A (23:39)
So you probably, then you probably don't know the whole backstory. Okay, that's, we should, that's fun to dive into because it relates to the psychological warfare domain that now I've become a pseudo expert on just in trying to understand what the hell I experienced and what's going on. So, so Matthias Desmet, who's a friend at University of Ghent in Belgium, who by the way has been pretty well railroaded in his university now not allowed to teach his own book on the psychological basis of totalitarianism, which is where that book had not come out yet. But it was. The mass formation hypothesis is what was the kind of core of that book that's now published and widely regarded. So Matthias came. Matias is somebody who, as a Ph.D. a full professor, had long taught 20th century psychology work relating to totalitarianism and thought that goes back to Freud and beyond, really all the way back to Plato and the Allegory of the Cave. And in particular there was a number of philosophers in the 20th century associated with trying to make sense of Nazi Germany and what had happened to the German people and really all over the world, but particularly relating to the Germans. And Matthias had been teaching this on a regular basis. And the way he tells the Story. He had an epiphany one day that, oh, my God, the thing that I've been teaching, I'm living. We're experiencing it. We're experiencing this process of the formation of masses, and you could call it crowd psychology. So mass formation, it's kind of awkward. Or mass formation psychosis, which is what the term was that was used in the initial podcast that he gave out. So that's why I use that term. But, you know, it's not in the. The attack was that. It's not in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual for the American Psychiatric Association. So therefore it doesn't exist. But, you know, all the attacks. But the core of it is that when people, to make it simple, become disassociated from society and from each other, they become extremely vulnerable to manipulation of a variety of different types. And a leader can come into that environment and offer, let's, to simplify it, offer a solution to their pain. Because being isolated, socially isolated, is associated with pain. We as human beings have a need to connect with others. It's a fundamental aspect of being human. It's what you do. I mean, you connect. That's the essence of the Joe Rogan experience, I think. So we need to connect with others. And in. In certain situations where people are threatened, and in particular in the modern era where we have all of these things that drive us into isolation, most notably our electronic tools, we become disassociated from our community. And when that happens, we have a strong need to become associated with community. And a leader can come into that environment and basically say, I have the solution to your pain, your psychological pain. And what will happen is a strange phenomena where people will, rather than building social networks, let's say horizontally to those around them, they'll attach to this strong leader and they'll get fulfillment for that need to belong by this attachment to that leader and following the edicts of that leader. And this leads to this phenomena that gives rise, you know, enables totalitarianism, but gives rise to this whole cluster of things that Mastias described that, you know, he uses the term mass formation in a way that's kind of an odd artifact of translation, I guess, from the Dutch. An easier way to think of it is a crowd formation. And in his examination of the history of what happened in Nazi Germany, where things, people really went crazy, I mean, mothers were turning their children in, children were being executed on, you know, consequent to mother's testimony, which is really strange when you think about it just, you know, in a fundamental way you know, we had all of this dear leader kind of stuff, the linkage of the self and the soul to this central figure in deriving a sense of identity and belonging from that that went on. And there's still people from that generation in Germany that are still caught up in a lot of that. That's why the German laws, that's the short version. When we spoke before, I gave a much more technical, precise definition of Matthias's core thesis. But this, once this happens, then people become very, very easily manipulated through propaganda and a variety of techniques that now I have a better comprehension of. I mean, then I was still just trying to make sense, just like all of us, of what the heck was going on, what's with this crazy. But now it's kind of coalesced into an understanding of the fact that modern psychology has been weaponized, it's been intentionally weaponized in the context of military activities in the domain that, you know, one way to express it, the term is used, kind of term of art in military jargon is fifth generation warfare, or you could call it psychological warfare. And what distinguishes the present from say Sun Tzu and you know, ancient propaganda has always been part of warfare and humans. But we haven't had the digital world, we haven't had modern psychology, we haven't had nudge technology, we haven't had all these tools that allow the control of information, thought, perception, feelings, emotions that have become commonplace. And that is this suite of technology and capabilities that we saw deployed in all of us were built in a kind of a structured way largely by UK and US leadership in the intelligence community, as a weapon of war to counter these successful insurgencies that we keep losing wars over. You know, Vietnam being a notable example, all the way through Afghanistan. And so that, that's why it was built. But then that tech got deployed by governments against their own citizens. And this was really launched in large part in the United States by a presidential directive from Barack Obama. I'm not making this up. You can look it up. And by the way, the presidential directive is still in place that established the nudge technology units in the United States. They were already operating in the uk and in the UK it's quite advanced. When you look at UK politics right now and what's going on there with all the censorship and everything, this is no joke. We're barreling right to that endpoint, same as Canada has. We're just a little bit behind. And there they. We have the benefit of the First Amendment and a constitution and often on courts. But There they don't have those obstacles. And the government believes in the UK that once they have won an election, it's perfectly acceptable to deploy this modern psychology and information control technology on their own population. And I argue that once that Rubicon is crossed, the idea of democracy because the tech is so powerful becomes completely perverted. And we got a good hard taste of that during COVID What you and I experienced, what you experienced with Ivermectin, what you experienced with just talking about your own experiences and the blowback that happened after we did that little hit, Is a super powerful, clear case study in understanding this intersection of modern psychology, warfare technology and the digital world and algorithmic control of information. The creation of digital avatars for all of us, the application now in present of artificial intelligence to custom craft messaging that gets fed into our digital domains on a regular basis in order to sell us whatever, but also to shape how we think and to control what information we get access to all the time. Just to give an example, my wife, who does a lot of our research for our substack, was talking to me the other day. She just gave me a couple examples.
