of the mass rational from the point of view of a lineage getting into the future?
That's the question.
And I'm perfectly happy to swap out the term rational for some other term, but successful, adaptive, right?
And therefore that the belief system, the irrational belief system, Doesn't need to persist in order for the strategy to be a success.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
Maybe it could be considered rational from this point of view.
Maybe.
But I believe Nietzsche, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, would probably say that mass formation is rational in this respect.
That it helps the weaker people to survive because they connect to each other in a mass and they start to belong to a supra-organism.
I remember certain quotes of Nietzsche who go in that direction.
But anyway, it could be considered rational, I think, from this point of view.
But I also think there could be A different type of rationality in the process of mass formation, I think.
And allow me to describe another perspective that could make us see that the process of mass formation maybe has some rationality in it.
You know, when a mass formation forms, when a mass emerges in a society, there is always a group who doesn't go along with the masses.
This group is typically put under a huge pressure.
And under these circumstances, this group can go in two directions.
It can form a mass itself.
And in this way, we have a small mass and a large mass who polarize.
And very often, in that case, the small mass is destroyed just because there are two groups functioning according to the same destructive principles.
And very often, the small group is destroyed.
Not always, but very often.
But then this group has also another option.
If this group decides to do something Very specific, he will not only survive, but he will go through an extremely fast process of mental evolution.
And it is the following, that this group, if this group decides to continue to speak out and to stick to the principles of humanity itself, while the masses typically dehumanize, Then this group, at a very fast pace, in a very short period of time, will become more and more aware of these principles of humanity and will become stronger and stronger, both at the mental and at the physical level.
That was perfectly described by Saltzenichin, among many other people, who described how in the Gulags, most prisoners became radically beast-like.
They started to behave in a beastly manner.
And they started to crush each other's skulls just to steal each other's food and each other's clothes and they became even worse for each other than the guards were already for them and so on.
But, Solzhenitsyn said, for one reason or another, there was also A small group of prisoners who went in exactly the opposite direction.
In this pool of darkness, they chose to represent a little bit of light, and they remained loyal to the principles of humanity, to certain ethical standards, and Solzhenitsyn observed something very specific in this small group.
Some of them died, but many of them became stronger and stronger and stronger.
At the mental level and at the physical level.
And Solzhenitsyn said that for him, he won the Nobel Prize for this wonderful book, The Gulag Archipelago, where he described this among other things.
And he described how he knew Prisoners who entered the gulags sickly, and because they were so unloyal to their ethical principles, they became stronger and stronger at the physical level.
And in the end, they survived the gulags.
And so that, if you look at mass formation and the totalitarianism from a little bit of distance, then you see a very typical process, which could be rational in this respect, that it is nature
that puts a lot of pressure, that makes that there's a large group, a large organism, puts a lot of pressure on a small group and pushes it in a direction and on a pathway where it would never go without the pressure of the masses of the large group and in which, in this way, nature creates like a mechanism that gives birth to
a new and more clear awareness of what it means to be human and in which it produces like a kind of awareness in human beings and the kind of strength that would not exist without this dehumanizing organism that the masses is.
We could also look at it like that, then it also makes sense, then it is also rational, but from a completely different perspective.
Well, first of all, I cannot help but see in what you've just described exactly the experience that happened during the pandemic, because I will guess that you've had the same experience that I have had, where
The pandemic has strained relationships that felt extremely solid beforehand, but it has also forged a tremendous number of very high quality connections with people who have extraordinary capacities and who amplify each other's humanity.
That's been the silver lining for, I think, many of us is that we have And so that's a very powerful force.
courageous, insightful people, yourself among them in my case.
And so that's a very powerful force.
I hear you saying that maybe the troubling authoritarian mass, that it could be rational in the sense that it creates this reaction that's very high quality.
I think they are both rational.
And you know, one of the things that's hard to see evolutionarily is we tend to think, well, what is the best strategy?
And the point is, well, you've got strategies and counter strategies.
You know, I have written on my notes here, mass versus anti-mass, because there is something about the process of the people who do appear to have resisted the madness and to have shown such strength of character that has some of the same characteristics, right?
We have scratched our itch in a very different way, but nonetheless, the camaraderie in your description It is the terror of loneliness and the inability to interpret the world that drives people to scratch that itch by signing on to a nonsense story that gives the promise of some kind of salvation.
And that thing created a world in which some of us became obsessed with making sense from actual evidence, difficult as that is, and it created a camaraderie of a different kind.
So basically the point is everybody's looking for camaraderie and there are a couple different paths.
One of them is easy and very dangerous.
The other is Well, dangerous to the individual at an extraordinary level, but nonetheless does bring you in the same kind of contact, and it is very reassuring to discover that there are others, for example.
Go ahead.
We should watch out that we do not become a real mass.
I think the most important distinction between a sound and fruitful group formation and a mass formation is that in a group, in a In a good group formation, there is on the one hand, a certain bond between the individual and the collective, but also the bonds between individuals are strong.
And there is a real solidarity between the individuals as well.
And I think that I also, I discovered many new friendships during the crisis.
And in my experience, It existed of really strong bonds between the individuals.
I don't think that I started to form a mass with other people.
Like, look, when you and me are talking now, we can have a different opinion.
Yes, I was just going to say this.
That's how we know this isn't a mass.
We haven't agreed on some abstraction.
Even, you know, if we were going to, right?
The group of people that we are now mutually in contact with.
have resonated with mass formation as an idea, and we have seen it move around.
So if there was an idea that we were all going to sign on to and not notice, you know, that there was an incompleteness here or a paradox there, that would be it.
But you're right, we're not doing that.
And that is, maybe that's the check That we need to know that we are not in a mass is are we holding each other's feet to the fire or not, right?
And I don't want to be part of any group that isn't willing to honorably hold each other's feet to the fire.
For one thing, that's how we make sense.
That's the whole point of the endeavor, right?
We will, you know, we will freeze ourselves in place with a narrative that isn't true if we don't pressure test it and challenge each other.
Indeed, yes.
But I think suddenly it seems to me to be a very attractive idea or a very attractive question.
Like, indeed, on the one hand we could say that from a rational point of view the smartest choice is to go along with the masses And to feel protected by the masses?
On the other hand, we could also say no, it's the other way around.
It's better to belong to the small group because if you do the right thing as a small group, if you stick to your ethical principles, You will go through this fast process of evolution, which has been described by many people, and which maybe is the real destiny of the human being, to become an ethically aware human being with an enlightened mind.
Perfect.
And, you know, I keep trying to explain to people who, you know, as I'm sure happens with you, people will come up and they will say, you're very brave.
I admire you this, that, and the other.
I try to explain.
This situation left no choice.
I literally do not know how I would have done the other thing, right?
I wouldn't have been able to stand it for five minutes.
And so it is that which, you know, does, you know, it does rob it of a certain amount of courage.
I didn't have a choice.
I didn't make the choice to do this.
It just simply was the only thing that was tolerable.
But it does raise this other question.
One of the things I saw, so I saw Two mass formations in a row, right?
There's the mass formation around woke ideology, which did the same thing.
It created a group of people who came together from very different perspectives, battled the irrationality of the claims, and it was a wonderful chapter.
Then when COVID came, it shocked me because it took the group of people who had formed this anti-mass to the woke ideology and it divided it.
Some of the people who saw right through the woke ideology fell right in line with the, I mean, I call it, I call them medically woke.
Right?
It's equally irrational and yet, and they've demonstrated the capacity to see through irrational things and the courage to do it.
And yet in this case, something about this story was in their blind spot.
I can't, I can't understand it.
Maybe, maybe you do.
Why is it that people who have resistance to this in one context don't have resistance in another?
Yes, I think that the emergence of the woke culture in our society was like a preparatory phase for the large mass formations that still have to come.
Because, in my opinion, the corona crisis was the first real mass formation, exactly because it has this It's a baffling characteristic that it splits all the existing groups in two.
That's the signature of a real mass formation.
It is energetically so strong that it re-divides, re-organizes the entire social structure.
And once one real mass formation emerged in society, very often a second one and a third one and a fourth one follows, just because the mass formation recreates the conditions that made it emerge.
Mass formation started on the basis of loneliness and disconnectedness, but the mass formation itself leads to even much more disconnectedness and loneliness.
While it seems to do the opposite in the beginning, it destroys the social bond further, and after a mass formation there is even more lonely people, more disconnected people, which Very often makes that a second mass formation and a third one emerges shortly after the first one ceased to exist or disappeared a little bit in the background.
So I believe that The phenomenon is very well known.
If a real mass formation emerges, then something happens, something very specific happens in certain people, which is referred to as a mental surrender.
People who were convinced, anti-totalitarians or anti-fascists or no matter what, Very often suddenly become fascist themselves as soon as a fascist mass formation emerges, just because they don't have the mental energy or the psychological strength.
To prevent that all the energy is sucked away from their mental representations and invested in only this limited set of mental representations that is shared by the group.
I know personally many people who wrote articles, many people, I know a few people who wrote articles about the dangers of technocratic totalitarianism, about the dangers of extreme collectivism and conformism and then the corona crisis started and in the blink of an eye they conformed to the mainstream narrative and they declared everyone crazy who didn't go along with the mainstream narrative.
So that's the strange thing.
In my case, not the opposite happened, but something different happened.
I had exactly the same experience as the one that you described.
I talked about it in numerous podcasts before this one, that in the beginning of the crisis, I realized immediately I will speak out.
I have no other option.
And I will continue speaking out, no matter what it brings to me or no matter what the consequences are.
I just immediately knew if I don't speak out now, I will never have to speak out.
And I will do it.
I will just do it.
And I started to speak almost without I didn't have the feeling that I choose for it.
I knew it.
I will speak out.
Right.
In my case, I would say...
I had had that discussion with myself decades ago, right?
I think in part, in my case, growing up as a Jew, as close to the end of World War II as I did, I was born in 1969, so a quarter century later, but nonetheless close enough that it was on people's minds.
Many people I knew had seen it, and my basic feeling was, I looked at all of the people who waited too long to speak out, who did something that leaves me frustrated even hearing what their response was, and my thought was, I will not go along with such a thing, right?
Even at the cost of my life.
I would much rather take my best shot and not be left with the question of why didn't I do more than to be stuck.
And so anyway, at the point that you get to the thing, you know, the choice is just made.
Yes, in my case as well.
My family also has this tradition of speaking out no matter what the coast is.
Certain people in my ancestors did that.
I also think that I also, when I started to work at university, and I saw how many flawed research there was, I immediately started to review it.
And I tried to show what the problems were with this kind of research.
And after two years at university, 90% of the people was very angry with me, and the other 10% really respected me.
And I had this...
Also there, in that period, throughout the last 20 years, I really became used to having 90% of the people against me and trying to continue to speak out in a very quiet way without trying to hurt anyone and being respectful as much as possible.
But still, I always refused to shut up.
And when the corona crisis started, I knew like, look, This time I will speak in public space.
I used to speak out and only in the academic world but I knew like this one I will speak out in public space and I don't know if that was also something that you experienced but While I continue to speak out, people were throwing mud at me here in the Belgian newspapers.
It happens all the time, even now.
If the mainstream media talk about me, it's always in a very negative and condescending way.
As I practiced and as I tried to continue to speak out without really becoming aggressive myself or without just calm and quiet, I really had this feeling that I felt as if a very warm and soft power grew stronger in me.
This experience in itself, for me, compensates for everything that I have lost in the crisis, which is not so much.
I have been excommunicated from certain groups at university.
I won't be too dramatic about it.
But still, no matter what I would lose, I would want to give it, if I have this phenomenon in return, that you feel the soft power that is increasing in myself and that that for me is the as the essence of life actually um i i agree and i uh i wish i knew how to convey what you're describing to a larger audience i
I will say it's very interesting to hear that you have polarized the institutions you've been part of.
I've had that same phenomenon.
I've polarized every institution I've been a part of.
And, you know, when people who don't, who haven't had that experience hear it, they think, how terrible that you're polarizing.
And the answer is, No, I want the respect of the people that I think their respect means something, right?
If you polarize an institution and all of the people who are, you know, phonies or corrupt or cowards, if they all, you know, line up against you and the people that you actually admire are like ready to acknowledge, yeah, You make sense, then the answer is, well, what else would you have done?
Do you want the respect of people who aren't respectable?
I don't, right?
And so, yes, what you are describing, what I think I have also experienced, is a training program for something.
It's a developmental experience that generates certain characteristics that, if you have them, you're not eager to trade them for something else.
Right.
I mean, I feel the same way in some sense about, you know, I have what people describe as dyslexia.
It interfered with my ability to do normal schoolwork.
But I don't look at it as something that I lost.
I looked at it as something that forced me into patterns that I I wouldn't know what to do without.
And so anyway, yeah, the path of somebody who polarizes institutions is not necessarily fun hour to hour, but viewed on a long timescale, it's very clarifying.
And I wish more people realized that and didn't fear causing people to reject them.
Yes, yes, yes, I agree, I agree.
There is something, there is this, the Talmud says, if I'm not mistaken, if a human being does not speak, does not articulate the words that emerge in him or herself, and that seem to be honest and sincere words, Then he will slowly start to lose his soul.
And I do believe the opposite is true as well.
If you practice and if you constantly try to articulate the words that you consider to be sincere and honest words, no matter what the consequences are, and no matter how the group reacts to it, Then you will slowly start to be more aware of your own existence as a human being.
You will start to feel stronger.
You will feel your real identity.
You will be less in need of all kinds of ego and fake identities.
And I think, for me, the human being is intrinsically dependent on the quality of his speech.
I think that the speech, the quality of our speech, and then I don't mean the aesthetical qualities, but the sincerity of speech and the courage of your words, determines in a straightforward way The strength of your soul and the strength of your mind, I think.
And I think the better we realize that, the more we know that maybe we should tolerate that they take everything away of us in the end.
But we should make sure that they don't take away our humanity.
And that we, if we have to die, that we die with our principles and not without.
That's something that I became much more aware of during this crisis, like what is important and what is not important in this life here.
Yeah, I think that's beautifully said, and at the risk of tarnishing it, I will put it in what I take to be the evolutionary context.
You know, people are often prone to, you know, ask, what's really special about humans, right?
And they come up with all kinds of Things, but really in the end, it is speech.
And the reason that it is speech is because that allows two minds to share ideas, abstract ideas.
And this is the core of what we do that other creatures cannot.
I agree.
So anyway, in saying the quality of your speech, and The integrity of it, and I would argue the capacity of it to convey important nuance.
You're really talking about the thing about us that Unites the individual with something else, right?
Speech.
Yes, you can talk to yourself.
And, you know, I think a lot of us who care about speech probably do.
But the point is, To say that your speech is important is to imply that your relationship, the integrity of your relationship and your capacity to interact with somebody in a deep high bandwidth fashion is also at the core of, you know, the most meaningful element of being human.
And I 100% agree with that.
Yes, yes, yes.
I think that our relationship The social bond between humans is always intrinsically linguistic in nature, because we have no other option than to constantly try to interpret the other.
The expressions on the face, everything is interpreted by us.
We have no other option.
We constantly do.
We are linguistic entities for each other.
And we can only connect to each other through language, or the nature of our connection is linguistic intrinsically.
Yes, I think the art of speech is the answer, I think, to all totalitarianism.
Yes.
Now, Heather and I many times have discussed the fact that modernity Has taken many essential human functions, and it has shifted them to the market.
Whereas a person 200 or 300 years ago would have had many close contacts.
They probably would have known many of them for their whole life.
They would have had a life partner.
They would have produced children almost automatically.
Those relationships would have been very important to them.
All of those things would be true.
Now, children are very optional, partners are increasingly optional, and as the pandemic set in, it dawned on us that People trapped without even a single person that they could look in the eye and say, is this making sense to you?
Because I hear everybody saying nonsense and I don't know what to make of it.
If you didn't have one person that you could trust to say, yeah, I see it too, you were in grave danger of not making any sense at all.
And I wonder if that's part of what happened is that lots of people who didn't have partners, because you don't absolutely need one, Isolated in a way that maybe is almost without precedent?
No, of course it is.
Stalin isolated his population because he knew that they were much more vulnerable for propaganda than he intentionally did.
He isolated his population because he knew that it was much easier to To use propaganda in that case.
Hitler didn't, but the effect was the same.
Actually, as mass formation exists, it also spontaneously creates isolation and a certain loneliness.
But here in this case, with the corona crisis, we have never seen such an extreme state of isolation of the population.
Never, I think.
And at the same time, people were constantly bombarded with these messages, with propaganda through their iPhones, through their television, through radio, constantly.
So, it was the most extreme example of an optimal situation to use propaganda.
So, a couple of things I want to make sure we highlight here.
One is your point About one mass formation often follows another.
I was going to ask you about this because what I've seen, and I almost wonder if there's not an addiction where because people feel isolated, and I will argue in a moment that that is the most
Because our ancestors were starving and because no human is equipped to survive alone in the world, being isolated is a terrifying experience because it's basically a precursor to starving to death.
So, when people feel that isolation, either because it's induced by somebody who wants to control them, or because it's a natural consequence of technologies and economic systems that separate us, they have this desire to replace something that they've lost.
They don't necessarily know what it is, but when it is offered, In the form of sign up for this narrative and you suddenly become part of this large enthusiastic group, right?
We're going to be the winners, we're going to end up with the food and all you got to do is believe these things and say them and punish the right people and you can be one of us, right?
That satisfies, it relieves the pressure of the threat.
Right.
And then the point is, at some point, coronavirus stops being a compelling narrative, or the slate of beliefs is so far off the evidence, and podcasts are so full of people talking about, you know, the hazards that you may have exposed yourself to, if you believe these things, that people don't, they're not enthusiastic about it anymore.
And so then the point is, well, They're still looking for something that causes them to feel safe and together with people.
And so they're primed for some other topic.
And I, you know, I almost, I watched Trump as this uniting force, right?
We have to do away with this demon, become The public health narrative, right?
They're obviously almost unrelated topics.
And yet people went seamlessly from one to the other because they were on the same team and they had become addicted to that team.
And, you know, I do wonder where we are now, obviously.
Remarkable, I think, that as soon as the corona narrative disappeared a little bit in the background, the narrative on the war in Ukraine seemed to fulfil a little bit the same function.
There was, again, this tendency to consider the good and the bad very much in black and white.
And then also there was like a new object of anxiety and a new intolerance for dissonant voices.
Also this new enthusiasm, this new solidarity.
Yes.
I also think that at the moment now, it seems that mass formation became a little bit milder, mitigated a little bit.
But I don't think we are rid of...
So we see that the consequences of the mass formation are very, very severe at the psychological level.
Like, I don't know how it is in the United States, but I think it is the same.
But now that students are allowed to come back to university to follow courses on campus, they don't show up anymore.
Only 5% shows up.
The same holds for the professors and the assistants at university.
The buildings are empty.
In companies, I hear the same story.
In the cultural sector, the theatres and the movies, nobody shows up.
So that shows us something very specific, namely that the mass formation was extremely destructive at the level of the social bond.
And that, you know, the social bond People always at the same time find their deepest satisfaction in the social bond, but they also have to overcome a certain resistance to take a step to the other because of all kinds of things, shame, anxiety, uncertainty, self-awareness and so on.
And so if the energetic, the psychological energy invested in the social bond goes below a certain threshold, then you typically see that people prefer to stay home.
And that's what they do now.
That's what they do now.
Many people stay home or many people don't go back to work, don't go back to university.
And this probably will prepare them for an even more intense example of mass formation in the nearby future.
Unless, again, and that's so important, the dissonant voices really do their best, continue to speak out.
And I'm confident that there is a group of people who is very determined now that they won't remain silent and that they will speak out.
So I'm confident that the years to come probably will be very difficult years.
But the group who defies the masses and refuses to buy into the mainstream narrative will be large and determined enough, I think, to keep open a certain path, no matter how difficult it is, so that the totalitarian system cannot destroy everything.
Well, we have to figure out how to retain our ability to speak to the world.
I think the people who have emerged globally, it's a very powerful group of people.
And I think we are well positioned to speak carefully about what's unfolding.
And I agree that what is to come may be well worse than what we've already I will say to your point about People not going back to university, to their jobs, etc.
We've seen some of that in the U.S.
I think it's not quite the same, but I will say having had the opportunity after two years of really not straying very far from home, I have now traveled a couple of times, a little bit around the U.S., a little bit to Britain, and
I am struck by, it's very hard for me to explain and I want to be very cautious because it's possible that it's in my mind and I'm not actually seeing what's in the world, but I feel a kind of unease in the population that people have gone back to activities that they remember, they're taking pleasure in.
Being in the sun, things like this.
But there is this sense, and I definitely have it, that I have now watched a spasm of what took place In Russia, before the formation of the Soviet Union, what took place in Germany, before the Nazis.
I have seen that begin to happen and I am aware of what it implies.
And in some ways, the most difficult question for me is, if this relaxes, how is it that we go back to living with each other?
I mean, for one thing, once you've seen it happen and you know, well, this is the confirmation of what many of us have said, which is it can happen here, right?
It can happen across the West.
So that means that it must be an extremely high priority that we figure out what makes it happen, that we figure out how to get in the way, and that we figure out how to rescue people that we know from it as it's happening so that it doesn't take them over, right?
But I don't know how to do that.
And I wonder if everybody is sort of feeling this tension of now having watched us divide into these teams that, yes, could turn into something genocidal.
It didn't in this case.
Yet, at least.
What do we do with that knowledge?
That's a good question.
That's a good question, of course.
And I think that, well, As fast as possible, we should try to talk with each other again.
Also, people who found themselves in a different camp.
So we have to restart the dialogue and the dialectical process between each other.
That's one thing.
But I think that at the same time, I'm convinced that the problem of the emerging mass formation and totalitarianism can never be really solved as long as we stick to our reductionist, mechanist fuel man in the world.
Because the root cause and the ultimate cause of the phenomenon of totalitarianism, I agree with Hannah Arendt in that respect, definitely, that it is to be situated in the mechanist, materialist ideology, not Mechanist science, because science has nothing to do with it actually, but it is a scientific ideology.
When science turns into an ideology, that means science once was an answer to dogmatic and institutionalized religion, but slowly it became an ideology itself.
It became a set of dogmas and a set of prejudices itself and a very specific ideology, an ideology which believed that the entire universe could be reduced to a materialist machine and perfectly described in a rationalist way, perfectly manipulated and controlled in a rational way, and that rational understanding should be the basis, the cornerstone of human living together.
I disagree with that.
I really disagree.
I disagree and thus respect that rational knowledge It's very important and the process we have been going through as a society throughout the last few hundred years is very important, but only if it leads to the next step.
I don't know if you're familiar with the work of René Thom, one of the famous mathematicians of the 20th century and one of the founders of systems theory.
And he said, ultimately, he said, this part of reality that can be understood in a rational way is rather limited.
And the rest of reality, you can only know by empathically resonating with it.
And that, for me, it took me until I was 35 years old, when I became familiar with the mathematical basis of systems theory, to suddenly start to understand, and it was a true revelation for me, that our rational understanding was never capable of grasping the true essence of life.
around us and that we needed a different way of knowing the world, and René Ton uses the word resonating knowledge, to feel or to be connected with the essence of the world around us.
Also, Niels Bohr also had this wonderful statement.
He said, when it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry.
You can only use language as poetry when you want to grasp something of the strange irrational behavior, ultimately, of elementary particles.
And it also makes me think of several statement of several principles in the samurai culture in Japan, where they said that in every art, when you master an art, Or a craft or something.
There is first a stage, this rational stage, in which you learn certain rules, in which you learn certain techniques that you can understand in a rational way and that you have to learn in a rational way.
But the real, the goal of the learning process is not the techniques in itself.
The goal of this rational stage of the learning process is always to be come in touch with something to start to develop a certain feeling, a certain feeling that you can never, never articulate perfectly in a rational way, but which is the real goal of the of the learning process.
And the samurai said, it's one thing to learn a technique, but it's more difficult to forget it again.
And if you don't succeed in forgetting it before you go to the battlefield, they said you will die on the battlefield.
So you need this other type of knowledge, which is more resonating knowledge, which is also a kind of knowledge which really gives a certain touch, a certain feeling of connection with what is out there, and which makes you a certain feeling of connection with what is out there, and which makes you aware, I think, of the eternal principles of the real outside of you, the eternal principles of the mystery of
And these principles, I think, these principles which are like the principles of humanity, the principles of nature, The ethical principles.
It's these principles that should be the real cornerstone of human living together and not rational knowledge that, no matter how important rational knowledge is, is always temporary.
It will always be renewed.
The only thing that can organize a fruitful living together, I think, is principles and not rational knowledge.
Well, that is the basis of several conversations we might have.
I have a whole different taxonomy that I have a feeling results in the same conclusion, right?
My sense is the universe can in principle be understood mechanistically.
We are a million miles from the ability to do it on the topics that matter most.
Right?
We are in our infancy with respect to understanding biology and psychology and society.
So, at some level, we are stuck in the predicament that you are describing, not because the world isn't mechanistic, but because the mechanisms are so complex That we don't even have the tooling to investigate them yet, right?
I mean, if we look at Mandelbrot's, you know, investigation of fractals as a solution to the math of biology, basically, right?
We needed a different kind of math to even begin to ask those questions.
And I think we are in the same place.
Our science is much better with simple phenomena than it is with complex phenomena, because that's where we learn to do it.
But I 100% resonate with the idea that the whole goal of the exercise of learning things in a conscious way is to stop doing them consciously.
That's when you really get good at something.
And so we have to think that way.
And the other thing I would add, which I heard implied in what you said, is that a mechanistic understanding, even if you had it, even if you had the complete mechanistic picture of the universe, it would not Deal with the values issue.
You could reverse engineer why we hold the values that we do, but the fact is, we have to, at some level, stop trying to justify the values on the basis of the mechanism.
It doesn't work, right?
And we have to say something like, It is glorious to be alive on this planet.
And if that is true, we are obligated to deliver that experience to people in the future, to not deny it to them by destroying what we have, right?
That is an ethical obligation.
And if you become too mechanistic, you'll say something like, well, it's all going to be destroyed anyway.
There's nothing we can do about it.
Right?
The earth will be destroyed.
The galaxy will be destroyed.
Ultimately, the universe will be destroyed.
So it's all for naught.
Why are we obligated to prove, you know, to defend what we've got?
And the answer is you just failed the ethical test.
You may have passed the mechanistic one, but you failed the ethical one.
You got the values wrong.
In any case, yeah, it's, and what you said at the beginning particularly resonates, right?
What you said is that this, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it was words to the effect of that science has become not only a mechanism for studying things, but it's become an ideology.
Is that what you said?
Yes, yes.
I agree with this, and not a sophisticated ideology either.
It's become a very narrow-minded ideology, and The costumes of science have been taken to be a good indicator of who knows what they're talking about.
And it's nonsense, as the Corona pandemic demonstrated just so extremely.
Indeed, indeed.
Yes.
And that's a strange thing.
When people blindly believe in rationality, they end up being radically irrational.
That's one of the strange things.
When you make science into an ideology, you often believe that you... These people who make science into an ideology often believe that they are extremely rational, but in the end they become radically irrational.
That's something very strange.
But as you said, Well, the question as to what extent reality is mechanistic in nature is a very important one.
And I think that, in the end, we might have a very fruitful disagreement, I believe.
But that depends.
It depends, of course, how you define mechanistic, the word mechanistic, because what does that mean, the word mechanistic?
Yeah, do you mean that everything can be reduced to the elementary laws of mechanics, the mechanical laws of Newton?
How do we define that?
It's not easy to define it.
Or, for instance, the mechanisms of language.
Well, as soon as you... If you study material reality, At least that's what the physicists of the 20th century concluded.
Then you soon have to conclude that subjective experience and all kinds of psychological phenomena have a certain impact on mechanistic, on the behavior of the material elementary particles.
That, for me, seems to be an indication that we actually can never succeed in reducing everything to the laws of mechanics.
But I can be wrong.
I can be wrong.
Well, I would say we want to parse this very carefully.
My argument would be, as far as we know, Everything could be reduced up till the point we get to Heisenberg uncertainty.
And then the question is, is Heisenberg uncertainty an observational problem?
Or is it built into the structure of the universe?
I believe it actually has to be built in.
There has to be uncertainty at the ground level.
But short of that, I would argue that in principle, the universe appears to be comprehensible mechanistically, but in practice, it never will be.
In other words, the computational power, it is not the correct way to think about the universe that you could in principle, you know, you could in principle, understand a baseball game at the level of the molecules, but it's not a good way to understand a baseball game.
No, no.
It's too cumbersome.
Yeah.
And also, the organizing principle has to be situated, I think, at the level of the intentions of the players involved, I believe.
And also, like, well, you know, what's definitely certain is that the universe will always be unpredictable.
That's something that was very clearly shown by complex dynamical systems theory, that even That every complex dynamical system, even if you know the formulas, the mathematical formulas that determine the system, then still it will be unpredictable.
Simply because of the characteristic of sensitivity for initial conditions in a complex dynamical system, it will remain forever unpredictable.
Because differences in the state of the system that are infinitely small, can create a radically different behavior in the system, meaning that you can never measure precise enough to predict how the system will behave.
So the universe is definitely unpredictable.
So the idea of Laplace, that one time there could be a computational force that is strong enough to predict the entire future, is rejected.
But if that means that the universe behaves in an irrational way, that's another question.
I'm inclined to believe that it does, actually.
I'm inclined to believe that it does behave in an irrational way.
Well, yeah, I think this is a potentially productive disagreement, maybe for another time.
But yeah, there is a question about why those systems are, you know, is all of that unpredictability the result?
Is it cascading from uncertainty at a very fine grained level?
I believe that it is.
I'm not wedded to that position.
But I believe that it is, and I believe we don't have a fully deterministic universe, but we do have a mechanistic universe.
And that's the difference that I'm arguing.
A deterministic universe, to me, would make no sense.
I mean, for one thing, it would invalidate the meaning that we take from evolutionary dynamics completely.
If all of those dynamics were set in stone from the moment the universe began, that's a very different phenomenon than an environment in which you have creatures competing over limited resources, which implies that one could win, or another one could win, and then one does, right?
But anyway, this becomes a very de-contractable philosophical conversation very quickly.
Indeed, yes.
Well, well.
Is there anything more you want to say as we wrap up?
No, not really.
We have been talking about it a lot and I liked it very much.
I want to thank you very much for inviting me and for bringing my book to the attention of the people.
Do you have a copy?
I do not have a copy or I would hold it up.
Do you have a copy?
I will send.
No, I don't.
I gave my copy to Eric Clachten actually.
Did you?
And now I will receive 10 new copies, but I don't have one here now.
I will have you send one, Brad.
Oh, great.
Great.
Excellent.
Well, I look forward to it.
I will say this was a great conversation and I feel That I have encountered a kindred spirit and a fellow polarizer of institutions.
And, you know, that's got to be that's got to be good.
So this has been extremely enjoyable.
I hope people who have watched and or listened have also found it interesting.
I know everyone will have found it challenging, as I did.
But in any case, I hope we we meet in person soon.
Yeah, me too.
Likewise.
I hope I do.
Oh, one more thing.
Where do people find you?
That's a good question.
I only have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page, but now I will start a Substack in one or two weeks.
At this moment it's maybe on Facebook, but you can find me on Facebook or on LinkedIn, but I will go on Substack in the nearby future.
You're one of very few people who are in this milieu who are not on Twitter, but not because anyone threw you off?
Or were you thrown off?
No, no, no.
I never tried to go on Twitter.
And then before the corona crisis, I almost didn't know that there was such a thing like social media.
Now I start to be aware of it.
Yes.
Well, I think in your business of studying mass formation, you need to be aware of social media.
All right.
And the name of your book?
The psychology of totalitarianism.
The psychology of totalitarianism, which is, of course, a derivation of Hannah Arendt's earlier title, which was... The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The Origins of Totalitarianism.
It's a mixture between the origins of totalitarianism and the psychology of the crowd of Gustave Le Bon.
Very good.
Got it.
All right.
Well, people should pick it up and read it, and then hopefully we can avert the disaster that otherwise might be headed our way.
