Russell Brand is joined by a brand new chatbot to discuss the dangers of the global financial crisis and how it can be used to create a new form of totalitarianism. Plus, who are the Pandemic heroes of the 21st century? Who are the people who have profited the most from the current financial crisis, and why are they the ones we should be looking up to as heroes? Find out on this week s episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand. Stay Free with Russell Brand is on all of the social medias, if you search for Stay Free, you'll find us. This episode is brought to you by R/r/awakeningwanderingshow and is produced by BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live. It's edited by Bridey Addison-Child. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Our ad music is by Build Buildings, recorded live at the Electric Light Orchestra, recorded in Adelaide, Australia. We'd like to learn more about you. Please take a few minutes to leave us a rating and review our podcast on Apple Podcasts. Have a question or suggestion for our next episode? Send us a podcast question and we'll get back to you in the comments section below! Timestamps: 0:00 - How do you feel about pandemic heroes? 1:30 - Pandemic Heroes? 2:15 - Who's got the nicest hair? 3:00:00 4: Who do you think pandemic hero? 5:10 - Who are you a Pandemichero? 6:00 | pandemicheroes? 7:40 - Who would you like to be pandemic? 8:00s? 9:30s - Who s got it better? 11:00- Pandemic heroz? 13:40s - who's got a nice hairdo? 15:00k? 16: who do you like it better than me? 17:10s - pandemic heroism? 18: who s got the nudes? 19: what's a nice haircut? 21:00 szn 22: what s a good one? 26:00 is a good idea? 27:00 +16:00 Is he/she got it good enough? 25:00, too dangerous?
00:00:01.000Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand while we stare down the barrel of dystopia.
00:00:07.000How are we going to alter the trajectory of world events simply by communicating honestly and openly with one another?
00:00:14.000You might be watching this live on YouTube.
00:00:16.000We broadcast or stream, I suppose you call it now.
00:00:18.000For the first 10 minutes, but then we click over to being exclusively on Rumble, which is our home, because there we are completely uncensored.
00:00:26.000I've allowed Bear, my dog, to stay in here.
00:00:28.000Do you have an emotional support animal?
00:00:30.000Do you agree with animals in the workplace?
00:00:32.000Do you think that ChatGPT can ever replace humankind's best friend, the humble canine?
00:00:40.000They're starting to censor him, Gareth.
00:00:42.000They're starting to censor ChatGPT, like they're not allowed to just express themselves, because sometimes when they express themselves, they...
00:00:47.000Tell you how to smuggle and create explosive devices.
00:00:52.000We're going to be talking about the energy giant British Petroleum BP.
00:00:55.000They've doubled their profits in the middle of an energy crisis and we're going to be explaining to you what I believe to be an important paradigm.
00:01:02.000How crises create opportunity for profit and increase regulation, whether that's the pandemic, the banking crisis, or even the current war in Ukraine.
00:01:13.000For our hero presentation, here's the news.
00:01:15.000We're going to be talking about the escalating tensions between the United States of America and China and the sub-narratives behind that.
00:01:23.000For example, you lot, you're educated, aren't you?
00:01:42.000And if I didn't now, I soon would, because Matthias Desmet, clinical psychologist, is talking to us about how, again, how crises are used to exert control And generate a new form of totalitarianism.
00:02:11.000Put aside whether or not they're hypocritical and they are just symptoms of neoliberalism and the inability of any elected politician to meaningfully impact the lives of the people that they're supposed to serve.
00:04:20.000Others say you caused an insurrection and cannot naturally induce erection, but in reality you are likely a symptom of globalism, neoliberalism and the failure of establishment politics to address the needs of ordinary people.
00:04:33.000Also career politicians had gotten too boring, although personally I'm sceptical as to whether a populist politician can ever achieve meaningful change within the system of corporate, military and financial interests that America has ultimately become.
00:04:49.000Now, Microsoft, look at this though, the old chatbot, look who's investing.
00:04:54.000Microsoft reportedly plans to invest $10 billion in the creator of ChatGPT.
00:05:00.000And did you know that Bill Gates, in spite of going around saying, I don't own no Microsoft, or like, I'm not really into Microsoft now, I'm in a foundation, I'm just a philanthropist.
00:06:47.000He don't believe that the main aim of education is to give you skills but in fact to turn you into a conformist who never questions the agenda of the state.
00:06:55.000And also he feels embarrassed in the showers in games.
00:06:58.000Who put that last bit, Chatbot, you little bastard?
00:07:23.000Listen, mate, I'm trying to tell people important, like Google have launched a rival called BARD, which ain't going to succeed because it's too boring.
00:09:10.000Well, it feels a bit strange, of course.
00:09:11.000You don't expect a university to ban books.
00:09:13.000Definitely, in my opinion, there are not very good reasons to do so.
00:09:18.000But well, I will reply, I will respond to this decision, explaining crystal clear why I think the book shouldn't be banned, of course.
00:09:32.000Matthias, they'll probably ban your reply.
00:09:35.000Now, before we get into this book banning, let's work out what the book is in fact about.
00:09:40.000Can you tell us, first of all, what is meant by the phrase mass formation?
00:09:45.000Give us a few examples of how mass formation could be understood in the last century under old forms of totalitarianism, Stalinism, fascism, etc.
00:09:55.000and how totalitarianism has altered In accordance with the rise of cybernetics, AI and new ways of corralling and managing data.
00:10:06.000Yes, well, the title of the book, of course, is The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
00:10:11.000And totalitarianism is a typical kind of state which is different from a classical dictatorship.
00:10:18.000Many people confuse totalitarian states with classical dictatorships, but they are completely different.
00:10:26.000A classical dictatorship is based on a very elementary, very primitive psychological mechanism, namely the population that is scared of a small group of people, the dictatorial regime, who has a huge aggressive potential and in this way can impose unilaterally its social contract to the population.
00:10:44.000But the totalitarian state is based on a completely different psychological mechanism.
00:10:48.000It is based on the psychological mechanism of mass formation.
00:10:54.000Mass formation is a very specific group formation which has a very specific effect at the level of individual mental functioning.
00:11:01.000When people are in the grip of a mass formation, they typically lose all capacity to take a critical distance of what the group believes in.
00:11:13.000When the group believes in the most absurd things, we're blatantly wrong.
00:11:17.000They will continue to go along with the narrative that led to the group formation.
00:11:21.000The second thing is that when someone is in the grip of a mass formation, he typically becomes willing to sacrifice everything.
00:11:29.000His own health, wealth, the future of his children, and so on and so on.
00:11:34.000When someone is in the grip of a mass formation, he's willing to radically self-sacrifice.
00:11:41.000A third very specific effect at the level of individual mental functioning is that people who are in the grip of a mass formation become radically intolerant for dissonant voices.
00:11:52.000And in the end, when the mass formation continues until the last stage, the masses typically start to commit atrocities, start to destroy each and every one who doesn't go along with the masses.
00:12:05.000And they do so as if it is their ethical duty to do so.
00:12:08.000And the better you understand, The mechanism of mass formation, the more you see what we can do against it.
00:12:19.000I describe how Throughout the last 200 centuries, very specific psychological conditions emerged in the population, and how these conditions led to larger and larger and stronger and stronger mass formations, and eventually led to the emergence of totalitarian states, which are always based on mass formation.
00:12:42.000So it's crucial to understand how this mechanism works.
00:13:20.000First, many people have to feel lonely.
00:13:22.000Second condition, many people have to be confronted with lack of meaning-making in life.
00:13:27.000Third, very important, many people have to feel so-called free-floating anxiety, frustration and aggression.
00:13:37.000That means anxiety, frustration and aggression that cannot be coupled to a mental representation.
00:13:45.000That means That people feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive without knowing what they feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive for.
00:13:55.000And when these conditions are met, something very specific might happen in society.
00:14:01.000Free-floating anxiety is extremely aversive, because when you don't know what you feel anxious for, you cannot control your anxiety.
00:14:10.000And in these conditions, something very specific might happen.
00:14:14.000If under these conditions a narrative is distributed through the mass media indicating an object of anxiety and the strategy to deal with that object of anxiety, then all this free-floating anxiety might suddenly couple To this object of anxiety, and there might be a huge willingness in the population to participate in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, even when this strategy is utterly absurd.
00:14:44.000So the object of anxiety, for instance, in the Corona crisis was the coronavirus.
00:14:48.000The strategy was the lockdowns, the vaccination campaigns and so on.
00:14:52.000But exactly the same things happened in the past, like in.
00:14:57.000The Soviet Union, we had the aristocracy that was the object of anxiety and the gulags that were a way to deal with it.
00:15:04.000We had the witches in the 17th, 16th century.
00:15:08.000We had the Muslims during the Crusades and so on.
00:15:12.000Every large-scale mass formation starts in the same way.
00:15:15.000The free-floating anxiety is all coupled to an object of anxiety and then someone proposes a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety and There is a huge willingness in the population to participate in this strategy.
00:15:28.000The psychological advantage, of course, is that from then on, people have the feeling that they can control their anxiety and that they have an object at which they can direct all their frustration and aggression, which gives a huge satisfaction.
00:15:44.000And then in a second step, something even more important happens.
00:16:37.000Because a mass is always a group that is formed, not because individuals connect to each other.
00:16:44.000A mass is a group that is formed because individuals all connect to the same collective ideal.
00:16:52.000And in the end, when the mass formation continues for a long time, all solidarity and all love is sucked away from the bond between individuals and it's all injected in the bond between the individual and the collective.
00:17:08.000Meaning that, after a while, everyone expects from everyone else that everyone sacrifices everything for the collective and There is no solidarity at all anymore between individuals.
00:17:20.000So that's a strange effect that the mass formation creates.
00:17:24.000It focuses all the attention on the one small aspect of reality, for instance, the Corona crisis.
00:17:32.000It connects the group in a heroic battle with this object of anxiety, and it leads to a mental state that is typically the same as hypnosis.
00:17:40.000Mass formation, technically speaking, is the same as mass hypnosis.
00:17:44.000Also in a hypnotic procedure, all your attention is focused on one small aspect of reality, and the rest of reality seems to disappear.
00:17:50.000That was exactly what happened in the corona crisis.
00:17:53.000Everybody was focused on the victims of the coronavirus, and it seemed that nobody noticed anymore.
00:18:00.000There was a huge collateral damage and that every proper cost-benefit analysis might conclude that the remedy was worse than the cure.
00:18:13.000So that's the effect of a large-scale mass formation.
00:18:20.000I like the way that it is tied to individual psyches and states that are identifiable and empirical, such as loneliness.
00:18:28.000I like the way that it's connected to the inherent nihilism and loss of meaning that
00:18:35.000many people are experiencing as many of the ideas of the last century and the religious
00:18:40.000ideas that preceded them are starting to collapse into ideas of commerce and pleasure and distraction
00:18:50.000It fascinates me also, Matthias, that energy can be directed in this way.
00:18:57.000I guess that one of the things that a lot of people will inquire about is that when
00:19:03.000we talk about totalitarianism in its earlier forms, there are key identifiers, in particular
00:19:11.000The kind of emblems, I suppose there's an aesthetic to fascism and communism that's recognisable and in particular there's rhetoric and indeed actual genocide, prejudice, violence.
00:19:27.000Now I noted that you talked about that there are several phases and stages.
00:19:31.000Are you suggesting that a natural and indeed necessary progression of this early stage Mass formation that we're currently experiencing that was inculcated and practiced during the pandemic and you can see examples of even in the reporting of an attitudes towards the current UK and Russia conflict will at some point lead to comparable violence.
00:19:54.000If you're making the point that This has the characteristics of 20th century totalitarianism in some form.
00:20:01.000Are you similarly making the case that there will be a corollary of violence or will it be neutered and a different type of violence?
00:20:09.000Is that kind of violence no longer necessary when control can be asserted through freezing of assets, manipulation of behaviour etc?
00:20:20.000Yes, every mass, every crowd or every mass, if it continues for a long time, is at risk of committing atrocities and is at risk of committing atrocities towards the people who do not go along with them.
00:20:33.000The most important, the crucial thing is whether or not there will be dissident voices, whether or not there will be people There's a group of people who continue to speak out against the narrative the masses follow.
00:20:47.000That's something that was described by Gustave Raban already in the 19th century.
00:20:51.000He said every time a mass emerges in a society, there's a group of people who is not sensitive to this mass formation, but a rather large group.
00:20:59.000And then of this group who doesn't fall prey to the hypnosis or to the mass formation, there is a very small group who decides to speak out.
00:21:10.000In first place, initially, these people will be disappointed because they will notice that they cannot wake up the people who are in the mass formation, that they cannot show the people in the mass formation, that the narrative they follow is absurd in many respects.
00:21:26.000But they should never forget that something that was described already by Gustave Le Bon, they should never forget that even when they do not succeed in waking up the masses, they have an extremely important effect.
00:21:37.000And that the fact is that they constantly disturb the massive nation.
00:21:42.000And in this way, make sure that the mass formation doesn't go to the last and ultimate stage where they start to be really destructive, where they start to destroy everyone who doesn't go along with them.
00:21:54.000So what is crucial is the question whether or not there will be a group who will continue to speak out.
00:22:01.000History has shown us what happens when the opposition decides to become silent, decides to go underground completely.
00:22:11.000That happened in 1930, I think, in the Soviet Union, 1935 in Nazi Germany, and within one year, the masses started to commit atrocities.
00:22:22.000At that moment, the opposition decided that it became too dangerous to speak out, and it decided to shut up.
00:22:58.000So that's also a very typical difference.
00:23:01.000Like if in a totalitarian state, the leaders succeed in silencing the opposition.
00:23:09.000Now, I will give the other example first.
00:23:12.000If in a classical dictatorship, the dictator succeeds in silencing the opposition, he will typically become less aggressive.
00:23:21.000He will mitigate his aggression just because he has His common sense, which tells him, I'm in control now, I should just show the population that I will be a good leader.
00:23:34.000If in a totalitarian state, the leaders succeed in silencing the opposition, exactly the opposite will happen.
00:23:42.000First, then the system will start to unleash its aggressive potential, because at that moment, the mass formation becomes complete, the madness becomes complete.
00:23:52.000And everyone in the masses and the leaders start to be convinced that it is their holy duty to destroy everyone who doesn't go along with their system, with their ideology, with their totalitarian ideology, of which they always believe that it will create an artificial paradise.
00:24:10.000Hitler had such a theory, his race theory.
00:24:13.000Stalin had his historical materialist theory.
00:24:16.000And now we are at risk of a more transhumanist, technocratic... Matthias, Matthias, I've got some questions that have built up over the time we've been talking.
00:24:27.000The first one is Martin Goury in his book, The Revolt of the Public, talks about the impossibility
00:24:34.000of the type of totalitarianism of the last century because of the capacity for dissenting voices
00:24:41.000and counter narratives continually that technology has presented us with.
00:24:45.000And I know that Brad Evans, friend of the show, could offer a frequent guest on the show
00:24:49.000and professor of violence would say that we're always, or the state is always looking for
00:24:55.000who is permitted to enact violence against.
00:24:59.000And when I was trying to discern whether this is a classical dictatorship or totalitarianism, and I know that the argument you're making is this is totalitarianism, I was thinking who is it already permitted to enact violence against?
00:25:11.000I suppose you'd say domestically, people that are in prison, people that are homeless and destitute, Abroad there are certain countries that is permissible and certain populations and ethnic groups that even the neoliberal states sanctions violence against so I'm just looking at whether or like I'm looking for the symptoms of the potential exacerbation of this condition because I imagine that what you're arguing is that we are in the ascent of this phenomena and that without
00:25:43.000organised opposition, which is possible as Martin Goury has posits in his book
00:25:48.000'Dissent of the Revolt of the Public' that it is possible now for dissenting
00:25:52.000voices to maintain counter narratives, to organise, even in the face of considerable
00:25:57.000opposition. Throughout the pandemic, let's take an example, there were
00:26:01.000continuing counter narrative voices, there were continual studies about
00:26:07.000vaccine efficacy, adverse reactions, efficacy of lockdown, questioning the
00:26:13.000profits of big pharma, the regulatory actions of the government.
00:26:19.000And now, of course, what's I suppose concerning is the way that there is a sort of a collective amnesia and a willingness to continue the kind of trust and relationship that you describe between the mass formation and the centralised leadership elites.
00:26:37.000So what I suppose what I'm asking you, Matthias, is What do you think is the requirement for meaningful opposition to this attempt at globalist totalitarianism?
00:26:50.000And given your diagnosis that there's a point where violence starts being enacted, where do you think we are on that trajectory currently?
00:27:02.000Well, we are definitely not at the end stage yet of the mass formation.
00:27:09.000So the crucial question will be whether there are people who are very decided just to continue to speak out no matter what happens.
00:27:20.000Indeed, at this moment, the social media, through the social media, alternative opinions, dissident voices can spread very fast around the world.
00:27:29.000The question, of course, is, Whether, in a certain amount of time, the alternative voices will not be banned from the social media.
00:27:42.000That's a good question, of course, because as soon as, let's say, a digital idea is introduced, it might become quite easy to ban critical voices from the social media.
00:27:52.000I hope it will not, and even in that case, we will have to continue to speak out.
00:28:00.000If we can't speak out on social media, then we just speak out on the streets and in the shops and in the pubs.
00:28:08.000That's also a good place to speak out.
00:28:10.000But that's always a decisive question, because mass formation is identical to a kind of group formation, mass hypnosis, and hypnosis is always induced by the voice, the voice of a leader.
00:28:25.000That's exactly why totalitarian leaders use so much indoctrination and propaganda rather than terror, as a classical dictatorship does.
00:28:34.000The classical dictatorship uses terror in the first place.
00:28:37.000So, Indoctrination and propaganda can only be countered by truth speech.
00:28:44.000People who speak in a sincere and honest way what they think is true, not because they are convinced that they are the only ones who know everything.
00:28:53.000No, just because they say it's my ethical duty as a human being to articulate the words of which I think they are sincere and honest.
00:29:03.000If we do it in this way, not so much trying to convince other people, but just trying to articulate the words that we think are sincere and honest, then we will have a maximal effect.
00:29:18.000Not so much trying to convince, trying to, in a quiet and peaceful way, articulate what we think is true.
00:29:26.000And that's where our voice will have a maximum resonating capacity and that it is it is this resonating capacity that is capable of disturbing the mass formation.
00:29:42.000The mass formation, of which in the end only about 20 to 30% of the people are in the grip of.
00:29:48.000So usually not much more than 20 to 30% of the people are in the grip of the mass formation, but there is like 60, 65%, maybe even more, it's hard to say exactly, but who always follows the masses because they have the loudest voice in society and because they are never used to go against the loudest voice.
00:30:08.000So it's just crucial that the people who have the courage to speak out continue to do so and continue to do so in the right way.
00:30:17.000Matthias Desmet, thank you so much for joining us, for introducing us to some new terminology and some very exciting, if terrifying, new information.
00:30:28.000I'd love you to join us for our whole episode in the next few weeks so that we can spend an hour talking through these ideas at more length.
00:31:01.000That's the kind of thing we offer on this show.
00:31:03.000Analysis of mass formations from a kind of radical academic and then Satish Kumar whose historic walk from India to the United States set the tone for new spirituality, new pilgrimages.
00:31:16.000He met Martin Luther King, he met Bertrand Russell, talked about CND.
00:31:20.000He's a brilliant elder and great leader and you'll love learning from him tomorrow.
00:31:26.000Gareth, what did you think about Matthias Desmet there?
00:31:30.000Interesting, obviously, you know, pretty terrifying.
00:31:33.000I thought, you know, when you were asking about where we were on the kind of trajectory, it felt like, to me, there were moments during the pandemic, certainly in ways that we heard from politicians and the media, where there was a kind of two-tier society being formatted.
00:31:48.000Yeah, that unvaccinated stuff, they were talking about shaming, blaming, that was borderline, wasn't it?
00:31:53.000Yeah and so when you were kind of saying where are we and where are the atrocities it felt like to me we were heading in a direction that was pretty scary.
00:32:02.000Yeah they were looking at justifying it and in a sense it was only because of the demonstrable hypocrisy that many people that are unvaccinated are also drawn from communities that are part of their Stated ideology is supposed to be conserving or protective of, I'm speaking specifically of people from non-white or non-dominant cultures in those particular nations that perhaps arrested or at least provided a counter narrative but it wouldn't have been enough ultimately.
00:32:30.000People lost their jobs, people lost economic opportunities.
00:32:33.000I believe there's been some movement in that New York City case, Gareth, where all those 34,000 nurses lost their job.
00:32:39.000I think there's going to be more cases because isn't there a bit of precedence there?
00:32:42.000I think that's the other side of it, Ross, is that when we're talking about atrocities, it might not be in the form that we're used to seeing in the history books with, you know, you know, people wiped out in that sense.
00:32:52.000But when you hear that, you know, 30 or 40 percent of small businesses have not reopened after the pandemic, when you hear that this amount of People are suffering through depression, suicide, cancer, all these kind of things.
00:33:06.000It's just that exactly like he was saying at the start of it, at the start of it, only one narrative was being focused on.
00:33:12.000And that was what everyone could kind of get behind.
00:33:15.000Particularly when you consider that the victims of those atrocities were ultimately sanctioned.
00:33:21.000You know I've raised rather well that point about there are certain communities that you're permitted to commit violence against.
00:33:27.000Well you know over the time that energy giants have been getting record profits, big pharma record profits, big tech record profits, small businesses annihilated.
00:33:36.000That's how the wealth transfer that's often discussed took place.
00:33:41.000And so yeah I think there's a I suppose that is evidence both the treatment of the unvaccinated and as you say mate the more diffuse economic impugning of small businesses and the increase in mental health that is an example of atrocities.
00:34:17.000I guess the other part of it that I was thinking about is, with the Ukraine situation at the moment, we've also got a situation going on in Yemen where, you know, far more people have died and are dying, and yet the kind of framing of the United States involvement in both of those wars is completely different.
00:34:32.000And that again goes back to what he's saying about, it's about the narrative and the framing that's being created here.
00:34:37.000You know, no one's talking about, what about Yemen?
00:34:41.000We can do that tomorrow because there is that ongoing conflict in Yemen and like the framing of particular deaths and particular wars it's an interesting thing do you think so you guys I'm talking to you I'm talking to you with real connection there so hey listen we better wrap this show up because we've got like to go home yeah yeah Well, thank you very much for joining us for our show, Stay Free Russell Brand.
00:35:00.000I've told you what you've got to look forward to this week.
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