I’ve gotten a decent amount of pushback for my assertion that Desmet is obscuring rather than illuminating what happened during High Covid. People see that Desmet accurately described what happened to society during Covid as society became increasingly intolerant of those who went against official recommendations. They then assume that Desmet also accurately described the cause of this, which was the prior tendency of society to be mechanistic thinkers and thus to become atomized.
Several people have told me that they don’t see that Desmet says that we were all mechanistic thinkers prior to Covid. So, here goes.
On page 23, Desmet tells us that researchers
… generally take their scientific fiction for reality, confusing their numbers with the facts of which they are a distorted echo. The same applies to a large part of the population, blindly trusting their scientific ideology, with no other ideological hiding place, given the fall of religion.
This is what I push back against: the idea that we’re a spiritually bankrupt people. I see Desmet as dehumanizing us so that he can then later say that the dehumanization during High Covid wasn’t a conspiracy but rather arose more-or-less spontaneously from a prior, largely dehumanized society.
In a 2017 poll, the Pew Research Center found that more Americans were saying they were spiritual but not religious— 27%. Forty-eight percent said they were religious and spiritual (so that makes 75% with non-mechanistic beliefs) whereas only 18% said they were neither religious nor spiritual. Another study found that 86% of people considered themselves spiritual.
On page 47 Desmet describes the undercurrent of totalitarianism:
… a naive belief that a flawless, humanoid being and a utopian society can be produced from scientific knowledge.
But who exactly holds this belief? Some scientists? Technocrats, yes, but you and me?
Desmet is taking the views of perhaps some scientists and some people— who believe in a purely mechanistic universe devoid of spirit— and continually implies that’s us or most of us, and thus we all believe that a utopian society can be produced from scientific knowledge. But a “large part” of society believes that way, as Desmet says?
On page 91, Desmet summarizes his argument so far, and the first point of his argument, as described in chapter 1, was that society was “increasingly gripped by a fanatical, mechanistic ideology that degenerated into dogma and blind belief.” Is that true? If 75-80% of people consider themselves spiritual— in my experience, that’s a good ballpark number— then that hardly qualifies as “gripped by a fanatical, mechanistic ideology.”
We can look around, too, and see for ourselves that most people are simply getting on with their lives, trying to raise families and get ahead in their careers, generally quite busy, going to church perhaps, and yes, relying on “trusted authorities” to give them guidance on matters they’re too busy to research for themselves. The people I know have rich human relationships and aren’t at all atomized, and even in big cities where anonymity runs higher we see a fair bit of friendly social interaction even if during the mornings we might also see a bizarre dog-eat-dog ritual to get on the subway.
We are not the people Desmet says we are despite that yes, some of us (a small minority) truly have what he calls “bullshit jobs.” But Desmet has to make the case that we’re an atomized people because ultimately he wants to prove that we did it to ourselves and there was no massive censorship/propaganda campaign, planned perhaps for years, that was the conspiracy to induce the mass formation. The masses can be directed by fear, and surely the master propagandists— the ones who really did the “steering” that Desmet claims was simply mechanistic, like a Sierpinski triangle— understand this.
Just because Desmet weaves a nice narrative doesn’t mean the narrative is true. The fear and anxiety during Covid were induced, deliberately. While Desmet accurately decribes the mass formation during Covid, he fails in discerning the true cause. His central point is: there was no conspiracy. There was only “ideology,” an ideology that a quite small portion of society held but that Desmet projects onto a “large part of the population” in order to deflect from the deliberately planned, orchestrated conspiracy to induce fear.
As with every one of your writings, inevitably. I carry them in my mind for a long time where they trigger a chain of analysis. How beautiful and fearsome, peaceful and bellicose, analytical and fanatical ways we humans experience our lives. Needless to say: Here I go again. Thank you so much Jim.
Hi, I'm writing an off-topic comment to you--I just liked your comments over there at Mark Crispin Miller's substack on RFK. I didn't bother to post my own thoughts because I'm just a little tired of dealing with the fan club over there and elsewhere (It seems like people just hop on the hopium train and believe someone is going to save them).
Anyway, I 100% agree with you on RFK being a fanatic on climate change--and at this point, it's certainly a concern, since it is obvious to all that the climate change hoax is a key component of the banking cartel's Great Reset and it's being used as justification for building a digital slave grid over humanity, where our carbon footprint will be tracked and attached to some kind of social credit score. Even Mark Crispin Miller, who used to believe in global warming/climate change has basically taken it back, admitted that he no longer believes in it, and I can only take that to mean that he has some intellectual integrity and honesty and is willing to change his position on issues in light of new information. And how can he see that the science for vaccines is bought and paid for, yet not see that the same holds true for global warming/climate change. I mean, all you have to do is go back and look at their fear-mongering predictions--one of them have come true. And he completely ignores the role of the sun and the fact that the sun has cycles--when things were warming, we were going through grand solar maximum, and now we're heading into grand solar minimum.
Anyway, I also wanted to pass along some links to you;
Here's an old article where he basically says that those who don't believe in the climate change hoax should be treated as war criminals and locked up:
Crackpot RFK Jr.: Jail Energy CEO’s in Hague For TREASON – Punish Climate Deniers (Video)
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/09/crackpot-rfk-jr-jail-energy-ceos-in-hague-for-treason-punish-climate-deniers-video/
Environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lamented that there were no current laws on the books to punish global warming skeptics. . “I wish there were a law you could punish them with. I don’t think there is a law that you can punish those politicians under,” Kennedy told Climate Depot in a one-on-one interview during the People’s Climate March. The interiew was conducted for the upcoming documentary Climate Hustle.
Kennedy Jr. accused skeptical politicians of “selling out the public trust.” “Those guys are doing the Koch Brothers bidding and are against all the evidence of the rational mind, saying global warming does not exit. They are contemptible human beings. I wish there were a law you could punish them with. I don’t think there is a law that you can punish those politicians under.”
Kennedy saved his most venomous comments for the Koch Brothers, accusing them of “treason” for “polluting our atmosphere.”
“I think it’s treason. Do I think the Koch Brothers are treasonous, yes I do,” Kennedy explained.
“They are enjoying making themselves billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us. Do I think they should be in jail, I think they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at the Hague with all the other war criminals,” Kennedy declared.
“Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offence and they ought to be serving time for it,” he added.
Kennedy previously called for jailing his political opponents. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at skeptics of 2007 declaring “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors” In 2009, RFK, Jr. also called coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared CEO’s ‘should be in jail… for all of eternity.”
And this is from a few months ago (he is completely brainwashed that carbon is the enemy)
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Mod 3 months ago
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/exxon-climate-scientists-predicted-damage/
I’ve spent 40 years fighting to stop the oil and coal titans from contaminating our water, our air and our children with toxins, arsenic, benzene, PAHs, the mercury that has poisoned every freshwater fish in America — AND the carbon which now poses an existential threat to our planet.
I have litigated these issues for almost four decades. I know the science backward and forward. It is ironic to me that activists awake to Pharma’s corruption and greed still remain blind when it comes to Carbon’s. Predatory industries employ the same playbook. Pharma convinces the public that the autism epidemic is an illusion. Big Tobacco swears smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Monsanto convinces us that glyphosate is harmless. Similarly, Big Oil and King Coal go to great lengths to persuade us that carbon doesn’t heat the planet.
They all capture regulators, tame reporters and corrupt lawmakers to subvert democracy. They use the same phony tobacco scientists and mercenary biostitutes to gin up fraudulent studies that sow doubt and give political cover to their corrupt politicians.
In the 1970s, Exxon employed the world’s most brilliant carbon scientists to understand oil production. The company prided itself on knowing more about the fate of the carbon molecule than anyone on Earth. Internal documents show that those scientists warned Exxon that business as usual would melt the Poles, cause sea levels to rise and trigger cataclysmic climate change.
Rather than changing its business model, Exxon and its Carbon Cronies invested half a billion dollars in a four-decade campaign of lies and deception to gull the public. Their campaign was abetted by their deep-state allies, the intelligence apparatus, the military-industrial complex, and the MSM, which took cues from its oil and automobile advertisers. This cartel engineered a suicide pact for humanity and the planet. They are the apocalyptical forces of ignorance and greed.
Please try to escape the seduction of their lies and propaganda and help us fight these villains.
Also, Allison McDowell calls him controlled opposition based on some of what is in his book, and how he's basically saying it was simply mismanaged when it was a psychological warfare operation based on nothing but propaganda, fraud, deception and a bogus PCR test.
RFK Jr.'s "Mismanaging a Pandemic" Narrative: Testing, Early Treatment and Repurposed Drugs
https://odysee.com/@Argusfest:b/mismanaged_pandemic:d