https://www.theepochtimes.com/mattia...m_4535569.html because it frees them from their anxiety because it enables them to direct
June 16, 2022 American Thought Leaders
Mattias Desmet: ‘Mass Formation’ Hypnosis and the Rise of Technocratic Totalitarianism
American Thought Leaders
JAN JEKIELEK
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For instance, I could refer to, as I do in the last chapter of my book, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize for his writings on the gulags of Stalin, where he stayed for about 15 years. He describes how, in the gulags, most prisoners started to behave in a radically beast-like manner. They lost all ethical awareness. They crushed each other’s skulls during the night. They became even more terrible to each other than the guards already were to them.
Solzhenitsyn describes how in this pool of darkness, a small number of the prisoners went in exactly the opposite direction. The more inhumane the world around them became, the more they became determined to stick to ethical principles themselves. Solzhenitsyn describes something wonderful. In particular, he describes how one of his fellow prisoners, Ivanovic Grigoriev, entered the gulag a little bit sick, suffering from several medical conditions. He refused, time and time again, to do something that was not in harmony with his ethical principles. If someone stole his food or his clothes, he just went outside without having eaten. He worked in temperatures of minus 40, 50 degrees Celsius, clothed in only a cotton sack or something with four holes in it.
When the guards commanded him to do something that he considered unethical, he refused to do it, no matter what the punishment was. Solzhenitsyn describes how this man became stronger and stronger physically, and how finally, he survived the gulags for 15 years. Solzhenitsyn says that if you start from a materialist, mechanistic, rationalist human understanding of the world, you can never understand something like that.
But if you were in the gulags, and if you have experienced yourself what the impact of sticking to ethical principles is under the most difficult conditions, then you can understand what the fundamental value and importance of ethical principles is for the human being—physically, emotionally, and psychologically—and also for society and for humanity living together. In my opinion, we are on the verge of discovering that this tradition of enlightenment and the ideology of reason is highly limited.
This rational understanding is extremely limited, and can never be the basis of society. Throughout the last few centuries, we have been thinking that rational understanding is crucial, and that it is the basis of humanity living together. The entire tradition of enlightenment actually believed that a society should be organized according to rational knowledge and rational understanding, and that we should try to manipulate the world around us in a rational way, in such a way that it becomes more friendly to the human being.
But we should do our utmost best to open up, to become aware of the limitations of logical and rational understanding, and to develop a different connection with our environment, a different way of knowing the things around us, which is much more based on resonance and on empathic resonance with the things around us in such a way that we discover these eternal principles of humanity, and that we can use them, or that we can base humanity living together on these ethical principles, rather than on a kind of rational analysis, which is always, in the end, based on factors that are radically irrational.
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The second piece is, we keep talking about Hannah Arendt. Please tell us why she’s so important to your thinking. Her observation is that nonviolent resistance is the thing that has the greatest impact on shifting the mass, so to speak.
Prof. Desmet: Yes. Non-violent resistance is crucial. Resistance from within a totalitarian system can only be successful if it sticks to the principle of nonviolent resistance. Of course, external enemies of a totalitarian system can destroy a totalitarian system. That’s what happened to Nazi Germany, for instance. But internal resistance should always stick to the principles of nonviolent resistance. Because every use of violence will have an effect on the masses, and will justify, and even necessitate destroying the people who do go against the system.
So, it’s very clear Hannah Arendt has been describing how non-violent resistance is the only thing that can be successful. Non-violent resistance can happen in many ways. It is a good time now to start to study the way in which people such as Gandhi proceeded it in India. But in any case, non-violent resistance is what we should definitely try to realize.
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It is sufficient, in times such as the ones we are living in now, to try to continue to speak out in a quiet, sincere, and honest way in order to naturally go through a process of evolution as a human being.
If we continue to do that, we will do the most important thing that we can do in these times. We might be able to prevent that all the humanity radically ceases to exist because of the emerging totalitarianism....
