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As Gustave Le Bon described in the nineteenth century, dissonant voices (i.e., the voices of the third group) usually do not succeed in breaking through the hypnosis of the first group, but it does reduce the depth of the hypnosis and prevent the masses from committing atrocities.
Asserting one’s voice should typically be done in the calmest and most respectful way possible, never in an intrusive way and always with sensitivity to the irritation and anger it may generate but with determination and persistence. Although the dissident voice typically provokes rejection, and under certain circumstances also aggression, it is worth realizing that the masses also need this in order to not fall prey to themselves.
It is important to note that the counterargument should never aim at reversing the process of mass formation and a return to the prior prevailing state (“the old normal”) because this is precisely the environment from which mass formation arose—from a profound psychological unease and suffering, which I described in chapter 6 (the four psychological conditions for mass formation). Attempting to convince people to return to this is completely nonsensical and will provoke the opposite effect: Those who are in the grip of the mass formation will cling even more stubbornly to their narrative.
This group usually becomes, to a greater or lesser extent, the object of the frustration and aggression of the masses (see chapter 6). It is typically dehumanized, presented as creatures of inferior humanity. If this group ceases to assert its voice, it confirms the stigma. Speaking and rational reasoning is what distinguishes humans from animals; to stop speaking out paves the way for dehumanization.
Dissident speech doesn’t have to be primarily tactical or rhetorical in nature, but it should be authentic and honest (see chapter 7).
Eventually, it is in this act of truth-telling that the absurdity of totalitarianism becomes meaningful: Those who do not join in the collective madness and quietly and sincerely continue to assert their opposing voice are, by doing so, steadily elevated in their humanity.
The mechanistic ideology has put more and more individuals into a state of social isolation, unsettled by a lack of meaning, free-floating anxiety and uneasiness, as well as latent frustration and aggression. These conditions led to large-scale and long-lasting mass formation, and this mass formation in turn led to the emergence of totalitarian state systems.
mass formation and totalitarianism are in fact symptoms of the mechanistic ideology.
This ideology sees the universe as a logically knowable, predictable, controllable, and undirected mechanical process. And above all, it sees the universe as a dead and meaningless given, as the blind, mechanistic interaction between dead, elementary particles.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we think; it is stranger than we can think.” (See Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.)3
Cantor dust.
Hippasus (a follower of Pythagoras)—who is considered the person who discovered these irrational numbers—experienced this to his own detriment. Legend has it, he was on a ship with his brethren Pythagoreans and was promptly thrown overboard when he articulated his intuition that there exists something such as irrational numbers. This illustrates clearly: The limits of the ratio always lead initially to uncertainty, fear, and aggression.
Lorenz attractor
Hidden beneath the apparent chaos of the superficial experience of the wheel is an aesthetically magnificent order of universal forms, in many ways reminiscent of Plato’s ideal world. The quantum physicists also arrived at Plato’s famous ideal world, albeit via a different route. Heisenberg expressed this in perhaps the most direct way: “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. The smallest units of matter are not objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas.…”12
Hence, there is no rational predictability, but there is a certain degree of intuitive predictability. In 1914 already, Henri Poincaré argued that logical understanding is not always necessary to intuitively understand some phenomena and to make predictions based on one’s intuition.13
Poincaré even went a step further, stating that pursuing logical knowledge about the phenomenon might, once a certain point is reached, be counterproductive. When confronted with the irrational aspect of a phenomenon, the persistence to obtain rational understanding will prevent us from coming to conclusions based on more direct receptiveness.
A society primarily has to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. If a society fails to respect these fundamental rights of the individual, if it allows fear to escalate to such an extent that every form of individuality, intimacy, privacy, and personal initiative is regarded as an intolerable threat to “the collective well-being,” it will decay into chaos and absurdity.
This culminated in totalitarian and technocratic forms of government, where decisions are not made on the basis of generally applicable laws and principles but on the basis of the analysis of “experts.” For this reason, totalitarianism always chooses to abolish laws, or fails to implement them, and prefers to rule “by decree.” This means that, each new situation will require the formulation of new rules on the basis of a (pseudo)rational assessment of such situation. History abundantly illustrates that this leads to erratic, absurd, and ever-changing rules, which ultimately destroy all
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Hannah Arendt’s thesis that ultimately totalitarianism is the symptom of a naive belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.
Quantum mechanics and chaos theory shake this worldview. They initiated the reverse momentum and lean much more toward a vitalist worldview. They suggest that there is life and consciousness in all kinds of phenomena that we previously considered to be dead, mechanical processes. Think of the noise on telephone lines: It proved to not be the passive effect of all kinds of mechanical factors, but to be self-organizing; it is characterized by purposefulness and a sense of aesthetics.
Chaos theory heralds, maybe even more than quantum mechanics, the era that historically and logically follows the Enlightenment; an era when the universe is once again pregnant with meaning.
The founders of quantum mechanics went even much further and considered the material domain to essentially form part of the realm of consciousness. As Werner Heisenberg says: “In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas.”4
Disagree with this example. It’s hydrocephalus and not dead brain tissue. Big difference.
Several authors (e.g., Gustave Le Bon) have pointed out that the beliefs of a crowd (the group of individuals who identify with one another) have the same influence on the body as hypnosis. When society as a whole is in the grip of anxiety and the accompanying images of illness and death, those images in themselves become a causal factor.
What about genetic differences?
Totalitarianism is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society. It aims to create a utopian, artificial society led by technocrats or experts who, based on their technical knowledge, will ensure that the machine of society runs flawlessly. In this view, the individual is completely subordinated to the collective, reduced to being a cog in the machine of society (see, for example, Bertrand Russell in The Impact of Science on Society).1
Technocratic thinking always walks on two legs. On the one hand, it appeals to people by intimating a positive image of an artificial paradise with which it claims we can be delivered from all adversity and suffering. On the other hand, it imposes itself based on anxiety, as a necessity to solve problems. With every “object of anxiety” that has emerged in our society in recent decades—terrorism, the climate problem, the coronavirus—this process has leapt forward.
On the one hand, you can see the development of science as a steady growth of rational knowledge, as an ever-increasing multitude of phenomena show us which laws they obey. But on the other hand, you can also see the course of science as a process that leads to an a-rational core in things, to something that eludes human understanding. And this something is not just a negligibly minor aspect of all things observed, it is the very essence of life (see chapter 3). It’s at this level that we can discern that, as the rationalization of the world continues, human beings also increasingly feel that
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what the founders of science already saw: The essence of things is not rationally knowable, and reality cannot be reduced to mechanistic frameworks.
The journey of science does not end in superior knowledge but in a kind of Socratic modesty. A human who has traveled this journey far enough knows better—he just knows—that all rational knowledge is relative and remains alien to the essence of the object he is trying to understand.
Albert Einstein liked to talk about the elusive mystery that he found everywhere in the universe and about the wonderful structure of reality. Niels Bohr understood that poetry has more grip on all things Real than logic.4 And 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: As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates
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It is the rule rather than the exception that the founders of science left the rationalistic worldview behind them. Just have a look at their more contemplative works—Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Louis de Broglie, Planck, Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir James Jeans—all of them had a mystical worldview because they were confronted in their research objects with an irresolvable mystery.6
In this book, we have shown that the logical end point of this vicious circle is mass formation and totalitarianism, that is, the radical destruction of all human creativity, individuality, diversity, and every form of social connectedness (except the bond between the individual and the state collective).
we are experiencing the end point of a cycle, the moment at which a ruling ideology is driven to its ultimate consequence, rears up with its full power for one last time, and thereby shows its powerlessness in a definitive and final way.
the further the logical analysis of the phenomenon under investigation is carried, the more clearly one sees the emergence of a core that is intrinsically illogical and inaccessible to the human mind. And just like with a child, that moment gives rise to an awareness of the relativity of all logic as well as a heightened sensitivity to forms of language that don’t aim to be logically understood but lead to a more direct affinity, to resonance with the object (poetry, mysticism, etc.).
The ultimate knowledge lies outside of man. It vibrates in all things. And man is able to receive it, by tuning his vibrations, like a string, to the frequency of things.
To the degree that we can connect with what is outside ourselves, we are able to transcend our own boundaries and our own world of experience gets expanded to an existence that extends endlessly in time and space. Through resonance with the greater plain, we participate in the timelessness of the universe, like a reed rustling in the eternal air of life.
The reappraisal of the phenomenon of truth-telling will be the indicator par excellence of the progress of the revolution, which is necessary to overcome the tendency toward totalitarianism inherent in the Enlightenment tradition.
No one panics for a child that is dying on the other side of the world. This is the inconvenient truth. The rationality and humanism of the Enlightenment are in many ways a masquerade and a fig leaf. Strip man of this masquerade and you look into the eyes of irrationality; look behind the fig leaf of rationality and you will find the ancient human vices.
A rational worldview does not prevent us from giving free rein to irrational thinking. On the contrary, it prevents us from recognizing irrationality.
The awareness that no logic is absolute is the prerequisite for mental freedom.
