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Mattias Desmet Books

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“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.”

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Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism
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“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.”

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“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.”

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Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism
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“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.”

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Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism
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“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.”

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“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.”

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Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism
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