Peak Prosperity - The Totalitarians Won’t Stop Until One of Us is Destroyed

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Chris and Matthias Desmet discuss mass formation, totalitarianism, and the illusion of rationality, emphasizing the importance of truth and ethical principles in countering societal control.

One of the most dangerous myths in our society is that people want to be free. People absolutely don't want to be free. That's the problem. They don't want to be free. The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. Hello, everyone. Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity. Really excited to sit down and have this conversation that you're about to see. This is with Matthias Desmet.

We had him on a couple of years ago. Before I fully introduce him, here's the context. We're at this Brownstone conference. And in three days, it's going to be Tuesday elections in the United States. So who better to talk to about mass formation, about totalitarianism, nobody. And I'm really excited to be able to do this in person. We stuck some time in here amongst a very packed schedule. So, Matthias, thank you for being here. So good to meet you and be here in person. Thank you for having me on. Yes. So, where do we start? You know, I was really taken by that, your framework.

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

Yes, well. It actually means that you buy into a narrative of which for certain reasons, emotional reasons, of which...van een andere narratief, van die voor een bepaalde reden, emotionele redenen... ...van die je kon zien dat het vervelend was.

Dat is wat er gebeurt in een massaformatie. Mensen kiezen gewoon naar een bepaalde narratief... ...die meestal wordt verspreid of door de massamedia geïnteresseerd. certain narratives usually spread or disseminated through the mass media, which usually even a child could see that they are wrong and still they buy into it and are completely blind for everything that could show them that the narrative is wrong. It shows, I think, that the human being is not a rational human being. And that's something I mentioned in my talk here. I think that's a major mistake of the Enlightenment tradition,

the ideology of reason, that we started to believe that the human being is a rational being, which it is not. Yeah. Which it is not. Yeah. Yeah. Is that a surprise to you?

Yes and no. To be honest, I'm a very rational person. I always try to understand. And until I was 35 years old, I actually believed that life is rational and that you can, like that everything in nature can be understood in a rational way. And strangely enough, it was while I was taking a deep dive into the mathematical underpinnings...en ik ging een diepe dive in de mathematische onderdrukkingen van een complexe dynamische systeemtheorie... ...toen ik ineens begon te begrijpen dat het niet rationeel was. Dat was iets heel belangrijk voor mij.

En dan kun je je hoofd beginnen te openen. Stop denken. Kijk in een veel meer open-minded manier. Zonder dat je voorkomt dat je uiteindelijk alles kunt versterken in de categorie van je rationele denken. Daar begint het leven. Daar begint het leven begint, dat is waar het leven echt begint. Als je begint te begrijpen dat rationaliteit nooit het beheerde principe in het leven kan zijn. En in het beste geval begint je te begrijpen dat de essentie van het leven ethisch is ethical in nature. Ethical, yes, ethical.

It's ethical principles that can be a guiding principle for our society, for collective life. And then if people ignore that, and if people continue to believe that rational theories and rational understanding, rational knowledge should be the guiding principle in society, I think, strangely enough, they soon lapse into complete irrationality and absurd beliefs. And that's what happens, for instance, in the corona crisis. Then you could see that the human being is not a rational being.

So, interesting detour, because I had this similar art, but I didn't go into it as deeply as you did. I'm trying to, this is early on, it's like 2008, 2009, I've created this thing called the Crash Course, and I'm looking at systems level stuff, and I'm trying to figure stuff out and it gelled for me. I read this book by Eric Beinhocker and it's called The Origin of Wealth. He talks about how at the Santa Fe Institute in 1984, they bring all these Nobels and PhDs,

top of the top, top physics, chemistry, sociology, economists, all this. The economists sit down across from all the other hard scientists and they start explaining their science. These guys were horrified. They said, you're using open form equations? Walrus did that in 1794 in Poland. They didn't know about the second or third laws of thermodynamics. What they were trying to do was they wanted to find the equilibrium point for an economy which is a complex open system and they wanted it to be closed so all these closed form equations and they hadn't bothered to update them because they don't work if they tried to update so they were clinging to their 18th maybe 17th century beliefs right just hanging on creating phds and formulas and all this stuff and I looked at the irrationality

of it and that's when I realized how screwed we were if we were going to be guided by these experts because they were trying to force reality into their equations because they couldn't do it the other way around because they had if that was the case then they would have to open up to this idea that you can't model it you can't predict it you would then have to understand its guiding principles, it would be like raising a child, right? You know, I want an opera singer. Well, you don't always get one, you know, but you can. So it was just fascinating and that's where I understood the first thing about complex systems have these emergent behaviors, and that's irrational, it's uncertain, and humans hate that. Yeah, exactly, yeszeker. En de mens houdt dat niet. Ja, precies. Dat is wat mensen anders maakt dan dieren. Onze menselijke existentie graviteert constant rond iets wat onze rationele gedachte niet begrijpt.

Dieren hebben dat niet. En dat heeft te maken met hun communicatiesysteem. De dierengevoelensystemen kunnen heel moeilijk zijn. Maar er is altijd een één-tussen-gevoelensverhaal tussen een signaal en wat de signaal betreft. between a sign and what the sign refers to. That's why an animal doesn't have to go through an interpretation process when it receives a sign from another animal. It doesn't. It instinctively knows what the sign means. In human beings, that's... And human language is different.

Human language refers to something only through... One word refers to something only through one word refers to something only through another word. You need another word to determine, to define the meaning of the first word and then you need another word to define another word and another word and that's why you always lack one word, literally. And that's why the meaning-making system of a human being is always changing and always uncertain. That's why we constantly wonder, like, what will happen after we die? What do we have to do to be loved by someone? What do other people think of us?

That's so typical for a human being that its life is always circling around, gravitating around, somethingitating around, something he or she can never rationally understand. And that's why uncertainty is the most crucial, central problem in human life and something that we constantly try to convince ourselves that we will overcome it. That's why this rationalist human man in the world, like Harari for instance, is the literary prophet of, I think. Harari and the other transhumanists and all the mechanist thinkers, that's what they try to convince us of. That one time our rational knowledge will be perfect and we will be able to eliminate all uncertainty in life.

We will be able to eliminate every glitch in the biochemical machines. We are, we will live forever in a technological new paradise. So that's what makes this rationalist worldview, this mechanist worldview, so attractive, I think, because it pretends that this perennialiale onzekerheid van de mens overkomt. Dat we het kunnen verliezen. En er is, terwijl zoveel mystische en religieuze tradities ons een andere weg hebben gegeven. traditions have shown us a different path. They have shown us like, yes, maybe your head, your brain, your rational thinking can never overcome or eliminate uncertainty.

But there is a certain knowledge. Some would call it an intuitive knowledge. Some, like Sam knowledge, some would call it an intuitive knowledge, some like Samira culture would call it the sixth sense of the warrior, some would call it the knowledge like Pascal would call it the knowledge of the heart. There is a certain knowledge that can give you certainty, that that's ultimately the essence of this revolution, which is a metaphysical revolution, I think, we are going through at the moment. Our society is about to find out that all these pseudo-rational experts, the end are completely irrational and that they will lead us straight into destruction. Because that's the human hubris of rationalism, ultimately, as an instrument, I believe, of

a metaphysical destructive force. And that's what we see now. The more we fall prey to this rationalism, the more we see that we are destroying life and that we are destroying the essence of the human being, the soul. The soul disappears. I wrote a Substack article. de ziel van de mens. De ziel verandert. Ik heb een sub-stake artikel geschreven, ik denk dat de titel was de de-zieling van de samenleving, ik denk dat dat zes maanden geleden was.

Kijk om je heen, dat is wat je ziet. Jonge mensen, ze verbeelden bijna als robots of machines, ze maken bijna geen sociale contact meer. Ze veranderen met de technologie die ze gebruiken. They merge with the technology they are using. They are like slowly becoming a cog in the technological machinery that absorbs, first, their attention, their mind, their soul, their body. They are ready for Harari's technological paradise, of which Hannah Arendt would say, Hannah Arendt had a wonderful quote, she said,

there is only one problem with this totalitarian paradise, and it is that it looks so suspiciously a lot like hell. She said. Well, I've got to confess, it sounds boring to me. My daughter, our youngest, when she was seven, Grace, caught me short at one point because she was running on some rocks in Maine. And, you know, Dad, like, hey, careful, you know. And she said, Dad, there's no danger.

It's not an adventure. The human soul needs to be tested, right, particularly for men. Let me talk masculine for a minute because I understand men because I'm one. I am so glad I grew up at a time where me and my friends, out of sight of our parents, egged each other on, and we did some dangerous stuff. I have ten fingers, which is a miracle, right? Still walking.

But for me, I had to find my edge, right? And then as an adult, you still have to find your edge, right? It might be different. How do I communicate more effectively? How do I wrestle this thought out into words? How do I play this piece of music more perfectly? Whatever your edges happen to be. What you're describing sounds like a place where they want to take all the edges away.

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

But when you look at it from a different perspective, this uncertainty, this edge or this limit to our rational knowledge, this fundamental uncertainty, is the precondition for our existence as a human being. to our rational knowledge, this fundamental uncertainty, is the precondition for our existence as a human being. It is exactly because no one, in the end, knows the rational answer to the big questions of life that we all have the right and the duty to articulate, to formulate our own answer to the big questions of life. dat we allemaal de rechten en de doelen hebben om te articuleren, om onze eigen antwoord te formuleren op de grote vragen van het leven. En daar begint het leven echt, waar we zeggen oké, ik zal proberen om in te komen, om mezelf te voelen voor wat ik soms noem de echte muziek van het leven, ik zal moeten resoneren met de echte geest van het leven

en het zelf rediscoveren, de echte principes van de mensheid rediscoveren, de ethische principes, ze in mijn eigen manier articuleren. En precies dit is mijn leven. Articuleren in mijn eigen singulaire manier, way and exactly this is my life, articulating in my own singular way the universal principles of life. And that's what you discover at the edge. Yes. Yeah, you know, I am not religious my whole life. I was Protestant. That was Christmas and Easter in church. That was it. No, Sunday school. Never had any use for it.

And then I read this tweet that said, I turned to God not because he spoke to me, but because evil made itself known. And I found evil to be sort of this decent organizing principle, right? If you define it the way Naomi Wolf did, which is evil likes to wreck stuff. So that's his point. I don't know if it's personal, but it likes to wreck stuff. So that's his point. I don't know if it's personal, but it likes to wreck stuff. So I was looking around because I see these things as highly destructive. So at the age I am, I can tell you that the amount of wildlife and insects and birds out there is a fraction of what it was when I was a kid. And we're killing it. And that's God's beauty or however you want to frame it, but we're doing something that ecologically you'd

say, don't do that. Fish and the ocean disappearing, all that stuff. It's terrible. Yeah, and it's coming from a profound lack of sense of the beauty of it. And also it's right to exist just because. So I look at all of that and I really see that the dominant culture, I have a hard time, Matthias, it feels like a death cult because everything it does is in the service of wrecking life, the beauty of life coming into your full potential as a soul, insects.

That's how I see it now, right? Yes, yes, I believe that people in a hypnotized way participate in rituals of death, and they don't know that it are rituals they denied that the human being is a symbolic being that it needs rituals and that's why without knowing it they started to perform rituals which they do not recognize as such and it or rituals of death you could see it in a corona crisis a little bit all these are this the way in which people followed die ze niet herkennen. En het zijn rituelen van de dood. Je kunt het in de coronacrisis een beetje zien. De manier waarop mensen de corona-metingen volgen,

in mijn mening, was ritualistisch gedrag. Ze participeren erin om te reguleren en hun angst en andere emoties te controleren regulate and control their anxiety and other emotions without these behaviors having any realistic necessity or effect at all. But they wanted to participate in it. It's ritualistic behavior. It's actually suicidal behavior, I think, at the deepest level. Our society is a suicidal society in many respects. While people, in a strange way, this entire materialist, and I use that word in a philosophical sense, not in the vulgar sense, but while people reduced themselves, while people started to believe that they are merely biochemical, material phenomena, they slowly started to get tired and started to long, to die, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that whole we're just a bag of chemicals thing is very nihilistic. Yeah. Like, how do you engage? I once believed in it myself, very much. Like, when I was 17 years old, I really had a feeling like, okay, I didn't like it. Ik heb het zelf ook heel veel gezien. Toen ik 17 was, had ik echt het gevoel dat ik het niet vond.

Maar ik had echt het gevoel van, wat zou de universum zijn? Wat zou het zijn als het niet een set van atomen en moleculen was? Het is een set van atomen en moleculen. Het is een set van atomen en moleculen. En heel langzaam, zoals door een aantal heel aanspreekbare boeken te lezen over kwantummechanica, later chaostheorie, complex dynamische systeemtheorie, begonnen we te begrijpen dat dat is niet wat wetenschap ons toonde. Wetenschap toonde precies het vervolg. Het universum is geen grote machine. Dat is precies wat het ons toonde. De metafoor van de machine is verkeerd. Het is iets helemaal verkeerds. is wrong. It's something completely wrong, and it's even not rational, as I said. It behaves like an irrational number, literally.

Someone like Niels Bohr had this wonderful quote. If it comes to atoms, he said, language can only be used as poetry. They are fundamentally irrational, and only poetic language can allow you to really feel something about the reality of what we call matter, the material world. So at one time, once when I was 17 years old, I was like, well, of course, there is only matter, there is nothing else. Our soul, our spirit must be an illusion that emerges somewhere, somewhere in the biochemical machinery of our brain. And now I'm so happy.

I'm so happy that I see how stupid that was. We all grow and mature. I think I held the same view. And then I ran across the thing that took me years, and I don't think I have it yet, was every derivation of the double slit experiment, where you have that wave-particle duality. The deciding factor seems to be if consciousness is observing it, so then you get back to, well, what's consciousness? It's consciousness, best I can figure, is some form of awareness. Maybe awareness of self.

We could have turned it inward, but it's awareness. And with that awareness, things go from a probabilistic, I could be anywhere, to, oh yeah, I always went this way. Just thinking that through, what are the real implications of that? It tells me that I'm here to interact with things that were probabilistic until I brought my attention to them, in which case something happens. I don't know what that's all about, but it feels important somehow. Exactly. In my consciousness, something, at the level of my consciousness, Ik denk dat er iets aan het niveau van mijn bewustzijn een impact heeft op de realiteit om me heen,

op de vereniging van de maat om me heen. Zoals deze idee van de colapse van de waaffunctie. Het is zo miraculeus, het is mogelijk. of matter around me, like this entire idea of the collapse of the wave function. It's so miraculous almost, like, wow, is this possible? Yes, it's our mind, to a certain extent, constructs the material world around us. And I also like complex dynamical systems theory,theorie, die zorgt dat met deze geweldige karakteristiek, het is best technisch, maar met deze geweldige karakteristiek van sensitiviteit tot de initiële gevallen, zorgt dat we in elke moment

de realiteit kunnen De realiteit kan zich weer organiseren. En een situatie die helemaal onverwacht lijkt, kan zeker vol hopelijkheid zijn. En dat is voor mij zo belangrijk in de tijden die we leven. Zo snel we begrijpen dat, begrijpenpen dat elke mens, bijvoorbeeld, zonder te diep in te gaan, dat we allemaal kracht hebben. Iedereen die in een authentieke en zinlijke manier spreekt,

de wereld verandert, geloof ik. Elke een van ons, zowel waar we praten, waar we acteren in een eerlijke manier. En misschien wat we denken. Wat we denken, ja, natuurlijk. Elke verandering in een minere detail van het systeem heeft een impact op het hele systeem. Dat is letterlijk in een complex dynamische systeem.

Neem een pot van boeiend water. En als je de vibratie van één molecuul verandert, dan verandert het hele pattern van de boeiende pot van water. Nou, onze samenleving is een boeiende pot van water. En als we iets veranderen op het niveau van het echte, op het niveau van de essentie van leven, dan veranderen we het hele boeiende pot van water. of the real, at the level of the essence of life, we change the entire boiling pot of water. That's why he didn't approach it from that angle, but Vaclav Havel, everyone

pronounces his name differently, the dissident Czech intellectual, he said like the powerless do have power in a totalitarian system. They do have power. They have the power to live in truth. That's what he said. And that's how they have an impact on the system. And that's what the system is so scared of, of these people who do not participate, use the words of Solzhenitsyn, in the lie. Yes, do not participate in the lie. Do not participate in the lie. I have a hypothesis that what we're witnessing, and COVID just sort of put it on steroids or maybe just made me more alert

to it, but is hypothesis, is that we're at the potentially the tail end of a multi-thousand year system of control. The humans came out of Dunbar number, tribal nomadic sort of things, come into agriculture, spent thousands of years, but that a certain class cast of people

have kind of figured out how to manifest power, if you will. And it's kind of ridiculously easy. They put the population into a fear state, and then these people can't actually access their agency and their power as effectively as they might if they were fully actualized, right? Epicureans said that the path to wisdom was pleasure. And what they meant by that to me was that if food, shelter, safety, warmth are all taken care of. If what?

Food, shelter, safety, warmth, the bottom of Basil's hierarchy of needs, you know, then your physiological needs, then sort of like your basic needs, and then, you know, your... They're saying once you can get all that taken care of if you can exist up here on the fourth fifth rung up well now you have access to real information by the way the appearance figured all kinds of stuff out more astonishing to me right Atomics up through about two you know they didn't go to string theory but that may be false anyway they got chemistry they got evolution like they got it all by sitting around and living in truth but But to do that, they had to bravely get rid of all the stuff they thought

they knew. After that was to get to a state where humans are open and then we can receive or be open to insights was their path, right? I see everything like we could look out this window and we'll see these people walking around kind of half dead. My culture has a way to distract, demoralize, deflect me from engaging with life, to having that power. Alcohol, guarantee, five minutes away, max. Porn, everywhere. Turn on the TV, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. So I feel like that's an old system of control and I think that's why we're experiencing so much urgency in the West to keep everybody in this mass formation state. Yeah.

Yes. Ja, ja. Sommigen strijken met een beperktheid om te domineren en te controleren. Zeker. En als je kijkt naar de structuur van onze samenleving nu, dan zie je dat het geen democratie is. Dat is wat Aldous Huxley in zijn boek, dat weinig mensen kennen, Brave New World Revisited, a book he wrote much later than Brave New World, he says, very soon we will live in a, I don't know if you know that quote, it's wonderful. I mentioned that somewhere in an article. It's wonderful.

He said, very soon we will live in a society which at the surface looks perfectly like a democracy. There will be a parliament, and every television broadcast, he said, will be about the importance of democracy. But below the surface, beneath the surface, he said, it will be a fully-fledged totalitarian system controlled by a few oligarchs

and an army of mind manipulators. And if you read the quote, it's uncanny, the way in which it describes the situation we were in and of course we could see how it developed. Like, it started like with this, as soon as rationalism emerged, the money system, gold and silver were replaced by paper money, then that system of paper money got completely perverted. Some people gathered a lot of money, replaced by paper money. Then that system of paper money got completely perverted.

Some people gathered a lot of money. They started to buy the congressmen. These congressmen voted laws that actually put the oligarchs above the law. And then the intelligence services emerged. The regime change operations started, and they actually basically were the kind of predatory democracy, conquered the entire world and subjected the entire world. So of course these people exist and they at the moment they own the media to a large extent

I believe and they more or less spread the narrative they want to, they shape public opinion and so on and so on, as these people exist. But that's one thing that some people refuse to see. They refuse to see that there are some people who pretty much control the entire public narrative and public opinion. But there is something else as well, I believe, that we should not forget.

That's the one kind of tyranny we live in. But there is a different kind of tyranny as well, I think. There is also people, there's people who want to control, but there is also a huge mass of people who want to be controlled. And that's... Yeah, there it is. Yes. People, like one of the most dangerous myths in our society is that people want to be free. People absolutely don't want to be free. That's the problem. They don't want to be free. Maybe it was even you who said it during your talk. I immediately recognized it. Freedom comes with responsibility. With responsibility. You have to take responsibility. You have to think for yourself. You have to try to find out what it

means to lead a good life and a bad life, and so on, and so on, and so on. Freedom comes with responsibility. Freedom is something that is time and energy consuming, and so on, and so on. So I mean, the situation we find ourselves in now in this state system, which is definitely, which has a structure of a totalitarian state, I think, can best be described, again, with the words of Hannah Arendt, she said, totalitarianism is always, in contrast with a classical dictatorship, totalitarianism is always a diabolic pact between the elite and the masses. It's a diabolic pact.

Without the masses who buy into the propaganda, there can be no totalitarianism. That's the point. And if we refuse to see that, if our analysis of the current problematic situation only focuses on the elite, we will soon fall prey to the enticing idea that we have to destroy the elite and that the problem We zullen straks aan het enthousiaste idee vallen dat we de elite moeten versterken en dat het probleem zal worden gesloten. Dat zou een intellectuele, ethische en strategische fout zijn. Een enorme fout. Een fatale fout.

Dat is niet het punt. Wat we moeten denken over is, waar komt deze situatie vandaan? En dan, de root cause, gel I believe, is always this rationalist human in the world. It's this delusional idea that this reality here is a kind of mechanistic reality which we can manipulate in a rationalist way and which we can control. Predict to what we want, yes, control that, we'll do what we want, but it won't, of course. There is a certain predictability, but not a fundamental one. Brilliant. I want to go back to the point. I'm a huge fan, like there's this one quote,

if I was only allowed one quote to live by in life, it would be, if you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. So that's from Warren Buffett's writing, Charlie Munger. You show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. So the older I get, the more I realize humans, it's just incentives. So we have competing incentives. We've got our biological incentives, brainstem we want to reproduce. We've got this social stuff which is very complicated.

How far apart do we sit? What's on my face? What kind of tone should we use? What are we dressed? All these cues, very complex, right? For a lot of people, they're at that level, which is like they care about what people think about them. They need more resources. They did it, all that stuff.

Now that stuff, I can plug as a biologist into reproductive fitness and standard stuff. You and I both know there's a bigger deal going on. Money, which we talked about briefly, you mentioned, it's the most brilliant system of self-slavery I've ever seen. We're our own slaves. You're responsible for your health care. You've got to figure out how to keep your house warm. You have to buy all your own food and all that stuff, right?

So our system of money is a very incentive-based system. the reason i bring that up because as you're talking i was thinking you know i live you live at the most abundant time ever in human history i know billionaires who are scared anxious because they don't have enough or it could go away like so so we have a money system its incentive model is fundamentally scarcity-based. Even though there's really no scarcity. You can't find scarcity on this planet right now. But we could manufacture it. It's an interesting thing.

It keeps people in that fear state the whole time. Yes, but even without someone keeping people in a fear state, if you think in a rationalist way, you inevitably end up in fear and anxiety because you try to control something through your rational thinking which cannot be controlled through rational thinking because you never can have certainty. You will always, people who think,

people who try to take decisions on the basis of rational thinking, they will typically end up in a very anxious state...en die mensen die proberen te besluiten op basis van rationele denken... ...zullen typisch in een zeer angstige staat komen... ...in de stijl dat ze niet meer slapen. De rationalistische personen... ...strijken bijna altijd met insomnia. Bijna altijd. En het interessante is dat veel mensen denken dat wat er nu gebeurt in de wereld... ...op basis van geld en kracht allemaal kan worden uitgelegd.

Volg het geld en je zal begrijpen wat er gebeurt. Oké, op een gegeven moment is dat waar. Als je ziet how Goldman Sachs in 2008 succeeded in making people pay, the taxpayers pay for the situation they created and the situation which made them rich or even much richer, then okay, there is a lot to do about the money. But at the same time, I believe that ultimately, it's even not about the money and even not about, it's not about human beings who want more money.

It's even not about human beings who want more power. There is something more fundamental. In the end, what happens can only be explained on the basis, I will use the word again, of a metaphysical power, a destructive power, which makes people believe that it will give them power, bring them money, but which in the end will make also these people slaves, which will also destroy them, which will destroy

basically every human being and all humanity. So it's like Freud would call that power the death drive. In religious discourse, you would prefer the term evil or the devil or something. But it's a power that is intrinsically destructive and that always tries to make you believe that it will bring you something, that it will bring you to paradise, and in the end, that's what Hannah Arendt said,

very beautiful, it will bring you to hell. The only problem with... And it's... I believe that's the essence of what's happening now. We see a clash. Ik geloof dat dat de essentie is van wat er nu gebeurt. We zien een clash, we zien meer dan ooit in de geschiedenis, we zien de puur manifestaatie van iets dat de essentie van de natuur, van de leven, van de mensheid, van alles, vermoord. Is het een menselijk ding? Ja, ja. Het leeft in mensen? Ja, ja. Het leeft in mensen?

Ja, ja. Ik geloof dat, als je kijkt... Ik geloof dat we technisch gezien... ...opgevraagd zijn met een nieuw ontwikkelde... ...globalistische, technocratische... ...en uiteindelijk ook transhumanistische... ...totalitarische systeem. En dit total. Dat totalitarisme heeft dezelfde structuur als de totalitarisme... ...in het begin van de 20e eeuw, nazi's en communisme.

Ze hebben één ding in samen. Al die totalitarisme systemen proberen... ...het kleine gebied, het kleine ruimte van vrijheid in een mens te nemen. Een totalitarisme, daar komt de naam van, totale... ...trijdt om zijn ideologie, volledig totale, te aan te brengen aan de mens. Het uniformeert de samenleving. Iedereen moet dezelfde kleding dragen. Ze zullen ons proberen dezelfde auto's te rijden... ...in dezelfde kleine, CO2 neutral houses.

And that's exactly what communism did, what Nazism did. It uniformizes everyone. It eliminates every space where a human being can make its own subjective choice in relationship to a certain ethical awareness. A human being can never be entirely free. It always has to stay in touch with a certain ethical awareness, ethical principles, and it has to try to find out what these ethical principles impose to its life, and then it will have a certain freedom where it can create, to a certain extent,

its own life and where it can become what it is. And that's what totalitarianism takes away. It eliminates that. Totalitarian leaders make the decisions for you in every aspect of your existence and at every level of your existence. In your private life, they will tell you what you can eat. They will tell you which clothes you can wear, and so on.

Can I add one more thing? That's why it is a system that destroys the essence of the human being, the very essence. But it's not a superior economic system because history is complete on that. But what it is good at is putting a very small number of people in control. So they like to control all of that. But I think we're down to where I've arrived. So I'd like some help getting more fully there. Never read a Bible until I was 60.

Now I've read it. I'm like, ooh, we've done this before right there's wisdom in there and the story is like this it's full of it humans got on the path things were cool for a while then they lost the path and then wrath happened right you know and and so you can you one quick example like you can flip through it says i think it's a problem but you should leave your fields fallow once every seven years right It's a way of regenerating the soil because that's the actual abundance. We don't need that anymore, Matthias. We're smarter than that.

We have drones. We can surface map this. We can apply chemicals at a certain rate. So we've converted vibrant soil to dirt, and we're doing outdoor hydroponics. It's all going to be great. But someday the fertilizer won't be there, and we'll find out that this stuff is not a growing medium. And famine will wrath. So it feels to me like we've been here before as a species, we lose the plot, we try this wackadoodle stuff out, but the number one thing that the Bible's clear on is that if you're going to approach God, it's

with free will. He doesn't come knocking on your door, right? You have to free will. So this whole thing sounds like they just want to destroy. It's not that they care about you living in this apartment, eating what they tell you. They want to destroy your free will. Right? They want you disconnected from that thing that makes you a human,

like a full authentic human. That feels like the goal to me. It's not an economically viable model. Het is schrikken. Oké, maar dit doel, deze intentie... Ik geloof dat de mensen die proberen te controleren... die proberen hun wil te bepalen... op hetzelfde moment zelf of als volledige slaven... to control, who try to impose their will, at the same time themselves are complete slaves. They're extremely scared, anxious. The more predatory they behave, the more they steal

everything from everyone, the more scared they become of course, and the more they feel in need of control. So it's strange. It's a system where in the end everyone falls prey to this kind of destructive, deceptive force. But I agree. I agree that at least that as the end result that it is a state in which the human being, in which they try to take away Het is een staat in het welzijn dat de mensheid... in het welzijn dat ze proberen te nemen van de menselijke vrijheid.

De ruimte waarin de mens een vrijheid heeft. Natuurlijk kunnen ze dat nooit echt. In het einde zijn we altijd vrij, maar we moeten ons ervoor voorstellen... om soms veel te verliezen. Om onze leven te verliezen. We always are free, but we have to be prepared to lose a lot, sometimes to lose our lives, and then nobody can make us a slave. And I think that's exactly what we have to realize in this situation, that speaking sincerely, articulating what you believe is sincere and true, now, just like always before, will make you lose something. It will make you lose something.

That's the essence of truth and of truth speech. The one who tries to speak the truth destroys illusions. He breaks through the wall of appearances. That makes other people angry with him, of course, because most people live in this world of appearances. They find their stability in illusions. So speaking the truth, inevitably, the ancient Greeks knew that very well and so many other people. You put yourself at risk when you speak the truth. You always lose something in the world of appearances. Like in my case, yeah.

When I started to speak out at university in the academic world, well, they more or less believed that I was a stupid moron who didn't understand that vaccinations are good and so on and so on and so on. Ze geloofden dat ik een stupide moron was die niet begreep dat vaccinaties goed zijn. Maar ik heb het wel gedaan. Ik heb iets verloren. Maar aan dezelfde tijd... Spreken met eerlijkheid maakt je iets los in de wereld van uitzonderingen, maar het maakt je iets winnen in de echte wereld.

Dat was iets dat ik in een erg profonde en echte manier ervaren. Ik bepalde dat er een zachte, warme kracht in me was die langzaam sterker werd. Terwijl ik steeds en steeds mijn best deed om te veranderen wat ik dacht dat ik had te veranderen. Of wat ik dacht dat was eerlijk in de situatie waarin we ons in vonden. I tried to do my best to articulate what I thought I had to articulate, or what I thought was sincere in the situation we found ourselves in. And every time again, I tried to stay calm and quiet. I tried to react to people who attacked me in a humane and human and quiet way. And I really noticed that, to my own surprise. Like, oh, you become much calmer, in een zacht verhaal. En ik heb dat echt op mijn eigen verrassing gezien. Je wordt veel kalmer en er is een nieuwe soort strengte,

begon ik te voelen. En de meeste tijd had ik absoluut niet gekeken naar wat ik had verliezen in de wereld van uitzonderingen. Laat me het zo zeggen. Dus dat is het prachtige. Hoe moeilijker ze ons maken, So that's the beautiful thing. The more difficult they make us, the more they try to impose and manipulate us. If we refuse to participate in it, they only make us stronger. I've experienced the same arc.

It imbues my life also with a new sense of meaning and purpose. I'll be the first to tell you I don't know what it is I'm doing, but it's important. Yeah, one day I'll like that. I don't know what I'm doing, but I feel it's important. That's an honest statement. The same applies to me. From time to time I think

what am I actually doing and why am I doing it and then suddenly there's someone who tells me like thank you for what you do because of what you said and wrote and I started to to be able to love my family again

stuff like that and then I know now I know that's why I'm doing it. Yes. Oh, wonderful. On that point. Sorry I interrupted you, yes. No, no, no, please, it's perfect. So I get this a lot from people, which is they don't get along with their families anymore.

Like real fractures have resulted. And in many cases, I'll put words in their mouth, but not me and my own family. I haven't changed. I've always had the same dedication to truth. But my mother and my sister really fell for what I'll call Trump derangement syndrome, you know, and now I'm just a very bad guy, you know. I haven't changed. So a lot of people report similar behavior, real fractures, because the people, let's call it the mind virus. I don't even know what it is, but they are absolutely certain of their moral certainty about something that, from my perspective, they don't even know

what they're talking about, right? Because I don't really care about Trump, per se. I care about the truth, but somehow this has become anathema to their worldview now, and I've become a threat to it. So this feels like part of this whole mass formation, right? When people fall down this, I could imagine, I hate to say this, but I could imagine my own family turning me in if we ever get to that point. Yes, that's exactly, that's so typical for mass formation, of course. Once people control their anxiety, regulate their frustration and aggression through a narrative, they become typically extremely intolerant for dissonant voices. Of course, because these dissonant voices might wake them up, they feel it, might wake them up and they don't want to wake up because they would

wake up and be confronted again with all this anxiety that they cannot control and so on. History has shown us the dramatic end stage of these processes where indeed, as you suspect, exactly that happens, that mothers report their children to the state, children report their parents to the state. Once you understand the mechanism of mass formation, it's just logical.

It's just like, that's what mass formation does. Mass formation is a is not a normal group. In a normal group, people are connected because all the individuals love each other a little group. In a normal group, people are connected because all the individuals love each other a little bit. And that weaves like the fabric of a normal group.

In a mass formation, that doesn't happen. In a mass formation, a mass formation is a group that is formed because all individuals separately connect to a collective ideal, a collective ideology, the virus narrative or the communist narrative or the racist narratives of Hitler. All individuals connect to this collective ideal, this collective ideology, and the longer that lasts, the longer the mass formation lasts,

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

a revolution where a mass formation happened and where this woman, Sherefishtali, a mass formation happened and where this woman, Sheref Eshtali, witnessed how a mother who had reported her son to the state

hung the ruse, the noose, around the neck of her son and when he died, when he was killed, she received, she was very proud to receive a medal for being a heroine. That's the dramatic end stage of a mass formation. It can happen again, definitely. If the mass formation lasts long enough, mothers will be convinced that their child is a danger to

the state and to, and then they will turn the child in. And that the children will report it, their parents, because they do not live up to the climate narrative or something. Yeah. Well, this is the only frame that helps me understand the vaccine issue, right? So I wasn't anti-vax before COVID, but now, because I didn't know. Now I've studied them enough to go, well, you can't, they don't have appropriate studies

to claim what they claim. So it's become like a religion. But I can't, like there are parents who will scream at you if you dare to question their vaccine orthodoxy. Right. Because they just have to all be good. But they would have certainly a dark night of the soul right to have to square up to the fact that maybe they've injured

their child no or done something that could have been their injured their child no because they bought into something where they had misplaced trust and had failed in their duty with their freedom and responsibility to really investigate something properly. Yes. You know, the problem is, once someone goes along with a mass formation, once someone really buys into a mass narrative, once someone really goes into the hypnotic mass formation state, that person actually committed already suicide. als hij in de hypnotische state van transformatie gaat, dan is die persoon al een suicidie vermoord.

En hij is ook welvarend om iedereen te doden die niet langer gaat. Dat is zo typisch voor transformaties. Het is gewoon het afwerken van zichzelf naar de dood. Dat is wat er gebeurt. Dat is wat je ziet. Zelfs als mensen zich tegen de extreem destructieve coronamandaten bevinden, het lijkt alsof ze het niet zien. Ze vertellen je eigenlijk gewoon, ik geef niet aan wat er gebeurt. Als ik dood ben van het zijn, van het conformeren, van het volgen van de maatregelen,

dan geef ik het gewoon niet aan. Ik wil liever dood zijn terwijl ik in de slaap ben. Ik zal niet de mogelijkheid bepalen dat de busrijder mijn rijbeheerder, mijn auto's, niet krijgt. Nee. Laat me dan dood zijn terwijl ik in de slaap ben. Dat is het enige wat ik vraag. Dat is wat er gebeurt in een massaformatie. Natuurlijk. Natuurlijk, we kunnen het steeds zien. De vreemde zorg om zelf te schrijven in een massaformatie.

Iedereen wordt opeens zorgvrij om zichzelf te schrijven. Heel volledig. En niet alleen zichzelf schrijven, maar ook het toekomst van de kinderen, also the future of the children, the health of the children, the lives of the children, their entire family. They want to sacrifice everything that used to be of individual interest or importance before. Do you think that it's possible that people have studied this and figured out how to do this and that the mass formation we're seeing is not organic at all. That, in fact, it's being engineered by people who've got tools?

Of course. Well, yes, of course. Both are possible. Sometimes it emerges in a spontaneous way, like in Nazi Germany in the beginning stage. It was a spontaneous phenomenon. That's what most really interesting and smart scholars concluded, like Hannah Arendt. She said in the beginning it was a spontaneous emerging mass phenomenon in Nazi Germany. And then, of course, very soon propaganda.

Some people saw the possibilities of this mass movement and they used propaganda to steer the masses, control them, manipulate them, and make the mass formation continue. Because if there is no propaganda and indoctrination, mass formation usually will stop very soon. It never lasts long. But like in the Soviet Union, from the beginning, it was provoked in an artificial way.

So from the beginning, through propaganda. So both are possible. It can happen in a spontaneous way. But if nobody takes advantage of it and uses it and uses propaganda to continue it and manipulate it, it will very soon stop the mass formation. Interesting. Yeah.

But of course, well, propagandists started to... Most absolutely do not really understand about how mass formation works, but they don't need to understand it. They just, on the basis of their experiences with propaganda, they know what they can do with it. And then, well, yes, of course,

definitely like in the 20th century, in the 19th century, society started to be atomized. I don't know if you're familiar with that term. Hegel, the German philosopher Hegel, was the one who coined that term in the beginning of the 19th century because he noticed that for one reason or another, society was falling apart. Like people started to feel more lonely. And now we are confronted with a society where everyone is disconnected from everyone. Look at the train, on a train or something,

people are all staring on their iPhones and the screens of their iPads and stuff, and they almost do not connect anymore with each other. So this loneliness increased then. And that was the reason, of course, why propaganda became so successful, and then a new kind of mass emerged that didn't exist before.

Like the Crusades were mass formations, the witch hunts were mass formations, but the new masses are different. They are different, they are what Jacques Ellul called the lonely masses, where to form a mass or a crowd, people had to meet physically. And then they could get in the grip of this narrative that someone was articulating. And a mass phenomenon emerged.

But now, because of the mass media and technology, people can perfectly sit isolated in their living rooms, all, never meet each other and form a mass, because they were infused with the same narratives. And that's the kind of mass, the lonely mass, can be much better controlled, manipulated, and can last very long, and in this way become the basis of a state system.

If a mass formation lasts only two days or six months, en kan heel lang lasten en in deze manier de basis van een staatssysteem worden. Als een massaformatie alleen twee dagen of zes maanden of zelfs een jaar last, kun je er nooit een staatssysteem op baseren. Maar als je het kan laten lasten, 10, 20 jaar, kun je de massaformatie gebruiken om de controle van de samenleving te beperken. En dat is wat er gebeurde, in het beginning of the 20th century. So, of course, usually now, most mass formations are provoked artificially now through a kind of propaganda. Public relations, they sometimes call it. Yeah, marketing, they call it at one point.

But it's gotten so sophisticated. I'm a skeptical guy, so I know all about the Milgram experiments and the ash conformity experiments. And then it just occurred to me a couple of days ago, I was ago I was like I gotta talk to Matias about this if I can because we all like our fame and notoriety what people just decided to stop doing these experiments those were in the 60s right yeah we all we all still know Milgram's name and ash's name what they stopped doing this yeah I don't so. I think they just took them underground. Yes, you know the Milgram and the Ash experiments,

the Ash experiments were methodologically sound and good, interesting experiments. The Milgram experiment was garbage, I think. But anyway, doesn't matter. But of course they are doing these experiments. I'm sure you know the MKUltra project for instance, all these other projects. Everyone can find them if you want and if you after the Freedom of Information Act of 2000... I talked to somebody who was one of their victims as it were.

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

They could select a set of files which they didn't have to publish. But what is published is quite enough to show you what happened. Like out of 248 military conflicts in between the Second World War and the year 2000, 201 were provoked artificially by the CIA. Not surprising. And it year 2201 were provoked artificially by the CIA. And it's there on the internet. I mean, and strangely enough, if you talk

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

well, they didn't stop practicing that art. They continued with it. You can see it, you know like like with the internet also google is a propaganda machine it's a yeah i used to really love going to reddit you know because you could find your own sub community there and they talk about stuff but about five years ago i got taken over by the hive mind it's all bots it's it's just narrative control stuff right try dropping an anti-vax or even a vax questioning thing in there and it just gets swarmed instantly, right?

Auto-botted and everything. So, I mean, the only interesting thing that's happened in my life so far in that regard is I think Musk did shake it up by allowing Twitter to talk about stuff. So that's the only place I actually get news now, for me. Yes, the new censorship is the worst censorship that the world has ever seen. And it will get even worse, of course, with AI. It's subtle now, with the AI. It's interesting, one of the first times Brett Weinstein and I met, we're comparing stuff, and then we introduced our groups to each other.

And both parties were like, I didn't know about this guy. So here we are. We talk about very identical things. Our groups would have a lot of algorithmic cross-checking. They were kept completely ring-fenced, kept apart from each other. So it's subtle now. I liked it when I got YouTube strikes because I could wear them proudly and people said you must be

over the target, right? But now you put something out and it gets just a few views and they... I don't know. It's much more subtle now. Yeah, probably. Yes. And I was watching een interview met Bill Gates aan het CNBC bekijken. Hij vertelde dat het een goede idee zou kunnen zijn, zelfs nodig, om een AI platform te creëren, om het internet en publieke spraak te beheersen op het spraakje van het geest. En hij zei, voor een geval, dat de vrijheid van spraak belangrijk is. Het is essentieel, het is cruciaal. Maar natuurlijk, hij zei, we kunnen niet toleren dat er mensen zijn

die proberen te recommenderen, die proberen te vermoeden dat ze niet een vaccin nemen, voor een geval. Hij zei, heb je echt niets geleerd over de coronacrisis? not to take a vaccine, for instance, he said. Did you really learn nothing of the corona crisis? But that's exactly, that's what they will try to do, of course. AI, it's self-evident almost. AI will be the next. That will be the ultimate end stage of the mechanization of the human being

because AI, a machine, or at least that is what they pretend, will be more moral and ethical than any human being. A machine will decide what you can say or not. And that's, of course, behind the machine. There will be the people who train the machine. Yes, yes. Yeah. We'll have mass customization was

this thing that came out a while ago in manufacturing, but we'll have atomized mass formation, right? So, we'll still be in a mass formation, but your experience will be different from mine, because AI is going to know you, right? It's going to know how long you dwelled, go scrolling past a certain image, and what you clicked on,

and where you've been, what you're susceptible to and all of this uh we're in a real fifth generation warfare right now that's how i see it so in the time we have left which isn't much um how do you see this playing out what's your what's your sense of the next one three five ten years in this story? Well, I'm trying to be realistic in the short run. I mean like this technocratic system will be imposed to society I think,...zijn aan de bevolking van de samenleving. Zoals digitale kruiden, digitale ID's... ...en nog meer. De hele idee van vijf minuten-cities en klimaatveranderingen.

Een AI-tool die de publieke ruimte schijnt en scoort. that screens and scans public space. And we've seen in the UK how they moved from the stage of indoctrination propaganda, in my opinion, to the stage of terror, where they started to put people in jail because they made these posts on social media, of which they actually acknowledged that they did not transgress any law. But still, we have to show what happens when we think that you spread hate speech or something. So we see, I think, that the years before us

will be quite difficult. I think so. Ik denk dat de jaren voor ons best moeilijk zullen zijn. Maar ik ben nog steeds heel optimistisch. We gaan elke week, soms twee keer per week naar buiten om te praten en te lezen. En overal. Ik heb gezien hoe een bepaald groep mensen allemaal door hetzelfde proces gaat. Ze zijn erg bepaald. Zoals, oké, terwijl de wereld om ons heen dehumaniseert, zullen we de mensheid representeren. We blijven loyaal blijven bij bepaalde principes van de mensheid.

En zoveel mensen beginnen zich te beseffen dat er iets is over waarheid en eerlijkheid. In deze wereld die in manipulatie ligt, of overal, op de ene kant besloten een groot groep mensen te collaboreren en te gaan bij de manipulatie, om mee te gaan met de manipulatie, omdat het te moeilijk is om er tegen te gaan. En zo op en zo op. Of misschien omdat ze het zelf niet zien. Maar er is ook een kleine groep mensen die zeggen nee. Hoe meer manipulatie er rond ons, hoe meer eerlijk we worden.

En dat is wat we nodig hebben. We moeten niet te veel denken en niet alles begrijpen. Ik wil veel dingen begrijpen, maar het belangrijkste is... everything. I like to understand a lot of things, but the most important thing always will be, in a world that loses all ethical awareness, you have to be the one. Just focus on this thing. Stay loyal. Try to, as well as you can, as good as you can, try to feel what it means to be an ethical being and try to represent these ethical principles. Try to stay loyal. And the rest will be solved for you, I think.

And maybe, you know, nobody can guarantee us what will happen. And I think it might be really difficult times. But I'm quite confident that, in the end, Het zou wel moeilijk zijn. Maar ik ben er wel van overtuigd dat het uiteindelijk... Dat is precies waarom een lie een lie is. Het heeft niet de structuur van het echte. Het is niet... In het einde... Zodat de mensen die loyaltig blijven bij iets wat ze geloven, het juist is... Ze doen hun best om eerlijk te zijn.

En het einde zal de winnaarszijde zijn. Geweldig. Inspirerend. Bedankt. Ik heb het heel erg gehoord. Bedankt dat je me hier hebt gehouden. Het was heel leuk om met je te ontmoeten. Mijn plezier. My pleasure. Deeper. My pleasure.