Of all the disagreements I’ve observed in recent years, that between the Belgian clinical psychologist, Mattias Desmet and the American psychiatrist, Peter Breggin strikes me as one of the most peculiar.
Dr. McCullough and I are staunch admirers of Dr. Breggin and we devoted an entire chapter of our book to his life and ideas. At the same time, I greatly enjoyed reading Professor Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
I was therefore happy to see Professor Desmet’s recent post Dear Dr. Breggin – let’s talk in which he wrote the following:
In a nutshell: Dr. Breggin believes that I am blaming the innocent victims of propaganda while excusing the propagandists. And it is not the first time I do so. According to him, I did exactly the same with my mass formation theory: blaming the innocent people and excusing the criminal elite.
…We have different opinions indeed. Unlike [what] Dr. Breggin seems to believe, I don’t think that the problems of this society can be reduced to the actions of an ‘evil elite’. We are all part of the problem, also the people who fall prey to the actions of ‘the elite’. Dr. Breggin seems to interpret this as ‘victim blaming’. In my opinion, I rather make people aware of the fact that they are not powerless. We are all part of the problem and hence we can all contribute to the solution.
In my interview with Dr. Breggin a couple of years ago, he mentioned Professor Desmet’s ideas in passing. If my memory serves, Dr. Breggin remarked that constant, frightening propaganda is extremely effective at manipulating the general public. Thus, the public’s response to propaganda should not be understood as an expression of mass psychosis, but as a perfectly understandable response to being psychologically conditioned by predatory manipulators.
It seems to me that the widespread irrational behavior we observed during the pandemic was indeed largely the result of manipulation by the “Global Predators” that Dr. Breggin expertly describes in his book. However, while our dreadful elites certainly played an instrumental role in fomenting the disaster, we also witnessed a stunning lack of virtue, prudence, intellect, and courage on the part of much of the population. Many people were all too willing to go along with the tyrannical nonsense inflicted on us by our rulers. That is why my circle of friends is now considerably smaller than it was prior to 2020. Life is too short to spend with avid boneheads.
The fact that many people did not go along with the tyrannical nonsense shows that resisting the barrage of propaganda is possible. Indeed, it seems to me that learning to identify and resist propaganda is not only possible, but is the responsibility of every adult citizen who aspires to live as a free citizen in a country with limited government.
I hope Dr. Breggin will accept Professor Desmet’s invitation to have a conversation. Even if they continue to disagree about things, it would surely be a fascinating talk.
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Author: John Leake
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