Wednesday, October 19, 2022
7 a.m. The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Mattias Desmet) arrived yesterday, and I pick it up and am electrified even by the few pages of the introduction, let alone by the first pages of this first chapter. He’s telling the truth, and he knows what the truth is.
Guys, I was thinking we would continue yesterday’s theme, but this is important. I came to Desmet via Amazon because I googled his name as one of many talking heads in some documentary I watched. (Was it the series about the Roman Empire?) but I sense your hands in my decision to buy this book, which came out only this year, after the series I watched, and in its arrival just now. The timing couldn’t be more perfect. I don’t know what his solution is – other than that it must involve a new social paradigm to replace the one currently failing around us – but I immediately recognized my own thought in his shorthand description of the cause of the problem.
“Problem” only if you would wish the current thinking to continue to shape your world.
Problem in the sense of an algebraic problem.
Focus first.
Yes. Presence, receptivity, clarity. I partly feel like I should be reading the book and partly feel that it is important for some reason to talk to you before I read more. I’m only on page 14, after all! Anyway, proceed.
Quote the one paragraph that electrified you, but not more. It would be easy for you to get carried away. Don’t.
It’s true. I’m tempted to quote the whole page. So which one do you want here, of the three linked grafs?
Start with, “Truth-telling is a way -.”
“Truth-telling is a way of speaking that breaks through an established, if implicit, social consensus. Whoever speaks the truth breaks open the solidified story in which the group seeks refuge, ease, and security. This makes speaking the truth a dangerous endeavor. It strikes fear in the group, and results in anger and aggression.” (p. 13)
Now quote the paragraph from the introduction, though your readers will not all like it.
“That’s how most people eventually become certain. Very certain. Yet of the most opposing things. Some people were convinced that we were dealing with a killer virus, others that it was nothing more than the seasonal flu, and still others believed that the virus did not even exist and that we were dealing with a worldwide conspiracy. And there were also a few who continued to tolerate uncertainty and kept asking themselves: How can we adequately understand what is going on in our society?” (p. 6)
That’s me, at the end. I have a very high tolerance for uncertainty, and I find it harder and harder to be sure of anything. When I was young, I regarded this as a handicap (and it certainly is, in terms of decisiveness), but now I see it as a means of preserving balance. (And after all, I do have Libra as my rising sign, with both Neptune and Jupiter in that sign.)
You all were born into the turning point, the end of one age and the beginning of another. Some people, in looking forward, see only the bright prospects ahead; some see only the darkness surrounding them and getting darker. Both are somewhat right, in that what they perceive does exist, and somewhat wrong, in that what they are filtering out is as important as what they are allowing in. The glass is always half-full and half-empty. It is always filling and emptying at the same time. Life never comes to an end-point. Every moment is a culmination and a beginning.
I sense that Desmet sees both. That’s what his TOC indicates, and that’s the sense I get from his introduction.
Well, how many years have you been telling people of your deep unease that almost no movies or novels are painting a utopian future, and almost all are painting a dystopian future or are pretending that the current moment is going to endure indefinitely?
A long time. Star Trek and its variations and spinoffs are almost the only examples I can find of a positive vision of the future. Most of the rest are like the old film “Bladerunner,” grimly dealing with a degraded world we wouldn’t want to live in.
And you think this is significant, why?
You know full well. A postwar analysis of Weimar Germany’s films showed that artists intuited what was coming.
You will find in Desmet’s book an incisive analysis of the situation. But that isn’t what you brought yourself to your journal to ask. So, what was it?
That’s true, I see, looking back: I didn’t have a question in mind, I just wanted to connect. Well, what’s my question? This, I suppose, though it sounds inflated: Is our work here potentially liberating to others? I hesitate to ask, our publishing track-record being so dismal. But still – is it?
You are being tempted to forget that what is important is not numbers but intensity. A different way to say that would be – well, think of Viktor Frankl in a concentration camp. Was it likely that his experience would have an effect on you (and, of course, on anyone who took his insight to heart)? Any one person, speaking truth, will have an incalculable effect on the 3D world, because the 3D world is only partly 3D, and is as much non-3D as 3D.
That is, as connected invisibly as it is separated visibly.
Well, what made you buy that book? Or any other fundamentally important book you have ever read?
I have concluded that it is very little different in effect to publish or merely to formulate.
Did Desmet’s book affect you while he was only thinking it, or after you had it in your hands?
I see your point.
What have we been doing, for a quarter of a century, but preparing you – by helping you to experience a truer sense of reality – to write it out?
But I don’t have the credentials nor the data. I have our conversations.
You will not persuade, no, but you may spark, which is what is necessary. Consider, Desmet wrote a book you have scarcely tasted, yet immediately you know it is true and is important and is part of the way forward.
Just as with Paul Brunton.
Just as with Colin Wilson, and Carl Jung, and every other recognition in your life. Did any of them prove anything to you?
Brunton did, I’d say.
But even there, he was able to persuade you only because you were ready to be persuaded. That is, only because you were not armored against his conclusions. Had you been so, his arguments would have left you cold, for you would have been psychologically unable to hear them, lest they shake your certainties.
One more book, like The Cosmic Internet?
It’s entirely up to you. What you leave behind is important in its way, and unimportant too. Don’t think Carl Jung is judged by how many books he wrote or interviews he gave, or even by how many patients he helped. That is all real and at the same time irrelevant, in a way. He judges himself by what he is, which manifests only partly by what he does.
I feel like there is a point to this session that I’m missing.
Desmet is a link between inner and outer that you have been seeking, as you will see as you read his book. It isn’t about society; it isn’t about psychology, even. Both, but something more, something harder to describe, as you will see.
I guess we’re just advertising somebody else’s book.
There are worse ways to spend your time. Once send this out, you can go back to reading.
The theme, then?
“A revolutionary book.”
Hmm. Maybe so. All right, our thanks as always.