These are two great, wise, and brave men talking. Another silver lining of the current crisis and the Covid debacle is that it flushes out our greatest minds. Any ideological doctrine - scientific or religious - is an insult to true intelligence, in my opinion.
I was raised under a dominant catholic religious ideology and instinctively rejected it from a young age. Only later did I realize how insulting and anti-freedom any doctrine is. So many Christian dogmas insult our natural intelligence.
I really enjoyed this conversation, which you can find here. I recommend listening to it to everyone. But it is 1 h 16 min long and not everyone has the time. Therefore, I summarised the most intriguing points as I understood them. I hope you find it useful. Occasionally, I add my thoughts in brackets and italics.
Intro:
In this conversation, Professor Jay Bhattacharya and Mattias Desmet discuss the psychology of totalitarianism and the Illusion of Consensus. They explore the corruption of science, the modern mechanistic worldview, and the alienation of people from each other. They also delve into the role of measurement and measurability, the impact of digital connections, and the phenomenon of scapegoating.
And much more.
Two great men are discussing our times. Jay is to the left, Mattias is to the right.
After the introductions, Mattias talks about the beginning of scientific discourse and that it originally was a minority “truth talk” to challenge the then-religious dominant discourse. While becoming the dominant mainstream discourse, it lost its qualities of truthfulness and stopped being a kind of truth talk.
Jay replies that when science is married to power, it becomes an ideology comparable to a religious ideology rather than a humble set of tools to explain the physical world, as so openly demonstrated during the Covid years.
Mattias adds that only when a discourse (in this case, science) becomes dominant can people use it to be successful and important in society, which is one reason why it becomes corrupted.
“To become rich, to become famous - and that’s how this discourse becomes perverted”, Mattias says.
Jay then points out that if scientific work is motivated by fame, money and power, it loses its honesty and humility. Facts that don’t support the desired hypothesis get easily ignored. Mattias agrees and adds that it then attracts a completely different type of human being.
The original scientific work was to challenge dominant ideologies with new facts. When it becomes dominant, it becomes an ideology that defends against new ideas and becomes perverted.
They then move on to explain the alienation and loneliness of more and more people that peaked just before the Covid outbreak. Mattias links that to the mechanistic view of the world by many, who see themselves and the universe as mechanistic machines of atoms working together.
(That seems to be the position of WEF philosopher Yuval Harari, who degrades us all to hackable machines that can be programmed)
However, he stresses that this is not the same as the original scientific approach and claims that this wasn’t mechanistic and spiritually meaningless at all.
To back this up, he quoted German philosopher Hegel, who, more than 200 years ago, already noticed how society was “atomizing”, meaning “that the social bond between people slowly deteriorated.” Since then, Mattias warned, it only got worse, citing that 40% to 60% of people did not have one meaningful relationship in their lives just before Covid. This is strongly correlated to the use of technology and industrialization among those people.
He linked this directly to the new purely rationalistic and mechanistic way of thinking that alienates people from the essence of life, claiming that the essence of life can never be grasped rationally and mechanistically.
He then quotes several famous scientists to back this up. Nils Bohr said, “When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry.”
Jay agreed and quoted one of the early Enlightenment scientists, Pascal, who, despite his scientific rational pursuits, wrote a book in which he defended his spiritual beliefs. That “only the head matters” is not only a human mistake but also a scientific mistake.
Mattias added that Einstein said that many people falsely think science depends on the supreme capacity for rational thinking. Instead, Einstein said, it is based on “Einfuehlung”, literally meaning “feeling into something” (my translation). Mattias translates it into “empathically resonating”, relating with your heart also.
This requires “the courage not to know”. And a new way of knowing is born in this space of not knowing. “That’s what science is”, Mattias insists empathetically.
(Socrates comes to mind: I know that I know that I don’t know.)
Jay wisely adds that science is paradoxical and beautiful. He then wants to dig deeper into the relationship between this purely mechanistic rational worldview leading to this atomization of society, the thought that all there is is this mechanistic physical machine.
This belief of coming together purely as this collection of atoms is alienating because there is no inherent meaning in simply being a collection of atoms.
Mattia agrees but points out that there is a more profound alienating psychological mechanism at work here. This worldview makes people think they know how other people are like we know how a machine works, and then makes this somehow surprising but very deep statement:
“If you are confronted with someone that […] understands you in a rational way, knows who you are, that knows you perfectly, you will feel no connection."
(As a Hakomi Therapist, I can only confirm this. Many laypeople think that good therapists fully understand the psychology of a client and then provide a solution. That’s also what most psychiatrists and psychologists believe. The opposite is true. Nothing alienates people more than being studied and assessed like a lab rat by “experts” who think they know you. Research very clearly links successful therapy overwhelmingly to a warm, loving relationship with the therapist. Such a relationship with the therapist is only possible if the therapist is in a space of loving, not-knowing empathy that opens up a here-and-now bubble in which the magic of healing happens between two people.)
Then Mattias explained how technological devices alienated us from nature and each other. The watch, for example, alienated us from the sun and the moon. Television and radio replaced real interactions between people, and the Internet only exaggerated that. While this technology is immensely useful to exchange pure information, it takes away most of the resonance between people. In the real world, bodies and souls resonate with each other. According to Mattias, we lose the ability to feel how the other one feels using technological devices by an estimated 90%.
They then talk about the downsides of communicating digitally, especially lecturing and how exhausting it can be, stating that in online settings, it is a “very disconnecting way to connect.”
(As I learned recently from a university student, more and more lectures are held online, presumingly to save costs. That particular student lives on campus but spends half of her time alone in her room before a screen. And she hates it. It is hugely alienating. Campus life used to be extremely social and character-forming. This is a sad future for our young people, and we will pay the price)
In short, Jay says, this widespread digital connection introduced on a big scale through the pandemic is dehumanising human connection by turning us into bio-hazards rather than seeing us as human beings.
(I wonder if a T-shirt saying: I am a human - not a bio-hazard, would resonate with people)
And this rational and digital alienation leads directly to mass-formation psychosis, according to Mattias.
This is a good point to stop Part I, which covers the first third of the conversation. I won’t promise more parts. True to my no-free-will stance, it will depend on many factors, so let’s see.
We don't have tech at our fingertips, it has us by our fingertips...the hands are the critical pathways of nervous system development, and can lead to addiction under blue light (dopamine spike) which then leads to total irradiation of our neocortex, which craves connection:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/how-does-emf-affect-children
Thank you so much for the summary 🙏 !