I keep trying to drive home the importance of Desmet’s thinking. Some don’t want to hear it.
Why is it important? It’s important because we have a prime example of doublespeak in Desmet’s book yet so many are hailing this as a psychology for a new world. We should be prepared to see this sort of doublespeak when it pops up.
In a way, Desmet’s is a psychology for a new world, but not one I’d want to be a part of. It’s one wherein the prime goal would be to keep everyone happy (and own nothing??) because the starting point for Desmet’s mechanistic view of the psychological development of totalitarianism is the anxiety and atomization of the individual. Note that Desmet rails against “mechanistic thinking” throughout his book but then turns around and offers us a wholly mechanistic account of how totalitarianism arises from Enlightenment thinking that leads to anxiety and atomization.
Anyhow, John Waters feels the need to defend Desmet. Whatever.
The core of Desmet’s thinking is that he sets up a society (that is, you and me) of alienated individuals with bullshit jobs just waiting for a leader. As Waters put it:
The underfoot conditions in the society — mass alienation, free-floating anxiety, anomie, bullshit jobs — create an amenable 'mass' which readily embraces the ideology that seems to offer it some strange kind of relief, including a false form of solidarity, which makes it easier for the manipulators to exercise control.
But this type of a society is a fiction. It does not now exist, and it didn’t exist prior to Covid, at least in the US of my experience. I’ve lived in several states, in several very large cities, in rural areas, on both coasts and in the middle, and there is no mass alienation. Yet Desmet needs to posit this in order to get his explanation for why we, the people, are the ones that did it to ourselves, and despite the protests of both Waters and Desmet, that’s the essence of what Desmet is saying. There were no manipulators he says— or, yes there were, but they weren’t real manipulators.
Doublespeak.
We were/are being manipulated and part of this is through ongoing and unrelenting censorship of opinions that don’t go along with the official narrative. Yes, the masses can be frightened and confused, but only after the manipulation happens.
What Desmet should have said, and which he did not, is that totalitarianism arose in Germany and Russia because of prior economic and social disruptions and this may happen again if we have massive economic and social disruptions which, coupled with massive censorship and surveillance, might again lead to atomized individuals. But no, instead Desmet has a thing for “Enlightenment thinking” which has turned in “mechanistic thinking,” as if we all now view the world as just so many billard balls knocking together.
So, it’s all our fault. We’re mechanistic thinkers.
Are we?
We have no poetry? No music? No compassion? No literature? We don’t think of ethics and the meaning of life, which most of us are certain isn’t in any mechanistic world-view? We don’t love our children— they’re just billard balls we have to feed? Or, what?
Why is Desmet gaslighting us into believing we are people that we are not? Why is he working so hard to sell us that narrative and another narrative which he unfortunately calls “the great narrative” toward the end of his book?
To be fair, Desmet probably had no way of knowing that Klaus Schwab would write a book with just that title.
As Jim knows, I've done a YT episode on his essay, "On the Psychology of Totalitarianism" and John Waters' article, recommended by one of my viewers. It's curious that I note several commenters on Substacks posting Jon Rappaport's Gain of Fiction and John Waters. I'm not sure why it's so important that we all agree with Desmet, since it doesn't lead to any discernable plan of action. But I'm looking forward to you, Jim, being able to discuss this with that viewer, so you can answer from a point of having read and analyzed the book. You'll hear my critique of Waters' critique in the video, he does the same character assassination he accuses them of, calling them 'the troika' and casting aspersions on their motives. Here's the YT and I'll post it with text and links on Substack tomorrow: https://youtu.be/KDrgnom5_NM.