Dear friends,
Below you find a podcast with Naomi Wolf. I rarely publish the podcasts I participate in on my Substack page, but this time I do. It is all about the theoretical and intellectual background of my mass formation theory and in this respect it is unique content. I appreciate Dr. Wolf’s kindness to invite me to a podcast with her, and, much more importantly, the way in which she has spoken out throughout the last few years.
I read her Substacks often and I truly admire her courage in many respects, for instance when she publicly changes her opinion if she feels her conscience demands it of her. I remember a Substack in which she said that after meeting Donald Trump, she realised that she had been misled by the media in forming her opinion about him. She noticed that the image the media created of him was not so correct.
I've never met Donald Trump in person and my vote would rather go to someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but I can tell you one thing: ever since I saw how the media created an image about myself, I am much more reluctant to go along with what the media says about other people. Given the intellectual environment that Dr. Wolf comes from, I know it takes lion courage to articulate these words about Trump.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Mattias
Or: https://rumble.com/v3is9jo-what-is-mass-formation-the-psychology-of-totalitarianism-with-dr.-mattias-d.html
I don't know how many times I've re-read Naomi Wolf's book, The Bodies of Others. Her analysis of the evil that's been permeating our societies is profound. For those who haven't read it, I did a short review on it a while ago. https://thorsteinn.substack.com/p/the-bodies-of-others-by-naomi-wolf
Peter Breggin is a descendant of the tribe that wrote the Middle Eastern Abrahamic religious tradition. In the Holy Bible, which was written in the Middle East by Middle Easterners and for Middle Easterners when said Middle Easterners were at the superstitious, magical/mythological level of psychological development, roughly the level of late elementary school/middle school, this book states that "In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was god..." and so forth. Mattias Desmet is a man who states that words, ideas, logic, reason, and the material/mechanistic way of looking at life can never capture the 'essence' of life. It is my sense that this dichotomy is at the very crux of their contention.
Seeing what following the dogmatic 'WORD' in the Middle Eastern book can bring forth, i.e. Gaza, I stand firmly with Mattias Desmet and adamantly against Peter Breggin.