Mattias Desmet Quotes

“Speaking leads to experiences of meaning and existence, at least if the one who speaks tries to express his subjective truth as honestly and sincerely as possible.”

Life Truth Human Contact Touch

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Totalitarianism and technocracy like to present themselves as the pinnacle of rationality and science.”

Life Humanity Natural Technology Totalitarianism Homo Sapiens Technocracy

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The ability to empathize also plays a role in relation to our own body. Our bodies are in essence foreign to ourselves. It responds to all kinds of stimuli -food, other people, all kinds of situations- and they do so autonomously, without our knowledge of volition. We can learn to feel our body throughout our lives, for example through certain movement-based arts or meditation, by attentively observing the effects of all kinds of factors (nutrition, exercise, etc) on our body, possibly by repeatedly putting our physical experiences into words during psychoanalytic therapy. Whoever listens to his body and learns to understand its language holds the key to health. The feeling with one's own body is more important than any medicine and also more important than any "objective" rational knowledge, of for instance, healthy food.”

Life Body Death Psychology Health Therapy Biology Human Being Mechanistic View

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Dictatorship are based on a primitive psychological mechanism, namely on the creation of a climate of fear amongst the population, based on the brutal potential of the dictatorial regime. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, has its roots in the insidious psychological process of mass formation.”

Psychology Society Population Ideology Ideological Masses Fixation

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individual's ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.”

Individual Psychology Society Population Ideology Ideological Masses Fixation

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The fact the the human being is like a flower that only blooms when it can enjoy the shade of privacy once in a while is of minor importance in a technocratic worldview. Anyone who refuses to go along with the system lacks civic sense, considers oneself more important than the collective. Your health is no longer your personal business, because some diseases are contagious.”

World Life Individual Society Globalization Totalitarianism Tribe Collective

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Our fear originates on a completely different level -that of the failure of the Grand Narrative of our society. This is the narrative of mechanistic science, in which man is reduced to a biological organism. A narrative that ignores the psychological, symbolic, and ethical dimensions of human beings and thereby has a devastating effect at the level of human relationships. Something in this narrative causes man to become isolated from his fellow man, and from nature; something in it causes man to stop resonating with the world around him; something in it turns the human being into an atomized subject.”

Religion Fear Nature Psychology Society Civilization Isolation

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“If one focuses too much on the superficial appearances of life and loses touch with the underlying principles and figures, life will increasingly be experienced as a meaningless chaos, just like Lorenz's waterwheel.”

Life Society Statistics Superficiality View Mechanistic

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence. In the fynal analysis, it is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.”

Religion Nature Psychology Evolution Myth Biology Evolutionary Psychology

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“It is also throught this art that we, as human beings, and more broadly as a culture and society, can relate differently to death. Within a mechanistic and biological-reductionistic view of man, suffering, decay, and death can only be meaningless; they cannot be seen as something that has something to say and teach us as human beings. This is perhaps the biggest problem with the Great Mechanistic Narrative: The ultimate master of the sublunary -death- has not been given an acceptable part in it.”

Life Death Psychology Biology Human Being Mechanistic View

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The ability to sense one's own experience and to put it into words and to express it in relation to another is what constitutes the core of our existence as human beings.”

Life Wisdom Death Psychology Experience Biology Human Being Mechanistic View

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The new norm has become so stringent that even suggesting that there is a physical difference between a man and a woman can be considered a violation of sexual integrity. The Black Lives Matter movement is captured in this as well. The tendency toward increasingly exhaustive standards with respect to racism intensified to little productive end: The chances that such rules truly contribute to the overcoming of the narcissistic superiority feelings that are involved in racism is, in fact, rather small.”

Racism Ideology Woke Blm Antifa Crt

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The first thing totalitarian leaders do is make sure their voices are the only ones left.”

Holocaust Totalitarianism Nazism Stalinism Regime Maoism

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“With its sign system, totalitarianism tries to imprint its logic on reality, to permanently link it to the real world. Importantly, the assignment of signs and stigmas is usually the first step in the process of destruction.”

Holocaust Totalitarianism Nazism Stalinism Regime Maoism

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Experimentation on humans is the prototypical activity of totalitarianism. It is the ultimate submission of reality to the pseudoscientific ideological fiction.”

Totalitarianism Nazism Pseudoscience Stalinism Regime Maoism

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Conspiracy thinking inflates the sizableness of the perceived enemy into infinity so that in the end one can only feel powerless compared to such a giant. In this way, conspiracy thinking also embodies an aspect of self destruction.”

Ideology Conspiracy Sociology Conspiracy Theories Technocracy Conspiration Mass Formation

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“Als je alleen maar iemand graag ziet, omdat hij identiek is aan jou, zie je niet de ander graag, je ziet je eigen spiegelbeeld graag, en wat je voelt is geen liefde, het is narcisme.”

Liefde Narcisme

Author:Mattias Desmet

“We zijn in de greep van narcisme.”

Narcisme

Author:Mattias Desmet

“The essence of things is not rationally knowable, and reality cannot be reduced to mechanistic frameworks. When realizing this, we can finally start to look for the essence of life where it truly can be found: in that which always escapes rationalization and mechanization, in that which dissapears from a conversation when you digitalize it, in the difference between the mother's womb and an artificial plastic womb, in the difference between the heat of an electric heater and that of a wood-burning stove, and so on.”

Human Beings Contact Biology Reductionism Mechanization

Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

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