Over the past week I wandered through the work of Walter Lippmann, in particular Public Opinion, published in 1922. Lippmann won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is regarded by many as the most influential journalist of the twentieth century. It is characteristic of our culture that this celebrated journalist was at the same time also a propagandist. During the First World War he worked, among other things, for the propaganda campaign of George Creel, charged with mobilizing American public opinion for war.

I present here one specific passage from Lippmann’s work, a passage that resonates strikingly with the reality that the Epstein files now bring before our eyes:

“The powerful, socially superior, successful, rich, urban social set is fundamentally international throughout the western hemisphere, and in many ways London is its center. It counts among its membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it does the diplomatic set, high finance, the upper circles of the army and the navy, some princes of the church, a few great newspaper proprietors, their wives and mothers and daughters who wield the scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real social set. But its importance comes from the fact that here at last the distinction between public and private affairs practically disappears. The private affairs of this set are public matters, and public matters are its private, often its family affairs.”
(Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 29)

Lippmann - hardly an anti-establishment thinker - describes a world governed by a small social organism of families for whom private and public interests largely coincide. The world is run by them as their private enterprise. Huxley likewise saw global society evolving in this direction: an oligarchy that, assisted by an army of “mind manipulators,” rules under the banner of ultimate democracy.

All the subcultures named by Lippmann appear in the Epstein files: the diplomatic-political world (Clinton, Trump), high finance (J.P. Morgan, the Rothschilds), high military and intelligence circles (CIA, Mossad), religious authorities (including representatives of the Vatican Bank), the academic world (Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky), owners of newspapers and media outlets (Robert Maxwell), and their wives and daughters who function as a kind of ceremonial masters (Ghislaine Maxwell). It is remarkable how accurately Lippmann, in 1922, described the international organism that is now, a century later, being pulled out from society’s shadows. Perhaps only the spiritual world remains to be added to the list: Deepak Chopra, the Dalai Lama.

Let us state this immediately: the mere appearance of a name in the Epstein files means very little in itself. It is entirely possible for someone to be mentioned once or several times without any involvement in the criminal activities orchestrated by Epstein.

Do the Epstein files reveal a grand conspiracy? The Ghent psychiatrist Joseph Guislain argued that one can only understand the human being by knowing l’envers du décor. Put differently: human beings hide behind façades, live in appearances, and “constantly erase their own traces.” This is not a privilege of the elite; it is a structural feature of being human. We hide our shortcomings from the Other, hope the Other does not see them, lose ourselves in who we want to be but are not (yet). We spin our masks so diligently that we no longer recognize our true face in the mirror, and spend our entire lives haunted by the question: Who am I?

Proponents of conspiracy theory will rightly note that many facts they tried to draw attention to for decades - facts for which they were derided as “conspiracy thinkers” - are now becoming openly visible through the Epstein files. In that sense, conspiracy theory is right: a relatively small group of people steers the world and bends it to its will.

At the same time, the Epstein files show the limits of thinking in terms of conspiracies. They do not reveal a tightly knit secret group executing a master plan; rather, they expose a steaming dung heap hidden behind the polished public images of (part of) the social elite - a subculture driven by the lowest human instincts, one that has withdrawn itself from all control and symbolic castration by the law.

Some will object that at a higher level there is strict planning. Epstein, they say, was merely a small fry, obedient to intelligence services such as the CIA or Mossad, which in turn are instruments in the hands of the real world elite. I believe that even at that level the degree of planning is structurally overestimated. The Church Committee of the mid-1970s is instructive here: it did not uncover a grand conspiracy within the CIA, but a chaotic assemblage of rival services and cells competing for resources and prestige, often barely aware of what the others were doing. What united them above all was an almost complete absence of legal and ethical limits in their struggle against “godless communism.” During this Cold War they warmed themselves liberally with whisky and Cointreau; sexual drives were indulged in projects such as Operation Midnight Climax; drugs were traded and consumed in abundance; and under MK-Ultra human beings were tortured to death in grotesque and pointless “experiments” in the search for a ‘truth serum’. All the things one apparently must do to defeat godless communism.

The Epstein files constitute a cultural tipping point—a structural moment. We find ourselves at a point where human relationships at the top of society have been hollowed out to such an extent that they can no longer sustain appearances. To maintain appearances, a minimum of love is required. Within a social group, members’ shortcomings are normally covered “with a mantle of love.” Cyclists observe omertà when one of them is accused of doping. High society is no exception: it preserves its collective image toward the outside world for as long as possible. When love between individuals in a group has almost entirely disappeared, the protective maintenance of appearances collapses as soon as someone gets into trouble.

That the Epstein files become public at all is therefore not primarily the result of a “limited hangout” or a strategic sacrifice, but rather the outcome of a mass-psychological process. Totalitarian structures extract love from human bonds and transform it into collective narcissism. In doing so, they ultimately destroy their own capacity to uphold appearances, and the dirty laundry falls out from behind the curtain. Social media ensure that this dirty laundry becomes visible to the entire world. Traditional media report sparingly and selectively on the files, as they have done for centuries: they select and censor according to the public opinion they seek to shape. Current mechanisms of online censorship are hardly sufficient anymore; the only solution will soon be to restrict access to social media - first for children, later for anyone with too low a social credit score. This, too, will not reassure High Society. Somewhere it realizes that its attempts at total control are doomed to fail. In its transhumanist and technocratic hubris it is, above all, desperate, staring with dulled eyes into a universe it has reduced to a machine that rattles on meaninglessly and lifelessly in an empty cosmos.

What can we know?

What can we truly conclude from the published Epstein files? This Kantian question is asked far too rarely. It already requires considerable effort to distinguish which documents are authentic and which are forged. For instance, an email circulates in which Epstein asks whether the plan to start the Third World War on February 8, 2026 is still in force. The stated sending date - Thursday, July 17, 2018 - does not exist. This email is fabricated, like much of the material currently circulating under the label of the Epstein files.

In other cases, the forgery is more subtle. This epistemic confusion is exacerbated by the fact that AI platforms often classify authentic documents as false. This may be related to training processes in which “conspiratorial” content is reflexively labeled as “disinformation.” There circulates an email in which Epstein states that he has “met many bad people, but never anyone as bad as Trump.” ChatGPT initially labeled this email as fake, but it is real. The next question, then, is: what can we conclude from this email? What does it mean if Epstein considers someone the worst person in the world? Does Epstein’s moral judgment suddenly become a valid reference?

What does it mean that figures such as Putin or the Dalai Lama are mentioned frequently? What do we make of unsent emails in which Epstein claims that Bill Gates contracted an STD and requested medication to secretly mix into the food of his - perhaps infected - wife? Why should that not be a fabricated blackmail construction? What is the status of anonymous messages in the files about strangled and burned girls allegedly buried on Epstein’s estate, or of claims that Epstein was trained as an Israeli spy?

In many respects the Epstein files form a suggestive, nebulous world in which everyone recognizes the figures and shapes of their own prejudices. This reinforces the conviction that only one’s own opinion is legitimate, adds a few more stones to the wall separating people from one another, increases frustration and aggression, generates fear, and fuels the demand for security and control. In this way, “wild” interpretations of the Epstein files primarily accelerate the movement toward the surveillance state.

If the Epstein files merely unleash a witch hunt against “the elite,” they are not a moment of truth. The files do not reveal only the pathology of an elite; they expose a symptom of an entire society. Shares in the arms industry, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Surveillance sell briskly, and porn websites attract massive audiences. Who is willing to pay double the price for clothing not produced by slave labor, or for food grown without saturating the earth with pesticides? That the banking system is perverse and transforms society into a kind of slave plantation - I agree. But how many people do you know who withdraw their money from banks and convert it into, say, physical gold and silver?

Is everyone equally perverse and equally guilty? Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell recruited girls as young as fourteen under the guise of “massages” that led to sexual abuse. They threatened them, confiscated passports, and coerced them into sexual acts. This is not about one or a few cases; it concerns hundreds of victims. They were offered to celebrities from the artistic, academic, spiritual, and business worlds, who gave them “lessons” in sexuality; they were forced to perform sexual acts with one another for an audience, and so on. This is roughly what we know so far, but it is more than likely that reality is grayer and darker still.

The materialistic worldview harbors a contempt for ethics and opens the path to the top of the social dung heap especially wide for those willing to throw all ethics overboard. At the very least we can say this: the imagery and symbolism emerging from the discourse of the Epstein files come from the darkest regions of the human psyche; the elite does what the population can only fantasize about in its darkest thoughts. Thus the Highest Society indeed becomes the Lowest Society.

Mattias

I am busy working, but I’m interrupting for an extra news broadcast. As you know, Putin has been spying in Europe over the past few weeks. At night he flew drones with enormous headlights over airports and military bases. You have to understand that in Russia they can’t think of any better methods for spying.

According to defense specialists, Putin may also have been teasing us a bit with his drones. After all, we are considering seizing his billions in reserve dollars. That is, of course, perfectly obvious. That’s typical Putin. He constantly indulges in the most foolish and pointless displays of frustration. It will certainly be effective. We feel so harassed by those drones that we won’t seize those reserve dollars after all.

Meanwhile, there were persistent rumors that two journalists were arrested near Brussels Airport. They had pulled a hat deep over their ears and were launching a drone — what journalist would do something like that? Another hypothesis we certainly did not need to consider is that they might have been amateur drones. On average, only about thirty unauthorized drones fly around an airport each day.

At the moment when the panic was spreading, those alternative stories were not yet in the mainstream media. So they were not facts or realities. Only the media bring the truth about the media. Above all, remember this: you do not see reality through your kitchen window or while taking a walk; your only window onto reality is the screen on which the broadcasts of national television are shown.

Journalists may act as if they are being shot at in Kyiv while old ladies around them are walking their dogs; they may cut and paste Trump’s speeches; they publish videos about the war in Syria that even a child could verify as fabricated. But playing with drones over Zaventem, just when tens of billions need to be collected to fuel a senseless war industry? No, that’s impossible. Only conspiracy theories about Putin can be true.

I followed this story with curiosity from the beginning. Should it eventually turn out that it wasn’t actually Putin spying, I will of course continue to trust national television. Though by now I’m quite sure it will eventually turn out that he wasn’t. After all, everyone knows the whole story is too absurd for words. About as absurd as the story that Putin blew up his own Nord Stream pipeline. Eventually the media themselves said that it was Zelensky after all. That story had served its purpose, so the media could simply toss it out with the old trash — Zelensky and a few drunk officers were the culprits. Biden surely had nothing to do with it. That is important to mention. You might start thinking otherwise, because he had announced that he would blow up the Nord Stream pipeline.

For the time being, I will therefore continue to believe that naughty Putin is here playing with his drones. I even assume that he personally controlled them, together with his equally impulsive bully of a foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. He’s also typically such a choleric little child.

Yes, that’s how I am — I believe in “facts” of which I actually know they are not facts at all. That saves me the troublesome process of thinking. I’m too tired to think. I pay enough taxes for the government to think for me. If they come to take the young people to fight in a pointless war, then so be it. I’m too tired to resist war as well.

**

I’m enjoying the whole drone saga in the meantime. I read a few days into the story and learn that the Belgian Minister of Defence has returned from Latvia. He personally went there to buy a few drones — drones to chase away the Russian drones. They were enormously urgently needed — that was clear.

Besides buying drones, he also went there to take lessons in “strategic communication.” That’s cognitive warfare, he helpfully explains to his compatriot who is just a bit less versed than he is in the art of waging war. He describes that part of his mission on his Facebook page:

“Closing a deal regarding our participation in the NATO center of excellence on strategic communication, you might say cognitive warfare. With the rise of social media and AI this is more important than ever.”

You should know that talking about “strategic communication” is itself a form of strategic communication. In the past they simply spoke of propaganda. Earlier still they called it the bad habit of making people believe things. With the rise of social media they now have a problem on that point, the minister says. Not everyone at the social media will readily go along with the defence minister’s strategic communication.

So now that we know he’s training in strategic communication, might we cautiously ask whether the fuss about those Russian drones was perhaps also part of some strategic communication?

The day after the Minister’s weaponry purchase in Latvia, the story that the Russians were spying here with drones — just like the story that Putin blew up the Nord Stream pipeline — was tossed out with the household rubbish by the media. That happened faster than expected. I’m even a little disappointed.

So I now read on the website of the Belgian National Television that it was not drones but — yes indeed — a police helicopter and a cargo plane. We are grateful to the National Television for breaking the hypnosis, but if next time it does not happen before the minister spends €500 million on anti-drone drones, we propose halving the subsidies to the National Television.

Someone should explain this to me: how can you confuse a Russian military drone with a police helicopter and a cargo plane? Instead of buying drones to repel drones, wouldn’t defence have been better off buying a pair of glasses and an ordinary pair of binoculars?

Those two journalists they arrested at the airport, with a stocking over their heads and a drone in their hands, turned out in the end to be doing what journalists usually do: fabricate fiction and photos. Nothing to be surprised about, then. The only thing that still surprises me about that story is that there were people who actually believed that the Russians came here to spy.

I have another question: what could we actually need those sophisticated drones for? To fight the Russians? According to the media those Russians have been losing in Ukraine for about three years now, right? They’re fighting with tanks like from the days when the Tsars still sat on the throne? Now all of Europe has to buy hundreds of billions in weapons to fend off the Russians with their pocket knives and catapults? Or is that story about the pathetic Russians also part of strategic communication?

We all understand that governing is a difficult profession. Tossing a few billion around from time to time comes with the job. Those drones are of course pointless — never, ever will they shoot down a Russian drone here. Maybe we can ship them off to Zelensky, who could then pelt Moscow with them from a golden toilet seat. Come to think of it, yes, maybe the lessons in strategic communication will ultimately be the only thing truly useful from those purchases in Latvia.

**

I feel a certain responsibility to continue reporting on the drone saga; fulfilling the duty to repeat as seriously and objectively as possible what I learn and read in the newspapers.

The Belgian National Television had discovered that the Russian drones which forced Belgium into decisive military measures were, in the end, a police helicopter and a cargo aircraft. You can’t blame the National Television for this. They had consulted the greatest military experts.

As a small aside, I would dare recommend that the National Television also consult a virologist when it comes to drones. I think virologists know at least as much about drones as the colonel. And maybe next time we can ask the colonel what we should do when we have to go to war against viruses again.

Anyway, after it turned out that those Russian drones were anything but Russian drones, I thought we were rid of this story for a while. Until the Naughty Russian would surface again, of course.

That was mistaken — everyone makes mistakes every now and then. Someone who knows someone who still reads a mainstream newspaper sent me an article with the title: “Dutch Air Force used weapons to shoot down drones above military base.” I’m attaching the evidence here in this link.

It’s always good to read the article as well as the headlines. I’ve learned that by now. Because the article usually contains something that is somewhat the opposite of what the headline suggests. I quote directly from the article:

“Ground-based weapons were used to shoot down drones, but they left and were not recovered.”

“They left and were not recovered.” So they missed them. Or saw something flying that wasn’t flying. That could also be. I think the war against Rus and Virus will be fought more efficiently if next time we let the virologists shoot at the drones and the colonel deal with the virus.

Another option is that we ask the Germans for help. They had already offered to come help the Belgians against the drones that later turned out to be just a cargo aircraft. We were on the verge of assembling Europe’s armies around Brussels to shoot down a cargo aircraft.

In any case, we now know for sure that this is not about military drones that can be remotely controlled over long distances, say from Russia. If the story is about drones at all, then it’s about glorified toys, probably drones controlled from nearby.

Unless we’re dealing with a situation in which the gathered European armies are seeing things that aren’t there, there must be some kind of shed or garage nearby with Russians who are playing — spying — with those drones. I’m of course no expert in warfare, but if we miss such a drone and it flies away, couldn’t we follow it with another drone?

The corona-critical Headwind team has such a drone. I remember it from the recordings. And it certainly flew fast enough to outrun the National Television during the Ultima awards ceremony. So we should definitely be able to use it to follow the drone of the Underdeveloped Naughty Russian.

We follow that drone to the barn or garden shed where the Naughty Russian is hiding, and then we capture that Naughty Russian and his toys — remote control included. Instead of seizing Putin’s reserve dollars and using them to buy weapons to attack Putin, we simply seize Putin’s weapons directly. We flatten Moscow with his own toy drones. Do you understand the strategic plan?

Good. So much for the report on the drone saga for now. I ask everyone reading this to check their own garden shed. The Naughty Russian is nearby. That is certain, that is a fact, that’s what the National Television says.

I have already shared a few thoughts about my recent stay in the Himalayas, but something else happened there that I don’t want to keep from you. On the third day of the conference in Leh, I attended a panel discussion about spirituality, science and ecology. The discussion took place in the Palace Hotel, on the edge of the city. The hotel is set against the backdrop of a colossal grey- and ochre-coloured mountain massif. A few hundred metres above the hotel you can see the seventeenth-century Lechen Palkhar, palace of the former Namgyal dynasty, and the century-older Buddhist monastery Namgyal Tsemo Gompa. Both buildings perch like swallows’ nests, moulded onto and against the mountainside.

In a small room at the front of the hotel, a small audience has gathered – about twenty people. They sit at tables arranged in a rectangular shape. The three speakers are seated side by side at the short end of the rectangle, closest to the door. I won’t go into the content of the discussion here. It matters little for what I want to say. I am there only as a listener, but during the exchange with the audience at the end of the conversation, I make a rather long comment about the problematic relationship between science and the university. There are a few approving reactions, and then time is up and the meeting is over.

A little later I am standing under the awning at the entrance of the hotel, waiting for a taxi to take me to the town square. I watch dusk fall over grey houses with carelessly stacked firewood on the roofs. To the left and right, Royal Enfield motorcycles are parked in front of and against the walls. The only country where these icons of the British Empire are still made is India. They are ridden everywhere here, enigmatic witnesses to the complex relationship between coloniser and colonised. Here and there donkeys look for a place to sleep against a tree or a wall. Their hoarse cries sound plaintive in the silver light of the rising moon. They beg the city to hide from the awakening demons of the night.

I feel my thoughts dissolving in the endless evening air and look dreamily at the snow-covered mountain peaks. No donkey or human can unsettle them, steadfast witnesses to all the justice that has already been done and all that is yet to come. I fall back to earth – to my left a clear little voice sounds. “Sir, can I ask you something?” Two black eyes of a little boy of about twelve look up at me. “Of course.”

“What is totalitarianism?” (I feel my face turn into a smile.)
“The word totalitarianism refers to a state system that not only wants control over what people do in the street and in the marketplace, but also in the kitchen and the bedroom.”
“Do they want total control, Sir?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why they call it totalitarianism?” (My smile blossoms.)
“You could say that, yes.”
“Why do they want that?”
“Because sometimes people crave order so much that they forget that only chaos can give birth to a dancing star.” (Is Nietzsche taking root in that young soil?)
“Will you still be here tomorrow, Sir?”
“Not tomorrow, but the day after I’ll be back here.”
“May I ask you a few more questions then?”
“Certainly.”
“I will bring an audiotape.”
“Oh, are you going to write an article about it?”
“No, but then I can listen to our conversation again later.” (My taxi arrives.)
“What is your name?”
“Maahir, Sir.”
“And how old are you?”
“Thirteen.”

I try, while making my way through the maze of little streets, in vain to remember at what point during the panel discussion I used the word “totalitarianism.” Do thirteen-year-olds come to academic conferences here?

Two days later Maahir is present, equipped with a digital recorder and accompanied by four comrades. During the lunch break we sit on the steps behind the town hall, where that day’s lectures are taking place. Before that conversation I had never considered giving lectures for children. Afterwards, I did. The precision of their questions about the mechanistic worldview, about the nature of narcissism, about the connection between totalitarianism and science, about the way in which the ordinary citizen is totalitarian—it dawns on me how much more the child’s mind grasps than I had thought.

As I write this, it suddenly occurs to me that when I reread writings or diaries from my own young self, I am often pleasantly surprised by what I wrote at that age. Why do we not see children’s capacities? Why do we forget the capacities we ourselves once had as children? Perhaps because we want to maintain the illusion that we are growing and making progress? I do not doubt that many people do in some respects actually grow throughout life. But perhaps they are mainly the people who rediscover the child within themselves? “It took me four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” (Picasso.)

Professor of developmental psychology Patricia Kuhl studied the cognitive and linguistic abilities of babies in the first six months of life. Newborn children, quite remarkably, possess perfect knowledge in certain respects. For example, they can distinguish all phonemes of all the world’s languages from one another. An adult needs years to learn this. They also detect, almost instantly and with mathematical precision, complex patterns in the sounds of language and music. They never had to acquire that knowledge or those abilities. It is freely available. Kuhl therefore calls babies “linguistic and mathematical geniuses.” To use Aldous Huxley’s words: they are in direct contact with The Mind at Large.

Kuhl reaches for a concept from nineteenth-century romantic philosophy to describe this phenomenon: “The celestial openness of the child’s mind.” Something in the child is still “open.” That opening forms a source-mouth through which a crystalline consciousness wells up abundantly in the childlike mind. Kuhl seeks that openness mainly in the brain structures of the young child. The biochemistry of their brain must be different. I think we should look elsewhere for the answer to the riddle. A child in its first six months does not yet have an Ego. It is not yet enclosed in a narcissistic shell. That shell forms only when a child, somewhere between six and nine months, first recognizes itself in the mirror. From then on its energy and attention begin to be absorbed by the superficial ideal image of its body.

That external ideal image, object of the Other’s enjoyment, becomes a psychological “shell,” a wall of narcissism, which increasingly isolates the growing child from the world and from other people, and ensures that the antenna picks up less and less of Huxley’s “Mind at Large.” By the age of seven the ego-shell has reached such a thickness that a child has already largely lost the spontaneous consciousness of the first months of life. From then on, for example, it must exert almost as much effort as an adult to learn to distinguish the phonemes of foreign languages. It likely takes until after adolescence for the ego-structure to have fully reached adult consistency, and for almost all knowledge to have to be realized through laborious rational thought.

The Ego is a boundary, a boundary between inside and outside. That boundary is not an end in itself. Its function is to keep what is good within and to be able to move destructive elements outward, to literally express them. Our Ego is not built to be the palace of our vanity; it is the workshop of the Soul. In the same way, our intellect is not made to be the ultimate guide — it is made to work in the service of a truth and a knowing that it can never fully grasp. An intellect that tries to lead will mostly mis-lead. That is, in my interpretation, the tenor of the book The Master and His Emissary, written by one of the true intellectual giants of our time, Dr. Iain McGilchrist.

Our education system has one merit: it indeed transfers a substantial amount of rational knowledge from generation to generation. But in general, even the transmission of rational knowledge is increasingly under threat. Whoever focuses too much on a secondary matter in life eventually loses even that secondary matter. Education is producing more and more illiteracy — neither writing nor reading reaches a reasonable level anymore, even among the highly educated. With Artificial Intelligence, that problem will, in all likelihood, become even more severe. There are already experts who apparently consider the greatest goal of education to be teaching students how to work with A.I. Why should a human do what a machine can do, after all?

In a certain sense, this is the deepest misconception of Enlightenment culture: true knowledge of the world does not come about through rational thought; consciousness does not arise in the small cave of our skull. Consciousness exists outside of us, sovereign and timeless. It comes to us in the quiet moments when our narcissism subsides; it flows in wherever it finds a crack or an opening in our Ego; it gently lifts us onto its ship, where for a moment we stop clinging to the false lifebuoy of our little intellect; it ap-pears where, with sincere words, we break through the Veil of Appearance behind which we so eagerly hide our nakedness.

There is a certain connection between sincerity or truth and intuition. In samurai culture this is well understood: the warrior who fails to speak sincere words loses his sixth sense and dies on the battlefield of life.“All living creatures as well as human beings lose intuition and awareness of their subconsciousas the level of culture becomes higher and higher. Supernatural power is not a skill or trick. It exists in your heart, in your sincerity.” (The Essence of Ninjutsu, pp. 49–50).

The education of Enlightenment culture is guided by the illusion that rational knowledge is the compass on which the ship of our life must sail. The ideology on which our education system is based is not rational, it is rationalistic; it nourishes the illusion of an ultimate rational understanding. That illusion mainly feeds the Ego and increasingly shuts us off from the Mind at Large. The great scholars of mass psychology and propaganda have repeatedly observed: the higher the education level, the more easily people allow themselves to be deceived, the more susceptible they are to propaganda. Jacques Ellul, perhaps the sharpest thinker in the field of propaganda, believed that formal schooling is ultimately a form of (unconscious) indoctrination that makes children vulnerable to the propaganda they will encounter later in life.

At this point I remember something from when I was barely twenty years old. I travelled to South Africa and, for the first time in my life, spoke with children who had spent very little time in school. The effortless precision with which they answered all my questions, the mischievous sharpness with which they questioned my answers to their questions—I could only conclude that a brighter light shone in their minds than in the educated minds of European children. The same was noticed by the Jesuits who studied the Indigenous cultures of North-East America: those unschooled minds surpass the highly educated European elite in both intellectual and rhetorical ability.

Maahir and his friends, with their sparkling intelligence and their moving sincerity, are all students of the Coveda school. That school combines pre-colonial Vedic education with modern subjects (English, mathematics, etc.). Schools do not necessarily make one dumber. Looking back on my own life, I must say that the school system both took much from me and gave me much. Like all institutions, schools tend to fall into the vice that is the opposite of the virtue they originally sought to cultivate. Thus the church becomes the breeding ground of the greatest immorality, the courthouse becomes the place where humans fall prey to the most systematised injustice, medicine becomes the most sophisticated assault on the health of the population, the police apparatus gains a monopoly on gratuitous violence… and schools become the place where children lose their minds.

Does there exist an education that is not indoctrination? Can one human teach another (a child) without indoctrinating him? Any education that sets rational knowledge as its ultimate goal is indoctrination and does the opposite of what it should do. Knowledge always belongs to a doctrine, to a system—but a good system is ultimately always aimed at abolishing itself and making itself unnecessary, like scaffolding that is dismantled once the building is complete. With the idealisation of reason in Enlightenment culture, that was lost, and the school system spread like a tumour and a tyranny. A child has essentially become a prisoner of the school bench. To place a being bursting with the energy of spring on a school bench for eight hours a day is something we will one day look back on as a kind of mistreatment.

I was moved and touched by the conversation with Maahir and his friends. I asked him if he would send me the recording. Liesje Breyne was kind enough to make a transcript of it—many thanks for that! Below you will find the entire conversation with the children of Ladakh. When I read the transcript earlier today, I noticed something else: in my own words I found something of the children’s clarity and unpretentiousness reflected. Le style, c’est l’homme. L’homme à qui l’on s’adresse.

Dear friends—I present to you the sparkling voices of the children of Ladakh. Enjoy!

Mattias

**The children of Ladakh**

Sumer (13 years old):

“We had lot of observations and with them came a lot of questions.”

Maahir (13 years old):

“I have like two questions. So like what is your worldview? To moving towards a more connected way of being instead of the way like you said the mechanistic way?”

Mattias:

“Yes, what is my world view and how can we move away from that mechanist world view? That’s a very good question and a very difficult one.

I think that first and for all we have to think about what the mechanist world view exactly means at a psychological level, and I think we cannot go really deep into that analysis, but I think that mechanist world view is a world view that starts from the desire to control the world.

In the mechanist world view we believe that the universe is a machine, a machine that we can understand in a rational way and that we can manipulate in a rational way. And I think that as soon as we understand that, we can see that this world view and this desire to control our environment is actually connected to the structure of the ego.

And what is the ego? That is the next question then. The Ego, what is the ego? Well it is good to study how the Ego emerges or is born in the life of a child. Like before a child is 6 months old, it has no ego yet. A child during that period is in a very specific state. It feels a perfect empathy with other people. When a very young child watches another child that drops to the ground for instance it will very often start to cry itself because it feels the pain of the other child.

And this changes when a child is 6 months old. At that moment a child for the first time recognizes itself in the mirror and it starts to believe that it is its outer image in the mirror. And that is the moment that the child starts to live in the world of appearances and where a child starts to try to become an ideal image.

And that is what we all do, we all try to look as a model on television or as someone we appreciate and that is the moment where we get isolated from our environment and where we do not feel empathy anymore.

And I think that is, when you ask me what the alternative for the mechanist world view, well the alternative I think is a world view where the ego is weaker, less important, where we feel more connected with other people and with nature around us, more in resonance and where we because our ego gets weaker we have a stronger ethical awareness. Jah.”

Maahir (13 years old): “Hmmm, I just ask another question I guess.”

Mattias: “Ask me no matter what, if you don’t understand certain aspects or it is too difficult what I’m talking about; feel free, ask me when you don’t understand something.”

Ashmita (15 years old): ”I had connected to this one only … I had a question… Like we … In some talk she was saying that we are locked up in this modern world view or something like that and it is quite limiting, she said. So I just wanted to ask what should be like done to break these frames of ours so we can also learn to listen to the other world views of people. Sometimes we are not ready to or are not listening to theirs and just … “

Mattias: “Exactly, listening is extremely important, I think. And I think it relates again to what I was telling about the ego. Like when all our attention, our psychological attention, when we are constantly thinking about the outer ideal image, how we want to look like, what degree we will get at school, and so on, when we are constantly focussed on the world of outer appearance, we literally, you used the word prison, I think, we get locked up.”

Ashmita: “Yah” (insightful, confirming)

Mattias: “And, and, and in what [do we get locked up]? In our ego! All our attention goes to the outer surface of our body and literally we do not feel anymore what is inside our ego. And in order to break free from that prison we first and for all have to learn to speak sincerely. That means: we have to speak on the basis of what we really feel inside and not on the basis of what we think we have to say in order to be as successful as possible. No, we have to speak in a sincere way on the basis of what we truly feel. And secondly – and there is where I come to what you mentioned – we have to listen in an open minded way. That means if someone, if we are confronted with someone who has a different opinion than us, we have to really try to open up and say “Look, okay, this person has a different opinion but I will not judge him on the basis of what I think. I will open up as much as possible, allow his words to enter my soul and my body. I will really listen, try to feel what he means.

And that is the moment I think where we are connected again with the other people and where we feel we are no longer locked up in our own world view. So, I think speaking, in my analysis, ànd listening, is the most important thing. What will change the world is the act of speech and the act of listening.”

Shinthoy (14 years old): “So is it like unlearning? Is that what unlearning means?”

Mattias: “Well, it ìs unlearning. I think because we all are locked up in a certain world view. For instance, as your friend referred to the modern world view or the mechanist world view, it doesn’t matter, we are all locked up in it. And what does that mean to be locked up into something? It means that you look at the world through the lens of a certain world view. Or in other words: you look to the world in a way that you learned in our culture. And we have to unlearn to look only in one way to the world, I think. We have to unlearn to immediately interpret and read the world in a certain modern or mechanist way. So it’s a process of unlearning on the one hand. But as again, I believe that the most crucial thing is that we practice the art of sincere speech and sincere listening. I think that is the most important thing. If you do that you will automatically unlearn to look always in the same way to the world.”

Sumer: “I have a question. Open to hearing and to speaking sincere speech. At the conference I observed a lot of fake. All the adults over here who just speaking like “Oh, me, me, me.” They are only speaking like that and not even touching connecting to one another. That is not happening at all. They are just saying like “Oh, I have this degree, this Phd, I’m from Schumacher college”, whatever, so …”

Mattias: (laughs a bit) “Have you observed this here, yes? That people are often talking in terms of “me, me, me”, that is interesting …”

Sumer: “Yes, that’s what they are talking about. They try to fill up their ego and like they are not connecting to one another at all. They are just saying…the kind of communication from inside, like I said, they cannot even touch it. ….”

Mattias: “Yes, I think, like many people here, myself included, we feel that something has to change and we feel that we need to move on to a world where people are more connected. But at the same time we ourselves are very often still very much in the grip of this old “me” behavior (laughs at bit), where exactly, where everyone tries to communicate his opinion, wants to make people realize how much degrees they have, how smart they are, and so on, and where we often exactly forget ourselves to listen, to really open up to other people.”

Sumer: ”Just, adults they do not see us really, so like whenever we talk, “Oh, good kids, oh ja, kids are needed.” Like this is like such a huge divide between us. Like unconsciously they are making us into really different species. Sort of… With the big terms, but like big terms, also sometimes I feel that big terms pull you away from what you are trying to say. And I feel that simple words, simplicity, is much better to communicate.”

Mattias: ”I think that adults often are a little bit scared of children, because children are more sincere and their Ego is less strong and their soul is stronger. And everyone who withdraws in the shell of his ego, as most adults do, usually are scared of people where the soul appears, because they feel confronted with the fact that they are living a life that is not true. That’s probably why very often adults will devalue children. They will do as if it is not important what they have to say, while it is actually exactly what children say which is the kind of true speech that we would need to create a really new connected society. And I’m very happy that you ask me questions and tell me all kinds of this.”

Sumer: “I thought that you are one of the few adults who does actually see us as human beings”

Mattias: ”There will be others as well…”

Shinthoy: ”I had another question, like, when people have their own opinions, it is just like, like we cannot express it, because of like how the world is, anything, like people think something of me. Do you feel that?”

Mattias: ”Yes, you know, I think there is a lot to say about that. First, I think it is important to have your own opinion. And second it is important to articulate it, to express it. And as you say some people think it is easy to express their opinion, they can easily do it, maybe because they are a little bit more vocal in nature, a little bit more articulate. And other people can’t and very often these people are symbolically murdered. Because they cannot exist as a speaking being. As a human being when you cannot speak, we lose our existence. We need to speak, we are symbolical beings who need to articulate what they think. I think we all can do a lot for each other if we help the people who do not easily express their opinion, if we help them by making them feel that we won’t judge them, that no matter how imperfect they articulate their opinion, no matter what their opinion is, we will be listening to it as good as we can and we will consider it to be something that is important not because it is true or false, it doesn’t matter, but just because it is the opinion of someone. I think that is what we have to learn. It doesn’t matter in the first place if an opinion is right or wrong. What really matters is that we create a human living together, a society where everybody can feel he has the right to have his own opinion. That is the most important thing. The question if the opinion is right or wrong is only of secondary importance. It is the same with our own opinion, we have to just find the courage to articulate our opinion even when it is maybe wrong. Our opinion is often wrong and it will change, the opinion we have now probably will be not the same as the one we have next year. But that doesn’t mean you cannot articulate it. Everyone has the right and even the ethical duty to try to articulate his opinion, even when it is wrong. And we also have the ethical duty to listen to someones opion in a sincere way even when it might be wrong.”

Sumer: “I would like to add something to it. So uh, yesterday we went to the village for u the congress and like all what there was to do was just talking, talking, talking. No one was listening to what the other was gonna say. They were just talking, talking, talking, talking.”

Mattias: ”Yes, that is also part of the problem, I also notice that often and I also notice that in myself, like when someone, when I’m in a panel and someone is speaking I often notice that actually I am not really listening, I am already thinking about what I will say and I don’t hear anymore what the other will say. So, that’s again the Ego at work.”

Sumer: “I also find it by myself. Like even that noticing is enough. But over there no one is even noticing anything.”

Mattias: ”Hm, it is the first step noticing it, becoming aware of it, yah.”

Sumer: ”Like I can see that thought, oh yeah, they are talking, but I don’t care, I only care what I am saying”

Mattias: ”Exactly”.

Ashmita: ”Like sometimes, it’s like many people are trying to fit in the world, like, not, like not asking anything. Maybe they think like something is wrong with them and like they won’t be heard or acknowledged. And they just try to fit in the world”.

Mattias: ”Yes, yes, I think what you mention that is really something connected to the Ego. I think, like very often we just try to live up or match all these ideals that the world wants us to match. We have the feeling that we are not good as we are but we have to be something what the other wants from us. That’s I think where we lose touch with ourselves and that’s where we disappear in a world of appearances. That’s where we disappear in a fake world because we try to be someone that we are not. I think that what you refer to is the fact that our Ego constantly tries to convince us that we have to be what the other wants. Strangely enough while our ego always promises us that it will make us a king it actually makes us a slave.”

Shinthoy: “Yesterday this woman was like saying “everyone has common sense”. So I had this question: what is common sense, because common sense is like different for everyone and common sense is basically the fake normal. So what is common sense?”

Mattias: ”That is a good question, you know the philosopher Decart?”

Children in choir: ”Yes”.

Mattias: ”René Descartes said: ”Common sense seems to be the only thing everyone has enough of.” Everyone thinks that they have common sense and exactly, we forget about the question: “what does that exactly mean ‘common sense’?” Euh, I think common sense, we think we have common sense when we act perfectly according to the world view that is dominant in a society. Would that be a good answer? I don’t know. What do you think it is, common sense?”

Shinthoy: ”I think like it should be different for everybody, because since everybody isn’t the same why should there be common sense all the same.”

Mattias: ”So that’s probably also the problem with common sense, that when people say to one another “Use your common sense!”, that they actually mean “You should think like everybody thinks”. It is a really difficult question, ‘What is common sense?’”

Sumer: “I have something related to both their questions. I think it was your talk where you said you look in another person and if they seem like you, they have the same beliefs, the same likes, and if all the same political party, whatever, you only like them because of that, that is narcissism.”

Mattias: ”Exactly”.

Sumer: ”So, on schools, they want to make children think what they think is right, what society thinks is right, so, that is what I believe is narcissism too.”

Mattias: ”I agree, it is narcissism, literally, because narcissism, like, maybe you’re familiar with the great myth of Narcissus where the word comes from. Narcissus was a Greek prince who was very handsome and very beautiful and once he saw his own mirror image in a lake and he fell in love with himself. He was so fascinated by this own mirror image that he couldn’t here anymore the voice of his beloved. So narcissism is the love for your own mirror image. When you love people only when they vote for the same political party, when they act the same as you, what you love is your mirror image and what you feel is not love, it is narcissism. And it will isolate you and it will make you incapable of feeling love. I think that is one on the ways we could characterize the problem of our society. I think maybe much more in Belgium then here in Ladakh, where I think society here is slightly less, is less narcistic. The more technology is used, the more it will become narcistic.”

Sumer: ”Like selfies”

Mattias: ”It is all build, like the algorithms of social media are all build to select people that are like you, that confirm your own ideal image.”

Maahir: ”You have anything you want to share?”

Mattias: ”Yes, there are many things that I want to share. I’m very happy that you are here. I’ve never been on a conference where there where younger people like you are and I’m very surprised that euh that you understand most things better than adults. For me it is a very nice experience to have this conversation with you. I hope we see each other again on other conferences and if you want I will give you my email address. You can always reach out to me. And I would like to ask you a favour: can you send me the recording?”

Children in choir: ”Yeah, sure!”

Mattias: ”I will love listening to it, yes. Thank you!

Children in choir: ”Thank you, thank you!”

The plane weaves its way between mountain peaks that disappear into the clouds on either side. The ochre-grey rock of the Himalayan giants sometimes seems to come alarmingly close to the dipping and swaying tips of the wings. It feels more like stunt flying than commercial aviation. Just before the plane drops onto one of the highest public airstrips in the world, we’re informed that, should we feel the need to vomit from lack of oxygen right after landing, we can make use of the plastic bag in the seat pocket in front of us.

Leh airport stands at 3,500 meters, in what can best be compared to a majestic lunar landscape — a cold desert above the tree line. The building itself is nothing but a series of barracks, where tourists gasp for air in the thin atmosphere and hope they won’t fall prey to altitude sickness. A rickety conveyor belt bravely rattles its loads of suitcases inside. I drag off my large green suitcase, skip the long queue in front of the three sparse toilet doors, step out onto the asphalt square at the main exit, and after some searching, find a taxi to take me to the Slow Garden Guesthouse.

The first images of the Himalayas pass like a film across a taxi’s window smeared with grease marks and dust, accompanied by a soundtrack of incessant honking. The view shudders to the rhythm of a road full of potholes, flanked on either side by unfinished sidewalks, heaps of stones, and leftover construction debris.Behind them rises a strip of houses and shops built from grey-brown cement blocks. Their fronts are often completely open, with segmented gates that are pulled down at night. Why all this honking from the taxi driver? I observe his weathered face beside me. There is no sign of irritation or frustration.

**

We approach the center of the city. A mass of pedestrians moves through the streets like a sluggish bloodstream — along the sidewalks and right through the middle of the road. Cows, donkeys, and dogs trudge resignedly along in this procession of everyday life. The crowd moves organically, parting for the honking taxi like a murky Red Sea before an ordinary Moses.

What do the animals eat in this desert of cement and asphalt? Cardboard and plastic, I am told time and again. A single blade of grass is a feast. After a few days in Leh, I begin to recognize certain animals as I wander the streets — the leather-colored dog with the black muzzle, the cow with a white patch on her chest that lies down each noon beside a car at a construction site, the five donkeys that seek out a terrace where they can huddle together for the night. I greet them and sometimes try to touch them with my fingertips. Together we wander, lost in thought, along this path of life — unknowing, moving toward a destination we dream of but cannot conceive.

They tell me that the cows are fed a little in winter, because they give milk. The bulls, dogs, and donkeys must fend for themselves. They often die in the winter ice, somewhere beneath a canopy or against a garden wall, while the mountain peaks that rise above the city stand as silent and unyielding witnesses to the end of their inglorious existence.

During the past four days, it has rained as much as it usually does in several years. The mud bricks used for building here cannot withstand it. Left and right, walls have partially collapsed; roads are impassable because of fallen bridges. Here and there I see gaping holes in walls, some roughly covered with tarpaulin. I look inside living rooms with tottering furniture — grayish burrows from which eyes peer out above incomplete rows of teeth.

“Are you happy here?” I ask the taxi driver. “Of course, Sir!” he replies. I glance at him hesitantly. His face radiates. Their shuffling gait and their chatter as they stand before their stalls or lay bricks with mud — the Ladakhis have nothing compared to me. But they have far more time — time to do nothing. Time to Be. “Through everything you possess, you are possessed,” Nietzsche once said.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, the economist who invited me to her conference in the Himalayas, tells me a few hours later about the time when she first arrived here, fifty years ago. There were no paved roads, no electricity, no running water. In the meantime, the people of Leh have been rescued from their pitiable condition. Now there are basic utilities, and owning a mobile phone is more the rule than the exception. The number of suicides has risen, over that half-century of modernization, from one every twenty-five years to one per month.

**

Everywhere in Leh, construction is underway. New houses and small hotels rise from the ground like formations of mushrooms on damp autumn soil. The stones are made on site, from a mixture of mud and cement. The cement has only recently been added, giving the new buildings a grayish hue that is hardly an aesthetic improvement. The people of Leh build without plans. They stack stones one on top of another without following the straight line of a mason’s cord. They simply see where they end up — “on touch and feel,” as the English say. The result gives their houses an organic look. In nature, straight lines are rare, and so they are in the houses of Leh.

Here and there, a house stands out because it is more orderly, more carefully maintained than the rest. The organic shapes of such a house adhere more faithfully to an architectural idea; the garden around it is not strewn with rubble and debris. To me, these houses are a relief — a successful marriage between the spontaneous, unrestrained creative power of life itself and the crystalline order of the Platonic world of ideas.

The urge toward order and regularity is intrinsic to human nature. Man seeks lawfulness. He reduces the overwhelming multiplicity of the Real into straight lines and regular figures; he searches for rule, formula, and theory. He does this to avoid being drowned by the Real, to keep from being passively swept away by the tide of the unfamiliar. He tries to reshape the world around him according to the ideas in his mind; he reforms the chaos that surrounds him. He levels undulating terrain into flat squares, straightens winding paths, channels water into canals, molds buildings according to geometry and the Golden Ratio, directs cars to the left or right, confines pedestrians to sidewalks, delineates plots of land in cadastral maps, and channels a man’s sexual drive into the narrow bed of a marriage contract with a single woman.

Societies and cultures differ greatly in their degree of order. Indian society has a low degree of order and a high tolerance for chaos. Visit New Delhi and you will see what I mean. People wash in the street under a rusted showerhead mounted on a façade; one need not be a vagrant to sleep on a bench or a sidewalk; scooters weave through crowds and piles of merchandise at markets; and it is not unusual to see someone driving against the current on the highway.

Japan lies on the opposite end of the spectrum, with its tendency to subject nearly every act of daily life to social rules. The Japanese delight in ritualizing existence. The tea ceremony illustrates this — one of the great cultural creations of that fascinating island. Every movement is performed according to protocol, with prescribed rhythm, duration, and intensity. The apprentice must allow even the smallest details of his actions to be governed by a language of form and motion passed down through generations. Yet the goal of this discipline is not forced correctness. The apprentice becomes a master only when he performs these culturally imposed gestures fluidly, with the spontaneity of a child. He is pressed like a turbid liquid through the fine sieve of culture, losing himself at first, only to rediscover himself on the other side — transformed and purified.

The drive for order is essential to humanity. Without it, man would not be human. But that drive can overflow its banks and become detrimental to life. This is evident, to some extent, in the high rates of depression and suicide in highly ordered societies such as Japan. When the mesh of culture is woven too tightly, more and more people suffocate as they are forced through it.

The will to order becomes truly destructive in totalitarian systems. Unlike great cultures such as Japan, totalitarian regimes have no ambition to raise man above law and rule. The totalitarian system gives birth to no tea masters or samurai warriors. It regards the submission of man to a proliferating web of bureaucratic rules as an end in itself. Its aim is not to cultivate and sublimate human impulses but to break and subjugate man entirely. In the totalitarian state, the will to order has become completely emancipated from Love.

Aldous Huxley, one of the keenest literary observers of the phenomenon of totalitarianism, saw in the escalation of the “will to order” one of its defining characteristics:

‘It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism. Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other’ (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958, pp.26-28).

Totalitarian rulers seek to reorder the entire fabric of nature according to their ideology. They attempt, through eugenic principles, to create a pure race, or through communism to materialize the ultimate society; now they plan to equip every living being with nanotechnology and to monitor and correct them through the great state computer. As heads of state, they subject the political, public, and private spheres to a sprawling system of bureaucratic regulation.

Yet even there the totalitarian will to order does not stop. The inner space of the human mind, too, must be organized and subdued. That is the function of propaganda: man must also, in his thoughts, conform to totalitarian ideology; he must believe that the totalitarian fiction coincides with fact. For part of the population, this works quite well. They watch the news broadcasts of the national television and believe they are witnessing reality itself.

Until now, the ordering and subjugation of the human spirit to the state has occurred by psychological means — through classical propaganda. But we stand at the threshold of a moment where psychological manipulation may be replaced by biological–material intervention. Since the 1950s, the American military apparatus has worked diligently on brain chips. Elon Musk brings this underground project now into the public sphere through his company Neuralink.

The brain chip will render every process of consciousness transparent; criminal thoughts will be detected before they can lead to criminal acts. The rules of the road, the workplace, and the living room will be projected directly onto one’s retina. At the first sign of transgression, intervention will occur proactively. The fine for your not-yet-committed crime will automatically be deducted from your social credit score and your CBDC account. The total (in)justice of the system punishes crime before it is committed. In the Soviet Union, totalitarian zeal had already reached similar extremes — see the treatment of “objective crimes” under Stalinism.

The totalitarian elite, driven by its will to order, becomes pathologically obsessed with rules; but the totalitarian subject — the group that allows itself to be totalitarized — fares no better. He becomes addicted to rules. Eventually, he can no longer cope with situations in which there is no rule to cling to. Someone must surely be responsible — someone must pay when something goes wrong. We need more lines on the asphalt, traffic lights with six rather than three signals. We must be able to determine exactly who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. All this, of course, in anticipation of the Neuralink chip.

In all of this one sees how the modern human being — estranged from himself and from the Other — seeks to contain his fear and disorientation through order and control. Modernist architecture reduces houses to abstract forms that can be conceived by the brain with geometric precision; cameras record every movement in homes, doorways, and gardens; shutters, refrigerators, and air conditioners connected to the internet are kept in line from a distance with a single touch; in hotels, digital keys regulate access to elevators and rooms; the movements and dealings of children are tracked by apps and, if necessary, corrected; pets are fitted with microchips; cows on their Animal Farm are guided from the milking station to the feeding trough by digital collars. The hyper-ordered, hyper-controlled society is imposed upon the human being from above — yet that human being also chooses it himself.

On the sixth day of the conference, we visit a small Himalayan village where life still appears as it has for thousands of years — or at least, something resembling it. Likir is a village of twenty-eight families that provides almost all of its own food. Each household also keeps a dozen small Himalayan cows for milk and cheese. The young man who shows us around tells us proudly that they are leaving behind their tradition of eating meat. It’s better for the climate, he says. They didn’t yet know that Bill Gates would change his mind a few weeks later — the climate doom scenarios turned out to be exaggerated after all.

That is typical of totalitarian schemes: they rise up and collapse again before they can subjugate reality. One need only read the history of Stalin’s grand projects — one megalomaniac plan after another carried unfinished to the grave. Most of the villagers are also vaccinated against COVID. They had no mental defense against the missionaries of artificial immunity. Bill Gates, meanwhile, has come to new insights there as well: the vaccine ultimately did not deliver what had been hoped. Still, for now, he presses on — the wonder-vaccine will and must bear his name.

I walk further to a small grain mill powered by a trickle of water. I crawl halfway beneath the stone structure, trying to understand its simple yet ingenious gear system. The splashing water disturbs my vision in its urge to see. The miller cannot explain it to me; he doesn’t speak English. The little mill has ground the village’s wheat for hundreds of years, without electricity or combustion engine. The flavor of its flour is mild and complex — perhaps because the slowly turning stone never heats the grain as it grinds.

A young woman tends a relatively large vegetable garden of some five hundred square meters. She is one of the few young people who have chosen to remain in the village. The others head for the city. I probably would have done the same. Perhaps we all must be pressed through the sieve of the over-ordered society before we can re-discover ourselves — transformed, returning to what we had left behind.

I see a dozen women in traditional dress spinning wool from sheep, weaving it into almost everything one needs to keep warm through winter. They chat cheerfully while the threads grow agonizingly slowly longer on their spindles. Who would want to sit here for days spinning a single sweater? — the thought passes through my mind.

Instead of spending hours a day spinning or growing vegetables for their neighbors, people now spend hours behind screens. Unlike the women of the village, they often do not know the purpose of their labor. More than forty percent of people today say they have a bullshit job — a job they themselves believe contributes nothing of value to society. The will-to-order, and its companion the will-to-digitize, drain meaning from the human body and plunge it into lethargy.

**

Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus that if a surgeon were to open the skull of a human being, he would find nothing but biochemistry. There is no Soul there, and no Free Will. Man does not make choices. Neuroscience, he argues, shows that a person’s decision is already made in the brain before the person experiences the act of choosing:

‘In the nineteenth century Homo sapiens was like a mysterious black box, whose inner workings were beyond our grasp. Hence when scholars asked why a man drew a knife and stabbed another to death, an acceptable answer said: ‘Because he chose to. He used his free will to choose murder, which is why he is fully responsible for his crime.’ Over the last century, as scientists opened up the Sapiens black box, they discovered there neither soul, or free will, nor ‘self’ – but only genes, hormones and neurons that obey the same physical and chemical laws governing the rest of reality. Today when scholars ask why a man drew a knife and stabbed someone to death, answering ‘Because he chose to’ doesn’t cut the mustard. Instead, geneticists and brain scientists provide a much more detailed answer: ‘He did it due to such-and-such electrochemical processes in the brain, that were shaped by a particular genetic make-up, which in turn reflect ancient evolutionary pressures coupled with chance mutations.’ (Homo Deus, pp. 328-329).

In other words: our brain-machine makes the choice for us; we are slaves to the Great Machine, finding our opium in the gossamer-thin illusion of freedom. When I was eighteen, that too seemed to me an inescapable truth: everything we do or think is determined by the biochemistry of our brain. Like Spinoza, I felt compelled to believe that on our path we are no freer than a stone falling to the ground. There is nothing I am more grateful for than having found a way out of that kind of thinking. Those tiny particles that seem to form the rock-solid foundation of materialism — they are such stuff as dreams are made on.

To see the human being as a creature thrown into life — in need of time to discover and refine his own choices — is a sign of gentleness and humanity; for even responsibility requires time to become response-ability. Man is bound to a narrative and a position into which he has been placed by the Other, by a family, by a culture; he clings like a speck of metal drawn to the magnet of addictions; the glow and sparkle of his eyes is dimming under a thousand social rules and power structures; his laughter turns into muffled sobs because his desire is occupied day after day by the demands of the Other.

But deep beneath the knots of a thousand chains, there truly lies a point at which the shackled human being can make a choice — and inevitably does. In the end, we are not merely the lead actors in the drama of our lives; withdrawn deep into the shadows of the theatre, we find ourselves also as the director. The act of choosing is our very essence. We are not the matter of our body, nor are we determined by the material conditions in which we find ourselves. Even in the most impossible circumstances, if we choose what is good at every turn, something of our essence will remain standing — and perhaps even grow. With the words of Emerson: “Nothing is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind”.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes something of this kind in his iconic The Gulag Archipelago. In Stalin’s concentration camps, he met a fellow prisoner known as Alyosha the Baptist. The man entered the camp sickly, tormented by rheumatism and other ailments, yet he clung steadfastly to his ethical and religious principles. When another prisoner stole his food or clothing, he refused to steal in turn, even if that meant facing the freezing Siberian cold, underfed and nearly naked. He generally obeyed the guards — except when their orders conflicted with his ethical principles. Then he refused, even at the cost of brutal punishment. And he never complained. Whatever God placed on his path, he accepted as rightly given.

Alyosha the Baptist survived years in a camp where nearly everyone perished within months. More than that: he even left his ailments behind. In a chapter entitled “The Soul and Barbed Wire,” Solzhenitsyn writes the following about him: “I remember thinking: I have seen what a pure soul can do with a body. He seemed freer than any of us — freer even than the camp commandant. For freedom does not reside in things, but in the Soul.”

It is in our choice that we realize ourselves; it is in our choice that we are one with the immense process of creation that unfolds at every level of nature. Theologians will affirm that in this love for man, even God meets His limit: He cannot prevent us from plunging into misery; He must allow us to choose wrongly, for otherwise He would make us slaves. That is why love seldom coerces. It safeguards the freedom of the Other, knowing that in doing so, it safeguards the Other’s very essence.

I used to look at my garden and want to impose my order upon it. I had a preconceived idea, an ideal image of how the trees and shrubs should grow, where the grass should stop and the flowerbeds and orchard should begin. Now I see, more and more, that the tree which deviates from the ideal often speaks most deeply to the Soul — the tree half-uprooted by a storm, the one whose limbs broke under too heavy a harvest, the one whose trunk and branches twist in eccentric curves yet still rise toward the heavens.

There beckons an open door to a vibrant joy in keeping porous the order we impose upon life. I see that the forms appearing in my garden have their own desires and inclinations. Clumps of thyme sow themselves in the gravel of a pathway; wildflowers choose a place in the middle of the lawn; tendrils from spontaneously sprouted tomato seeds weave through and over pumpkin plants; maize and sunflower seeds dropped from bird feed grow into stalks that tower here and there above the creeping plants; the gnarled, irregular language of the pollard willow forms a sublime counterpoint to the elegance of flowers and grasses. Here and there, man must call the swelling green and the winding branches to order — but not so strictly that the freedom and joy of growing life are smothered, not so strictly that the essence and the soul of things can no longer speak or sing.

Totalitarianism, with its frenetic will to order and its excess of bureaucracy, is ultimately a campaign against the Soul. It represents a law elevated to absurdity, a rule that has lost all touch with love. It forces life into servitude; it transforms man into a soulless machine. With the imminent merging of man and technology, this process reaches its final stage — the point where this derailed force rises to its maximum and, at the same time, collapses.

In principle, the solution to totalitarianism is actually simple. Once the group that unites around sincere speaking and listening becomes stronger than the masses that form around a (propagandized) opinion, the era of totalitarianism will be over.

Mattias

I spent ten days in the Himalayas, a place said to be where heaven touches the earth. I was invited there to give a lecture connected to my book on totalitarianism. I am now traveling through central India, and I had intended to stay far away from social media during this journey. I changed my mind.

Yesterday I read that Charlie Kirk was murdered while giving a speech at a university in Utah. A wave of emotions is sweeping across the world. We are not human if we stand outside these tides of life.

Who did it? The authorities say they do not yet know. Read the newspaper articles that suggest a far-right Trump supporter “died in a shootout.” They are now busily cutting and splicing Charlie Kirk’s speeches, trying to make him the criminal. In this way, after the murder comes the character assassination, and with it the preparation for the next murder.

I have written a book on totalitarianism. It brought me to the Himalayas and to many other places around the world. That is because it touches something people everywhere feel is happening. More and more believe they must commit violence to ruthlessly enforce a discourse that is already dominant.

I call these people the heroes of the masses. They are always fighting for “the good cause.” They are lavish in displaying their “virtue.” They drip with it. That is because it is cheap. It is paid for with counterfeit currency that can be printed at will.

Do not be deceived by the heroes of the masses. They are cowards, but they are ready to die for their cause. That is their secret: the only desire their withered, hollow lives can still bring forth is the desire for death. It is not death they fear—it is truth.

I see these words appearing on the page before me. I did not really know Charlie Kirk. But I know those who took his life. I know those who took a husband from his wife. I know those who took a father from his children. I know the heroes of the masses.

Silence offers no safety when totalitarianism is on the rise. It is a direct road to a world where the heroes of the masses alone hold power. Do not postpone the act of speaking. Your words need not be perfect. Do not wait until you are sure what you say is “correct.” That is not the point. The point is that you speak with your own voice, even if it trembles.

Above all, guard yourself from becoming a hero of the masses. I say this also to myself. Everyone is vulnerable to the cowardice of the group. True courage shows itself when you stand alone against the many. Time and again, in whatever group you find yourself, let your most sincere voice be heard. If no one does this, every group becomes a mass.

Charlie Kirk, you spoke. In the coming weeks I will listen here and there to some of your speeches. Perhaps my opinion is completely different from yours, perhaps not. That does not really matter. By speaking your mind in a time when the heroes of the masses inscribe their words only on bullets, your death has become a mountaintop where heaven touches the earth.

And the echo of your words will form a mountain range. Your voice will resound—in your wife’s memory, in your children’s future, and in the mouths of all those who, through your death, find the courage to speak for themselves.

Mattias

A different topic for a moment – because it’s holiday time, and a good time to go for a walk. “The best thoughts come while walking,” said Nietzsche.

So, last week I treated myself to a new pair of walking shoes – barefoots. You know, those shoes that feel as if you’re not wearing any shoes at all. Made entirely of leather, cork, and merino wool—with a wafer-thin layer of rubber as the sole. I loved them immediately. It’s truly a delight to be able to read the story of the ground again with your feet.

The man in the shop warned me to take it easy: just a kilometre a day for the first week, then maybe try two, and so on. Six months, he said, before my feet and leg muscles would be fully adjusted to this new walking style.

Two days later I headed to the Ardennes. I loved the shoes so much that on the first day I walked nine kilometres, and the next day twenty. My youngest years may be behind me, but that fellow in the shop had badly underestimated me. Uphill, downhill – you float with these shoes.

The following morning, I tried getting out of bed. I had to catch myself before toppling over – my upper calf muscles seemed to have turned into dried wood overnight. Later, when I stepped out of the car to pick something up from the butcher’s, I timed it carefully so only the butcher would be the one laughing himself silly.

In other words: I can highly recommend barefoot shoes to everyone – just don’t forget to read the manual.

Happy walking,
Mattias

I have just spent a week at CERN, the world’s foremost research center for elementary particles. I was invited by a quantum physicist who had read my Psychology of Totalitarianism and who is providing thorough commentary on the physics chapters of my next book as I write them. I spent a week among particle accelerators, discussing from morning till night the nature of matter and the collapse of the wave function. One thing I know for certain now: nobody in the world knows what matter is. I actually knew that beforehand, but I am glad to know that physicists know they don’t know either.

In the week before I went to CERN, I immersed myself in the famous Bell’s theorem. The Irish physicist John Bell is, together with Peter Higgs, perhaps the best-known CERN researcher ever. His theorem is sometimes described as the most intelligent piece of science ever conceived. It is this theorem that ultimately addressed the question Einstein once mockingly put to Niels Bohr: “Do you really think the moon doesn’t exist when you’re not looking at it?”

On the internet you can find countless attempts to explain the theorem—some more successful than others. I have also made my own attempt to present the theorem in my own words. This explanation fits within a few chapters on physics in my new book. It is, at certain points, just a little too abstract to include in the book itself. That’s why I am posting it here.

My presentation approaches the mathematics behind the theorem in as accessible a way as possible. I would say: don’t be intimidated by a few formulas and symbols—invest a little energy in the fascinating story of Bell’s theorem.

..

At the beginning of the twentieth century, physics found itself in a tight spot. In 1802, Thomas Young had demonstrated through his famous double-slit experiment that light behaves like a wave. But in his miraculous year of 1905, Einstein had shown through his work on the photoelectric effect that light also behaves like a particle—at least under certain conditions. Both theories about light were logically coherent. Both were based on reproducible observations. But how can light be both a wave and a particle?

The rift between these two perspectives was bridged by a new theory: the now-famous quantum physics. Yet in many ways, quantum theory is a torment for common sense. It makes predictions that appear absurd—so absurd, in fact, that even Einstein, who laid the foundation for quantum mechanics through his work on the photoelectric effect, remained deeply skeptical of it.

Quantum theory claims, for example, that elementary particles — like all matter — do not exist in a definite state until they are observed. Before observation, they exist in a wave-like form that holds all possible properties at once — the so-called state of superposition. Einstein mocked this notion by asking Niels Bohr and his colleagues whether they truly believed the moon ceases to exist when we’re not looking at it.

Quantum theory also proposes the existence of “entangled” particles — particles that are identical at the level of their wave functions and therefore must share corresponding properties. In other words: the properties of one particle are inextricably linked to those of another.

This means that if you measure or manipulate one entangled particle, its twin — no matter how far away — instantly changes too. Since particles don’t assume definite properties until they’re observed, measuring one not only defines its own state, but also that of the other. So far, so good — or at least, so strange.

In the famous 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, the authors argued that something was seriously wrong with quantum theory. If the theory is correct, then the change in one entangled particle causes an instantaneous change in the other — “instantaneous” meaning “without the passage of any time.” If true, this would imply that the information travels faster than light. And if that were the case, Einstein argued, such communication would be not material, but immaterial. “I do not believe in spooky action at a distance,” he sneered.

Einstein defended what’s known as “local realism.” Realism refers to the idea that particles exist independently of an observer. The entangled particles, once separated, may indeed respond to measurement or manipulation — but the way they respond depends on properties they already had, even if quantum theory doesn’t yet account for them.

Local, meanwhile, means that particles cannot be influenced by events happening far away if there’s no material interaction between them. In other words: quantum theory’s claim that distant particles react to each other faster than light is absurd.

Niels Bohr and the other quantum physicists stuck to their guns, though they admitted it would be extremely difficult — if not outright impossible — to prove their position through observation or experiment. Logically speaking, it seems impossible: how can you observe what properties a particle has before it’s been observed?

But nearly thirty years after Einstein’s critical paper, Irish physicist John Bell would demonstrate that the impossible might just be possible. In 1964, he published a short paper introducing what would become known as Bell’s Theorem — showing that an experiment could be devised to determine who was right: Einstein or Bohr.

**

We begin with an introductory explanation of the polarization—or vibration direction—of light. This property of light is important for understanding our explanation of Bell’s theorem.

Light propagates (in wave form) as a transverse wave, meaning a wave whose vibration direction is perpendicular to the direction of propagation. Imagine a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system with orthogonal axes X, Y, and Z (see Figure 1). If the light wave moves in the direction of the Z-axis, then the wave oscillates perpendicular to Z—i.e., along a vector lying in the X-Y plane. The direction in which the wave vibrates is called the polarization of the light.

Light can consist of waves that all share the same polarization or have different vibration directions. The left part of Figure 1 illustrates this. There you see a beam of light traveling in a horizontal direction, made up of light waves oscillating in various directions perpendicular to that horizontal arrow. Some types of light, such as sunlight, exhibit all polarizations—that is, they contain waves oscillating in every possible direction within the X-Y plane

.

It’s important to note: while a light wave can consist of multiple polarizations, a single light particle or photon can only have one polarization. It vibrates in a single direction. It is the combination of many photons that allows a light wave or beam to exhibit multiple polarizations. This distinction will become important later, when we describe the experiment related to Bell’s theorem.

Light can be filtered using polarization filters (or polaroid filters), which allow only light with a specific polarization to pass through. This filtering results in a loss of light intensity. You might tentatively compare such a filter to a kind of blind or slatted screen (see Figure 2). These “slats” correspond to the so-called transmission axis of the polaroid filter, which is perpendicular to the hydrogen chains that make up the filter’s structure. When light waves strike the filter, they have a higher probability of passing through if their vibration direction aligns more closely with the direction of the slats.

Light waves that vibrate along a vector parallel to the slats will all pass through the filter. In that case, the angle between the polarization vector and the filter’s transmission axis is 0°, and the probability of transmission is 100%. In formula:

P(0°) = 100%

Light waves that vibrate in a direction perpendicular to the slats will all be blocked. In this case, the angle between the polarization vector and the transmission axis is 90°, so the probability of transmission is 0%. In formula:

P(90°) = 0%

For light waves whose polarization vector forms an angle between 0° and 90° with the transmission axis, the probability of being blocked increases as the angle approaches 90°. You can calculate this probability using the sine squared of the angle X. A quick trigonometry refresher: the sine of an angle is simply the projection of the radius of a circle onto the vertical axis under that angle (see Figure 3).

It is immediately clear from this that the probability is highest at 0° and lowest at 90°. The general formula is:

P(X) = sin²(X)

When light with multiple polarizations strikes a polarizing filter, the filter will block (absorb or reflect) some of the light waves and allow others to pass through. The probability that a light wave passes through depends, as shown in the formula, on how closely the light’s polarization direction aligns with the transmission direction of the filter.

That concludes our short introduction to the physics of light. Now we move on to Bell’s theorem.

**

As mentioned earlier, Bell had devised something that allowed one to experimentally test whether entangled particles do or do not possess all their properties prior to observation, and whether or not they can “spookily” communicate with each other at a speed faster than light.

Imagine an experiment in which two entangled particles are emitted simultaneously and in opposite directions. In each direction, a scientist is waiting with three polarizing filters at their disposal:

• a filter A with a horizontal transmission axis,

• a filter B with a transmission axis tilted at 22.5° relative to the horizontal, and

• a filter C with a transmission axis tilted at 45° relative to the horizontal.

The two particles travel at the same speed (the speed of light), and the filters are placed at precisely equal distances from the source, so that both particles reach their respective filters at exactly the same time.

In the experiment, three series are carried out, each consisting of a large number of entangled particle pairs—let’s say a few hundred.

• The scientist who receives the first particle chooses to use filter A in the first series, again filter A in the second series, and filter C in the third series.

• The scientist who receives the second particle chooses to use filter B in the first series, filter C in the second, and again filter C in the third series.

This setup results in the following filter combinations for each entangled pair:

• Series 1: particle 1 meets filter A, particle 2 meets filter B

• Series 2: particle 1 meets filter A, particle 2 meets filter C

• Series 3: particle 1 meets filter C, particle 2 meets filter C

You may wonder why we are only considering these specific combinations of filters in the experiment. That is a good question. As you’ll soon see, the other combinations are indeed unnecessary.

At first glance, this experiment seems to make no progress at all in determining whether Einstein or Bohr was right. In fact, Einstein predicted exactly the same filter results as Bohr. According to both theories, the particles would either pass through certain filters or not, in the same way. The difference between Einstein’s and Bohr’s theories lies entirely in the explanation of the particles’ behavior—not in the behavior itself.

Einstein believed that the particles already “knew” in advance whether they would pass through a given filter or not—simply because all their properties were already determined beforehand. Bohr, on the other hand, believed that—for reasons beyond our reach—the particles made that choice at the moment of measurement, and only then acquired the properties that would determine whether they would pass or not.

In a flash of genius, Bell realized that Einstein’s and Bohr’s theories actually do make different predictions. The statistical probability that entangled light particles pass through the filter differs depending on whether the calculation is based on the assumption that Einstein’s theory (i.e., local realism) is correct, or whether it is based on the assumption that Bohr’s theory (i.e., quantum theory) is correct.

We will now go ahead and perform the calculation of both probabilities.

**

If Einstein is right, then the particles already possess the properties in advance that will determine whether or not they pass through the filter. We don’t know those properties—they are hidden variables—but they are definitely already there beforehand. That’s simply the reasoning that our common sense provides. Reality and matter exist, whether we are looking at them or not.

Bell realized that in this case, you cannot precisely calculate the probability that the particles will or won’t pass through the filter (since you don’t know the relevant properties in advance), but you can determine a ratio or inequality in the probability distributions across the three conditions (i.e., the three series of particle pairs fired) of the experiment, based on simple logic.

We use the following symbols in laying out that logic:

• P = Probability

• A = the passsing of a particle through filter A

• Ā= the NOT passsing of a particle through filter A

• B = the passing of a particle through filter B

• Ḃ = the NOT passing of a particle through filter B

• C = the passing of a particle through filter C

• Ċ= the NOT passing of a particle through filter C

Here we go.

If Einstein is right and the properties of the elementary particles are fixed in advance, then it is also fixed in advance whether a particle will or will not pass through filter A, B, or C. Based on the following simple (algebraic) logic, we can then say something about the probability that a particle has the potential to pass through combinations of filters A, B, and C:

(1) P(AB̄) ≥ P(AB̄C̄)

According to our notation, we read this as:“The probability that a particle passes through filter A and not through filter B is greater than or equal to the probability that it passes through filter A and not through filter B and not through filter C.”

There’s no arguing with that—it is as logically sound as anything can be.

In the same way, we arrive at the following expressions:

(2) P(BC̄) ≥ P(ABC̄)
(3) P(AC̄) = P(AB̄C̄) + P(ABC̄)

From the combination of (1), (2), and (3), we can very simply derive:

(4) P(AC̄) ≤ P(AB̄) + P(BC̄)

In this way, Bell determined a specific inequality between the probabilities that a particle would or would not pass through certain combinations of filters.

**

We can now determine exactly the same probabilities under the condition that it is not Einstein but rather Bohr (i.e., quantum mechanics) who is right. For this, he used a different kind of calculation.

Quantum mechanics assumes that a particle only acquires its properties at the moment those properties are registered or measured. For example, the polarization direction of a particle can “come into being” as it passes through a filter and is thereby “measured.” That is precisely what we do in the experiment described here: we send particles through a filter and thereby determine their polarization.

Since, according to Bohr, the particle has no polarization before passing through the filter, it always has a 50% chance of passing through any filter.

It is precisely at this point that the difference between Einstein’s theory and Bohr’s theory becomes relevant. According to Einstein, each particle has an unknown but definite chance of passing a filter, depending on its pre-existing, hidden properties. According to Bohr, each particle has exactly a 50% chance (½) of passing through any filter.

At the moment the particle passes through the first filter, its polarization direction becomes fixed/materialized, and from that point on, there is a definite probability that it can pass through another filter.

Let us note here: in our experiment, the two particles pass through their respective filters at exactly the same time. Is that a problem? No. We can arbitrarily designate one of the two filters as the “first,” and the rest of the reasoning proceeds accordingly.

So: the probability that the particle passes the first filter is always 50%. The probability that it passes the second filter depends on the difference in angle between the transmission axes of the two filters. As we showed earlier, we can calculate that probability by squaring the sine of that angle.

Using this, we can calculate each of the probabilities that appear in the inequality we derived earlier under the assumption that Einstein was right.

We first calculate the probability that a particle passes through filter A but not through filter C. The angle between the transmission axes of filters A and C is 45° (see earlier). The formula to calculate the probability that a particle passes A but not C is:

(1) P(AC̄) = 50% * sin²(45°) = 50% * 0.500 = 25%

If we apply the same formula to the two other relevant probabilities, we get:

(2) P(AB̄) = 50% * sin²(22.5°) = 50% * 0.146 = 7.3%
(3) P(BC̄) = 50% * sin²(22.5°) = 50% * 0.146 = 7.3%

Now comes the key point. If we fill in these values in the probability inequality that we derived under the assumption that Einstein was right, we see that they are incompatible. Let’s do that.

Under the condition that Einstein was right, we found the following inequality (see earlier):

  P(AC̄) < P(AB̄) + P(BC̄)

If we now substitute the values we calculated under the assumption that Bohr was right, we get:

  25% < 7.3% + 7.3%

Which is clearly false.

In other words: Bell’s theorem shows that—contrary to the initial impression—Einstein’s and Bohr’s theories do not predict the same outcomes, and that an experiment can, in fact, determine which one of the two was right.

**

At that time, the equipment required to carry out the experiment was not yet sufficiently advanced. It wasn’t until 1982 that this became the case. Alain Aspect then tested Bell’s theorem, and the outcome left no room for doubt: Einstein was wrong, Bohr was right.

The consequences for our view of reality are enormous. The test of Bell’s theorem showed that elementary particles are wave patterns in a state of superposition before being observed, and that they communicate with each other ‘timelessly’ over any distance. Since these elementary particles are the building blocks of our entire reality, this implies that our entire reality is in superposition as long as it is not observed. What is true for each tiny brick of a house is, in a sense, also true for the house itself.

Einstein once sneered at Bohr: “Do you really believe that the moon ceases to exist if you’re not looking at it?”
We can now answer him: Indeed. Or at least: it does not exist in the way it exists when we are looking at it. Man is a co-creator of the reality in which he lives; he does not passively undergo it.

But what exactly causes the wave in superposition to become a particle? Is it the act of measuring, or the act of observing?
The most conservative stance is to claim that it is the material measuring apparatus that changes what is being observed. In that case, one still clings—if only with one hand—tightly to the branches of the materialist trees. Most academic physicists probably opt for this position.

But then I wonder: Einstein wasn’t referring to the material act of measuring when he mentioned the moon; he was talking about looking at the moon. He clearly interpreted quantum theory as a theory that believes it is the act of looking that is decisive (even without measuring equipment).
Likewise, I wonder: we do not see the world around us as a wave in superposition, but as a collection of particles with more or less fixed properties.
Does this not imply that the act of looking itself caused the wave function to collapse, and that the particle became a fixed particle?
To paraphrase Einstein: Do we really believe that the collapse of the wave function does not occur if there are no physicists measuring particles?

Finally: in the many variations of the double-slit experiment, it turns out that a wave becomes a particle precisely at the moment the camera that registers it actually makes an unambiguous registration.
For instance, if electrons are fired at the double slits and we register the exact position of the electron with a camera using light frequencies, then it is observed that exactly at the moment the light frequency becomes high enough to register the electron, the wave pattern collapses and the electron becomes a particle.

These experimental findings also suggest, in my opinion, that what is decisive is not the material measuring apparatus itself—which remains the same, regardless of the light frequency—but rather the act of registering or observing itself.
In other words: it is the ‘act of consciousness’ in observation that is decisive.

Lastly, it is the case that the founders of quantum theory, based on their theory and their observations, declared the materialist worldview to be incorrect, and leaned toward a mystical or idealist worldview, in which consciousness is regarded as the cause of matter (and not the other way around, as materialism claims).

And if we see how even someone as admirable as Niels Bohr vacillated somewhat on this theme—sometimes warm, sometimes cold—then perhaps we must ultimately conclude that even the greatest among us did not entirely overcome a certain fear of the (materialist) masses.

Mattias

I am increasingly gaining respect for the bees, the plants, and the trees, and the healthy honey they produce together in a breathtakingly intelligent way, without having read a single peer-reviewed article.

Without sarcasm, irony, or mockery: I honestly don't think that science should primarily aim to "improve nature." Anyone with their eyes open can see that nature has a subtlety and beauty that cannot be improved. Humans can and must play a role in it, participate in it, but once we start believing that we can do better than nature, things start to go wrong.

I’ve just returned from a week-long stay at CERN in Geneva, the world’s most renowned institute for research on elementary particles. That research offers us something truly revolutionary about the nature of the reality we live in. Science, in that sense, belongs to the greatest achievements of human civilization. But the moment we use science to manipulate nature, its value — in my opinion — easily shifts from positive to negative, from productive to destructive. Just ask Oppenheimer.

I would rather say: science’s purpose is to uncover the beauty of nature, to remove the scales from the human eye so that we might better perceive the sublime structure of nature — and become silent, grateful witnesses of it.

When Aldous Huxley took zero point four gram of mescaline and entered the Egoless state, this was exactly what he experienced: he suddenly saw the beauty of the mere Being. Following the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart he called that the “Isness” of things. The intensity of the aesthetic experience was such that even the strongest hunger couldn’t distract his attention from a bunch of flowers. Had the mescaline experience not ended, he believed, you would die there from sheer hunger, your soul absorbed by the essence of a flower.

I’m not promoting mescaline — I’ve never tried it and don’t plan to anytime soon. But that Huxley’s state might be meaningful for those who believe we need to overturn all of nature in order to find happiness — that, I do believe. Close your eyes and try a spoonful of healthy honey — for a moment you might find your destiny in it.

Mattias

At one point, the article reads:

“It’s important to keep in mind that the likelihood of a donor passing on a pathogenic variant is significantly lower than in traditional bedroom-based reproduction. That’s because the family history of candidate donors is mapped out and their DNA is screened for the most common genetic variants. Candidate donors with increased risk are rejected.”

This statement is made almost in passing but is underscored by being chosen as the article’s title: “Sperm donation is already ‘safer’ than traditional reproduction.” Once you accept the starting point of a logic, you automatically accept its continuation and conclusion. That’s why logic is often called “compelling.”

The logic of the title runs roughly as follows: “Technological-medical control can eliminate the risks inherent to natural reproduction.” The next logical step: “Whoever has a child outside of a lab exposes that child to avoidable risk.” A few steps further: “Choosing natural reproduction constitutes a criminal act.” If you say “A,” you have to say “B.” As Hannah Arendt pointed out: once you accept the “A” of the totalitarian alphabet, you are forced to continue to its deadly end.

During the COVID crisis, a new form of apartheid was justified through logic. It began with: “The vaccine prevents the spread of the virus.” Then came: “Those who refuse the vaccine not only endanger themselves but also others.” That led to: “A vaccine refuser is not a responsible citizen.” In no time, vaccine refusers were — literally — labeled as “anti-government thinkers” and “far-right fascists.” They were denied access to restaurants, cultural events, and (in some countries) public transport. Suddenly, second-class citizens existed again.

Later, it turned out the logic used to justify this exclusion was flawed. The vaccine didn’t prevent the virus’s spread. But those who imposed the logic didn’t seem to care. Suddenly, logic no longer mattered to them. Not that they’re so exceptional in that. To the extent that we try to live purely by logic, perhaps we’re all like that. It’s not logic we truly care about, it’s something else. Our logical thinking isn’t rooted in itself. It’s an instrument serving powers from another domain. Every time we prioritize logic over ethics and humanity, we step further down the totalitarian path. Stalin and Hitler both knew: it’s about ruthlessly imposing your logic.

***

I understand you’re inclined to laugh at the idea that, in the future, those who wish to reproduce “naturally” might be marginalized or criminalized in the same way as the unvaccinated were during the COVID crisis. Yet that is merely the logical consequence of the statement: “Sperm donation is already safer than traditional reproduction.” That statement is a monstrosity — at least if you more or less correctly locate the purpose of life. As if human beings would become more human by having their reproduction take place under clinically controlled conditions. Quite the opposite: imposing clinical logic on reproduction and the creation of life is radical dehumanization. But to those trapped in a narrow mechanistic image of humanity — one in which the ultimate goal of life is to build the perfect human machine — this logic seems unassailably correct.

In a TED talk by the newly elected rector of Ghent University — titled “Tele-babies” — Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is described as a visionary work. Huxley foresaw the future of human reproduction as early as 1932! He was a visionary, almost a century ago, already smart enough to see that technological reproduction is far better for humanity than ‘old-fashioned reproduction’ (as that bedroom business is called in the TED talk). Yes, rewatch it: you heard it right — Brave New World was not a dystopia; it was a brilliant vision of the future.

But no need to panic for old-fashioned minds. The video assures us that there’s no reason to fear we are heading toward a totalitarian state through technological reproduction. You won’t be forced to have your baby meticulously constructed in a high-tech clinical lab where every cell division is precisely monitored and guided. If you’d rather tinker together a baby in a bedroom, among dirty sheets, you will still be allowed to.

So no tele-baby will be imposed on you. That won’t happen in “liberal democracies... as long as they still exist,” the video tells us. Then the Australian professor of bioethics, Julian Savulescu, is introduced: “he is really a smart guy” (minute 12:12), who says that genetic manipulation of babies is “a moral duty.” After all, who would want to saddle their child with a statistically higher chance of abnormality? Of course, even in a liberal democracy, citizens have moral duties. Surely old-fashioned romantics who want to tinker together a baby between dirty sheets should be able to understand that. We are liberal — but only insofar as it fits our logic.

The video also notes that technological reproduction opens up many other possibilities. For example, we’ll be able to create a child using DNA from three or four people (minute 5:50). I wonder: why would you want to make a child with three or four people? Because you love each other so much? Or just because putting a child together with four or five people sounds like an experiment they want to try? What if, one day, a new citizen wants to mix their own DNA with that of their beloved cat — is that a right they should have?

Do advocates of the technological model think there are any limits to rational-technological manipulation of life? Is there even such a thing as ethics in that world? If so: who will define the ethical rules? Humans themselves? Artificial Intelligence, perhaps? I’d bet on the latter. In a world trying to root itself in the quicksand of mechanistic logic, even the core of the human condition — ethical awareness and moral judgment — will be handed over to a machine (and the people who train it, of course). Prepare for the reign of the AI God.

***

That Huxley’s dystopia is interpreted by a university rector as a brilliant vision of the future may not mean much culturally. It’s a curious interpretation, one that arises from the singular narrative and subjective choices of one person’s life. Everyone has the right to make such interpretations. “Human, all too human,” I’d say. But what is culturally significant is the silence that follows from the academic community — and the broader society. That silence suggests that either the community agrees with the interpretation, or is afraid to publicly challenge it. In both cases, the Brave New World may be closer than we think. The video leaves no doubt: “Aldous Huxley’s dream, the future he is talking about — he wrote his book in 1932, remember — this future is happening now” (minute 11:30). That seems a bit premature, a bit of wishful thinking perhaps — but it’s good to at least be aware of people’s wishes.

The idea that the world and human beings are mechanical objects that we can — correction: must — control and manipulate, has gained a nearly irresistible appeal in many minds. And not only in reproduction. In another newspaper article I read this week, it stated that about 5,000 people in Belgium are under “electronic monitoring” with ankle bracelets. I wonder: why not just give everyone an ankle bracelet? That would only make the world safer, right? Except for real criminals. They should feel totally free to follow their criminal instincts. That way, they scare the rest enough into embracing electronic ankle bracelets for a safer world.

Again: don’t laugh too quickly. History shows that the endless rule systems of totalitarian regimes, which supposedly eliminate crime, eventually ensure that criminals are about the only ones who are still safe. Solzhenitsyn describes this in The Gulag Archipelago. The typical dynamic of totalitarianism always leads to the opposite of what it promises.

Why does totalitarianism invert every truth? In the final analysis, totalitarianism is a manifestation of the narcissistic structure of the Ego. The Ego belongs to the realm of Illusion. It convinces us that the essence of who we are is revealed by our reflection. But a mirror inverts everything. It turns left into right. It doesn’t show us the colors absorbed by our real bodies — only those it reflects, those the object doesn’t contain.

So in a sense, there is an inverse relationship between an object’s essence and its image. In other words: the world we see is the reverse of the real world. That recalls Aldous Huxley’s conclusion after his mescaline experiments: what seems worthless in everyday reality turns out to be most valuable in the world beyond the doors of perception. We can apply that to people and their flaws. Flaws don’t make a person worthless; they are the essence of what it means to be human. Lack is the origin of love. It is precisely because we lack something that another person can truly matter to us.

I refer to a third article — a column — that I read in the paper this week. The columnist confesses that she sometimes longs to find a typo in a text. All those errors are now expertly eliminated by Artificial Intelligence. She used to get annoyed by typos, but now she misses them. They carry something of the author’s personality. That might be AI’s greatest contribution to humanity: as machines mimic humans better and better, we will rediscover the essence of humanity in the remaining differences. We’ll be surprised at where we find that essence — among other things, in our imperfections.

In that light, the technological ambition to eliminate every flaw in a child is, in essence, an attempt to erase the child’s existential core. Don’t get me wrong: we don’t need to create flaws on purpose. Nature already provides enough to give rise to human connection. It is the obsessive technological drive to eliminate all flaws that risks producing an excess of them — even in terms of the body’s mechanical function. In other words: the result might resemble Frankenstein’s monster more than Adonis.

Our Enlightenment culture tries to find truth by observing the world with the eyes. And so it ends up deceived. It peers through a microscope at the cells of a developing fetus and sees a small biological machine instead of a symbolic being rooted in the bodily desire between a man and a woman.

— Mattias

The story initially presented by the media went roughly as follows: Yannick was a corona skeptic, far-right conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, prepper, and anti-government thinker. He believed the end of the world was near, had illegal weapons at home, and was preparing a terrorist attack. When the police unit raided his house, he opened fire. The police responded in self-defense and shot Yannick dead. The coverage painted him as a thoroughly antisocial character, emphasizing this with fitting photos—Yannick with deep, dark eyes, demonstratively wearing a gas mask, and so forth.

Note: While the government and media portrayed Yannick Verdyck as a conspiracy theorist, they themselves produced a conspiracy theory: Yannick Verdyck was secretly preparing a terrorist attack with several accomplices. This shows once again how media and government, when push comes to shove, willingly become conspiracy theorists themselves. The remaining question here is: is their conspiracy theory true or false? We will return to that.

It is also somewhat ironic that a few years after his death, the government adopted Yannick’s “prepper discourse.” Europe now recommends urgently having a survival kit at home. Putin is secretly plotting to attack Brussels (another government conspiracy theory). A survival kit alone even won’t be enough. We must massively arm ourselves. Plans for new military infrastructure are mushrooming. Nature reserves have to give way; Putin is even more dangerous than climate change.

The Belgian prime minister—under normal conditions one of the smartest politicians, with excellent historical knowledge—shows he is willing to make great sacrifices. He posted on social media a photo of his son cleaning a terrace in military uniform; he can’t wait to join the reservists. The defense minister cannot stay behind. He established a division within the army where young people can get acquainted with drone technology and operations to spark their interest in the military. He also posted a drawing of himself as Rambo with a rocket launcher. Compared to this minister, Yannick Verdyck is a softy.

Of course, I understand that Yannick, unlike these ministers, expressed his discourse from an “anti-government sentiment.” In other words: Yannick’s great guilt was not in glorifying weaponry but in opposing the established order. The media explicitly mentioned this too: Yannick was an “anti-government thinker.” This has apparently become a new stigma systematically used in the media in recent years. Can someone explain to me: since when is it forbidden to be against the government? Isn’t a government that forbids opposition by definition a dictatorship, thus a government one must oppose?

A few days after Yannick’s death, the media more or less abandoned their conspiracy theory. Yannick was indeed a far-right conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, prepper, and anti-government thinker, but he probably did not have illegal weapons at home, was likely not preparing a terrorist attack, and probably did not shoot at the police.

In a way, the media deserve credit for making this correction, but it only makes it stranger that they do not fundamentally question how Yannick died. Do they really believe that anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, even if they have done nothing illegal, may be taken out by the police? Isn’t this simply legitimizing state terror against dissidents? Moreover, the correction came too late. The conspiracy theory’s toxic sting had already deeply embedded itself in the social fabric. It had already channeled the emotions and turmoil that every new event causes. Once the market stall of public emotions is sold out on a false theory, the truth goes home empty-handed.

***

It took me a few days to realize that the newspaper articles about the shot terrorist were about a young man I had met a few times myself. I remember the moment I shockingly realized this. At first, I had not psychologically connected the photos and horror stories in the papers with the man I had spoken to a few times at gatherings of “corona skeptics.”

Yannick held a master’s degree in mathematics and worked as a gold and silver trader. He was also chairman of a shooting club. Indeed, he did not see the future optimistically. Our society is heading into the abyss—social unrest and war are coming. You better prepare. Yannick, in other words, did not have an average profile. He did not hide this on social media either. He regularly posted photos of weapons and warned that soon we would have to take our fate into our own hands. You can still find his posts online if you want. In a society where the state increasingly monopolizes the right to violence and weaponry, Yannick’s self-cultivated public image did not exactly help him.

But how substantial is a public image? Doesn’t an image mostly hide something about a person rather than show their Real essence? A society that judges solely by image is a society living in appearance, a society discarding the essence of the human being, a society inevitably becoming dehumanizing.

Those who knew Yannick beyond the image knew a person easy to like. I challenge everyone to watch this podcast with Yannick. After watching, tell me if you can still remain indifferent to his death. You see Yannick as I knew him: a somewhat shy but pleasant conversationalist. He had opinions he passionately defended but, as far as I know, he always listened to others’ opinions as well. He also made a distinctly intelligent impression, among other things through his extraordinary knowledge of mathematics, history, and economics. Every question you asked him was a free lecture.

If Yannick wasn’t interesting, he was funny (often both at once). He mastered the art of making people laugh without offending or hurting anyone. Good humor shows nobility; it is a crystal formed in a person who has endured the harshness of existence yet remained human. I do not know enough about Yannick’s life path, but I read in the language of his eyes and body the kindness of someone who wrestled with life. If I took a hundred photos of Yannick, none would resemble the ones I saw in the newspapers.

Those who knew Yannick as a person can hardly believe he truly intended to carry out a terrorist attack. Maybe some tough talk—that could be. My humble opinion is that Yannick was neither dumb nor violent enough to plan an attack. That does not mean this line of inquiry shouldn’t be investigated. Humans have many faces and hidden sides. Some live a whole life with a serial killer without seeing the monster in him. We cannot exclude that Yannick, behind his shy, intelligent, and humorous style, also harbored a terrorist.

The problem is not so much that the terrorism hypothesis is being investigated. The problem is that it is currently not being investigated. It must be investigated. The public prosecutor decided in 2024, after a judicial investigation, that Yannick was indeed preparing a terrorist attack but didn’t provide any substantial evidence for it. Is this a trial or a sham trial?

The judicial process followed so far offers no answer to the question why Yannick died. People who sympathize with Yannick often look for the answer in a conspiracy theory: the government deliberately eliminated Yannick, wanted to set an example for the entire government-critical group, and so on. I understand why such ideas make sense to some extent, but they don’t seem plausible to me.

***

A few months ago, three years after Yannick’s death: a man who used to work in the military sphere asked me for a conversation. He wanted to talk about something of social importance. We met a few weeks later, with my assistant present. He told me about an issue within his professional environment that indeed interests someone who writes about totalitarianism. Suddenly, his discourse took a detour. The man claimed to know exactly how the murder of Yannick happened. His story goes as follows:

In an organization where Yannick was a member, there had been an informant for state security for years. A personal relationship developed with Yannick that at some point, due to an incident in the romantic sphere, turned into hostility and rivalry. The informant then sent a report to state security insisting on an investigation: "Yannick Verdyck has weapons at home; he distrusts the government; he is part of a network of conspiracy theorists."

State security did not investigate the report further but immediately classified Yannick as a state threat. According to my interlocutor, this is not exceptional. State security is funded based on the number of dangerous situations. Better one dangerous situation too many than too few. They immediately forwarded the informant’s report to the police, asking for a special intervention team to be sent: immediate action required, if not tonight, then this night. At that moment, no Dutch-speaking team was available. So they sent French-speaking agents. On September 28, 2022, at five in the morning, a French-speaking special intervention unit blew up Yannick’s door with explosives and stormed inside.

Put yourself in Yannick’s position: you’re lying in bed at night, with serious stocks of gold and silver at home. You hear your door being blown up, French-speaking men storm into your house. Indeed—you are convinced you are being attacked by gangsters. Whether Yannick reached for a weapon or not, I don’t know, but the possibility is not negligible. In any case, the police opened fire. When Yannick’s parents were finally allowed to see their son’s body days later, it was riddled with bullets.

This story is not a conspiracy theory. It frames Yannick’s death as an excess of what Hannah Arendt calls “tyranny without a tyrant,” an advanced bureaucratic system where everyone follows (absurd) rules and no one feels responsible:

“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” (Arendt, 1970, On Violence)

Was Yannick Verdyck primarily murdered by bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that in its extreme form always becomes absurd and murderous? Bureaucracy stems from the rationalist worldview. It arises from the illusion that human coexistence must be organized based on (pseudo)rational rules instead of a law that truly is law—that is, a law grounded in ethical awareness. In bureaucratic systems, ultimately every law and ethical awareness is lost.

If bureaucracy is Yannick’s murderer, does that mean no one consciously wanted to kill him and no one is responsible for his death? “You are responsible for your unconscious,” Sigmund Freud believed. I agree with Freud. But the question of guilt is more complicated than in the case of an intentional and planned murder. In this case, there is no single culprit but rather a cluster of semi-guilty parties, a temporarily lethal tumor that emerges in a bureaucratic body tissue that has completely lost its natural resistance to the death drive due to the absence of ethical awareness.

Intellectually and emotionally, this analysis is much more challenging than a conspiracy analysis. It requires us to view the great societal problems of our time in all their complexity and to dare to ask the more difficult questions: How exactly did this bureaucratic Leviathan rise during modernity? What is the connection with the pseudo-rationality (rationalism) of Enlightenment culture? This analysis demands that we mentally transcend our rationalistic worldview and experience our reality as a product of (metaphysical) processes that ultimately exceed all rational understanding. A conspiracy analysis makes all that unnecessary. The truth is simple: the problem is the malicious elite, no need for transcendence of rationalism or metaphysics to understand reality.

The greatest challenge, however, is not intellectual but emotional and human. A conspiracy theory also initially makes things seem simpler here. Once the great culprit is known, we can focus our rampant emotions on them. No need to see a reflection of ourselves in the bureaucrats and police; no need to acknowledge that under certain circumstances, we too are part of the malicious bureaucratic tumor that cost Yannick his life.

Conspiracy theories—from both the government and dissidents—are sometimes true and sometimes false. But they almost always tend to scapegoat and excessively simplify human intentions. For example, they ignore the fact that humans usually don’t fully know their own intentions and are divided among all kinds of desires and impulses. In that sense, an (incorrect) conspiracy theory does injustice to the scapegoat, dehumanizes them, while in reality, they are indeed a person, an astonishingly ordinary person.

That is the greatest challenge for people who now critically approach the dominant (mainstream) narrative: to leave behind psychologically simplistic interpretations. This path is intellectually and humanly much harder. Instead of feverishly hunting the malicious elite, the focus of awakening then lies in confronting and working through our own shadow sides.

This is more or less also the message Hannah Arendt conveyed with her “banality of evil”: evil is not committed by exceptionally monstrous people; it is committed by people who are strangely ordinary and everyday, people who believe they are doing good but unwittingly become instruments of destruction and dehumanization. This is by no means the privilege of the elite; you find it at all levels and, in a way, in every human being (I will return to this in future articles).

Principally seeing people in those involved in matters like Yannick’s death is difficult but is the most correct intellectually and ethically. It is the greatest tribute we can pay to Yannick, perhaps the only thing that can truly give meaning to his absurd death.

Granted, sperm donors sometimes mess up, but in the future, we will solve all of that. We will then compose babies ourselves, flawlessly and without defects, without anti-government or far-right tendencies, one by one perfect biological and psychological conditioned model citizens with no inclination towards ‘traditional reproduction.’ It will be a beautiful, brave new world.

In another newspaper article today, I read about yet another way to increase control over life. Currently, 5,000 people in Belgium are under ‘electronic supervision’ with ankle bracelets. I propose that we immediately give everyone an ankle bracelet. That will only make the world safer. An exception would be the real criminals. They should feel completely free to follow their criminal nature. After all, they scare the others enough to make electronic ankle bracelets acceptable for a safer world.

You might laugh at this too, but I would still advise holding off for a moment. The history of totalitarian systems shows that the endless rules they impose to supposedly eliminate crime eventually result in criminals being almost the only ones who remain safe. Solzhenitsyn vividly describes this in The Gulag Archipelago. The typical dynamics of totalitarianism always lead to the opposite of what it promises and ultimately turn every truth completely upside down.

This is entirely due to the fact that totalitarianism is a manifestation of the narcissistic structure of the Ego. The Ego represents the register of the Illusion. It deceives us into believing that the essence of who we are is shown by our reflection. The reflection, however, reverses left and right and it doesn’t show us the colors the real object of our body contains, but those it reflects. That means: it shows us exactly the opposite colors than those that are inside the object. Transcending totalitarianism, in the end, simply boils down to transcending the Ego.

It once again shows: it is time to look for ways to transcend this mechanistic worldview and reach, with words, for another worldview — one in which freedom is preferred over false security and illusions of control over the uncontrollable, a worldview, perhaps, in which a child is not thought of as a little biological machine, but as a symbolic being anchored in the bodily desire of a man and a woman for each other.

Mattias

To begin with: when I reject an overall interpretation of what happens in the world in terms of conspiracies, it is not my intention to ignore the fact that a dangerous system of control is rising, where a small number of people (an ‘elite’) have the power to control almost everyone else. We are indeed at risk – if we aren’t already to some extent – of ending up in a digital gulag, with digital currencies and digital passports, where AI calculates how far each citizen can go today according to their ‘CO2 account’ and what they can or cannot eat for breakfast, what ‘chemical corrections’ are necessary for their blood values, and so on.

In line with the pervasive reversal of every truth in modernity, the emergence of the new totalitarianism, of course, take place under the (false) flag of democracy. All in all, Aldous Huxley had it pretty much right when he foresaw the following about seventy years ago:
‘By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms – elections, parliaments, supreme courts, and all the rest – will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile, the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the shows as they see fit.’ (Huxley, 1958, Brave New World Revisited)

Over the last century, there has undoubtedly been an increasing concentration of economic, banking, media, and ideological power. Fewer and fewer people have gained more and more power, and they are increasingly imposing their ideologies on the masses through subtle and less subtle forms of propaganda. They have virtually unlimited resources, constantly provided through a perverted system of central banks controlled by an even more central bank in Switzerland, the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, which is technically above the law and thus can do pretty much whatever it wants.

That such an ‘organism’ or ‘system’ is rising, we cannot really doubt. Many refuse to see this. Or they see it but don’t mind it. ‘Such a digitally controlled system is necessary to save the climate; surveillance isn’t bad if you have nothing to hide’, and so on. Without going too deep into it here, I think these people are blind to an inconvenient realty. Moreover, they are selectively blind. They refuse to see the dangers of Gates and Soros, calling anyone who wants to bring attention to these dangers a conspiracy theorist. But as soon as it’s about Elon Musk, they suddenly see a dangerous oligarch who wants to take over the world.

Here we also encounter a much broader phenomenon: people who identify with ‘the mainstream’ call anyone a conspiracy theorist who doubts the truthfulness of the mainstream narrative, but as soon as it concerns an enemy of the mainstream, such as Trump, Putin, or Saddam Hussein, they see conspiracies everywhere. These monsters are always secretly plotting to overthrow democracy or hiding weapons of mass destruction. I would simply suggest to all parties: take each other’s conspiracy theories a little more seriously, listen carefully, and try to be open-minded and separate sense from nonsense.

Ultimately, it’s about this: the rising surveillance state will be a tragedy for the human being. Again I hear some already saying, ‘But if you have nothing to hide, then it’s not a problem that there is surveillance everywhere?’ Such reasoning starts from a naive view on man and the world. The human being is a creature that can only thrive if it has a space where it can momentarily free itself from the control of another, among other things, in order to make choices that are truly its own; it is in making subjective choices that the very essence of a human being emerges and exists.

Totalitarianism is a system driven by a frantic desire for control, aimed at eliminating this space of subjective choice. In this way, totalitarianism destroys the essence of the human and indeed represents the ultimate evil. Human beings cannot be completely free; for example, they will always have to adhere to ethical principles in some way, but they absolutely need a certain freedom. Some will undoubtedly protest here as well: ‘But if freedom leads to climate catastrophes, then we can’t tolerate it!’ I will go deeper into this another time, but I want to emphasize this here: believe me, the last thing the surveillance state will do is ‘save the climate.’

Hannah Arendt believed that the end point of the totalitarianization process was not so much the creation of a society with concentration camps, but rather the transformation of the entire society into an open-air concentration camp. I see it as self-evident that we are moving towards that point (without saying that we will fully reach it).

So what is my point in resisting fanatic interpretations of this phenomenon in terms of a grand conspiracy? That is what I will be addressing in a series of publications over the coming months. The importance of this subject is undoubtedly enormous and even decisive, both intellectually, tactically, and ethically. That is why I will devote an extraordinary amount of attention to it in the coming period. I will primarily discuss the following points:

1. How exactly did this totalitarian structure arise? Was it planned and consciously built?

2. What is the psychology of the elite? What type of people are they? Are they more evil than the ‘ordinary person’?

3. What role does the population play? Are they merely victims, or did they help build their own prison?

4. What are the merits and weak points of thinking in terms of conspiracies?

None of these questions can be answered simply. We will approach them carefully and try to come to a nuanced and fruitful understanding of the grand conspiracy question from different perspectives. I look forward to a lively discussion about the nature of world events!

Mattias

En plus d'une page en néerlandais, une page Substack en français est aussi active, rendue possible grâce aux traductions de l'aimable Dieudonné Dard, qui avec beaucoup de dévouement traduit mes articles depuis de nombreuses années.

Via ce lien, vous accédez à la page en français, où vous pouvez vous inscrire.

Et voici le lien vers la version française de mon dernier article, intitulé "Le grand complot (sioniste)".

J'ai hâte de vous y rencontrer!
Mattias

Ik hoorde via verschillende kanalen dat mijn Nederlandstalige lezers het jammer vinden dat mijn Substack-artikelen enkel in het Engels gepubliceerd worden.

Dankzij een helpende hand zal de Nederlandstalige Substack-pagina (die eigenlijk al bestond maar niet meer actief was) vanaf nu weer actief zijn.

In de komende weken zullen we ook de Engelstalige artikelen van de voorbije jaren stap voor stap vertalen en in het Nederlands publiceren.

Via deze link kom je op de Nederlandstalige pagina, waar je je kan inschrijven.

En hier vind je de link naar de Nederlandse versie van het meest recente artikel, getiteld 'Het grote (Zionistische) complot'.

Ik kijk ernaar uit om jullie daar (ook) te ontmoeten!

Mattias

Are all wars staged performances directed by an overarching power that governs from the darkness? I think it depends on how you define that same ‘overarching power’. The warring parties are never just warring parties. In every major conflict, there remains something of the fabric that connected the parties before the war.

Examples include the operations in which Nazi scientists were ‘distributed’ between the US and the Soviet Union (operation paperclip and operation osoaviakhim, respectively), or the behind-the-scenes contacts and meetings between former leaders of capitalism and communism.

There are certainly financial, economic, and even ideological structures that connect the warring parties beneath the surface. But that does not mean the war on the surface is not real; I believe it is indeed real, but the schism on the surface is simply not absolute. I do not believe that everything happening on the surface is a perfectly staged performance. I have never seen evidence of that. There is plenty of evidence for regime-change operations, false flag operations, and baffling propaganda manipulations, but that everything would be directed by a central group of people, to my knowledge, there is no evidence for that.

But the geopolitical game is still full of patterns, right? They don’t just happen by themselves? There must be something organizing those patterns? That’s definitely true. There is something organizing. But the organizing principle is not so much a person or group of people. Just look at how sand grains on a metal plate form perfect patterns when the plate is vibrated. None of the sand grains organize; they all just undergo the same vibrational frequency; something larger than them organizes them.

Every time we notice patterns and organization in human behavior, we tend to believe that they are the result of intentional planning. Sometimes, of course, that is the case. Many demonstrations, mobs, and uprisings against undesirable regimes were intentionally organized, for example. In the world of propaganda, people know that the best way to make a certain belief or opinion popular in the population is to create the impression that it is shared by a large group of people. Search for ‘rent a crowd’ on the internet – there are companies that do nothing but provide ‘crowds’ on demand for anyone who wants to make a particular opinion popular. A large part of the so-called crowds rising up against, say, Yanukovych or Gaddafi, or any other undesirable ‘dictator,’ was artificially created. This has already been widely known and proven.

But that doesn’t change the fact that, on the other hand, we are often inclined to experience spontaneously occurring patterns in human behavior as the result of intentional planning. I experienced a good example of this myself this winter. I watched a dance performance produced by Emmanuel Gat. For more than an hour, I watched breathlessly as the aesthetically sublime patterns rose from the dancers on stage. Every detail was perfect—the bending of a raised arm, the arching of the neck as a dancer dropped to the floor, the dynamics of the opening and closing circles emerging constantly on the stage, and so forth. After the performance, I asked Emmanuel how long it took him to plan and rehearse every detail so perfectly with the dancers. "It goes very smoothly, I don’t tell my dancers exactly what to do; I just give them the principles of the choreography, the rules they need to follow, and the rest forms itself on stage."

If a group of people consciously or unconsciously follows the same principles or symbolic rules, a whole series of patterns will emerge on the societal stage without intentional planning. The whole world is under the influence of the same kind of thinking or worldview, or, in other words, the same symbolic framework. To use a computer metaphor: all minds are running the same program. To the extent that Biden and Trump both think according to the materialistic worldview, they will eventually indeed carry out the same 'program'; to the extent that Russia and the USA are both gripped by the same materialistic thinking, they will ultimately feed the same global process and ultimately the same global power structures. But they will not hate each other any less or stop trying to destroy each other, to the point that they would be willing to throw every living being on earth, including themselves, into a nuclear winter.

So, the entire geopolitical game being strictly directed by a small group of people seems unlikely to me when you consider the complex and dynamic nature of humans and reality. The tendency to misunderstand this complexity and reduce all evil to one 'organization' or group of people seems historically inaccurate, tactically harmful (it creates the illusion that eliminating that small group would solve the problem), and ethically problematic.

Take the persistent idea that a grand Zionist conspiracy is at the root of all misery on this planet. To me, it’s just another hypothesis. A large Zionist conspiracy or a large Bulgarian or Italian conspiracy—why not? But the arguments I’ve heard for it are not very convincing. It’s true that there are more Jews and even Zionists at the top of the global power pyramid. After all, Jews are overrepresented at the top of nearly every pyramid. Their extraordinary drive to excel plays a role in this, among other factors. Solzhenitsyn provided a good description in his book Two Hundred Years Together of how Jews were involved in the rise of the Soviet Union. The gist of it is this: Jews are overrepresented in the entire upper layer of society, including the layers that promote totalitarianism. They are therefore equally overrepresented in both the good ‘projects’ of humanity and the bad ones. In other words, aside from the fact that they have a drive to excel, they are ordinary people with the universal struggle between good and evil in their hearts.

I also have a fundamental objection to reducing the world problem to one small, malevolent group. First, it excuses the 'ordinary' person. He can’t do anything about it; it’s all the fault of those who misled him, and so on. But secondly, it immerses that ordinary person in powerlessness. After all, he can’t do anything about it. The ordinary person should not be excused. He carries his money to the big bankers himself, he gives up his vegetable garden for the convenience of supermarkets and industrial agriculture, he buys shares in any company promising high short-term profits, he prefers not to bother with uncomfortable truths and believes instead that he’s only hearing the facts on the evening news, he buys clothing that he knows is produced by slave labor on the other side of the world, and so on. In short, the ‘ordinary person’ is willing to stifle all ethical awareness and dehumanize his fellow man as long as it makes his life easier and puts him in a more favorable position.

For clarity, I count myself among those ‘ordinary people’. That’s why I try every day to become just a little bit more truly human, a being that only truly becomes itself when it puts its ethical awareness at the forefront of its existence. To the extent that the ordinary person realizes that he is co-guilty, he will also stop being powerless. In principle, we all struggle—with elites or ordinary people—with the same problem. Everyone who genuinely tries to untangle themselves contributes to the great untying. For all I care, you can even bring in Rupert Sheldrake’s theory: every time we solve a problem ‘in our own head,’ we also solve it in the great morphic field that every human mind is connected to, and make it easier for others to solve as well.

At the core of the issue, therefore, the world problem does not lie so much with a small group of people, but with a certain ‘program’ on which humanity operates. That ‘program’ is materialism and rationalism, a worldview that tells humanity that nothing exists but matter—dead little marbles bumping against each other—and that the highest goal of humanity is to survive. Or conversely, commit suicide directly—that’s also a possible conclusion. In any case, you don’t need to take ethics and humanity into account; they don’t exist in this universe of rocks and stones. Only an idiot harms themselves by considering ethics and making sacrifices for truth. This worldview has indeed allowed a certain elite to rise to the top, who have a malicious talent for throwing all ethics overboard, but if it weren’t for the fact that a large group was all too willing to step into this worldview, that elite would never have become the elite. I know that anti-elite thinking is very popular both on the left and right of the political spectrum, but it doesn’t warm me up. The elite, ultimately, is a reflection of the population.

To conclude today, I return once again to the vibrating plate with sand grains. That plate shows us something else. If the frequency of the vibrations changes slightly, a completely different pattern immediately appears in an untraceable and breathtaking way. In other words, no matter how much the sand grains of society and the world organize themselves under the sign of the darkest shape, a change in frequency can, in the blink of an eye, summon a different shape and make it the organizing principle. That frequency change, which boils down to a change in the quality of speech. To put it simply: society currently organizes itself on the frequency of propaganda and manipulative speech (and the metaphysical forces in which propaganda is rooted); when the frequency of sincerity and truth comes to the foreground, human coexistence will normally take on a completely different shape in the blink of an eye. Every person who sounds a different, sincere note contributes to that revolution—the revolution that is the logical consequence of the revolution that ushered in the Enlightenment culture in the seventeenth century.

Mattias

Frank Vandenbroucke, Belgian Minister of Health, is about to launch a line where people can report doctors who write too many sick notes. Moreover, employers will have to pay for their sick employees for a longer period, and employees could lose their entire benefit if they do not ‘cooperate’ well enough in this whole process (see article in the comments section).

The number of long-term sick people is undoubtedly a problem. In some cases, being declared long-term sick is an easy way to shift the burden of life off your own shoulders and onto someone else. And yes, there are doctors who reach for the pen too easily – I believe that too. But this is also true: more and more people are genuinely physically or mentally exhausted. Fortunately, there are doctors who are human and acknowledge this.

A correct diagnosis must be made of the individual, and it must be ensured as much as possible that only those who truly need help are supported by society. But in this current era, we don’t just need correct diagnoses of individuals; we especially need a correct diagnosis of our society and political system.

The Belgian Minister of Health should actually first and foremost take a long, hard look at his own actions. He was one of the main advocates of Belgium’s COVID policy. The rise in long-term sickness is largely a result of the type of society this minister champions – a society where QR codes distinguish between first- and second-class citizens, where the state believes it knows better what kind of medicine is good for people than the people themselves, where the Minister of Health prefers a sickening pharmaceutical and food industry over the health of the people, a society where ministers mercilessly drive entrepreneurs and employers into bankruptcy, a society that has become so bureaucratic that most people find their bureaucratic jobs – rightfully – completely meaningless, a society where the citizen only works to keep the state system running, a society where solidarity between doctor and patient is forbidden but solidarity with the state is compulsory… a society where politicians have structurally integrated a snitch mentality into the state system.

Such a dehumanized society does indeed cause more and more people to become physically and mentally exhausted. Pathological state systems do not respond to this by questioning themselves; they punish the illnesses they themselves cause in the population, even if it means that eventually no healthy citizens will be left. It’s all textbook totalitarian rule.

That a ‘socialist’ minister, without any form of self-criticism or reflection, threatens to take people’s benefits away – we must speak out against this. This same minister spent hundreds of billions on a COVID policy that, from any reasonable analysis, must be considered meaningless and extremely destructive; a policy that ruined both the physical and mental health of the population. To give just one example from my own field: the number of depressions and other psychiatric problems increased by at least a quarter. It doesn't matter which health parameter you consider; the COVID crisis caused a tragedy.

How much did the COVID policy, which this Minister of Health was a major supporter of, actually cost? Worldwide, about 18 trillion (!!) dollars were directly pumped into the measures. But that astronomical amount is small change compared to the damage it caused.

To give just one reference point: when farmers occupied a few roundabouts in Belgium last year, Belgian newspapers reported that this would cause 100 million euros of damage to the economy (see comments for article). Can anyone use the same formula to calculate how much damage the months-long lockdowns caused? And I certainly don’t mean primarily in economic terms. I mostly mean in terms of healthy and happy years of life. In a way, these are after-the-fact reflections, but I would still love to see the cost-benefit analysis. And don’t forget to factor in that the average age of death for COVID patients was about the same as the average life expectancy. That alone is enough to give an idea of what the outcome of the analysis will likely be.

To this day, I have heard no apology or even a sign of remorse from the minister involved. On the contrary, in Europe, it seems that the main lesson learned from the COVID crisis is that they will repeat the same mistakes with the next ‘pandemic.’ It becomes even more troubling when the current generation of politicians, at the same time, ruthlessly cuts the benefits of chronically ill people but manages to make big plans to invest hundreds of billions in going to war in Ukraine. They are not hindered by any historical awareness or understanding of the geopolitical situation that led to the war. Otherwise, they would know immediately that with some diplomacy, they have a good chance of saving not only hundreds of billions but maybe the entire future of humanity.

Returning to the Minister of Health: what makes it even worse is that this ‘socialist’ minister belongs to a political culture that has labeled any rightful criticism of social security abuse as ‘inhuman’ for decades. I fear this: the same political trend will, in the near future, more and more deny help to those who truly need it.

We can extend this story to the theme of migration: it is likely that the same political culture, which has hypocritically and politically demonized any legitimate addressing of migration issues as ‘racism,’ will soon emerge as the true promoters of pure racism. All that will be needed for this to happen is that Muslims do not conform sufficiently to their technocratic and radically atheistic ‘woke’ policies.

How far are we from a policy that regulates migration in a human and realistic way, one that is sensitive and open-minded towards people from different cultures, but also respects itself and its own culture enough to set clear boundaries?

Finally, back to long-term sick leave. I do not place all the blame on the Minister of Health and ‘the state.’ The individual person also carries a serious responsibility. Most of us are sick from our ‘bullshit jobs.’ It’s hard to recharge physically and mentally for work when you don’t even know if you’re doing anything useful at your job. That’s true. But we all bear responsibility in this regard as well.

If I may offer good advice to everyone – and to myself: we must do everything in our power to find work that gives meaning to our lives; work with which we can feel that we’re giving something to ourselves, to others, and to society. Work that keeps us as far away as possible from the sickening bureaucracy and the over-digitalized world. There is no better remedy for long-term illness than this kind of work.

And regarding the minister, I would say: I think we should put him on long-term sick leave. It will cost us less than if he ‘works.’

Mattias.

On my walk today

I found this tree

Torn open by lightning

With its few twigs where sap still flows

scattering blossoms and light.

Mattias

We are at a pivotal moment. On one hand, we are witnessing the collapse of the corona narrative; on the other, we are seeing a new mass formation arising around the story of the war in Ukraine. These two phenomena are not occurring by chance at the same time.

What everyone who wanted to know had already long known, is now slowly seeping through to newspapers and news programs: we can stop blaming the bats from Wuhan. The coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, where, indeed, they were experimenting with coronaviruses. What is now emerging in the mainstream media is even worse than just the fact that the virus came from a lab. It is also becoming clear that (some of) those who promoted the measures always knew it came from a lab.

People like Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier warned from the start of the crisis that certain sequences in the virus’s DNA do not occur in nature, and that the virus was a so-called "gain-of-function" creation. He was dismissed by the media and by government-paid 'research journalists' and 'fact-checkers' as a charlatan and conspiracy theorist.

He was simply right. It shows something of the ruthlessness with which the truth was suppressed during the crisis. Be sure to also listen to Mark Zuckerberg's public confession with Joe Rogan. He explains there exactly why he wants to stop the fact-checking on Meta. The fact-checkers are primarily propaganda tools. They mainly serve to divert attention from the truth.

Does the origin of the virus ultimately matter? Yes, it does. It further demonstrates the dramatic failure of the entire technocratic and rationalistic approach to life and living together. Not only did the technological remedy for the disease fail (for example, the mRNA vaccines did not stop the spread of the virus), but this approach now also turns out to be responsible for the disease itself (i.e., it produced the virus).

Now that we agree the virus came from the Wuhan lab, the next question arises: what did virologist Anthony Fauci have to do with that lab? For those who want to know a bit more, click on this link to a document from the US Congress. Or read the last two books of that damned new health minister in the USA, the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Kennedy. Perhaps his mouth, like that of Professor Montagnier, generally speaks the truth on this matter as well?

And the media may slowly warm up to answering the following questions:

First question: What about the mortality rate of that gain-of-function virus? Why did the world go along for so long with mortality statistics that even the authors of them had stated in a hearing for ‘The House of Commons’ in 2020 were much too high?

Second question: Did the vaccines stop the spread of the virus? The assumption that this was the case led to the group of people who refused the vaccine being treated as second-class citizens. They were banned from restaurants, theaters, airplanes, and a few other things. They were pointed at by politicians worldwide as those who caused the pandemic. ‘The pandemic of the unvaccinated’ – you remember that if you were part of that group.

Who still doubts that this whole dehumanizing policy was anything but based on facts? The vaccine did not stop the spread of the virus. As for the question of how safe it was, we will wait a bit. We’ll be ready for that once the previous two questions are answered.

Despite the obvious failure of the corona policy, the proponents are preparing to apply the same strategy for the next virus outbreak (I wonder if it will come from a lab again). The WHO, for example, has already bought the corona-surveillance technology (the system with the QR codes and so on) from the EU to further develop it into a digital vaccination passport. It is to become part of a broader digital identity and a linked social-credit system and a digital currency (the so-called Central Bank Digital Coins).

To the extent that one is seduced in life by the idea of order and control, it is indeed a very attractive idea: to neatly reorganize the entire wriggling heap of society digitally, reduce the human ecological footprint by rewarding and punishing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior. Children have to be raised, don’t they? And aren’t we all little, irresponsible children? In a way, yes. The question is: which little child is going to raise the other little children?

Like any totalitarian system, the current technocratic system learns nothing from the disasters it causes. It sails blindly and fanatically on the ideological wind toward the rocks of its next failure. It sacrifices the next generation of its victims in anticipation of a technological paradise that will always remain a utopia on the horizon. Totalitarian systems always live on credit. Later, when the system is running perfectly, they will compensate for the disasters they are currently causing. And that’s why they will continue to cause disasters for the time being.

***

I could go into many other aspects of the corona crisis, but I will leave it here for now. I prefer to ask myself the question: why is the corona story collapsing now? Perhaps because insight progresses slowly and we are only now beginning to see what happened during those strange years?

I don’t think so. The appearance of the truth in the mainstream media has little or nothing to do with the progress of insight. Even a small child could see from the beginning that the story was falling apart in every direction. There were, therefore, other reasons for being blind to it than the insight not being far enough advanced.

The corona story is collapsing now because all the emotions that had found refuge in it – fear, frustration, aggression, the drive toward self-destruction of the completely isolated person – have slowly found a new refuge: the story of the war in Ukraine and the prospect of a new world war.

All the fear, frustration, and aggression that had been linked to the coronavirus and ‘the anti-vaxxers’ are now linked to a new object: ‘Putin’ and ‘the Russians’. The great vital forces – the true Masters of man – have found a new story to take refuge in. The corona house remains abandoned, shrinking like a house left behind by its inhabitants, to the point that even a small push from a small mind is enough to make it collapse. If the current series of crises teaches us anything about humanity, it is this: man is not primarily a rational being; he is a being governed by vital and metaphysical forces to which his reason is radically subordinated.

The new mass formation has the potential to be more intense and aggressive than the previous one. The reason, I have explained many times: the previous mass formation only increased loneliness and the fear and aggression linked to it. Mass formations seem to take away loneliness. Hence the bewildering enthusiasm we witnessed in, for example, videos of dancing nurses and doctors.

That enthusiasm is based on an illusion. In reality, the mass only makes loneliness and all the dark feelings attached to it greater. In the mass, solidarity and connection with fellow human beings are strictly forbidden. The only solidarity allowed is solidarity with the collective. And to that, every form of solidarity and connection with another person is radically subordinated. The dramatic endpoint of this is the mother who reports her child to the state and proudly receives a medal on the scaffold for her unwavering loyalty to the collective.

***

In Europe, the call for war is growing louder. Now that the great monster Trump no longer wants to protect Europe, the urgent need arises to mobilize a proper army and weapon system, it is said. President Ursula Von der Leyen goes so far as to say that she wants to use the savings of the population – a sloppy 800 billion – to make the war industry run at full speed.

Let me be clear: I have no need to tell a pro-Putin story. My opinion is neither pro nor con. My opinion is that the way of words, rather than the way of war, should be pursued. It is certainly not a matter of convincing you not to help Ukraine; it is a matter of thinking together with you about how we can truly help Ukraine. And that will not be by plunging the world into a third world war.

That Putin is no saint, no one needs to convince me of that. I have written a long article on Russia under Putin. Putin rose from street boy to director of the FSB, the successor of the infamous Soviet KGB. Anyone who has any knowledge of the workings and nature of that secret service knows that its director will not exactly be a sentimental soft-boiled egg.

Putin keeps a great power afloat. And he does that like leaders of great powers do. For example, the Moscow regime uses false flag operations in which hundreds of its own citizens die to create support for war in breakaway republics like Chechnya, and it eliminates journalists who speak uncomfortable truths.

That being said, the way the war story is now portrayed in the media bears the same absurd characteristics as the corona story did at the time. Russia is, in some respects, an expansionist nation. But its expansionism is small beer compared to that of NATO and the USA. Here is my modest opinion: Russia knows that in the great expansionist struggle it might lose, and if it comes to war, it is largely because it feels that it has a knife to its throat.

In this article from ten years ago – written in tempore non suspecto – you can read that the geopolitical maneuvers of NATO in the Black Sea region would inevitably lead to war with Russia. Those maneuvers were merely the point of the spear directed at Russia in a much larger expansionist USA project. Since WWII, the USA has, by most estimates, built between 700 and 800 military bases abroad.

To those who are so convinced that Russia is the only aggressor in the Ukraine story: try looking through the eyes of the Kremlin. How would Europe or America feel if, under the cover of many beautiful stories about ‘democracy’, Russia marched toward Brussels or Washington with hundreds of military bases? Or also, look at the history of the regime change operations of the USA since WWII. Anyone who takes the trouble to learn about recent history will see how South America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe were gradually politically and militarily subjected by the USA and/or NATO.

I have previously written an article on the historical context of the war in Ukraine. I will not go into it in detail here. You can find the article via this link. In short: it is not true that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was ‘unprovoked’. Since the American-initiated regime change of 2014 in Maidan Square, there have been roughly three reasons that drove Russia to start the war.

First, the Russians had humanitarian reasons. After 2014, the Kiev regime oppressed the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (especially the Donbas region). This was not exactly done gently. Kiev even used cluster bombs in densely populated neighborhoods, which led to hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking safety in Russia.

I don’t know if Putin invaded Ukraine out of humanitarian concern. It is quite possible that he didn’t want to let his authority as a leader be undermined by allowing the regime in Kiev to commit atrocities against Russian-speaking Ukrainians. But this is enough to make clear that we cannot simply speak in black-and-white terms about ‘the bad Russians’ and ‘the good Ukrainians’. That much I know.

Second, there were economic reasons. Since 2014, Ukraine’s vast natural resource reserves (especially minerals) were at risk of falling into American hands. The pro-American regimes that came to power in Ukraine after 2014 lifted the law that stated that foreigners could only buy up to two hectares of land in Ukraine. In no time, American companies like Cargill, Monsanto, and Du Pont bought up a third of Ukrainian land, and investment giants like Blackrock signed contracts for the supply of weapons for the war (which they knew was inevitable) and for the reconstruction of the country after that war. Or how one can make a lot of money in a short time by throwing all ethical considerations overboard.

Additionally, there are important strategic reasons involved in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Think mainly of the importance of ensuring access to the Black Sea region for Russia. If Russia does not have access to the Black Sea, it will cease to exist as a great power in the near future. NATO knows this well, because they are using the militarization of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region to apply the strategy Lord Palmerston used in the 19th century, which led to the first Crimean War. This strategy was revived at the end of the 20th century by Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard. It is well-known that the so-called neocons, who in many ways pull the strings in the USA and NATO, adopted Brzezinski’s strategy as their own.

I believe that any sober analysis of the situation will conclude that Putin and Russia had a choice: either they invaded Ukraine, or it was over for Russia as a great power. Moreover, Putin already made it clear at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest that Ukraine was the red line: if NATO made moves to annex Ukraine after the rest of Eastern Europe, war was the only outcome. He probably didn’t need to explain it to them, they knew it better than him. Any analysis of the historical data shows that the European and American leaders at that time realized that their maneuvers in Ukraine were almost inevitably heading toward a third world war.

So, we are witnessing a struggle between great powers. One is more expansionist than the other, one is more successful in the dirty military game than the other. Like all great powers, they feel threatened in their dominance. Great powers are subject to the law of the Ego: the more power one has, the more fearful and aggressive one becomes. Like all great powers, they use all the harmful strategic and military techniques of our rationalist time. Both thrive on propaganda, including false flag operations where, if necessary, their own citizens are sacrificed to influence public opinion. And both do not shy away from political persecution and murder.

The population should not so much choose between one of these two great powers; they must make it clear that a large-scale military and nuclear conflict is not an option, and that at least the way of words must be fully explored first. Putin is a human being, the Russians are human beings. And a human being wants to be heard. There are enough reasons to listen carefully to what the Russians have to say.

I do not want to say with this article that Ukraine should be left to its fate. Certainly not. What I do want to say is that the lead-up to a conflict and the intentions behind it must be assessed and portrayed as accurately as possible. And that we should certainly be cautious about fueling a war that, with diplomacy and a little bit of introspection, might be stopped. That is the only way we can truly offer the suffering men, women, and children of Ukraine a prospect of ending this senseless violence.

It is an illusion to think that a looming nuclear inferno, which threatens to wipe out all life on this planet, will wake the masses up from their mass formation. The mass is an organism that thrives on death drive. Its ultimate goal is self-destruction. The person who slides into mass formation has already chosen death; the death of all others and their own death.

The only thing that can stop this tendency is the courage to speak the truth by those who feel that something is wrong with the war story. A mass formation always develops under a growing veil of illusion, a one-sided and misleading danger that attributes all the misfortune in the world to one object. It is that illusion that must be broken with words, words that are spoken from the realization of the limitation of all knowledge, from the realization that the truth cannot and should not be fully said, from the realization that the one who thinks and is different is ultimately also a human being, from the realization that the Other is only our enemy in illusion.

Mattias

It was an honor to speak at a place where so many remarkable individuals have preceded me, and at a moment when America is seeking its way to the future between feverish enthusiasm and wary anticipation. Many thanks, straight from the heart, to Hillsdale.

I ended in California, all the way in the South, invited by THINQ, a conservative association that appreciates my interpretation of the spirit of the times. It was the second time I spoke in their midst, and I feel the warmth and friendship growing.

The organization had arranged for me to stay for three days at one of the most beautiful resorts in the US, on the rocky coast of California. Normally, such stays aren't my thing – the prices are ridiculous, and I usually prefer to keep it simple.

After three days, I must say: there are worse things than staying at The Montage. I’m quite particular when it comes to food and wine, but I now know that there exists a cuisine that is truly American – not a failed imitation of French or any other cuisine – yet subtle and full of feeling, serving the diversity of nature on a plate.

As for wine, America still needs to find its self-confidence. They need to stop trying to imitate France and get French winemakers to work with French oak barrels on their best vineyards. The best American wine comes from American winemakers who use American oak to create red wine with subtle vanilla flavors. French wine gets ruined with American oak; American wine is brought to its highest level with it.

The second evening, when I went to the lobby for a glass of wine, the pianist asked me if he could play a song of my choice. “On the Nature of Daylight” – that’s the one I’d like. He said, “I don’t know it. Let me hear it.”

I found it a bit strange. A pianist who doesn’t know Max Richter’s most famous piece. I didn’t feel like using my phone in that lobby where the shine of the wood made me long for days gone by.

“Then try another one, Arvo Pärt, Spiegel im Spiegel.” He didn’t know that one either. I played both pieces for him on YouTube. To my surprise, he then played both pieces one after the other, with so much feeling that my eyes closed, and musical notes and wine flavors merged into a world where no boundaries existed. The waitress passed by: “He doesn’t actually know music, he never studied, but let him hear anything and he plays it perfectly.”

On the last day, the sun broke through the clouds. After my morning swim in the cold waters of the wintry Pacific Ocean, I looked with tingling skin towards Mexico. The sunlight sparkled on the choppy waves and cheered like Champagne pouring into a crystal goblet, welcoming freedom.

I turned around and looked towards Los Angeles. The sea had a color that might be my favorite color: the royal blue of Lapis Lazuli. In my mind, I couldn’t get further than the words, “How beautiful it is….”

The busiest months of the year are approaching now. But from time to time, you experience moments that you carry with you, moments that give you confidence that real beauty and goodness exist. Tomorrow, I will dive into the new semester, but for now, I’ll put this into a story. What has been expressed in words accompanies us more faithfully on the winding path of life.

Mattias