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In this chapter, we will discuss the fate of another great ambition of science: to liberate man from his anxiety and insecurity and his moral commandments and prohibitions.
sexuality was restored and its coupling with sin and corruption was undone.
The old commandments and prohibitions were eventually replaced by a jungle of rules and regulations and a new, hyper-strict morality.
These are just a few of the endless stream of media reports that illustrate how much twenty-first-century people’s lives are dominated by fear of physical adversity.
Screening for cancer and other diseases is not only harmful in and of itself but also leads to ever more unnecessary, harmful interventions, such as unnecessary breast amputations and side effects of chemotherapy.10
Humans and animals—potential spreaders of
disease—are too dangerous to each other to be let loose.
between human insecurity and narcissism.
As a result, it does not know where its body ends and where the surrounding world begins, and it situates its own sensations not only in its own body but also in the people and objects surrounding it (animism).
For example, when it looks at someone being beaten, its face shows the same grimace and it cries as if it were being beaten itself (transitivism).
we are almost constantly tormented by a lack of knowledge.
You will never see an animal sitting on a couch worrying about the meaning of its life or about what it means to another animal.
This reflection instantaneously tells the child who it is and needs to be in order to be the object of the mother’s desire.
am it for the Other.
This experience is the archetype of the narcissistic experience. It is so overwhelming that some people obsessively look for such experience later in life in an effort to avoid the feeling of lack and insecurity in human relationships.
Excessive narcissism comes at the expense of empathy.
In essence, this trend boils down to a growing obsession with fallacious visual “solutions” in an attempt to eliminate the irresolvable uncertainties in human relationships.
That’s the point at which the child is confronted with the human primal insecurity and is overtaken by the human primal fear: being left behind by the Other (primarily by the mother) because it is unloved.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new morality has arisen from the belly of Enlightenment thinking, which in a number of respects is stricter, more vagarious, more irrational, and more hypocritical than the prior religious morality, which the Enlightenment sought to obliterate in order to set people free.
With the rise of the woke culture, society fell prey to implicit and explicit rules that made every detail of human interaction more precarious.
The environmental movement was once a dissident voice, but with its turn toward “ecomodernism,” it has clearly merged into the dominant mechanistic ideology.
as Freud pointed out, the repressive nature of the new morality is fueling an exacerbated “return of the repressed”:
The new morality is also more and more aggressively enforced, both by the government and by the population itself.
The contradiction and ambiguity of so many rules creates a neurotic dog-of-Pavlov effect and its excessive nature takes away the satisfaction, spontaneity, and joy of life. There is less and less space for autonomy and freedom.
A driver no longer has the option of acting with spontaneous generosity, because he is obligated to do so.
If it continues to ask “why,” the parent eventually has to admit the limitation of his knowledge. It is at this stage, for most children, that the belief that his parents are omniscient and omnipotent comes to an end.
From then on, the child intuitively understands that even his authorities do not fully understand the meaning of the words and that the uncertainty can never recede.
in stories and poetry, echoes and scents of the lost maternal paradise of its earliest months of life.
How is it that the Enlightenment tradition led to more fear and insecurity and, eventually, hyper-strict morality?
Didn’t it explicitly aim at the opposite? The developmental psychological scheme, as outlined above, makes the answer quite simple. The Enlightenment
tradition, the ideology of Reason, was a persistent attempt to squeeze life into logic and theories. It placed all symbolism, mysticism, fiction, and poetry secondary. But this is exactly the kind of discourse that allows us the ability to respond to the uncertainty of life with ...
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The more we attempt to eliminate the fear and uncertainty through rationality and rules, the more we collide with failure.
They are related to real problems, but those problems are not the real reason for the existence for these phenomena.
The educating and disciplining function of the government is becoming more complex every day and, for this reason, an efficient system becomes necessary.
This last word floats elusively in the resounding spaces of poetry, fiction, and symbolism—that is, in the space of the type of discourse that admits that it is incomplete.
resulting in a psychologically exhausted population that craves an absolute master.
It paradoxically looks for that master, in accordance with the dominant view of man and the world, in the mechanistic ideology—that is, the ideology that caused the problem to begin with.
population—fearful, socially atomized, and yearning for direction and authority—that is the perfect breeding ground for the emergence of a specific social group, which increasingly manifested itself through the Enlightenment and beyond and which formed the psychological-social basis of the totalitarian state: the masses.
And the most astonishing thing of all was that most victims made no effort whatsoever to refute the mostly unfounded allegations. They even made unequivocal admissions of guilt and willingly went to the gallows.
The first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism, a completely new form of government commonly referred
to as totalita...
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While dictatorships are essentially based on instilling a fear of physical aggression—the population is struck by such a degree of fear that the dictator (or the dictatorial regime) is able to unilaterally impose a social contract—the totalitarian state is grounded in the social-psychological process of mass formation.2 We have to take this process into account in order to understand the astounding psychological characteristics of a totalitarian population: the willingness of the individuals to blindly sacrifice their personal interests in favor of the collective, radical intolerance of
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heart of private life, the curious susceptibility to absurd pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda, the blind following of a narrow logic that transcends all ethical boundaries (making totalitarianism incompatible with religion), the loss of all diversity and creativity (making totalitarianism the enemy of art and culture), and intrinsic self-destructiveness (which ensures that totalitarian
The moment Arendt had anticipated in 1951 seems to be rapidly approaching: the emergence of a new totalitarian system led, not by “ring leaders” like Stalin and Hitler, but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats.9
the “individual soul” in the masses is completely taken over by the “group soul.”
This uniformization is accompanied by an almost absolute loss of rational thinking and the ability for critical reflection, even among people who, under “normal circumstances,” are extremely intelligent and capable of well-founded criticism.
masses of Nazism and Stalinism; the small-scale mass formation that occurs time and again in trial juries,
Juries are almost exclusively susceptible to frequent repetition of simple emotional messages and poignant visual images (including numbers presented in graphs).12 Think of all the successful trial lawyers: This is exactly how they build their plea.
More and more people entered a condition of social atomization and as soon as their numbers exceed a critical limit, the process of mass formation begins.
There are four conditions in particular that have to be present in a society for large-scale mass formation to occur. These four conditions were present prior to the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and they are also present now.
