1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:14,880 So among many, many illustrious guests, I count the next two as really top, Matthias 2 00:00:14,880 --> 00:00:27,960 Desmet, who scandalized the entire planet Earth with his book on mass formation, which 3 00:00:27,960 --> 00:00:31,580 I think you said, well, there's mass formation. 4 00:00:31,580 --> 00:00:34,580 And people said, no, that's disinformation, right? 5 00:00:34,580 --> 00:00:39,620 There's no such thing as that. 6 00:00:39,620 --> 00:00:44,340 Strange times. 7 00:00:44,340 --> 00:00:50,460 And then Aaron Curiotti from your university is not UCLA, is it? 8 00:00:50,460 --> 00:00:51,460 UC Irvine. 9 00:00:51,460 --> 00:00:52,460 UC Irvine. 10 00:00:52,460 --> 00:00:57,460 And mental health psychology, you're a psychiatrist, both of you. 11 00:00:57,460 --> 00:00:58,460 Psychiatry. 12 00:00:58,460 --> 00:00:59,460 Yeah. 13 00:00:59,460 --> 00:01:00,460 Psychiatry. 14 00:01:00,460 --> 00:01:02,460 I'm a psychologist. 15 00:01:02,460 --> 00:01:07,840 Brownstone gets us into many areas, economics, psychiatry, God knows, right? 16 00:01:07,840 --> 00:01:12,840 I have some good friends here who have a nonprofit entirely devoted to getting people off psychiatric 17 00:01:12,840 --> 00:01:16,840 beds. 18 00:01:16,840 --> 00:01:21,540 And are you like this? 19 00:01:21,540 --> 00:01:24,460 I'm discovering all these problems I didn't even know existed, right? 20 00:01:24,460 --> 00:01:27,460 Just like a third of people are addicted to psychiatric beds. 21 00:01:27,460 --> 00:01:28,460 I didn't know. 22 00:01:28,460 --> 00:01:29,460 Then you turn on the TV. 23 00:01:29,460 --> 00:01:32,460 It's like, whatever your malady is, there's a pill. 24 00:01:32,460 --> 00:01:34,840 You know, the world is crazy. 25 00:01:34,840 --> 00:01:39,340 You know, I think about this all the time with regard to pharmaceuticals. 26 00:01:39,340 --> 00:01:44,340 If you told me five years ago, there's one industry in the world so powerful, they will, 27 00:01:44,340 --> 00:01:50,340 in the course of about 48 hours, shut down the entire global economy on command. 28 00:01:50,340 --> 00:01:51,340 Which one is that? 29 00:01:51,340 --> 00:01:54,340 I would not have been able to name it. 30 00:01:54,340 --> 00:01:56,340 Now, some people have been around for a long time. 31 00:01:56,340 --> 00:01:59,340 You know, the power of big pharma, right? 32 00:01:59,340 --> 00:02:00,340 I didn't know about it. 33 00:02:00,340 --> 00:02:02,340 This is a shock to me. 34 00:02:02,340 --> 00:02:07,340 It's more powerful than the East India Tea Company or whatever. 35 00:02:07,340 --> 00:02:08,340 Right? 36 00:02:08,340 --> 00:02:11,340 That's nothing. 37 00:02:11,340 --> 00:02:14,340 Anyway, so thrilled to have these two gentlemen here. 38 00:02:14,340 --> 00:02:19,340 Now, the issue I want to address, especially from Matthias, who's come a long way to be with 39 00:02:19,340 --> 00:02:23,340 a concern of somebody, I think that it's affected us all. 40 00:02:23,340 --> 00:02:29,340 And in our quest to understand, we toggle back and forth between two possible explanations. 41 00:02:29,340 --> 00:02:34,340 One is that masses of people are complete idiots. 42 00:02:34,340 --> 00:02:38,340 And the other is that an evil cabal imposed this on the world. 43 00:02:38,340 --> 00:02:42,340 I'm guessing that the real answer is some combination of the two. 44 00:02:43,340 --> 00:02:44,340 Right? 45 00:02:44,340 --> 00:02:49,340 Not to give away the punchline, but Matthias, do you want to address that general framework? 46 00:02:49,340 --> 00:02:50,340 For us. 47 00:02:50,340 --> 00:02:51,340 Yes. 48 00:02:51,340 --> 00:02:52,340 Okay. 49 00:02:52,340 --> 00:03:11,340 Yes, I believe it's important to consider tyranny at different levels. 50 00:03:11,340 --> 00:03:22,340 As you mentioned, there is a tyranny of big pharma, which is the industry that represents, 51 00:03:22,340 --> 00:03:31,340 in the most direct way, our materialist, rationalist, mechanical view on the human being. 52 00:03:31,340 --> 00:03:32,340 Like the human being is a mechanical entity. 53 00:03:32,340 --> 00:03:42,340 It's a small machine, biochemical machine in the big machine of the universe. 54 00:03:42,340 --> 00:03:51,340 And the pharma industry and the medical sciences represent that worldview or their view on man in the most straightforward way. 55 00:03:51,340 --> 00:03:57,340 And that's probably also why they have this enormous psychological impact on society. 56 00:03:57,340 --> 00:04:04,340 In particular because they are backed up by the oligarchs of this world. 57 00:04:04,340 --> 00:04:07,340 Which is the first level of tyranny, I believe. 58 00:04:07,340 --> 00:04:14,340 The kind of tyranny which was foreseen by Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New World Revisited. 59 00:04:14,340 --> 00:04:36,340 Not Brave New World Revisited, not Brave New World Revisited, in which he predicted that very soon we would live in a society which, under the flag of democracy, would become the absolute opposite of democracy. 60 00:04:36,340 --> 00:04:46,340 In which a small group of oligarchs steered society, helped by an army of mind manipulators, he said. 61 00:04:46,340 --> 00:04:50,340 It was a very prophetic paragraph in which he articulated that. 62 00:04:50,340 --> 00:04:52,340 So that's the first level of democracy, I think. 63 00:04:52,340 --> 00:05:07,340 Forgotten the two disparate oligarchs that emerged after, let's say, winning the relentless capitalist battle helped by their perversion of the financial system 64 00:05:07,340 --> 00:05:09,340 Yeah. 65 00:05:09,340 --> 00:05:19,020 afterwards buying politicians through lobbyists politicians congressmen who voted laws who put 66 00:05:19,020 --> 00:05:29,400 the oligarchs above the law allowed them to uh engage in predatory wars uh through their regime 67 00:05:29,400 --> 00:05:35,320 change machinery and so on so that's the first level of tyranny who is an important level and 68 00:05:35,320 --> 00:05:41,080 i think that it's an important level but it's the easiest level of tyranny to see and to understand 69 00:05:41,080 --> 00:05:47,620 yeah but that's interesting i don't think i've ever heard you uh speak directly to to that and 70 00:05:47,620 --> 00:05:53,840 my little riffing on the power of big pharma i did not intend to uh set stage for that comment but 71 00:05:53,840 --> 00:06:02,520 that's uh really alarming to and so the idea is then that that pharma plays into this kind of 72 00:06:02,520 --> 00:06:10,340 theory of life that we've uh adopted by default which is that the human personality is infinitely 73 00:06:10,340 --> 00:06:17,840 gameable and our biology is malleable to the point that it can be uh constructed and reconstructed 74 00:06:17,840 --> 00:06:26,780 and tricked by exogenous influences in the forms of potions and shots and and pills and the industry 75 00:06:26,780 --> 00:06:34,120 that produces those then gets an inordinate power over regimes and and by constant software updates 76 00:06:34,120 --> 00:06:43,840 to the system yeah i mean the human body is a sort of computer that um people who understand 77 00:06:43,840 --> 00:06:51,260 the world of tech and computers sort of i i think bring that framework into something like well yeah 78 00:06:51,260 --> 00:06:56,900 every six months they need a software update from the new mrna yeah yeah friends out and that's the 79 00:06:56,900 --> 00:07:03,380 that's the mental framework that's operating in the background and yeah the software on you know 80 00:07:03,380 --> 00:07:09,120 your microsoft whatever is infinitely malleable you can change everything on it theoretically if you 81 00:07:09,120 --> 00:07:17,040 wanted to you know uh and i i had speculated about this with regard to bill gates that when he was 82 00:07:17,040 --> 00:07:24,360 putting together you know the windows machine that the major thing that vexed him that nearly ruined 83 00:07:24,360 --> 00:07:31,200 his business was computer viruses what they called viruses right and and and the way he fixed the 84 00:07:31,200 --> 00:07:37,440 viruses was with anti-virus software uh so this idiot 85 00:07:37,440 --> 00:07:46,680 he hasn't changed he's still yeah but now he thinks well i've noticed that some people are sick just like 86 00:07:46,680 --> 00:07:56,760 my old hard drives well i'll invest in anti-virus uh software that can fix human beings but i don't 87 00:07:56,760 --> 00:08:01,140 know if it's as simple as that but what you're describing is actually more foundational it's not just 88 00:08:01,140 --> 00:08:08,880 an eccentricity of one billionaire no i i mean if i could jump in yeah i think there's some metaphysical 89 00:08:08,880 --> 00:08:14,920 principles that were operating deep below the surface um that were informing a particular 90 00:08:14,920 --> 00:08:22,660 ideology that that formed the framework for what we dealt with and one way into understanding it is 91 00:08:22,660 --> 00:08:28,780 i mean part of the ideology was scientism which needs to be distinguished from science science is a 92 00:08:28,780 --> 00:08:35,620 set of methods to try to pursue the suit the truth without you know recognizing that those methods 93 00:08:35,620 --> 00:08:40,820 don't lead to infallible conclusions and that you talked about kuhn's model of normal science and 94 00:08:40,820 --> 00:08:48,560 paradigm shifts yeah um but scientism is an ideology that says that science is the only valid form of 95 00:08:48,560 --> 00:08:52,880 knowledge which by the way is not a scientific claim it's a metaphysical claim that needs to be 96 00:08:52,880 --> 00:08:59,860 smuggled in the back door because it contradicts uh it contradicts itself um and then once you 97 00:08:59,860 --> 00:09:06,000 monopolize what counts as knowledge and you exclude other forms of knowledge uh whether it's the 98 00:09:06,000 --> 00:09:13,800 humanities whether it's uh moral or religious principles or whatever um you're on the road to 99 00:09:13,800 --> 00:09:20,440 tyranny and totalitarianism because that's what totalitarian systems do that's where they begin of 100 00:09:20,440 --> 00:09:25,880 course once you get people to adopt the ideology of scientism science science can then present 101 00:09:25,880 --> 00:09:31,780 infallible conclusions you and we can we can of course anoint the people that count as yeah 102 00:09:31,780 --> 00:09:36,820 scientists and exclude and vilify the people i'm very curious and i hope that we can get to this point 103 00:09:36,820 --> 00:09:42,520 because i'm i i have i have an intuition that everything has changed that people are no longer 104 00:09:42,520 --> 00:09:47,000 trusting of the experts no longer trusting of the science after what's happened and one wonders if 105 00:09:47,000 --> 00:09:53,480 we're really coming to we've entered into the last stages of this mythology of of scientific 106 00:09:53,480 --> 00:09:59,720 explanations for everything so scientism if if we really are are are leaving that that world because 107 00:10:00,280 --> 00:10:06,120 um i mean the fact that the shot did not work is actually devastating i mean the methods are becoming 108 00:10:06,120 --> 00:10:13,400 more desperate yeah clearly um you know in a perfectly realized totalitarian system you don't need so many 109 00:10:13,400 --> 00:10:19,000 external controls toward censorship i mean hannah arendt i think talked about this the end stage 110 00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:24,920 people have internalized theology to such an extent that they're self-censoring and the dissident thoughts 111 00:10:24,920 --> 00:10:29,880 simply no longer occur to them um and so the more external controls you had matthias can 112 00:10:30,520 --> 00:10:37,960 probably comment on this better than i could uh the less well the totalitarian ideology is functioning 113 00:10:37,960 --> 00:10:44,280 but i think the reason matthias your book was so was so riveting was because it it helped us explain 114 00:10:44,280 --> 00:10:51,640 the strange thing that was going on all around us which was this this uh this the willingness to go 115 00:10:51,640 --> 00:11:03,400 along with absurdity um we i we all witnessed it firsthand the instantaneous construction of a of a kind of 116 00:11:03,400 --> 00:11:11,560 rubricle liturgy uh over dining you know where where people would put on the mask to go to the bathroom 117 00:11:11,560 --> 00:11:18,120 take off the mask take a sip of their coke put on the mask and rest and where did you learn all this 118 00:11:18,120 --> 00:11:26,520 nonsense or or the the new holy water of hand sanitizer which was everywhere that stuff is disgusting um 119 00:11:26,520 --> 00:11:35,240 um and how instant it was that everybody it was weird it was a mass compliance at least initially 120 00:11:35,240 --> 00:11:42,440 seemed like that was going to be the way forward yes yes i i i believe that the absurdity of the corona 121 00:11:42,440 --> 00:11:49,960 measures and the willingness of the population to go along with it demonstrated the most important 122 00:11:49,960 --> 00:11:57,800 repressed truth of our enlightenment culture which is the human being is not a rational being it's an 123 00:11:57,800 --> 00:12:03,960 irrational being and you can accept it or you can reject that truth if you reject it it will return 124 00:12:04,840 --> 00:12:12,200 in a more powerful way that's the absurdity and if and we as soon as you really accept that you are 125 00:12:12,200 --> 00:12:18,920 irrational beings you start to understand that the guiding principle of individual and collective life 126 00:12:18,920 --> 00:12:25,800 can never be rational knowledge it has to be something else and that that something else 127 00:12:26,920 --> 00:12:35,720 inevitably or absolutely is ethical principles and and if you reject that that truth will return 128 00:12:35,720 --> 00:12:41,080 as completely erratic and absurd behavior as we have witnessed for instance in the corona crisis 129 00:12:41,080 --> 00:12:47,320 but but but framed under the rubric of of morality you're a good person if you engage in yeah 130 00:12:47,880 --> 00:12:54,120 liturgy well it was a new ethic um and you're evil if you if you don't in the name of i mean six feet 131 00:12:54,120 --> 00:12:59,400 of flexibility okay i mean all all human beings have to stand six feet apart from each other what the 132 00:12:59,400 --> 00:13:06,760 hell right they said this and people said oh good point yes but what it's it's an absolute moral rule 133 00:13:06,760 --> 00:13:13,720 that is imposed there you have to follow these rules if you don't you're not a responsible citizen and so on 134 00:13:13,720 --> 00:13:22,920 but i believe that through reproductive and truly humane uh guiding principle is an ethical principle 135 00:13:22,920 --> 00:13:30,440 it's not the moral rule it's an ethical principle which you have to feel an ethical awareness which 136 00:13:30,440 --> 00:13:37,080 has to develop and which only develops when you have a certain loyalty to truth and sincerity that's the point 137 00:13:37,080 --> 00:13:41,480 that's the point of my next book uh but matthias let me ask you a question because uh one of the 138 00:13:41,480 --> 00:13:50,680 books that i i've uh uh always loved is a book by uh this this guy thomas paine you know common sense 139 00:13:50,680 --> 00:13:57,400 i'm happy not to know it well his book is called the age of reason right and so it was this classic 140 00:13:57,400 --> 00:14:07,080 uh treatise of of of late enlightenment thought that uh believed that we had left the age of faith 141 00:14:07,640 --> 00:14:14,440 and we were entering into an age of where human reason and rationalism would govern everything and 142 00:14:14,440 --> 00:14:21,560 the morality the moral framework as i understand pain was an idea called human rights which seems like a 143 00:14:21,560 --> 00:14:29,480 good idea to me um but now that you're describing this it seems like you're saying uh thomas paine had a 144 00:14:30,920 --> 00:14:38,840 overly optimistic view of you know you know i i believe that we have to be as rational as possible 145 00:14:38,840 --> 00:14:45,400 you have to push rationality to the absolute limit and if we do so in a faithful way without falling prey 146 00:14:45,960 --> 00:14:51,320 to uh the enticement of power and money and so on because that's what happens to most people 147 00:14:51,320 --> 00:14:56,520 while they follow rationality they fall prey to something else but if we really push rationality 148 00:14:56,520 --> 00:15:05,640 to the ultimate to the ultimate point we will spontaneously transcend it we will get into touch 149 00:15:05,640 --> 00:15:12,680 with something that is super irrational that's what people like einstein said like the true scientific 150 00:15:12,680 --> 00:15:17,000 discovery is born at the moment you transcend rationality and you move to a stage of 151 00:15:17,000 --> 00:15:22,520 einfühlung which is a german term meaning something like something like feeling one with what you 152 00:15:22,520 --> 00:15:27,880 observe where you get in touch where you get the feel for the phenomenon that you observe and that's 153 00:15:27,880 --> 00:15:33,560 the true knowledge that's what that's what samurai culture knew so in such a supreme way they knew like 154 00:15:34,360 --> 00:15:41,320 you learn the martial arts through rational technical training 10 years 20 years 30 years but you become a 155 00:15:41,320 --> 00:15:49,080 master when you start to develop this field for the martial arts where you where your sixth sense is 156 00:15:49,080 --> 00:15:53,800 developed where your intuition is developed and that's the true guiding principle yeah yeah thomas 157 00:15:53,800 --> 00:16:00,200 point has had it described the same things uh in terms of what he called connatural knowledge so you 158 00:16:00,200 --> 00:16:05,880 know if you want to know what the right thing to do is in a difficult situation you can ask the person who 159 00:16:05,880 --> 00:16:12,280 studied ethics and principles and um you know applied their intellect to the problem if they've done it 160 00:16:12,280 --> 00:16:16,680 well they will give you a good answer about how to navigate this difficulty or what's the morally 161 00:16:16,680 --> 00:16:22,440 correct thing to do or you could ask the virtuous person who's just developed the habits of living those 162 00:16:22,440 --> 00:16:26,600 virtues and you know she may not be able to explain why that's the right thing but she'll know 163 00:16:26,600 --> 00:16:34,280 intuitively she'll have that that feel that what he called connatural knowledge and i think maybe maybe just 164 00:16:34,280 --> 00:16:39,160 as i drew a distinction between science and scientism we can draw a distinction between rationality the 165 00:16:39,160 --> 00:16:47,400 open uh and sincere and transparent and shared pursuit of knowledge versus a kind of narrow rationalism 166 00:16:47,400 --> 00:16:54,360 that we got stuck in that has maybe been bequeathed to us by the enlightenment returning to our theme of 167 00:16:54,360 --> 00:17:01,720 tyranny uh there's a 20th century political theorist named eric voglin who studied the totalitarian 168 00:17:01,720 --> 00:17:06,520 systems of the 20th century and he pointed out that the common feature of all those systems 169 00:17:06,520 --> 00:17:12,360 is not concentration camps you know barbed wire fences men in jack boots secret police mass surveillance 170 00:17:12,360 --> 00:17:17,000 although we have many of those things including mass surveillance now the common feature and the 171 00:17:17,000 --> 00:17:23,480 starting point of all these systems is the prohibition of questions that the regime monopolizes what 172 00:17:23,480 --> 00:17:29,080 counts as rationality what counts as knowledge and if you raise your hand you ask any inconvenient 173 00:17:29,080 --> 00:17:33,560 questions about information it's disinformation in fact they don't even argue with you they did 174 00:17:33,560 --> 00:17:38,120 they just you know you you you're in a you're in a marxist communist society you say i'm not sure 175 00:17:38,120 --> 00:17:43,400 about this revolution of proletariat it's going to lead to a classless communist utopia they don't 176 00:17:43,400 --> 00:17:47,400 sit down and argue with you matias this is what you got wrong this is why you don't understand they 177 00:17:47,400 --> 00:17:52,440 simply say you're infected with bourgeois consciousness you're not worth talking to you're not part of polite 178 00:17:52,440 --> 00:17:58,280 society shut the hell up and if you don't shut up that's when the external controls then we're gonna throw 179 00:17:58,280 --> 00:18:04,040 garbage throw you in a concentration camp we don't need those controls anymore now we have a digital 180 00:18:04,040 --> 00:18:10,200 kind of gulag now that you can be unpersoned by your bank and so on and so forth but but that so 181 00:18:10,200 --> 00:18:17,800 the the starting point this is why the censorship issue is so important because that's where these 182 00:18:17,800 --> 00:18:24,520 systems begin and then the rest of the apparatus of control follows inevitably from that so whenever 183 00:18:24,520 --> 00:18:30,120 we see that we smell that that you know monopolizing knowledge and that prohibition of questions it 184 00:18:30,120 --> 00:18:35,400 make it should make us very very nervous really from the from the very onset of the of the coveted 185 00:18:35,400 --> 00:18:42,280 regime um which is the regime there seemed to be a systematic effort to replace our natural uh 186 00:18:42,840 --> 00:18:47,560 experience-based intuitions right about right and wrong with something completely artificial and 187 00:18:47,560 --> 00:18:53,960 constructed uh totally i mean you can't talk face to face with a person yeah those elements of those 188 00:18:53,960 --> 00:18:59,640 elements of knowledge that happen in a real encounter you can't sing remember the attack on singing 189 00:19:01,560 --> 00:19:08,360 yeah so it's it's easier to accomplish this in an entirely if you sing you're spreading you're 190 00:19:08,360 --> 00:19:14,120 spreading the virus yeah and and people began to see things that uh believe they were seeing things 191 00:19:14,120 --> 00:19:20,440 that they couldn't possibly see uh i was in a uh i was in in a hudson uh hudson new york 192 00:19:21,080 --> 00:19:26,280 wine bars waiting for a train or something and i ordered a glass of wine and she gave it to me in 193 00:19:26,280 --> 00:19:30,680 a paper cup and she said drink it out there and i said there's a perfectly nice dining room right here 194 00:19:30,680 --> 00:19:35,000 why don't i sit there and drink it because it's rather cold outside she said well you can't because 195 00:19:35,000 --> 00:19:45,640 of covet and i said you think covet is in that room and she said yes 196 00:19:50,280 --> 00:19:51,960 right yeah 197 00:19:54,120 --> 00:20:02,200 yes but that's uh that's how rationalism which for me is completely different from being rational but 198 00:20:02,200 --> 00:20:07,720 that's how rationalism lapses into complete absurd irrationality yeah and that you even can't laugh 199 00:20:07,720 --> 00:20:18,600 with it right you're not allowed to yeah it plunged into a strange a strange uh mysticism uh is what i 200 00:20:18,600 --> 00:20:28,680 observed you know right and and i mean that what was held up as the highest ideal of civic virtue was 201 00:20:28,680 --> 00:20:34,520 non-participation right right and i mean it was just this complete contradiction at the heart of 202 00:20:34,520 --> 00:20:43,320 it all so what what we saw was a kind of totalitarianism of of disintegration and fragmentation before 203 00:20:44,040 --> 00:20:50,120 it was a totalitarianism no weddings funerals no church services no uh guests in your home of more 204 00:20:50,120 --> 00:20:56,760 than 10 people because then because that will cause cover to spread and so on right um and i looked at 205 00:20:56,760 --> 00:21:05,800 all of this stuff for a very long time as a bunch of crazy wacky mistakes uh stupid people doing stupid 206 00:21:05,800 --> 00:21:11,400 things uh at this point four years later i don't think that that's a plausible explanation it seems like 207 00:21:11,400 --> 00:21:18,040 there was something else both i guess yeah both it was of course it was pre-planned to a certain extent 208 00:21:18,040 --> 00:21:26,520 uh it's very well known for instance that um totalitarian leaders need a lonely population 209 00:21:26,520 --> 00:21:33,480 yeah in order to be able to impose their totalitarian system but once they imposed it all of them without 210 00:21:33,480 --> 00:21:40,200 one exemption replaced loneliness by isolation first thing they do because propaganda works very well 211 00:21:40,760 --> 00:21:46,920 in a lonely population and even much better in an isolated population in which people are restricted 212 00:21:46,920 --> 00:21:51,480 that level of traveling in which people are locked up and in their homes that's where propaganda works 213 00:21:51,480 --> 00:21:58,120 almost perfectly and uh so it's it's it's the two i think i think to a certain extent it was just a bunch of 214 00:21:58,120 --> 00:22:04,360 people who turned completely stupid and blind because of certain psychological conditions in society 215 00:22:04,360 --> 00:22:10,920 and at the same time some people took advantage of that situation of the population to impose their 216 00:22:10,920 --> 00:22:18,200 their technocratic uh transhumanist plans which are just the ultimate consequence like a technocratic 217 00:22:18,200 --> 00:22:23,800 system is just the ultimate consequence from the mechanist rationalist fuel man in the world if the 218 00:22:23,800 --> 00:22:29,160 entire world is a machine and the human being a small machine and the big machine then it's logical 219 00:22:29,160 --> 00:22:35,400 that it is led by a kind of an expert or an engineer yeah who just why would you ask a democratically 220 00:22:35,400 --> 00:22:40,760 elected guy who doesn't know anything about the machine stupid yeah yeah it's so it's it's a 221 00:22:40,760 --> 00:22:45,240 combination of the two right as soon as you start from this rationalist fuel man in the world you 222 00:22:45,240 --> 00:22:51,400 inevitably will end up with an elite representing his fuel man which believes that it should impose 223 00:22:51,400 --> 00:22:57,800 its right mechanism knowledge to the population in a relentless way in a relentless way yeah and anybody 224 00:22:57,800 --> 00:23:04,760 who disagrees that with that is is a potential populist dictator yeah it's a reprisal of actually ancient 225 00:23:05,320 --> 00:23:12,200 gnosticism in the sense that okay so scientism is is self-contradictory and it is irrational by 226 00:23:12,760 --> 00:23:19,160 definition so it can only advance basically by slander of its critics and the promise of future 227 00:23:19,160 --> 00:23:25,880 happiness which never quite appears around the corner right um the utopian society never uh never 228 00:23:25,880 --> 00:23:32,680 realizes itself um but what you end up when you monopolize knowledge in that way is there has to be a kind 229 00:23:32,680 --> 00:23:39,080 of gnostic elite that has access to this the secret knowledge in the future we understand the direction 230 00:23:39,080 --> 00:23:45,880 of history and you stupid plebes are ignorant of it so you need to be swayed by propaganda you need to be 231 00:23:45,880 --> 00:23:51,960 controlled by coercion if you ask inconvenient questions and we can discern this direction of 232 00:23:51,960 --> 00:23:57,240 history and so you you need to sort of shut up and listen to us and go along uh if you do that you're a good 233 00:23:57,240 --> 00:24:03,480 person i mean ethics i mean in this in this twisted upside down framework ethics by definition 234 00:24:04,040 --> 00:24:09,240 becomes you know go along with us you're a good person stand in the way of the direction of history 235 00:24:09,240 --> 00:24:17,000 that only we can tell you where it's going and you're gonna you're a bad person therefore you deserve 236 00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:23,480 to be steamrolled in fact because you're getting in the way of of uh you know the future happiness that's 237 00:24:23,480 --> 00:24:28,840 that's going to come about when we completely whatever eradicate this virus eradicate you know 238 00:24:28,840 --> 00:24:35,960 classes or you know usher in whatever the you know proposed totalitarian utopia might be um now 239 00:24:36,840 --> 00:24:42,200 matthias one of the reasons your book was so exciting was that it seemed to explain the behavior of our of 240 00:24:42,200 --> 00:24:48,920 our fellows and i thought it did so so brilliantly um by the way and before reading your book i had read 241 00:24:49,560 --> 00:24:54,760 a wonderful book by uh freud and you you don't like freud probably don't i didn't say that well 242 00:24:54,760 --> 00:24:58,680 nobody likes like i like him i like i got some things right i'm the only guy who seems to like 243 00:24:58,680 --> 00:25:03,560 freud but anyway not all of freud just something but he wrote a book on group psychology and the 244 00:25:03,560 --> 00:25:10,200 analysis of the ego which i think that is a riveting that it explained like so much yeah like for 245 00:25:10,200 --> 00:25:16,360 example if you joined your local gardenia club you know and and doubled the membership and are in charge of 246 00:25:16,360 --> 00:25:21,320 the newsletter and raise the money and whatever but after a couple years you you get sick of 247 00:25:21,320 --> 00:25:29,000 gardenias like why did i ever do this so you quit but then everybody hates you you're an enemy of the 248 00:25:29,000 --> 00:25:39,400 gardenia i served you faithfully for two years my whole life is gardenias have some thanks nope you suck 249 00:25:39,400 --> 00:25:49,080 right so that freud addresses freud addresses why this happens um oh anyway so the point is that 250 00:25:49,080 --> 00:25:54,840 your book was such a brilliant explanation for for the mass formation we saw all around us 251 00:25:55,640 --> 00:26:02,120 uh i maybe it's just where i am the people i hang out with or whatever but i see something 252 00:26:02,840 --> 00:26:09,080 unraveling about the entire experience and people the the the fact that the shots didn't work 253 00:26:09,080 --> 00:26:18,280 has has uh disoriented a lot of people the loss of trust in the media the loss of trust in government 254 00:26:18,280 --> 00:26:24,360 the loss of trust in everything really uh seems to be a defining characteristic of our age and it 255 00:26:24,360 --> 00:26:31,480 is roiling politics the world over it is maybe not this time around but certainly at some point in 256 00:26:31,480 --> 00:26:37,000 the future we're gonna have to come to so my question to you is you know in your analysis in your 257 00:26:37,000 --> 00:26:44,680 understanding your framework is there a period in which this mass formation does is it terminal does 258 00:26:44,680 --> 00:26:52,920 it have a life does it end and then what happens yes there is a thing i believe that well mass formations 259 00:26:54,120 --> 00:26:58,680 usually usually were short-lived but because of the emergence of the mass media they started to last 260 00:26:58,680 --> 00:27:02,600 longer and longer and longer and because the population got more lonely it was a complex dynamical 261 00:27:02,600 --> 00:27:08,200 phenomenon but it's only recently or at least throughout the last 150 years that they started 262 00:27:08,200 --> 00:27:14,040 to last so long that it was possible to base a state system on it which was this new kind of state 263 00:27:14,040 --> 00:27:19,160 the totalitarian state which emerged in the 20th century so but since then actually we live in a 264 00:27:19,160 --> 00:27:24,840 continuous process of mass phenomena usually massifications i think not really fully fledged 265 00:27:24,840 --> 00:27:29,960 mass formations and then after the second world war for the first time in history this global this 266 00:27:29,960 --> 00:27:36,040 global mass formation which was called the corona crisis so but i do believe that it will end at 267 00:27:36,040 --> 00:27:42,120 least the power of the propagandized masses will end i truly believe so because no matter where i come in 268 00:27:42,120 --> 00:27:49,160 the world i've been in four countries in in three weeks time i think and everywhere i feel the same 269 00:27:49,160 --> 00:27:55,880 awareness emerging yeah i feel that people start to become aware of the fact that there is something about 270 00:27:55,880 --> 00:28:01,800 truth yeah there is something about sincerity we are all going through the same process and at a 271 00:28:01,800 --> 00:28:09,960 certain moment we will pass this tipping point yeah in which a small group of people truly unified 272 00:28:10,600 --> 00:28:16,440 by sincerity and truth not by the same opinion they might all have a different opinion but the way all 273 00:28:16,440 --> 00:28:17,080 they will all 274 00:28:17,080 --> 00:28:26,440 they will be aware that every human being has the fundamental right to articulate his opinion and 275 00:28:26,440 --> 00:28:33,080 that's what will unify the group of people that's true love because if you if you only love someone 276 00:28:33,080 --> 00:28:39,560 because he's he has the same as you or because he has the same opinion right then what you love is not 277 00:28:39,560 --> 00:28:45,000 the other it's your own mirror image and what you feel is not love it is narcissism and that's what is so 278 00:28:45,000 --> 00:28:51,000 typical for a mass that's what happens in a mass in a mass everyone has to have the same opinion 279 00:28:51,000 --> 00:28:57,240 everyone identifies with the same ideal image that was the major contribution of freud in the text you 280 00:28:57,240 --> 00:29:04,600 mentioned freud wrote only one text about mass psychology but he contributed one of the most important 281 00:29:04,600 --> 00:29:10,760 contributions he understood what was so unique for a mass and it was different from all other groups right 282 00:29:10,760 --> 00:29:17,000 because the the organizing principle is not love between the individuals it's love of every 283 00:29:17,000 --> 00:29:23,800 individual separately with this one same ideology ideal image yeah that's why mass formation and 284 00:29:23,800 --> 00:29:31,160 totalitarianism uniformize a society yeah so and now we are in this metaphysical revolution i believe 285 00:29:31,160 --> 00:29:40,520 this metaphysical revolution where we see how a propagandized mass propagandized by their leaders emerges 286 00:29:40,760 --> 00:29:48,840 in its full strength and at the same time it provokes the emergence of its counterpart a group of 287 00:29:48,840 --> 00:29:55,240 people who start to become aware that without truth and sincerity there is no human living together 288 00:29:55,240 --> 00:30:00,760 yeah not and that is the what we are going through i believe this process in which the propagandized 289 00:30:00,760 --> 00:30:07,400 masses slowly start to become weaker than this emerging group of people unified by truth speech so 290 00:30:07,400 --> 00:30:12,520 everyone at every moment no matter where who speaks a sincere word be it at the kitchen table in a shop 291 00:30:12,520 --> 00:30:19,160 or no matter where or here on stage or during the break everyone who truly speaks a sincere word and 292 00:30:19,160 --> 00:30:24,680 who connects a human being beyond the narcissistic shield yeah who connects them at the level of the 293 00:30:24,680 --> 00:30:30,680 soul through sincere speech contributes or at least if enough people do that 294 00:30:30,680 --> 00:30:41,160 the era of totalitarianism is over it seems like that i really yeah i really want to disagree with 295 00:30:41,160 --> 00:30:47,080 you so that i know that i love you authentically and not narcissistically but i can't help but agreeing 296 00:30:47,080 --> 00:30:54,760 with you a hundred percent um hopefully we'll find something else to disagree on we will we will but 297 00:30:54,760 --> 00:31:01,960 but just to just to riff and gloss which i can't say anything better than what you just said but you 298 00:31:01,960 --> 00:31:08,280 taught me that you know hannah arent's phrase for the precondition for totalitarianism was not just 299 00:31:08,280 --> 00:31:16,360 loneliness but organized loneliness a deliberate loneliness and in fact our surgeon general who got 300 00:31:16,360 --> 00:31:23,320 many many many things wrong um it is a defendant in one of my lawsuits that i'm uh i'm not a big fan of 301 00:31:23,320 --> 00:31:28,680 vivek murthy but he was correct back in 2018 when he said there's an epidemic of loneliness and 302 00:31:28,680 --> 00:31:34,440 it's as serious as cancer and heart disease for our health and so we had this epidemic of deaths of 303 00:31:34,440 --> 00:31:41,880 despair really since 1999 yeah uh 20-year rise in deaths by suicide drug overdose alcohol-related 304 00:31:41,880 --> 00:31:49,400 illnesses which ex which we already had a crisis drug overdose deaths 1999 20 000 a year 2018 had gone 305 00:31:49,400 --> 00:31:57,080 up to 70 000 a year which is horrifying um and then it jumped in 2020 during lockdowns to from 70 to 100 306 00:31:57,080 --> 00:32:02,600 and you remember they said that wouldn't that wasn't going to happen yes no it was crazy um but it did of 307 00:32:02,600 --> 00:32:11,480 course uh alcohol related deaths same same thing 69 to 99 000 in in one year um after the lockdowns but 308 00:32:12,200 --> 00:32:19,720 that that organized loneliness that precondition for tyranny was already present prior to covet for a 309 00:32:19,720 --> 00:32:28,040 variety of reasons some of them i would argue some of them by design actually and so just to riff on your 310 00:32:28,040 --> 00:32:34,040 remarks the the remedy is the kind of thing that we're doing here propaganda doesn't work when people 311 00:32:34,040 --> 00:32:42,520 meet and talk and gather face to face it works much better when with organized loneliness and so anything 312 00:32:42,520 --> 00:32:52,120 that can be done to connect with real people in real time um in in you know real space uh will move us 313 00:32:52,120 --> 00:33:06,200 away from this uh rationalistic kind of hyper um um the the virtual world where information can so easily 314 00:33:06,200 --> 00:33:13,960 be manipulated and our mental life can begin to conform to an unreality i feel that hyped through the 315 00:33:13,960 --> 00:33:20,600 screen so this this what we're doing now is remedy i i feel that do you don't you agree i mean absolutely 316 00:33:21,240 --> 00:33:28,360 we had about a year or two of of weird artificial isolation and and like even now four years later 317 00:33:28,360 --> 00:33:37,000 it's just a thrill to gather with other people and see smiling faces and and and shake hands remember 318 00:33:37,000 --> 00:33:45,480 when fauci said we'd never shake hands again you know yeah never yes yes for for us it is it is a 319 00:33:45,480 --> 00:33:53,640 pleasure to to shake hands for some it isn't some prefer isolation yeah they continue to to to to work 320 00:33:55,080 --> 00:33:59,160 from their homes and so on and that's what's so typical for the people who are into the mass formation 321 00:34:00,600 --> 00:34:08,840 will become more lonely that that's an inevitable consequence yeah uh of of because a mass formation 322 00:34:08,840 --> 00:34:14,760 sucks away all the energy uh from the bonds between people and it all injects it in the bond of the 323 00:34:14,760 --> 00:34:20,760 individual with the collective so meaning that uh the individual bond becomes weaker people feel more 324 00:34:20,760 --> 00:34:27,800 lonely and so on and so on and even more vulnerable for new propaganda like the propaganda on the ukraine war 325 00:34:27,800 --> 00:34:35,240 started immediately after the the the uh the covet crisis and so on so uh the the propagandized mass will 326 00:34:35,240 --> 00:34:39,800 become more and more and more lonely but the people who do not fall prey to it who go against it will 327 00:34:39,800 --> 00:34:45,080 become more and more and more connected and that's how the balance will shift probably yeah um yeah that 328 00:34:45,080 --> 00:34:50,920 that explains uh i think what we are we often call the rabbit holes you know um uh there's things i 329 00:34:50,920 --> 00:34:58,760 accepted as true uh five years ago that now i'm doubting you know um same with me well i mean just just 330 00:34:58,760 --> 00:35:04,920 not to be controversial but i never cared much either way about this issue of climate change you 331 00:35:04,920 --> 00:35:11,880 know like whatever i i'm glad we got climate change i don't care but i it never really but but now you 332 00:35:11,880 --> 00:35:16,440 know soon after the covet thing started yeah there was the ukraine war but there's also this the climate 333 00:35:16,440 --> 00:35:21,720 you know it rains outside well the climate changer that's because because of your standard of living or 334 00:35:21,720 --> 00:35:30,920 whatever um and now it's so obvious to me that the exact same models and techniques and scientistic 335 00:35:31,560 --> 00:35:40,920 pretense of knowledge and fake data uh you know rule by experts all in the pay of the state and so on 336 00:35:40,920 --> 00:35:47,560 are are in charge of that realm of thought too so for the purposes of accruing more power top down 337 00:35:47,560 --> 00:35:55,800 yeah and a general and a reset an industrial reset i mean it's so apparent to me now so much has been 338 00:35:55,800 --> 00:36:04,040 revealed we are waking up yeah yeah you're waking up and um yeah but i think it's that's always 339 00:36:04,040 --> 00:36:09,560 extremely important we just we touched upon it uh uh while we were talking but it's extremely important 340 00:36:09,560 --> 00:36:16,840 to understand that there is this the tyranny of the oligarchs but there is also a tyranny at different 341 00:36:16,840 --> 00:36:21,560 levels like at the level of the individual itself there is also a tyranny a tyranny of narcissism and 342 00:36:21,560 --> 00:36:28,360 the ego which also emerged throughout the last 200 years and which in which interacts with this 343 00:36:28,360 --> 00:36:33,880 tyranny of the oligarchs that's so important it's like this materialist fueled man in the world it 344 00:36:33,880 --> 00:36:41,160 focused our attention on the world we could see with our eyes also at the level of our identity it 345 00:36:41,720 --> 00:36:48,520 made us believe or at least it shifted individual experiencing in that direction made us believe 346 00:36:48,520 --> 00:36:55,720 that we could see who we are in the mirror we i it made us identify more with the visible aspects of 347 00:36:55,720 --> 00:37:02,040 our being and that's exactly what narcissism is it's a psychological investment in the surface of our 348 00:37:02,040 --> 00:37:11,560 our bodies our outer ideal image and that was the first uh uh phenomenon that isolated us from each 349 00:37:11,560 --> 00:37:21,160 other when we focus at the surface of our being we make our ego stronger and we make we disconnect 350 00:37:21,160 --> 00:37:26,680 ourselves right from the other human being and that's the first level of loneliness and it is that 351 00:37:26,680 --> 00:37:34,360 loneliness that makes us fall prey to propaganda that's exactly what uh um um jacqueline explains 352 00:37:34,360 --> 00:37:39,800 in his book propaganda yeah where he explains about how the modern masses are different from the ancient 353 00:37:39,800 --> 00:37:47,240 masses because it are lonely masses ah well narcissism also produces with the analyst going back to your 354 00:37:47,240 --> 00:37:52,680 friend freud yeah the character armor a kind there's there's a kind of hardening of of the personality 355 00:37:52,680 --> 00:38:00,840 yeah um that makes it impossible to actually connect you know with real friendship or intimacy or what 356 00:38:00,840 --> 00:38:07,800 have you with the person underneath and rates of narcissism otherwise i wrote a book of on the 357 00:38:08,680 --> 00:38:15,160 wrote a book review on the book called the narcissism epidemic which is gene twangy um probably 15 years 358 00:38:15,160 --> 00:38:22,120 ago now showing data that narcissistic traits not necessarily full-blown narcissistic personality disorder 359 00:38:22,680 --> 00:38:28,360 uh but narcissistic traits were on the rise among college students over the last you know 20 years 360 00:38:29,080 --> 00:38:34,680 um particularly interestingly among women but among both men and women but it was more strongly 361 00:38:34,680 --> 00:38:40,760 pronounced among women in the data set that she was looking at and i think the the effects of that 362 00:38:40,760 --> 00:38:46,760 were a piece of what we're seeing now and social media playing a role in that and the you know the 363 00:38:46,760 --> 00:38:51,720 effects of technology this is an absurd format where i try to extract all truth from you in a matter of 364 00:38:51,720 --> 00:38:58,840 seconds but um uh all right so you both have talked about this for lack of better term tipping point 365 00:38:58,840 --> 00:39:05,960 where where people gradually realize that the the propaganda is fake and and that there's a regime 366 00:39:05,960 --> 00:39:11,160 telling us to think one thing that's really contrary to the intuitions of the lifetime that we were taught 367 00:39:11,160 --> 00:39:18,520 from all our ancient religions and and we don't believe anymore and and uh this truth begins to 368 00:39:18,520 --> 00:39:27,480 overwhelm the propaganda at some point um so let me ask this of both of you uh how close are we to 369 00:39:27,480 --> 00:39:34,920 that point are we talking generations or or or a month uh uh right and then what is on the other side 370 00:39:34,920 --> 00:39:41,800 of it i would like to live in a in a free society where people are decent toward each other and human 371 00:39:41,800 --> 00:39:48,440 beings are granted basic dignity and we cobbled together a good life for ourselves again is that 372 00:39:48,440 --> 00:39:55,560 possible in our time so um i think it's already happening to a lot of people but i think that 373 00:39:55,560 --> 00:40:03,240 process is going to be also limited by certain factors that are going to be hard to overcome which 374 00:40:03,240 --> 00:40:10,440 in my estimation a real reckoning with what happened to us is another i'm sorry to say it 10 to 20 years 375 00:40:10,440 --> 00:40:15,320 yeah away and here's the reason i think the the analogy even though a lot of people are waking 376 00:40:15,320 --> 00:40:20,920 up and very often it's personal experience i believe this thing i took this thing and it injured 377 00:40:20,920 --> 00:40:25,960 me i mean we just have one of the vice president candidates in a recent interview describing his 378 00:40:25,960 --> 00:40:31,960 vaccine injury and uh so you know that sort of immediate experience can wake a lot of people up 379 00:40:31,960 --> 00:40:36,440 amazing how many people even something like that doesn't wake them up and they're still in denial 380 00:40:36,440 --> 00:40:43,720 um but i think one of the difficulties now is i compare our society to maybe germany after world 381 00:40:43,720 --> 00:40:49,880 war ii in the sense that something terrible happened it was global in this case and not confined to 382 00:40:49,880 --> 00:40:58,920 one nation um and a lot of people a few people really actively participated in evil but a lot of people 383 00:40:58,920 --> 00:41:06,360 probably the majority of people kind of passively went along and kind of at some level participated 384 00:41:06,360 --> 00:41:10,920 in a way that made them morally complicit you know they pressured a loved one to do something they 385 00:41:10,920 --> 00:41:17,240 didn't want to do radically let's say or they they alienated their own brother by disinviting him to 386 00:41:17,240 --> 00:41:23,400 thanksgiving dinner um because of decisions that he had made i mean these are these are very very serious 387 00:41:24,120 --> 00:41:31,720 things speaking of um you know ethics and love and uh it takes a while to kind of work well and and so 388 00:41:31,720 --> 00:41:37,080 and so to to recognize you know for germans to recognize yeah i was i was living next door to 389 00:41:37,080 --> 00:41:42,040 this to this place and there was a big smokestack and there was smoke coming out and i kind of kind 390 00:41:42,040 --> 00:41:47,560 of everyone knew what was going on there but none of us did anything about it yeah um that's difficult 391 00:41:47,560 --> 00:41:52,840 to overcome yeah right and it's going to take a society probably a new generation of people 392 00:41:53,560 --> 00:41:58,520 that are that are maybe less complicit and in this case i think it's going to be the generation of 393 00:41:58,520 --> 00:42:05,400 people that were in high school and college who were most harmed by these policies who in 10 20 394 00:42:05,400 --> 00:42:11,320 years when they're hitting their their stride in their career as business professionals as historians 395 00:42:11,320 --> 00:42:16,680 as economists as you know psychologists or whatever they're going to want to know what the hell were you 396 00:42:16,680 --> 00:42:21,640 guys thinking and what did you you robbed me of three years yeah the most important years of my 397 00:42:22,280 --> 00:42:29,960 of my education or my social life yeah um and i think my children's generation is going to want a 398 00:42:29,960 --> 00:42:35,560 reckoning with this yeah i think my own generation that was so complicit in this there's a few people 399 00:42:35,560 --> 00:42:41,640 like the people in this room that that are ready for that but i'm not sure that we're going to be the 400 00:42:41,640 --> 00:42:50,600 full extent of that probably until the generation of of people who are in college um are you know in 401 00:42:50,600 --> 00:42:55,160 positions of power and authority and other people have retired or died okay so i'll be dead by 402 00:42:55,160 --> 00:43:04,360 that time do you have a last last last word last word for us matthias i think nobody knows 403 00:43:05,080 --> 00:43:10,840 how long it will last you can see this from different perspectives i think 404 00:43:10,840 --> 00:43:23,000 like science actually learned that all complex dynamical phenomena are intrinsically unpredictable 405 00:43:24,360 --> 00:43:30,520 like they literally behave as an irrational number in mathematics and they have this they have this 406 00:43:30,520 --> 00:43:36,440 strange characteristic of deterministic unpredictability meaning that they are determined by mathematical 407 00:43:36,440 --> 00:43:40,680 formula but even with the formula in your hand you cannot predict one second in advance how the 408 00:43:41,080 --> 00:43:45,880 system will behave at least not when it is in its chaotic phase and we are going through a complex 409 00:43:45,880 --> 00:43:54,920 dynamical uh uh uh process now as a society and meaning that we don't know it can be over tomorrow 410 00:43:54,920 --> 00:44:02,600 yeah and it can last for another 100 years yeah the point is i think that we actually don't have to try 411 00:44:02,600 --> 00:44:10,440 to know it because that's exactly where we fall prey again to this rationalist illusion that we can live 412 00:44:10,440 --> 00:44:16,360 our lives on the basis of our rational understanding predict what will happen and so on the only thing 413 00:44:16,360 --> 00:44:23,720 we really have to know in the years to come is that we will stay loyal to the principles of humanity in 414 00:44:23,720 --> 00:44:33,800 a world that is at record pace dehumanizing that's what we have to do and the crisis and totalitarianism it 415 00:44:33,800 --> 00:44:40,600 will last exactly as long as it has to last as it has to last to give birth to a new kind of human 416 00:44:40,600 --> 00:44:48,520 being which lives from the soul and which is it which re-appreciates the value of truth and sincerity 417 00:44:48,520 --> 00:44:53,000 i think that's the only point that's what we have to stay loyal to just keeping in mind that no 418 00:44:53,000 --> 00:44:59,400 matter what happens we will stay loyal to ethical principles like solzhenicin described how in the 419 00:44:59,400 --> 00:45:06,280 gulags those people often survived who no matter what happened stayed loyal to ethical principles he 420 00:45:06,280 --> 00:45:13,400 referred to this wonderful prisoner uh what was his name ivanovich gregoryev i think who entered the gulag 421 00:45:14,120 --> 00:45:23,320 sickly and but from the beginning when other people stole his clothes and his food he refused to steal 422 00:45:23,320 --> 00:45:29,240 clothes and food back he refused to do it no matter what the guards told him that he considered unethical 423 00:45:29,240 --> 00:45:35,320 he refused to do it he stayed loyal in a world in a world where everyone behaved in a beastly and then 424 00:45:35,320 --> 00:45:42,520 humane way he himself stayed loyal to the principle of humanity he survived the gulags for 15 years and when 425 00:45:42,520 --> 00:45:48,200 he left them one of the very few people who survived them he was stronger than when he entered them and 426 00:45:48,200 --> 00:45:55,320 but even so i think that's that's exactly in in a society which started to believe that we should 427 00:45:55,320 --> 00:46:02,680 live this life on the basis of some pseudo rational knowledge we have to be the ones who say no we will 428 00:46:02,680 --> 00:46:08,520 live our lives on the basis of ethical principles on the base of ethical awareness that's the big challenge 429 00:46:08,520 --> 00:46:22,520 i think in this society thank you matthias thank you aaron all right