Professor Mattias Desmet, a Belgian psychologist with a master's degree in statistics, gained worldwide recognition toward the end of 2021, when he presented the concept of "mass formation" as an explanation for the absurd and irrational behavior we were seeing with regard to the COVID pandemic and its countermeasures.

He also warned that mass formation gives rise to totalitarianism, which is the topic of his new book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Desmet's work was further popularized by Dr. Robert Malone, whose appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was viewed by about 50 million people.

But as the search term "mass formation" exploded in popularity, Google responded by manipulating the search engine results in an attempt to discredit Desmet and show people in their search results information that would cause them to discount the importance of this work. Why? Because Google is at the core of the global cabal and movement toward totalitarianism.

Like a lot of others, I've been working my way through Ian McGilchrist's The Matter With Things. This is one of those truly seminal, vast, once-in-a-century works of syncretic philosophy that is destined to leave a deep impression on the world. The dust cover says 'one of the most important books ever published, and yes, I do mean ever'. It lives up to that billing.

One of McGilchrist's points regards the nature of life. Specifically, he goes after the machine model. This is something that Winston Smith covers in detail in his essay Are You a Machine? That's a long read, and while it's well worth your time, I'll quickly summarize the main points of the argument.

For centuries now, organisms have been understood as basically mechanical in nature. The modern view is that life-forms are basically survival machines, biochemical robots constructed by selfish genes for the purpose of their own propagation.

This is a very left hemisphere way of seeing things. The left hemisphere likes to understand reality as pure mechanism, composed of discrete parts related by clear causal linkages, such that the whole can be decomposed into the parts, understood at the level of the parts, and then reassembled - the whole being no more than the sum of the parts.

I've been eagerly awaiting Mattias Desmet's new book ever since his podcast appearances delineating the "mass formation" hypothesis regarding COVID-19 and the subsequent announcement the book's English translation: The Psychology of Totalitarianism (PT). Desmet is a practicing psychoanalyst and professor of clinical psychology in Belgium, and he brings a level of insight to his analysis that is sorely lacking in many other commentators. I highly recommend readers get the book. It's an essential addition to the library of ponerology.

In this and subsequent posts I will be summarizing the book's main points, correlating and comparing them to ideas from Lobaczewski, and responding to the very few bits I take issue with.

The book itself is divided into three sections: "Science and Its Psychological Effects," "Mass Formation and Totalitarianism," and "Beyond the Mechanistic Worldview." As Desmet points out in the Introduction:

...part 1 and part 3 of this book only marginally refer to totalitarianism. It is not my aim with this book to focus on that which is usually associated with totalitarianism — concentration camps, indoctrination, propaganda — but rather the broader, cultural-historical processes from which totalitarianism emerges. This approach allows us to focus on what matters most: Totalitarianism arises from evolutions and tendencies that take place in our day-to-day lives. (PT, p. 8)

A new study led by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University used brain imaging to explain why humans are aggressive toward rival groups.
Humans tend to form groups, which often find themselves in conflict with rival groups. But why do people show such a ready tendency to harm people in opposing groups?

A new study led by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University used functional brain imaging technology to reveal a potential answer: It increases activity in the brain's reward network.

"At a time of deepening political divisions and global conflict, it is crucial for us to understand why people divide each other up into 'us' and 'them' and then show a profound willingness to harm 'them,'" said corresponding author David Chester, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Humanities and Sciences. "Our findings advance this understanding by suggesting that harming outgroup members is a relatively rewarding experience."

The researchers had 35 male college students complete a competitive, aggressive task against either a student from their university or from what they were told was a rival university. In reality, participants unknowingly played against a computer program, and no real people were harmed.

They found that participants who were more aggressive against outgroup members (students from a rival university) versus ingroup members (students from their own university) exhibited greater activity in core regions of the brain's reward circuit — the nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex — while they decided how aggressive to be.

Both before and after outgroup exclusion, aggression toward outgroup members was positively associated with activity in the ventral striatum during decisions about how aggressive to be toward their outgroup opponent. Aggression toward outgroup members was also linked to greater post-exclusion activity in the rostral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex during provocation from their outgroup opponent. These altered patterns of brain activity suggest that frontostriatal mechanisms may play a significant role in motivating aggression toward outgroup members.

A series based on Iain McGilchrist's conclusions about a left brain dominated world

In the conclusion of Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary, the question is asked:

"What would the left hemisphere's world look like?" if the left hemisphere of the brain "became so far dominant that, at the phenomenological level, it managed more or less to suppress the right hemisphere's world altogether."

In this series of posts I'd like to break down his conclusion and discuss just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere's perspective.

Berger and colleagues(1) emphasise that consciousness changes its nature in a world geared to technological production. It adopts a number of qualities which again are clearly manifestations of the world according to the left hemisphere, and therefore in such a world technology could be expected to flourish and, in turn, further to entrench the left hemisphere's view of the world - just as bureaucracy would be both a product of the left hemisphere and a reinforcement of it in the external world. In a society dominated by technology, Berger and colleagues predict what they refer to as: 'mechanisticity', which means the development of a system that permits things to be reproduced endlessly, and enforces submergence of the individual in a large organisation or production line; 'measurability', in other words the insistence on quantification, not qualification; 'componentiality', that is to say reality reduced to self-contained units, so that 'everything is analysable into constituent components, and everything can be taken apart and put together again in terms of these components'; and an 'abstract frame of reference', in other words loss of context.

Is contemporary liberal-left culture producing greater mental distress?

Will America be entirely gay in a few generations? Will everyone be mentally ill? It would appear so from a straight-line extrapolation of the stunning rise in both LGBT identification and mental illness among young Americans.

Let's begin with trends in sexual orientation among young people. A recent Gallup survey found that:

"Roughly 21% of Generation Z Americans who have reached adulthood — those born between 1997 and 2003 — identify as LGBT. That is nearly double the proportion of millennials who do so, while the gap widens even further when compared with older generations."

Abigail Shrier, meanwhile, reports a 1,000-fold increase in trans identification. Reactions to these trends have varied. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks they indicate that there will be no straight people in a few generations; Bill Maher lampoons the increase as a rebellious fad; and progressives celebrate the rise as an electoral boon for the Democrats. Other liberals view the rise as the product of increasing toleration, similar to left-handedness, in which identification increases as stigmas are lifted and people come out of the closet.

"Non-attachment" sounds a bit intimidating, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, most people tend to associate this spiritual phrase with being emotionally cold and unfeeling. But true non-attachment is quite the opposite: it allows us to live in this world fully, without being attached to people, things or thoughts that create suffering.

As the Dalai Lama was once quoted to have said:

Attachment is the origin, the root of suffering; hence it is the cause of suffering.

It seriously tricks your brain.

A brand new optical illusion tricks the majority of people into thinking that a dark "black hole" region at the center of a stationary image is rapidly expanding, as if the observer were moving toward it. Researchers now suspect that the image literally tricks the brain into thinking that the observer is moving into a darkened space, like a cave or tunnel.

The illusion consists of a large black ellipse surrounded by a dark halo on a white background filled with smaller black ellipses. Typically, as a person stares at the image, the dark elliptical region will appear to expand outward for a couple of seconds, which is why the design has been nicknamed the "expanding hole."

In a new study, researchers found that 86% of the 50 participants who looked at the optical illusion reported seeing the expanding darkness. The team suspects that the illusion plays on the brain's perception of changing light levels.

"The expanding hole is a highly dynamic illusion," lead researcher Bruno Laeng, a psychologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, said in a statement. The illusion tricks the mind into seeing a change in brightness that isn't really there, "as if the observer were heading forward into a hole or tunnel," Laeng added.

If you've ever had an imaginary argument in your head, you may have "heard" two voices at once. Your own inner voice and that of the other person in the quarrel. You may even "hear" the other person's accent, or the timbre of their voice.

So what's happening in the brain when that inner monologue is running? How is it that you can "hear" your thoughts?

As it turns out, the brain undergoes similar processes when you're thinking words as when you're speaking out loud.

Inner monologues are thought to be a simulation of overt speech, said Hélène Loevenbruck, a senior neurolinguistics researcher and head of the language team in the Psychology and NeuroCognition Laboratory at CNRS, the national French research institute. When we're children, we're virtual sponges, soaking up new information from every angle. Children playing alone will often speak dialogue aloud, for instance between a toy truck and a stuffed animal. At around 5 to 7 years old (opens in new tab), that verbalization moves inward, Loevenbruck said.

In chapter 12 of Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter With Things, he elegantly debunks the myth that the living, organic world is anything like a machine. With many examples of totally un-machine like behaviour, McGilchrist completely dismantles the notion that organisms like ourselves, or single cells for that matter, are anything like a machine. The second half of the chapter he addresses the reasons why the machine model has been so pervasive in our perception of just about everything.

I think this is an important awareness for us as some strive for a transhuman future and try to convince us this is a good thing. The transhumanist agenda¹ of marrying human to machine only makes sense if the human is seen as one type of 'machine' and computer/hardware another type of machine, that can seamlessly integrate. I have no doubt it can be of use in some cases - artificial limbs come to mind - but doubt its wisdom when attempting to 'evolve' the human race as a human/machine hybrid (a cyborg²). The other part of the transhumanist dream is gene editing and the manipulation of our genome for 'enhancement', tackling disease, and longevity. They sound like noble pursuits but they conceptualise DNA like a computer program, and as we will explore, it's way more different and complex than that.

But quite apart from transhumanism, using a model to conceptualise a reality that is very unlike the model is severely limiting and forces an unhealthy bias. Machines are designed from the bottom up for a purpose. Utility is fundamental. Output, productivity, service, is all foundational to the model. As we will see below, the world of the living, the organic, is quite unlike a utility, unlike a machine, and should be conceptualised in a completely different way. A human has more in common with a river than a robot.