Dear members of the
Romanian parliament,
Dear audience,
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
As some of you might know, I wrote a book, titled The Psychology
of Totalitarianism.
It is about a new kind of
totalitarianism
that is emerging now, a totalitarianism which is not so much a
communist or fascist totalitarianism, but a technocratic
totalitarianism.
I have articulated my theory on totalitarianism on so many
occasions. I will only present the gist of it here and move on
to a problem which is particularly relevant for an address in a
political institution such as this parliament: the perversion of
political discourse in the Enlightenment tradition.
Here is in a nutshell what I articulated on totalitarianism
throughout the last years:
totalitarianism is not a coincidence.
It is a logical consequence of our materialist-rationalist view
on man and the world.
When this view on man and the world became
dominant, as a spontaneous consequence, a new elite ánd a new
population emerged.
A new elite that excessively used propaganda
as a means to control and steer the population; and a population
which lapsed more and more into loneliness and disconnectedness,
both from its social and its natural environment.
These two evolutions, the emergence of an elite that uses
propaganda and a lonely population, reinforced each other.
The
lonely state is exactly the state in which a population is
vulnerable for propaganda. In this way, a new kind of masses or
crowds emerged throughout the last two centuries: the so-called
lonely masses.
People fall prey to mass formation to escape a pervasive feeling
of loneliness and disconnectedness, induced by the
rationalization of the world and the ensuing industrialization
of the world and the excessive use of technology.
They merge
together in fanatic mass behavior because this seems to free
them from their lonely, atomized state.
And that is exactly the big illusion of mass formation:
belonging to a mass doesn't liberate a human being from its
lonely state. Not at all. A mass is a group that is formed, not
because individuals connect to each other, but because each
individual separately is connected to a collective ideal.
The
longer a mass formation exists, the more solidarity they feel
for the collective and the less solidarity and love they feel
for other individuals.
That's exactly why in the end stage of
mass formation and totalitarianism, every individual reports
every other individual to the collective, or to the state, if
they think that other individual is not loyal enough to the
state.
And in the end, the unthinkable happens, with mothers
reporting their children to the state and children their
parents.
The lonely masses distinguish themselves in several respects
from the physical masses of earlier times: they can be much
better controlled, they are less unpredictable than physical
masses, and they last longer, in particular if they are
constantly fed by propaganda through mass-media.
The creation of
long lasting lonely masses through propaganda was the
psychological basis for the emergence of the large totalitarian
systems of the twentieth century.
Only if a mass formation
exists for decades can it be made the basis of a state system.
The emergence of lonely masses led to Stalinism and Nazism in
the beginning of the twentieth century and now it might lead to
technocratic totalitarianism. I described the psychological
processes involved in the emergence of lonely masses on many
occasions, and I won't repeat it here.
Today, here, in the Romanian parliament, a political
institution, I address politicians.
I want to tell you that
politicians have a particular responsibility in these times of
emerging totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism, as
Hannah Arendt
said, is a diabolic pact between the masses and the political
elites. Political elites need to contemplate - scrutinize the
ethical qualities of their speech.
There is something wrong with
political discourse. This is what I intend to say: political
discourse is perverted.
For instance, we got used to the fact that politicians, once
they are elected, never do what they promised to do in their
election speeches. How far are we removed from political virtue
as described by Aristotle.
For Aristotle, the core of political
virtue was the courage to speak the Truth, or, to use the Greek
term, Parrhesia, bold speech, in which someone says exactly this
what society doesn't want to hear, but which is necessary to
keep it psychologically healthy.
I am not so much accusing individual politicians here; I am
addressing political culture in general.
And even more, I am
talking about a perversion that is inherent to the entire
tradition of Enlightenment.
Our society is in the grip of a
specific type of lying, a kind of lying that is historically
speaking relatively new, that emerged for the first time after
the French revolution, when the religious view on man and the
world was replaced by our current, rationalist-materialist
worldview.
What am I talking about when I refer to this
'new
kind of lie'? I am talking about the phenomenon of 'propaganda'.
Propaganda is everywhere around us. Public space is saturated
with it. Recent years have illustrated that abundantly, during
the
coronacrisis, during the
Ukraine crisis, and now, even more
clearly, during the coverage of the
Israel-Palestine conflict on
both mainstream and social media.
It is not that I do not understand the motivation of those who
choose for propaganda.
They often start from good intentions.
Or
at least:
somewhere, they do believe in their good intentions.
Read the work of the founding fathers of propaganda, such as
Lippman, Trotter and
Bernays.
They believe that the only way for
the leaders to keep control in society and to prevent society of
lapsing into chaos is propaganda.
The leaders cannot overtly
impose their will anymore to the population. Nobody would accept
that within a materialist-rationalist society.
Hence, the only
way to make the population do what the leaders want, is to make
them do what the leaders want without them knowing that they do
what the leaders want.
In others words:
the only way to control
the population is through manipulation.
The people in favor of propaganda will argue that we can never
tackle the challenges of
climate change and viral outbreaks
through democratic means.
They will ask:
'Do you think people
will voluntarily give up their cars and flying holidays?
To
escape disaster, we need
technocracy, a society led by technical
experts, and to install technocracy, we need to mislead the
population, we need to manipulate them into technocracy'.
First of all, I want to tell you that I don't believe
technocracy is a solution to the problem.
But that's not what
matters most.
Let me tell you something:
to try to create a good
society for the human being through manipulation, is a contradictio in terminis.
The essence and core of a good society
is exactly the ethical quality of public discourse.
Man, in the
end, essentially is an ethical being, and to pervert man's
speech is to pervert man itself; to pervert political speech is
to pervert society itself.
To give up sincerity in order to create a good society, is to
try to build a good society by giving up immediately, from the
beginning, the essence of a good society (!).
Truthful speech is
not a means towards an end, it is the end in itself; sincere
speech is what makes us human and humane.
This is crucial to understand:
propaganda is not a historical
coincidence, it is a structural consequence of rationalism.
If
you consider the psychological structure of our current society,
it's fair to say that propaganda is the major guiding principle.
In a remarkable way, the pursuit of rationality during the
tradition of Enlightenment didn't lead to more Truthful speech,
as the founding fathers of this tradition believed.
Science
would replace questionable religious and other myths; society
would finally be organized according to reliable information
instead of subjective conjectures.
Now, a few centuries later,
this turned out to be an illusion.
There has never been as much
unreliable information as now in public space.
The materialist-rationalist view on man and the world, in a
strange way, rather led to the opposite of what it expected.
As
soon as we started to conceive the human being as a mechanistic,
biological entity, for whom the highest attainable goal was
survival, it became rather unfashionable to try to speak the
Truth.
Speaking the Truth, the Ancient Greeks knew that very
well, doesn't maximize your chances on survival. The Truth is
always risky. Hence, within a materialist-rationalist tradition,
speaking the Truth is something stupid to do. Only idiots do it.
That's how the fanatic pursuit of rationality led us astray,
straight into the dark wood of Dante,
'where the right road is
wholly lost and gone'.
This
materialist-rationalist view on man and the world - why do we
actually cling to it? It loves to present itself as the
scientific view on man and the world.
Let me tell you that
this is nonsense.
All seminal scientist
concluded exactly the opposite:
in the end, the
essence of life always escapes rationality, it transcends
the categories of rational thinking.
To name only one
major scientist:
in the preface of
a book of Max Planck, Einstein claimed that it is a
mistake to believe that science originates from supreme
logical-rational thinking; it originates from what he called
a capacity for 'einfühlung' in
the object one investigates, which means as much as,
'a capacity
to empathically resonate with the object you are investigating'.
Rationality is a good thing and we need to walk the path of
rationality as far as possible, but it is not the end goal.
Rational knowledge is not a goal in itself; it is a stairway to
a kind of knowledge that transcends rationality, a resonating
knowledge, the kind of supreme intuition the martial arts of the
Samurai culture aimed for throughout their technical training.
It is at that level that we can situate the phenomenon of Truth.
This brings us closer to an answer to the question:
what is the
remedy to the disease of totalitarianism?
Can we do something
about totalitarianism?
My answer is simple and straight:
yes.
The powerless do have power...!
Propaganda induced mass formation is a fake, symptomatic
solution for loneliness.
And the real solution lies in the
Art
of Sincere Speech. My next book, which I am writing now, is all
about the psychology of Truth.
Truth, by definition, from a
psychological point of view, is resonating speech, it is speech
which connects people, from core to core, from soul to soul,
speech that penetrates through the veil of appearances, through
the ideal images we hide behind, the imaginary shells we seek
refuge in, and reconnects the shivering and disconnected soul of
one human being to that of another human being.
Here we observe something crucial:
sincere speech is the real
cure for loneliness - it reconnects people.
As such, it takes
away the root cause of the major symptom of our rationalist
culture - mass formation and totalitarianism. And at the same
time, sincere speech also inhibits this symptom in a more
straightforward way.
It is well known that, if there are some
people who continue to speak in a sincere way when mass
formation is emerging, the masses do not go to the ultimate
stage where they start to think it is their duty to destroy each
and everyone who doesn't follow the totalitarian ideology.
At every moment we chose to speak out in a sincere way, no
matter where this happens, in a newspaper or a television
interview, but equally well in the presence of only one other
person at the kitchen table or in the supermarket, we help to
cure society from the disease of totalitarianism.
You have to take this literally.
Society, as a psychological
system, is a complex dynamical system. And complex dynamical
systems have the fascinating characteristic of so-called
sensitivity to initial conditions...
To put it simple:
the
smallest changes in one minor detail of the system, affect the
entire system.
For instance,
the smallest change in the
vibration pattern of one water molecule in a boiling pot of
water, changes the entire convection pattern of the boiling
water.
Nobody is powerless. And hence, every single one of us
is
responsible.
Each and everyone who speaks a sincere word and
succeeds in truly connecting as a human being to another human
being, in particular a human being with a different opinion,
deserves to be mentioned in the books of history, much more than
a president or a minister who engages in propaganda and fails to
show the courage to speak sincerely.
The more I study the effects of speech on the human being and on
human living together, the more hopeful I become and the more I
see that we will overcome totalitarianism.
We shouldn't be naïve when we talk about the Truth.
Endless are
the atrocities in history committed by people who believed they
possessed the Truth. Truth is an elusive phenomenon; we can
enjoy its presence from time to time, but we can never claim it
or possess it.
Sincere speech is an art.
An art we have to learn step by step.
An art we can progressively master.
That's exactly why I started
workshops on the Art of Speech - workshops in which we practice
that art in the same perseverant, disciplined way as any other
art is practiced.
Practicing this art implies that we overcome our own fanatic
convictions, and even more, our own narcissism and ego.
Truth
speech is this kind of speech which penetrates through what I
call 'the veil of appearances'. To practice it, you have to be
willing to sacrifice your ideal image; your public reputation.
That is exactly what the
Parrhesia in Ancient Greek culture
meant:
speaking out, even if you know that those who find their
stronghold in the world of appearances will target you.
Truth-telling can make you lose something. That is for sure.
But
it also gives you something.
To be more psychologically precise:
Truth speech makes you lose something at the level of
the Ego
and win something at the level of
the soul.
I am quite
fascinated by the way in which sincere speech leads to
psychological strength.
I think Mahatma Gandhi provides us with a splendid historical
example. A few years ago, I started to read his autobiography. I
did so at the moment I started to realize that the only
efficient resistance against totalitarianism is non-violent
resistance...
Of course this only applies to internal resistance,
resistance from within the totalitarian system. External enemies
can destroy totalitarian systems from without.
That's for sure...
But internal resistance, as I mentioned, can only be successful
if it is non-violent in nature. All violent resistance will
rather speed up the
process of totalitarization, just because it
is always used by the totalitarian leaders to create support in
the masses to destroy each and everyone who goes against the
system.
Once I realized that, I became interested in what Gandhi
had to say in his autobiography.
I was happily surprised to see the title:
Experiments on Truth...
And from the first pages, I learned that for Gandhi, the core
and essence of non-violent resistance is sincere speech...
His
entire life, Gandi tried to improve the sincerity of his speech.
He did so in a simple, almost childish and naïve way, wondering
every evening how sincere he had spoken that day, where he had
lied or when he could have spoken more accurately or sincerely.
And here is something important: in the beginning of his
biography, Gandhi mentions something magnificent.
He says:
I
actually had no major talents. I was not handsome as a man, I
didn't have much physical strength, I was not intelligent at
school, I was not a good writer and I was not talented as a
speaker.
But he had this passion for sincerity and Truth...!
And
this man, devoid of any major talents, but with a passion for
sincere speech, this man did something even the strongest army
in the world couldn't do:
he kicked out the English of India.
The better you start to see the almost endless horizon of
possibilities offered by speech, the more you realize: it are
words that rule the world.
The human being can use words in a
manipulative way, as pure rhetoric, indoctrination, propaganda,
or brain-washing trying to convince the Other of something it
doesn't believe in itself.
Or it can use words in a sincere way,
trying to convey something to a fellow human being it feels
inside itself. That is the most fundamental and existential
choice human beings face:
to use words in one or the other way.
Dear politicians of Romania and abroad, this is what I want to
tell you today:
it's time for a metaphysical revolution. And you
are ought to play a major role in it.
The series of crises our
society goes through are nothing else than a metaphysical
revolution, which, essentially, boils down to this:
the switch
from a society that functions according to the propaganda
principle to a society that is oriented towards Truth.
We need a
new political culture, a culture that re-appreciates the value
of Truth Telling...
We need a new political discourse, a political
discourse that leaves the shallow, hollow rhetoric and
propaganda behind and speaks from the soul, from the heart...
We
need politicians to become true leaders again, leaders who lead
rather than mis-lead the population.
