Mattias Desmet and Aaron Kheriaty: Understanding the Age of Loneliness

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] America is facing an epidemic of loneliness, and it’s as bad for people’s health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, says U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy.

In the past two decades, there’s been a marked rise in suicides and “deaths of despair.”

What’s fueling these trends of social fragmentation, isolation, and atomization? And how are they linked to broader political and social trends?

In this episode, two of the world’s leading thinkers on bioethics and group psychology join together with me for the first time.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a former psychiatry professor and director of the medical ethics program at the University of California Irvine Medical School. He’s the author of “The New Abnormal.”

Mattias Desmet is a professor of psychology at Ghent University and author of “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

*Big thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Patriot Gold Group. Check them out here: https://ept.ms/3sr5LhH

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Aaron Kheriaty, Mattias Desmet, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Aaron Kheriaty:
It’s great to be with you, and it’s great to be with my new friend, Mattias.

Mattias Desmet:
Likewise. Happy to be with you, Aaron. Jan, thanks for having us on.

Mr. Jekielek:
You were together in a session here at this Brownstone Conference this year, and you brought up the issue, and this is something we’ve both talked about in previous interviews I’ve talked about with both of you, is this issue of loneliness. And as the years have gone on, I keep thinking about it as a foundational issue. So I want to start by discussing that. And of course, atomization is this concept that comes from that. So maybe let’s start with you, Aaron. You actually mentioned that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said himself that there was this crisis or a huge epidemic of loneliness, which is very much the case.

Mr. Kheriaty:
That’s right. Murthy is a man with whom I have many disagreements, but on this point, he was absolutely right. It was announced in 2018, somewhere around then, that there was this epidemic of loneliness in the United States. And he wasn’t just using that word metaphorically to describe a social phenomenon. He was looking at it as Surgeon General from a health-related phenomenon and looking at robust data that loneliness produces negative health outcomes on the same level as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, that this epidemic of loneliness was as serious in terms of compromising Americans’ physical and mental health, as was heart disease, cancer, and the other things that the surgeon general traditionally pays attention to.

In connection with that, there were a couple of researchers at Princeton, Case and Deaton, who were doing a lot of work around that time on so-called deaths of despair. Deaths of despair are deaths by suicide, alcohol-related illnesses, and drug overdose, which since 1999, had been on the rise, so about a 20-year rise in deaths of despair. Drug overdose deaths in 1999 were 20,000 a year, which is a tragic number. That had ballooned to 70,000 a year by the year 2019.

Then with COVID lockdowns and our response to COVID, we basically threw gasoline on that fire. After the lockdowns in 2021, that 70,000 number jumped to 100,000 a year. The same thing happened with alcohol-related deaths, 69,000 a year pre-pandemic to 99,000 a year post-pandemic. And that crisis has continued to worsen. Tragically, the suicide numbers from the CDC have continued to go up every year.

So basically, all age groups, with the exception of the very elderly, those over the age of 75, all age groups in both men and women have seen marked rise in suicide in the last 20 to 25 years. It has hit adolescent girls especially hard with a tripling of suicide rates among adolescent girls. With all of these tragic, horrifying numbers, there is a devastated family. Behind each and every one of those statistics of a ruined life is this epidemic of loneliness, which is contributing to social fragmentation, isolation, being locked behind a screen, and having fewer face-to-face interactions.

If you asked polling questions from some Gallup data back in the 1980s, if you asked people, how many Americans have someone in their life with whom they can discuss important matters? A family member, a friend, a close colleague at work. A majority of Americans said that they had someone, three out of five, to four out of five. Today, that number is much lower. And you know, this is a proxy. There’s many ways of trying to measure loneliness and social isolation. That study was just one of them.

But I think all of this suggests a profound crisis in society. The causes are complex. Technological developments have certainly played a role, but I would say certain social and ideological developments have also played a role. Like, what’s driving us to embrace this technology? The technology itself is not necessarily alone leading to all of these changes. Why have we as a society pursued the use of technologies in certain ways that lead to these kinds of problems?

Mr. Jekielek:
Mattias, you’re looking at this from a different vantage point. Perhaps I’ll get you to build on that now.

Mr. Desmet:
Yes, I think it’s very interesting to see how loneliness, to a certain extent, is a spontaneously emerging phenomenon. As Aaron mentioned, the use of technology plays a role. It’s very highly correlated with use of technology.
The more technology used, the more lonely people feel in a country, which is surprising, of course, because we always believe that technology connects us to each other.

That’s true at the level of the exchange of information, but it disconnects us at the level of the resonating bond between humans. So it destroys the resonating bond to a large extent. So that’s one thing, like it’s a spontaneously emerging phenomenon as a consequence of the increasing use of technology.

What is also very interesting, I believe, is that sometimes it is intentionally created like that is what Hannah Arendt said totalitarian leaders can only seize control in a society where a lot of people feel lonely. They need loneliness. It spontaneously emerged and was used by totalitarian leaders. They just noticed that their propaganda was very efficient because there was a little bit of loneliness. Once people feel lonely, people are very vulnerable to propaganda.

A new type of mass emerged in the 20th century, which Jacques Ellul called the lonely mass. In medieval times, there were also mass formations, but they were physical masses. People had to meet physically in order to experience this kind of group dynamic that I refer to as mass formation.

Mass formation has always existed, but in the 20th century it became stronger because of the emergence of mass media and propaganda, but also because much more people felt lonely. And in this way the propaganda really kicked in, became very successful and led to a new kind of mass, a lonely mass, where people did no longer have to meet physically to form a mass, but could form a mass while they were all sitting in a lonely state in their houses, because they were all infused by the same narratives through the mass media. And the interesting thing is the following.

As soon as a totalitarian leader or a totalitarian system can use loneliness to seize control of the population, the first thing it will always do, according to Hannah Arendt, is replace loneliness by isolation, physical isolation, meaning that it will try to impose travel restrictions. It will try to prevent people from meeting like Stalin did with more than two persons,
because they know if you can use loneliness and replace it by physical isolation, preventing people from meeting physically, then their propaganda will be extremely successful. You have perfect control of propaganda.

So we can see that this atomization of society on the one hand was a spontaneous process. That’s the most important thing I believe. It was a spontaneously emerging process as a consequence of the industrialization of the world, the use of technology. But it was also sometimes intentionally and artificially created by totalitarian leaders.

And then there is this last thing that I would want to add to that, and it is that we really have to try to understand the complex relationship between loneliness and narcissism, because they are related to each other.
And that’s the deepest psychological level. That’s the root cause of the phenomenon of the emergence of loneliness in our society, like something that I will try to describe in a tangible way in my next book.

Our modern worldview started to emerge somewhere in the 16th to17th century, when human beings left the religious view of man and the world behind and replaced it by the rationalist, materialist view on man, the world which believed that it’s not so much God that reveals the truth. We have to construct the truth ourselves by observing the world with our eyes and trying to understand the rational connections between the facts that we establish with our eyes. That metaphysical revolution in which the religious-feeling men in the world were replaced by the materialistic-feeling men in the world, basically boiled down to this.

The human gaze, the eyes, the focus changed. It was no longer focused on our ethical awareness and ethical rules and stuff. No, it was focused outwards. We started to believe that the real world is the world that we could observe with our eyes. And that was a moment where we also started to believe at the level of our own identity that we could see who we are in the mirror. We are our outer mirror image, our ideal image.

And that at the same time, immediately, on the one hand, isolated the human being from other human beings because in all human interactions, we were like a few percentages, which was enough to have a substantial impact, more focused on our own ideal image, meaning that we couldn’t
see the image of the other anymore. We resonated less with the other because we were more focused on our own outer ideal image and our own ego and that the ego is literally like a superficial shell of your own being.

And if you invest a lot of psychological energy, if you focus your attention on your outer ideal image, you get disconnected from the other because you do not mirror the other’s image anymore and there is no spontaneous emergence of empathy anymore, so the human bones get weaker, the real human bones. That at the same time explains it’s the rationalist-feeling men in the world that led to isolation and narcissism.

Mr. Kheriaty:
You could see that in living color as young people are curating and airbrushing their image and projecting it on Instagram. And they can’t experience the real being together with other people in spontaneous, convivial friendship and relationship. You know, young people going to a dance and the whole purpose of the dance is to take pictures and post them. Otherwise, it’s like it didn’t happen, right?

And another thing that happens in that context is that one’s own interior life disappears. And so the possibility for real human friendship, intimacy, and connection that Matthias is describing also disappears because it’s one person’s character armor, which is a psychoanalytic term that the analysts 100 years ago used to describe the narcissistic personality. It was characterized by this hardening, one person’s character armor bumping up against another person’s character armor and society increasingly isolated and then characterized by conflict when people are together or are trying to connect.

The other thing I’ll say just to riff on Mattias’ comments about the rise of a kind of rationalism over really the last 500 years is that the philosophy of Karl Marx. And I’m not talking about his economic theories. I’m talking about Marx’s metaphysics, his view of ultimately the world and how we know things and what human beings are. I mean, the first thing he said is basically, there is no such thing as human nature. We are what we make.

And the whole project of rationalism and its kind of apotheosis in the 19th century was that we can recreate ourselves, we can recreate the world, we can recreate ourselves by recreating the world. That was basically the Marxist revolutionary program. And there are no already given elements in the world or in human nature that need to be respected and regarded or treated with a kind of contemplative gaze, everything needs to be subjected to our rationalist control. This leads to a top-down managerialist society of total control and totalizing surveillance.

It leads to extreme ideologies like transhumanism that begin from the premise that there is no such thing as human nature. We could just recreate ourselves and become demigods or bigger, faster, stronger through the use of, let’s say, biotechnology or nanotechnology or other technological enhancements. And this program, I would argue, and Mattias, you could say if you disagree, ends up not being enhanced. It doesn’t actually make us better. It certainly doesn’t make us happier, as the deaths of despair are suggesting.

It ends up being dehumanizing because we aren’t disembodied ghosts in a machine. We are not reprogrammable software. We are human beings. We are embodied, enfleshed spirits, if you will, that need to attend to all those different levels of our humanity, and that need to connect with one another in real face-to-face bodily encounters, where all of my senses are engaged in, and my memory and my imagination are engaged in a real encounter
with another person. And these things are stripped away.

And we’re left with one of our senses, the sense of sight or the sense of sound that is being denuded by technology when we’re interacting over Zoom. We don’t have the physical presence of the other person and all the subtleties that go along with that. So we’re in the process of creating this unreal world and then trying to conform ourselves to a kind of virtual unreality that we were never built for. That can only lead to unhappiness and misery and all kinds of downstream social problems.

Mr. Jekielek:
I definitely want to talk more about this relationship between narcissism and loneliness. I’d never frankly thought about that at all, but it makes a lot of sense given what you’re just saying. But there’s two things that just struck me. One of them is this spontaneous rise of loneliness through technology. It’s curious that a lot of that, these masses, it’s all mediated. I don’t know if it’s ironic, or just obviously through technology, right? So it’s almost like the connection gets, to use your word, denuded through the fact that a lot of it seems to be mediated through technology. So it makes sense you would prevent physical contact at some level.

The other thing that struck me is this cause and effect question. Is it with the totalitarians taking advantage of the spontaneous rise of loneliness, could it be the cause and effect is reversed, in fact, that the technology itself gives rise to more totalitarian tendencies because of these kinds of behaviors? I’d like to get either of you to comment.

Mr. Kheriaty:
I think it runs in both directions. So the technological developments obviously have an impact, but also the ideologies drive the technological developments and the widespread embrace of those technologies. So you think about lockdowns during COVID, which is the most extreme example of what Mattias was describing before. I mean, the 20th century totalitarian dictators from Stalin to Hitler never dreamed of such rigid controls.
I mean, they never told people to stay six feet apart. They never told people that they couldn’t go to, you know, couldn’t go outside or go to work.

So the world globally and supposedly free Western democratic societies embraced a level of control and organized loneliness that had never been seen before. And the question is why? And some people have pointed out, well, if the laptop class had not, you know not already had available Zoom technology, then lockdowns never would have been possible. There’s certainly truth to that.

But I think also we have been conditioned for decades into thinking that it’s possible to live a human and humane life, staying in my room and ordering my food from people that I will never actually see, and actually never encountering a real person face to face. Somehow human beings globally had developed the belief that it was actually possible and in some cases even desirable to do that. And I think it’s a very complex question to ask. How did we get to that point where something that would have sounded insane to people 50 years ago was something that was embraced with very few examples of dissent and pushback, at least at the level of cultural
elites.

Mr. Desmet:
Yes, of course. How did we get to that point? Maybe this first, like if you look at it through the lens of just a medical emergency situation necessary to save people’s lives, then the lockdowns have nothing to do with totalitarianism. But I think it’s clear that you have to look at it through a different lens as well, at least, and see it in a in a wider project where they want to introduce 15-minute cities, a digi-cosmos where people don’t have to leave their house anymore, where they can travel to China or anywhere in virtual reality. Then you see a different picture emerge, of course.

Exactly how did we come to this point where people do accept this? That’s a very good question. It was clear that the human bond had already become very painful for most people. Most people felt lonely, most people suffered from anxiety. I believe 25% of the world population deals with the psychiatric disorder, which almost always is part of a social problem, a problem in the connection with other people.

So many people, like many young people in Japan, don’t have sex anymore. Many young people just prefer virtual reality over in-person contacts and conversations. It is something that is very enticing, the use of your mobile phone. Mobile phones are our major addiction and the most dangerous one definitely in our era. You can see how throughout the last two, maybe three centuries, the social fabric deteriorated step after step. The introduction of television and radio reduced the number of in-person contacts we had, maybe by 50% or more, and then the introduction of the internet with another 30%.

The disappearance of the physical labor of working together in a physical way also destroyed the direct contact between human beings. Then you start to understand how suddenly people who just because of their blind belief in this rational system, in this rationalist worldview, and their blind striving towards rational control and manipulation of nature in general and society.

These people started to feel that maybe the next step could be taken and that we slowly got used to the fact that maybe it was better for everyone that people stayed in their houses from now on, better for nature, better for climate change. and better because it will protect you from dangerous viruses. So that’s indeed the situation we find ourselves in now. If we do not start to really think about how we can escape it, I believe humanity might end up in a very well-organized prison.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a bizarre thing to think about, and that is a very dark future.

Mr. Kheriaty:
There’s a real lack of intellectual humility today. Behind these converging ideologies and converging uses of technologies, there is a lack of self-awareness and understanding that the world is enormously and beautifully complex and complicated. The hyper-rationalist ideology says,
no, we can figure everything out and then we can put the really smart people into positions of permanent power.

They can, in a top-down sort of managerialist control, organized fashion, tell everyone what to do, and figure out all the dangers and minimize them, and refine all the pleasures and maximize them. And it’s a very naive view of the cosmos and of the world that we live in and the immediate lived environment, which is enormously complex beyond our reckoning and beautifully beyond our ability to fully comprehend it.

So science, and I should say, and I’m sure Mattias would say the same thing, that both of us are fans of science as a process for discovering more and learning more about the natural world. And I’m not opposed to technology as a way of managing our lives in the environment, but to put those things at the service of human beings. To put those things at the service of the actual complex world we live in is going to require a very different path we are going down now.

Mr. Desmet:
It is the strangest thing. But in the beginning, scientific discourse initially was a fine example of truth-telling and truth-searching. It was a small minority of people who went against a dominant discourse, which hadn’t become in many respects a dogmatic religious discourse. So this small group of people went against it and that’s exactly what truth speech does. It destroys a common illusion.

But as science as a consequence of the first scientific discoveries became dominant in society, a scientific discourse slowly became dominant. And that’s what always happens with discourses that become dominant. It got perverted, of course, because people started to use scientific discourse to make a career, to earn money, and the discourse got perverted. That’s what always happens.

Most discourses start as truth speech and they turn into the opposite, into a fake discourse. That is something that happened in science. Somewhere along the road, what science the academic world produces has nothing to do with truth speech. Sometimes it happens, exceptionally. Let me add one more thing to that.

Another very important phenomenon is the following. Like as soon as science emerged and in its wake the rationalist, materialist human being in the world emerged, people started to believe that rational understanding should be the guiding principle in life, that we should not think in the first place about whether something we did was good or wrong in a moral and ethical context.

No, we started to think about what was the smartest way to do things. So as rational knowledge accumulated, our ethical awareness declined. The combination of the two is extremely dangerous because rational knowledge accumulation of natural, rational knowledge makes you more powerful. It gives you more power.

At the same time, if your ethical awareness declines you have the recipe for evil. That’s what happens. The first thing you could see was that these western countries who had this scientific knowledge at their disposal started to colonize the world and started to use it to oppress others.

Mr. Kheriaty:
Auschwitz itself was a hyper-rationalized environment of hyper-efficient death, as were the atomic bombs that we built during World War II as maybe premier examples of what you’re describing there. And I think we’ve moved now, especially in the context of institutionalized science and higher education, moved away from authentic science and the ideal of science as the disinterested and self-skeptical pursuit of knowledge and hypothesis and testing and refutation.

We’ve moved away from science into an ideology that I call scientism, which is different from science. Scientism is the non-scientific claim smuggled through the back door that science is the only valid form of knowledge. That claim contradicts itself, because science is not the only valid form of knowledge. It’s a metaphysical claim that attempts to hide itself.

But the exclusion of moral knowledge, the exclusion of religious, spiritual, moral, metaphysical perspectives, the diminution of the humanities, of the arts and of literature and so forth in the context of what’s really important in our education system. All of this points to a kind of totalitarian conception of science where science attempts or people attempt to monopolize what counts as knowledge and rationality in the name of science. And of course, when you do this, you can anoint whoever you want to be the spokesperson for science, bringing the unassailable conclusions down from on high.

And you get people saying, people in positions of authority in our society saying absurd things like, I am the science and he who questions me questions the science, which no real credible scientist says such an absurdity. It’s important, so as not to throw out the baby with
the bathwater, that we draw this distinction between science as a method and as a way of life almost, as a mindset and a particular pursuit that is good, and scientism, which is hardened into an exclusionary, monopolistic ideology that has actually nothing to do with the disinterested pursuit of truth and everything to do with deploying power in a very authoritarian way.

Mr. Jekielek:
Is it a foregone conclusion that, you know, as the rational view of the human being or perhaps the universe entirely grows, the moral view declines? Or can there be a synergy?

Mr. Desmet:
A rational view is completely opposite to an irrationalist view. That’s a strange thing. Rationalism is the illusion that ultimately you can grasp the essence of the world of nature and everything around us in rational categories, but that’s not true. Science rejected that idea. The essence of things always transcends rational understanding. The strange thing is as soon as you fall prey to that illusion as soon as you fall prey to the belief that through your rational understanding you will be capable of controlling and manipulating everything you will be capable of becoming god.

For instance, read Yuval Harari’s book, Homo Deus. That’s rationalist. It is the belief that in the end you will be capable of understanding, controlling, and manipulating the essence of life. This rationalist illusion always leads humanity into complete absurdity of totalitarian systems. It leads to complete irrationality. If you’re really loyal to rational understanding and walk the path of rationality, step by step, you will soon arrive at the end where you will see the limit of rational understanding and say, here we have to move on.

Here we have to find a new way of knowing, which is what Einstein talked about. It’s this sixth sense where Samurai culture talked about. It’s where everyone knows that real knowledge transcends rational knowledge. So that’s something extremely important, I think. I consider myself to be very, very rational, but I’m not a rationalist at all.

Mr. Kheriaty:
There’s an aesthetic dimension to science. Einstein himself talked about seeing the truth of his theory of relativity and his great contribution to science and embracing it not because he had irrefutable experimental proof for it. That actually came later. That was some experiments done at the University of Washington having to do with light being bent by gravity that confirmed his theory. But he embraced the theory initially because he said it was beautiful. Not because he had an irrefutable experiment, because it was beautiful. Because it was intuitively elegant.

Because, as he liked to put it, God did not play dice with the universe. It was almost a mystical intuition. Then you can ask, how do we have the scientific method, but how do good scientists generate good hypotheses? You stop and think about that for a moment, right? The process of generating a good hypothesis, something that hasn’t yet been demonstrated by an experiment, that has to involve but some non-rational or supra-rational, intuitive, feeling toward, empathetic, something with the subject that you’ve been studying that most scientists probably couldn’t put it into words and describe it to you or it probably would be difficult to teach unless you’ve got a knack for this sort of thing.

Mr. Desmet:
You need sincerity. That’s something that Einstein literally said in a foreword of a book by Max Planck. He said, many people think that science is born from rational thinking. It’s not. It’s born from a capacity for einfühlung, which is a German term which means feeling into what you observe. In a speech he gave at an American university he said, the best starting point for science is cosmic religious awareness.

Mr. Kheriaty:
Yes, that’s right.

Mr. Desmet:
As you said, relativity theory was not born from experimenting or rational considerations. It was born from a certain intuition, from a certain feeling for aesthetical sublime theory.

Mr. Kheriaty:
So real science, not so much the fake nonsense that it’s turned out in our so-called peer-reviewed journals today, but real science and very significant contributions to our understanding of things, is perhaps not as far apart from art or even religion as our contemporary ideologies might have us think.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to build on this concept of sincerity that you mentioned. It seems to me like a lot of things boil down to people acting with sincerity and figuring out what that means in this strange technology, lonely, mediated world that we live in. And there seems to be, at least to my eye, a significant lack of that. And you seek it, you know it when you see it, and you go after it because you’re missing it. What do you mean by finding sincerity?

Mr. Desmet:
Somewhere in the beginning of our conversation, I referred to the fact that loneliness and narcissism are actually two branches of the same tree, that they are both a consequence of human rationalist hubris that automatically this rationalism leads to two things like interconnected things uh loneliness of disconnectedness and narcissism and in the in detail like what we’ve seen throughout the last 200 years is a triumph of the ego like the ego became more and more powerful in the world that means this this
identification of the human being with its own outer socially rewarded ideal image.

So that ego emerged, became stronger and stronger throughout the last centuries. And sincerity is exactly the act through which you punch a hole in your ego. Literally, speaking sincerely means that you reveal something, that you show something that doesn’t match the ideal image. It is something people usually hide behind their outer ideal image and you can almost feel that physically.

My next book talks about that. You can almost feel it physically. Sometimes you are in a social situation and you feel that everyone is buying into something and you do not agree. It doesn’t feel right to you. If you take this courageous decision to articulate what you feel, you know two things. You will destroy your ideal image in that group. You will say something that destroys the socially shared ideal image. That’s really the act. You feel it almost physically in which you push something that resonates in your body through the outer ideal image. You literally punch a hole in your outer ideal image in your ego.

Then the effect is that there is usually if the other people can open themselves a little bit can put aside their own prejudices and and and clinging to social ideal images and stuff if they can open a little bit you will see how the words that you articulated from your resonating strings of your body go through the whole and father’s ego and make them resonate and that. And that’s why sincerity is the only remedy for a society sick of lies, propaganda, manipulation, and deception.

Mr. Kheriaty:
The possibility for that relies on a more ancient philosophical doctrine that all of us participate in. The Greek word was logos, which sometimes would be translated as a shared rationality, but it’s sometimes translated as word, order, reason, intelligibility. All of us participate in a transcendent logos that allows us to communicate with one another, to engage in a shared, sincere pursuit of truth, and allows us to communicate that and to share that in a non-coercive way, that the authentic pursuit and finding of truth does not happen through coercion. It doesn’t need the methods of propaganda.

When the light of my intellect sees that 2 plus 2 equals 4, or Mattias demonstrates for me a proof of the Pythagorean theorem, and the light goes on, and I see that it must be so, that light of truth compels my intellect, but without forcing my will. It’s compelling, but in a way that respects my freedom.

I think the contemporary crisis that we are currently facing in the world, aspects of which we sort of touched on in this interview, is also an opportunity because many people are hungry for that. Many people have grown kind of sick and nauseated by a steady diet of propaganda that somewhere deep inside intuitively they know is not right, even if they feel that they have to parrot these falsehoods. And that act that you described so beautifully of taking off the mask and sincerely speaking the truth, which may be very simple in a particular situation.

It may be just stepping out of a group and saying, no, we can’t do that, that’s wrong, that’s not okay, because that’s not what we do to people. Or just speaking some simple moral truth that everyone in the room ought to know, but no one is acknowledging for whatever reason, because of institutional or social forces or ideological forces that are getting in the way. That’s very attractive. People are hungry. If courageous people begin trying to live in that way, that will grow. People will find one another. We can then begin to create small communities of people who are trying to live differently.

Mr. Desmet:
Yes, I agree. We have to practice the art of sincere speech with the same perseverance as the Samurai practiced in martial arts, step by step, growing, and becoming stronger. It was as Mahatma Gandhi did it, step by step every day, trying to become more sincere. Try to practice the art of sincere speech. I was wondering, Aaron, would there be something we disagree about, do you think? Could we find something?

Mr. Kheriaty:
I don’t know. Maybe if we started talking about God, we might find some disagreements. We haven’t gone there yet, but we’ll definitely have to do this again.

Mr. Desmet:
By the way we could come back to logos. Also very interesting is the greek concept of parrhesia, bold speech in a public space, which is always very risky. The ancient Greeks said the one who speaks the truth might be hated. There is a good chance of that because he destroys the illusions where people find their stability, so they will be angry with them. But the ancient Greeks said if there is nobody anymore who lives up to the ethical duty of parrhesia, of speaking out these painful truths in public space, then society is ready for the plague.

Mr. Jekielek:
Should we give a homework assignment to all of us here as to what is sincere?

Mr. Kheriaty:
Jan, we’ve also talked about the issue of government censorship. I’ve talked about it in relation to totalitarianism, that the starting point for all totalitarianism is the prohibition of questions and the prohibition of dissent and the monopolizing of what counts as knowledge by the ideology and then excluding people who voice dissenting opinions. And at the end point of that process, the external concentration camps and mass surveillance and secret police are no longer necessary because people have so internalized the ideology that a perfected totalitarian system wouldn’t require those external sort of forcible methods of conformity because
everyone is informing on everyone else, and everyone’s surveilling everyone else.

Mr. Jekielek:
Everyone’s controlling themselves to not do that.

Mr. Kheriaty:
Right. They are self-censoring. A practical homework assignment would be to notice the times when you don’t say what you think. I’m not advocating that you say every thought that comes into your head all the time in every social situation. Obviously, there’s discretion and there’s propriety. But I think we have gone very far down the path of getting to the point where in certain social situations, we almost never say what we think on really important matters. We restrict ourselves to trivialities.

We need to recognize when there may be moments where, no, this is a time for me to actually say what I believe to be the case. It may feel a little bit risky and it may have negative social consequences, actually. But in a society where no one does that, we are ripe for misery and we’re perfect fodder for authoritarian rulers to exercise totalitarian forms of control. So push back against self-censorship. Notice when you’re biting your tongue simply to go along, to get along, and find ways here and there strategically to try to push back against that and to engage in the kind of sincere speech that Mattias described so beautifully.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mattias, a final thought we finish up?

Mr. Desmet:
It’s just as simple as that, I think, that every time you speak sincerely,you inevitably will go through the dark night of the soul to use a concept of the great mysticist.

Mr. Kheriaty:
John of the Cross.

Mr. Desmet:
Yes, John of the Cross. Thank you. It means that if you speak sincerely, you will inevitably lose something in the world of appearances. And you will win something in the real world. You have to accept that and go for the real world.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mattias Desmet, Aaron Kheriaty, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Kheriaty:
Thank you.

Mr. Desmet:
Thanks for having us.