Matthias Desmet is the Dutch psychologist that got into trouble pushing against the Narrative on COVID. La Wik:

Desmet became known for his negative assessment of the corona measures… He also made a number of statements that were considered untrue and/or misleading by fact checkers[.]

I picked up his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism last week, in which he argues that the kind of “mass formation” we saw during COVID where everyone rushed to get with the latest ukase from on high, is characteristic of modern totalitarianism and its “mechanistic” worldview.

At the end of the book he cites modern physics, including quantum mechanics and chaos theory, to argue that the mechanistic worldview -- of the Enlightenment, Newton, and the Industrial Revolution -- has been superseded and needs to be tossed onto the trash heap of history.

Of course, there is only one problem with the new worldview. Sure we all live in a world that uses the new science: H–bombs and Shannon’s Law that information is surprise. But only about three people in the whole world understand it all.

I have only one problem with Desmet’s ideas. I don’t think that “mass formation” applies just to our modern mechanistic age. I think that all rulers rely on getting the people riled up to get their way, whether it’s to go to war or put on masks or get the saboteurs and wreckers.

And they especially go for “mass formation” when things are going wrong. Like right now here at home, according to Schmuel Klatskin, with:

a deep state grown so corrupt that it has not hesitated to use the nation’s intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice to initiate political prosecutions at the highest level and to institute censorship in order to forcibly control the national conversation.

Or in France:

On Wednesday, a court in Paris charged the 39-year-old [Pavel Durov] with being complicit in the spread of images of child sexual abuse, as well as a litany of other alleged violations on the Telegram messaging app.

Or Brazil:

X, the social-media giant owned by Elon Musk, has officially been banned in Brazil… The Brazilian elites loathe X for precisely the same reason as the elites across the rest of the democratic world do -- they blame it for the spread of so-called disinformation[.]

Or Britland, according to Robert Reich:

In the UK, far-right thugs burned, looted and terrorized minority communities as Musk’s X spread misinformation about a deadly attack on schoolgirls.

Earth to “elites across… the democratic world:” The words “disinformation” and “misinformation” are neologisms created by our noble U.S. Intelligence Community and they got the idea from the secret police of the Soviet Union.

But why now? Why do our rulers want to “institute censorship in order to forcibly control the national conversation?”

It’s pretty obvious. Here in the United States it’s Trump. In the UK it’s Nigel Farage. In France it’s Marine Le Pen. In Brazil it’s Bolsonaro. As American philosopher Lina Lamont told us, they “cain’t stand it.”

Now my belief is that the Narrative that our democratic countries have been the lands of free speech is not really true. I believe that, in the age of the printing press, newspapers, and network TV, the rulers kept free speech on a pretty short rein. For instance, I keep running across far-Right extremists that mention this or that conservative journalist that got silenced in the glorious age of FDR. And I don’t just mean Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh. I am talking about John T. Flynn, Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles A. Beard, and now Garet Garrett. But the age of social media has meant that every nobody “influencer” can spew their stuff across the world. And just like FDR, our current rulers don’t like anything that goes against the Narrative.

Richard Fernandez wonders if we have reached “showdown time” after the 1989 End of History.

On the clock of contemporary history, it's showdown time, not simply in America but the wider West. At stake is the future of a culture… It is about whether history ends with a Western palace coup or it continues.

In the Narrative World of politicians everywhere, everything needs to be tied down, because democracy. But for Desmet, mechanical determinism is death. He writes that physicist “Max Planck said that all matter is grounded in a conscious and intelligent Mind that holds the fate of the world and every human being in its almighty hand[.]”

Or you can go with George Gilder. He says Information is Surprise; Wealth is Knowledge; Economic Growth is Learning; Money is Time.

Or Roger Scruton “We are in the world in a questioning relation with it. I think everyone is open to the experience of beauty... There’s no one thing that matters. You matter. Your life matters and what you make of it. But also you can only make anything of your life if you recognize that others matter more.”

Down with “mechanical” Narratives!

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: AT via Magic Studio