There was an interesting interview with Desmet recently on Brett Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast. They disagreed on the reductionist/materialist aspect, but in a productive way. Worth listening to.
One of the things they touched on was precisely the formation of an 'anti-group', and the danger of mass formation happening there, also. The key to avoiding that trap, according to Desmet, is to ensure strong interpersonal bonds in order to provide stability against the personal-group bonds. Horizontal connectivity preventing the purely vertical connectivity that characterizes a ponerpgenic mass, in other words. It seems to me that this contains much of the answer to the key question - how to effectively combat this situation. Simply speaking out calmly and rationally is surely important, but much more important I think is participating in and providing fora for the development of organic societal bonds, since it is the latter that will actually solve the underlying issue that led to mass formation in the first place.
Another thing he touched on, which is very similar to Gurdjieff's concept of conscious suffering, was that by enduring these difficulties and holding to our principles, our souls and even our bodies actually become stronger. Statements like that, along with other remarks eg the assault on crude materialism, make me suspect that Desmet understands far more than he states directly in public.
I think I listened to that one too. I downloaded a handful of interviews he gave around the same time and listened to them back to back. (Though maybe it was just Heather and Brett's podcast they did after the interview, where they referenced it... Either way, he said similar things in the other ones, too.)
Interestingly, Lobaczewski describes the formation of a countergroup, too. I'll write about it in the next post. He calls it a "society of normal people" and argues that it develops naturally. But that's not to say we can't take that knowledge and get started early.
Thanks for the reply. This rhymes with my own observations. I seem to get along very well with other former grunts, regardless of country btw. Bring back the draft?
"...that by enduring these difficulties and holding to our principles, our souls and even our bodies actually become stronger"
Often referred to as Post-traumatic Growth. It is when you are in a do or die situation -- having hit rock bottom -- in which there is no wiggle-room left. You need to face the situation and you need to rise. The Stockdale Paradox?
The targets of chronic Narcissistic Abuse all fall in this category -- do or die.
And if you know the work of Lawrence LeShan, he wrote about "Cancer as a Turning Point". In other words, it is the arrival at a point in life where things must be faced and decisions made If you ace the test, your reward is Post-traumatic Growth. THRIVING, as some call it.
Gurdjieff must get in line behind many others who have realized this.
There is an Australian woman named Melanie T. Evans who knows about this kind of growth, and who realized that heinous Narcissistic Abuse is one of the situations that pushes a person towards it. Melanie's talk of angels I can do without, but she does have the basic principles absolutely correct. These growth opportunities usually involve suffering, and are not seen as growth opportunities when you are in the midst of them. In fact you would do anything to get rid of the suffering!
And not everyone passes the test....not everyone comes out the other side. But the potential is there.
The standard book to start with is Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous." It's great, but one thing that doesn't really shine through in that book is how goddamn funny G could be. You can get some of that in his own writings, like Beelzebub's Tales (but that one is notoriously difficult and will probably leave you with the impression he was a mad man - which he was, but in the best way possible), but also in bits and pieces of many of his students' memoirs.
Good God whatever you do don't actually read Gurdjieff, the guy was a terrible writer.
Like Harrison said, Ouspensky is a pretty good place to start. The problem there is that Gurdjieff had a tendency to throw a lot of obscurtantist nonsense in with the actionable information, and also, to not actually write down the more practical aspects of his methods.
I found Azize's book, which published a lot of the actual excercises Gurdjieff used, to be pretty useful (props to Harrison's podcast for turning me on to that).
I did enjoy Meetings with Remarkable Men, but yeah, don't look go to G's writing if you want clear, practical stuff. One Gurdjieffian I don't tire reading is John Bennett, a British gentleman and spy. Azize's next book will be about him.
Here is the conundrum, as far as left-brain/right-brain thinking goes in this situation.
We need left-brain thinking to figure it all out. But is the irony here that there would be nothing to need to figure out -- if we had had centuries of balanced thinking to begin with?
So do I take the leap....quit reading.....just go back to my knitting (I love knitting)? Am I just exacerbating the problem by stubbornly insisting on thinking it through?
Professors Desmet ....McGilchrist? An open question.
I will contribute this, for what it is worth. There are many questions/comments here about the existence of nefarious men behind the curtain in these totalitarian games. And that Mattias Desmet denies this. Peter Breggin goes bonkers with him for that. But then again, Mattias Desmet has the far better mind of the two. He can deal with abstractions well. And Peter just lashes out when he gets ticked-off.
From my experiences in life, and my learning about this issue, I would say the following. That Psychopaths and other lesser Cluster-B types certainly exist. Desmet seems to ignore that. If you were a Psychopath-target or Narc-target in childhood, you will very likely grow up in the Re-enactment Compulsion of being a regular target of such persons, even though you think you are avoiding red flags and trying very hard to keep them out of your life. They just keep coming.... Why to you, but not to the average person? It is as if you have a homing-device in your brain....a Narc-attractor. Can it be removed?
I suspect that the world at large operates in a fashion similar to this. That there are many unconscious attractions, depending on what has been coded into you. And that the resulting Western totalitarianism in 2024 had its attractors previously coded into many, many people over generations. As what? Too much left-brained thinking? Was that it?
Desmet seldom uses plain-speak or comes to the down-to-earth point of the whole thing. I find him frustrating in that way. Because many people could do something about it if they actually understood what he is talking about. Too much vagueness in his book, even if it happens that does know what he is saying about this issue.
So from my understanding of Desmet, he is stating that we are all in a vast Re-enactment Compulsion, with built-in homing devices attracting these predators....but we don't realize it because 400 years after the Enlightenment, this just seems like reality.
We attract the predators because something vital is very much out of balance in us. It is that out-of-balance-ness which attracts undesirable powers into our lives. If we could all get into normal human balance again.....the predators would dissolve from our societies. They would lose control over us. In often unpredictable ways.
This all sounds whippy-dippy/airy-fairy. I agree. But I didn't design human life on earth. I just live it, and make my observations. And as a comparison, I have seen too many cases of Narc-targets completely changing their attitudes/approaches....and having the Cluster-B personalities in their lives suddenly lose the grip on power....in what might be called miraculous ways.
Therefore, IF this is what Mattias Desmet is getting at, I wish he would put it into more concrete down-to-earth terminology. Commit himself to that. Because it does little good for only Mattias to understand it, apart from contributing to a grand tease.
Desmet certainly has a lot of worthy things to say. Ultimately, though, he comes down on the side of "there was no conspiracy during Covid to induce fear, which in turn induced mass formation. This fear arose naturally from our own propensity for mechanistic thinking." I firmly believe that was indeed a conspiracy to induce fear, with the probable hope of getting us to world-wide vaccine passports.
Desmet also says things like, "the belief in the human intellect is the basis of totalitarianism." I don't have the page number but trust me, it's there and I can get it. That makes no sense.
When Malone introduced his readers to Chris Langan, I was a bit shocked. The guy is a eugenicist and full of himself and would like to rule the world. He posits this "better world" that's non-rational. Desmet also posits this non-rational "better world" even as he argues that we have to use our reason. Yet Enlightenment reason is the source of our psychological problems. So which is it? To me, something funny is going on with this "better world" talk. Let's just fix the one we have.
That Desmet does, indeed, serve as an apologist for the conspirators-- telling us that they didn't even exist, and to think they did is dangerous-- negates everything he says for me. Why does he do that? Couldn't he simply explain the mechanisms of the psychological effects of fear as it leads to mass formation, and point out how we abandoned "stay calm and carry on" and instead went hysterical? We did that because we were fed 24/7, unrelenting fear porn concerning Covid-19. Desmet could have profitably noted the "single idea" carried to irrational extremes that Arendt explicated, which is what Arendt meant by "ideology"-- literally the logic of a single idea. What was that idea during Covid? It was "stay safe." Desmet missed the boat on that completely. Why? Arendt gave it to him, that idea was there for the taking and explained so much, as a singular focus on it led to irrationality and yes, mass formation. Yet now, when in my state Covid cases and deaths are as high as they were in 2020 (and we are one of the most highly vaccinated) there's virtual silence around "stay safe." And people are back to normal. So we, the people, did not "ask" for it due to our mechanistic thinking, or we'd still be in a state of fear.
I appreciate the author tackling this. And yes, I do get carried away a bit about Desmet.
As long as the ruling elites and oligarchies are allowed to remain in power - or near it - the situation will not change, the structures will continue on, but with different names. Thus, in Russia, the nomenklatura became the oligarchs, and an old KGB apparatchik, Putin, has turned into the new dictator, with the prospect and intent of re-creating Stalinism and the USSR. Contrast that with Czechia and Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where the old elite were driven out of power and had no place in the creation of the new system.
And, repeating a previous comment - ""There’s a scientific consensus, after all." The trouble is that most of what is purported to be science is junk science, especially in the "social sciences" which have attained an entirely undeserved respectability. A lot of the "numbers" come from those fields, in which cases the conclusions are often assumed and then "numbers" are cooked up to back those conclusions. Thus you get critical race theory and wokeism - go back in time and you get the Frankfort School and "scientific socialism", all of them games to demonstrate the desirability of one totalitarian system or another. The conclusion that individual freedom must be subsumed to the "needs of the collective" - usually determined by a very small group, an oligarchy or "leadership vanguard" - is the driving force behind the creation of these "numbers", and the "research" is paid for by the beneficiaries. And people are trained to accept and back this by systems of public education - government schooling - the basis for mass formation in every society in which this has occurred since the 1880s:
"Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers." http://wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
People coming out of such a system are ripe targets for mass formation. In the US, forty and fifty years ago, they were targets for authoritarian cults, many of which used the same Thought Reform techniques as seen today. I don't recall seeing references to Singer, Lifton, or Gatto in Desmet's work, and their work in explaining this phenomenon and the propensity for people to get caught up in it would be of great explanatory use.
"As long as the ruling elites and oligarchies are allowed to remain in power - or near it - the situation will not change, the structures will continue on, but with different names. Thus, in Russia, the nomenklatura became the oligarchs, and an old KGB apparatchik, Putin, has turned into the new dictator, with the prospect and intent of re-creating Stalinism and the USSR."
Yes, the influence of the nomenklatura continued and continues, but I disagree with your characterization of Putin. He's more of a traditional, pre-Soviet type leader than a Stalin. I'd recommend reading some of Gordon Hahn's recent books, for example.
"Contrast that with Czechia and Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where the old elite were driven out of power and had no place in the creation of the new system."
Mostly agreed on that point. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than nothing.
"In the early days of the war, most branches of the Russian state seemed blindsided by Putin’s determination to invade, and some prominent officials even seemed to question the wisdom of the decision, however timidly. But in the weeks since, government and society alike have lined up behind the Kremlin. Dissent is now a crime, and individuals who once held decision-making power—even if circumscribed—have found themselves hostages of institutions whose single-minded purpose is security and control. What has happened is, in effect, an FSB-on-FSB coup: Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now a faceless security bureaucracy has become the state, with Putin sitting on top. " https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-05-10/coup-kremlin Sounds an awful lot like a proto-Stalin to me.
Still nah. Specifically, you can check out Hahn's two most recent books: "The Russian Dilemma" and "Russian Tselostnost". Comment again when the mass incarcerations, mass executions, and radical society-destroying policies start getting implemented.
"“Over the past decade, we have witnessed a decisive and systematic clampdown on civil society in Russia.” the experts said. “The stigmatisation of civil society actors and human rights defenders as ‘foreign agents’, their harassment and imprisonment, shutdowns of human rights organisations, and severe restrictions on the freedoms of expression, of peaceful assembly and of association have further contributed to the closing of an already shrinking civic space.”
Since the outset of the invasion of Ukraine, this disturbing trend has deteriorated dramatically. As thousands came out to protest peacefully against the war, over 16,000 people, including many human rights defenders, have been detained for participating in or covering peaceful anti-war protests. The police have reportedly used excessive force against detained protesters and human rights defenders, including humiliating and threatening them. Those providing legal assistance have allegedly also been denied access to police stations and courts by law enforcement officials.
Over 60 criminal cases have also reportedly been opened for “fake war news”; and at least seven for ‘discrediting’ and ‘calling for obstruction’ of the use of the Russian armed forces’, which were criminalized under amendments to the Criminal Code, adopted on 4 March 2022.
“This law and other sweeping restrictions on freedom of expression and association in Russia are being used to silence human rights defenders, journalists and civil society representatives,” the experts said.
Most independent Russian media outlets have closed down to avoid prosecution, or have been blocked along with dozens of foreign media. Over 20 media outlets stopped operating or suspended their work in the country, including the Nobel Peace Prize winning newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the last independent TV channel Dozhd and radio station Echo of Moscow.
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are also blocked, and Meta has been designated an extremist organisation and banned. Many other companies, including the international technology sector, are withdrawing from the Russian market due to reputational and legal risks, without necessarily taking into account the negative impacts on human rights of people left behind. This leaves human rights defenders and civil society organizations with little access to the information and communication infrastructure vital for their work." https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/07/russia-un-experts-condemn-civil-society-shutdown
And you're fantastic for knowing about him too! ;) I may get more into his works here sometime in the future. I've got some of his unpublished manuscripts, which would be fun to write about.
There are two books in print: TPD, and Personality-shaping through PD. Plus there are several out of print English books available on the PTD website, here: http://www.positivedisintegration.com/Six.htm
And there are 3 unpublished English manuscripts. Not sure if they're available through the website, though.
You have probably gathered, Harrison, that I am Canadian too. Something in the water here? We tend to turn out decent thinkers on the abstract sides of life.
There was an interesting interview with Desmet recently on Brett Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast. They disagreed on the reductionist/materialist aspect, but in a productive way. Worth listening to.
One of the things they touched on was precisely the formation of an 'anti-group', and the danger of mass formation happening there, also. The key to avoiding that trap, according to Desmet, is to ensure strong interpersonal bonds in order to provide stability against the personal-group bonds. Horizontal connectivity preventing the purely vertical connectivity that characterizes a ponerpgenic mass, in other words. It seems to me that this contains much of the answer to the key question - how to effectively combat this situation. Simply speaking out calmly and rationally is surely important, but much more important I think is participating in and providing fora for the development of organic societal bonds, since it is the latter that will actually solve the underlying issue that led to mass formation in the first place.
Another thing he touched on, which is very similar to Gurdjieff's concept of conscious suffering, was that by enduring these difficulties and holding to our principles, our souls and even our bodies actually become stronger. Statements like that, along with other remarks eg the assault on crude materialism, make me suspect that Desmet understands far more than he states directly in public.
I think I listened to that one too. I downloaded a handful of interviews he gave around the same time and listened to them back to back. (Though maybe it was just Heather and Brett's podcast they did after the interview, where they referenced it... Either way, he said similar things in the other ones, too.)
Interestingly, Lobaczewski describes the formation of a countergroup, too. I'll write about it in the next post. He calls it a "society of normal people" and argues that it develops naturally. But that's not to say we can't take that knowledge and get started early.
It's a subject that a lot of people have written on. Vaclav Havel, too, if I recall. Also Rod Dreher.
Interesting. What about military experience is it in your opinion that grounds people?
Thanks for the reply. This rhymes with my own observations. I seem to get along very well with other former grunts, regardless of country btw. Bring back the draft?
"...that by enduring these difficulties and holding to our principles, our souls and even our bodies actually become stronger"
Often referred to as Post-traumatic Growth. It is when you are in a do or die situation -- having hit rock bottom -- in which there is no wiggle-room left. You need to face the situation and you need to rise. The Stockdale Paradox?
The targets of chronic Narcissistic Abuse all fall in this category -- do or die.
And if you know the work of Lawrence LeShan, he wrote about "Cancer as a Turning Point". In other words, it is the arrival at a point in life where things must be faced and decisions made If you ace the test, your reward is Post-traumatic Growth. THRIVING, as some call it.
Gurdjieff must get in line behind many others who have realized this.
There is an Australian woman named Melanie T. Evans who knows about this kind of growth, and who realized that heinous Narcissistic Abuse is one of the situations that pushes a person towards it. Melanie's talk of angels I can do without, but she does have the basic principles absolutely correct. These growth opportunities usually involve suffering, and are not seen as growth opportunities when you are in the midst of them. In fact you would do anything to get rid of the suffering!
And not everyone passes the test....not everyone comes out the other side. But the potential is there.
Just saying.....
I'm down with that but only if we get cool hats.
Keep your pseudonymity, if you have it, with style.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51FHu6mlYOL.jpg
Good Lord.
Can confirm. Got a sister who's into it. She made me a Cthulhu for Christmas one year.
The standard book to start with is Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous." It's great, but one thing that doesn't really shine through in that book is how goddamn funny G could be. You can get some of that in his own writings, like Beelzebub's Tales (but that one is notoriously difficult and will probably leave you with the impression he was a mad man - which he was, but in the best way possible), but also in bits and pieces of many of his students' memoirs.
We've got a bunch of Gurdjieff-related podcasts on MindMatters: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf7E0PQH2J1dC4PYKMyqFQ2WbaMmzMWU7
Good God whatever you do don't actually read Gurdjieff, the guy was a terrible writer.
Like Harrison said, Ouspensky is a pretty good place to start. The problem there is that Gurdjieff had a tendency to throw a lot of obscurtantist nonsense in with the actionable information, and also, to not actually write down the more practical aspects of his methods.
I found Azize's book, which published a lot of the actual excercises Gurdjieff used, to be pretty useful (props to Harrison's podcast for turning me on to that).
I did enjoy Meetings with Remarkable Men, but yeah, don't look go to G's writing if you want clear, practical stuff. One Gurdjieffian I don't tire reading is John Bennett, a British gentleman and spy. Azize's next book will be about him.
Now that sounds like an interesting character.
Not a bad idea but that might mean I spend less time reading trashy sci-fi.
You could always do trashy sci-fi for your book club. lol
🤔
Wow....I need to go for a coffee and try to digest this. That was quite the summary.
Excellent work here, Harrison! Blew my mind in places.
Thanks!
Here is the conundrum, as far as left-brain/right-brain thinking goes in this situation.
We need left-brain thinking to figure it all out. But is the irony here that there would be nothing to need to figure out -- if we had had centuries of balanced thinking to begin with?
So do I take the leap....quit reading.....just go back to my knitting (I love knitting)? Am I just exacerbating the problem by stubbornly insisting on thinking it through?
Professors Desmet ....McGilchrist? An open question.
I will contribute this, for what it is worth. There are many questions/comments here about the existence of nefarious men behind the curtain in these totalitarian games. And that Mattias Desmet denies this. Peter Breggin goes bonkers with him for that. But then again, Mattias Desmet has the far better mind of the two. He can deal with abstractions well. And Peter just lashes out when he gets ticked-off.
From my experiences in life, and my learning about this issue, I would say the following. That Psychopaths and other lesser Cluster-B types certainly exist. Desmet seems to ignore that. If you were a Psychopath-target or Narc-target in childhood, you will very likely grow up in the Re-enactment Compulsion of being a regular target of such persons, even though you think you are avoiding red flags and trying very hard to keep them out of your life. They just keep coming.... Why to you, but not to the average person? It is as if you have a homing-device in your brain....a Narc-attractor. Can it be removed?
I suspect that the world at large operates in a fashion similar to this. That there are many unconscious attractions, depending on what has been coded into you. And that the resulting Western totalitarianism in 2024 had its attractors previously coded into many, many people over generations. As what? Too much left-brained thinking? Was that it?
Desmet seldom uses plain-speak or comes to the down-to-earth point of the whole thing. I find him frustrating in that way. Because many people could do something about it if they actually understood what he is talking about. Too much vagueness in his book, even if it happens that does know what he is saying about this issue.
So from my understanding of Desmet, he is stating that we are all in a vast Re-enactment Compulsion, with built-in homing devices attracting these predators....but we don't realize it because 400 years after the Enlightenment, this just seems like reality.
We attract the predators because something vital is very much out of balance in us. It is that out-of-balance-ness which attracts undesirable powers into our lives. If we could all get into normal human balance again.....the predators would dissolve from our societies. They would lose control over us. In often unpredictable ways.
This all sounds whippy-dippy/airy-fairy. I agree. But I didn't design human life on earth. I just live it, and make my observations. And as a comparison, I have seen too many cases of Narc-targets completely changing their attitudes/approaches....and having the Cluster-B personalities in their lives suddenly lose the grip on power....in what might be called miraculous ways.
Therefore, IF this is what Mattias Desmet is getting at, I wish he would put it into more concrete down-to-earth terminology. Commit himself to that. Because it does little good for only Mattias to understand it, apart from contributing to a grand tease.
If this is indeed what is going on.
Desmet certainly has a lot of worthy things to say. Ultimately, though, he comes down on the side of "there was no conspiracy during Covid to induce fear, which in turn induced mass formation. This fear arose naturally from our own propensity for mechanistic thinking." I firmly believe that was indeed a conspiracy to induce fear, with the probable hope of getting us to world-wide vaccine passports.
Desmet also says things like, "the belief in the human intellect is the basis of totalitarianism." I don't have the page number but trust me, it's there and I can get it. That makes no sense.
When Malone introduced his readers to Chris Langan, I was a bit shocked. The guy is a eugenicist and full of himself and would like to rule the world. He posits this "better world" that's non-rational. Desmet also posits this non-rational "better world" even as he argues that we have to use our reason. Yet Enlightenment reason is the source of our psychological problems. So which is it? To me, something funny is going on with this "better world" talk. Let's just fix the one we have.
That Desmet does, indeed, serve as an apologist for the conspirators-- telling us that they didn't even exist, and to think they did is dangerous-- negates everything he says for me. Why does he do that? Couldn't he simply explain the mechanisms of the psychological effects of fear as it leads to mass formation, and point out how we abandoned "stay calm and carry on" and instead went hysterical? We did that because we were fed 24/7, unrelenting fear porn concerning Covid-19. Desmet could have profitably noted the "single idea" carried to irrational extremes that Arendt explicated, which is what Arendt meant by "ideology"-- literally the logic of a single idea. What was that idea during Covid? It was "stay safe." Desmet missed the boat on that completely. Why? Arendt gave it to him, that idea was there for the taking and explained so much, as a singular focus on it led to irrationality and yes, mass formation. Yet now, when in my state Covid cases and deaths are as high as they were in 2020 (and we are one of the most highly vaccinated) there's virtual silence around "stay safe." And people are back to normal. So we, the people, did not "ask" for it due to our mechanistic thinking, or we'd still be in a state of fear.
I appreciate the author tackling this. And yes, I do get carried away a bit about Desmet.
As long as the ruling elites and oligarchies are allowed to remain in power - or near it - the situation will not change, the structures will continue on, but with different names. Thus, in Russia, the nomenklatura became the oligarchs, and an old KGB apparatchik, Putin, has turned into the new dictator, with the prospect and intent of re-creating Stalinism and the USSR. Contrast that with Czechia and Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where the old elite were driven out of power and had no place in the creation of the new system.
And, repeating a previous comment - ""There’s a scientific consensus, after all." The trouble is that most of what is purported to be science is junk science, especially in the "social sciences" which have attained an entirely undeserved respectability. A lot of the "numbers" come from those fields, in which cases the conclusions are often assumed and then "numbers" are cooked up to back those conclusions. Thus you get critical race theory and wokeism - go back in time and you get the Frankfort School and "scientific socialism", all of them games to demonstrate the desirability of one totalitarian system or another. The conclusion that individual freedom must be subsumed to the "needs of the collective" - usually determined by a very small group, an oligarchy or "leadership vanguard" - is the driving force behind the creation of these "numbers", and the "research" is paid for by the beneficiaries. And people are trained to accept and back this by systems of public education - government schooling - the basis for mass formation in every society in which this has occurred since the 1880s:
"Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers." http://wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
People coming out of such a system are ripe targets for mass formation. In the US, forty and fifty years ago, they were targets for authoritarian cults, many of which used the same Thought Reform techniques as seen today. I don't recall seeing references to Singer, Lifton, or Gatto in Desmet's work, and their work in explaining this phenomenon and the propensity for people to get caught up in it would be of great explanatory use.
"As long as the ruling elites and oligarchies are allowed to remain in power - or near it - the situation will not change, the structures will continue on, but with different names. Thus, in Russia, the nomenklatura became the oligarchs, and an old KGB apparatchik, Putin, has turned into the new dictator, with the prospect and intent of re-creating Stalinism and the USSR."
Yes, the influence of the nomenklatura continued and continues, but I disagree with your characterization of Putin. He's more of a traditional, pre-Soviet type leader than a Stalin. I'd recommend reading some of Gordon Hahn's recent books, for example.
"Contrast that with Czechia and Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where the old elite were driven out of power and had no place in the creation of the new system."
Mostly agreed on that point. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than nothing.
"In the early days of the war, most branches of the Russian state seemed blindsided by Putin’s determination to invade, and some prominent officials even seemed to question the wisdom of the decision, however timidly. But in the weeks since, government and society alike have lined up behind the Kremlin. Dissent is now a crime, and individuals who once held decision-making power—even if circumscribed—have found themselves hostages of institutions whose single-minded purpose is security and control. What has happened is, in effect, an FSB-on-FSB coup: Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now a faceless security bureaucracy has become the state, with Putin sitting on top. " https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-05-10/coup-kremlin Sounds an awful lot like a proto-Stalin to me.
Still nah. Specifically, you can check out Hahn's two most recent books: "The Russian Dilemma" and "Russian Tselostnost". Comment again when the mass incarcerations, mass executions, and radical society-destroying policies start getting implemented.
"“Over the past decade, we have witnessed a decisive and systematic clampdown on civil society in Russia.” the experts said. “The stigmatisation of civil society actors and human rights defenders as ‘foreign agents’, their harassment and imprisonment, shutdowns of human rights organisations, and severe restrictions on the freedoms of expression, of peaceful assembly and of association have further contributed to the closing of an already shrinking civic space.”
Since the outset of the invasion of Ukraine, this disturbing trend has deteriorated dramatically. As thousands came out to protest peacefully against the war, over 16,000 people, including many human rights defenders, have been detained for participating in or covering peaceful anti-war protests. The police have reportedly used excessive force against detained protesters and human rights defenders, including humiliating and threatening them. Those providing legal assistance have allegedly also been denied access to police stations and courts by law enforcement officials.
Over 60 criminal cases have also reportedly been opened for “fake war news”; and at least seven for ‘discrediting’ and ‘calling for obstruction’ of the use of the Russian armed forces’, which were criminalized under amendments to the Criminal Code, adopted on 4 March 2022.
“This law and other sweeping restrictions on freedom of expression and association in Russia are being used to silence human rights defenders, journalists and civil society representatives,” the experts said.
Most independent Russian media outlets have closed down to avoid prosecution, or have been blocked along with dozens of foreign media. Over 20 media outlets stopped operating or suspended their work in the country, including the Nobel Peace Prize winning newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the last independent TV channel Dozhd and radio station Echo of Moscow.
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are also blocked, and Meta has been designated an extremist organisation and banned. Many other companies, including the international technology sector, are withdrawing from the Russian market due to reputational and legal risks, without necessarily taking into account the negative impacts on human rights of people left behind. This leaves human rights defenders and civil society organizations with little access to the information and communication infrastructure vital for their work." https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/07/russia-un-experts-condemn-civil-society-shutdown
Fixed! Thank you, Jean!
And you're fantastic for knowing about him too! ;) I may get more into his works here sometime in the future. I've got some of his unpublished manuscripts, which would be fun to write about.
There are two books in print: TPD, and Personality-shaping through PD. Plus there are several out of print English books available on the PTD website, here: http://www.positivedisintegration.com/Six.htm
And there are 3 unpublished English manuscripts. Not sure if they're available through the website, though.
Of course you know about Dabrowski.
Didn't Dabrowski teach at an Alberta university for a time?
Yep, UofA.
You have probably gathered, Harrison, that I am Canadian too. Something in the water here? We tend to turn out decent thinkers on the abstract sides of life.