Mattias reply on Facebook:

Dear friends and followers, I had intended during my holiday to leave social media for what it is as much as possible, but sometimes people make a small exception. Over the past week, I've been repeatedly sent the same review of my book, a review by American psychiatrist Peter Breggin and his wife Ginger Ross Breggin. I finally decided to read that review. It only took me a few lines to understand that Peter and his wife are not entirely happy with my theory of mass formation and totalitarianism. Among other things, they accuse me of trying to hide the fact that there is a major conspiracy going on and that I don't really know what mass formation is. How could masses be formed in the corona crisis, people were not even allowed to physically come together? I would say, a crowd doesn't have to come together physically at all to be a crowd. Jacques Ellul described this very aptly in his book Propaganda. The modern masses are almost always so-called 'lonely masses', where the individuals are all sitting at home on their couches, but through the mass media are all gripped by the same images, representations, stories. It is even in that state of solitary mass formation that individuals are maximally susceptible to indoctrination and propaganda. However, Breggin and Breggin's critiques go a lot further than that. I would be 'victim blaming' and purposefully demoralize 'the counter-movement' (my book is not what it seems, I am paid to burden the counter-movement with guilt, I am, in short, controlled opposition):

'Desmet's book is a dangerous Trojan horse calculated to keep us feeling confused and self-blaming and for giving hostile forces ammunition for discrediting both the suffering of people under COVID-19 and for dismissing anyone who researches and finds conspiracies behind COVID-19. It pushes a psychology and philosophy in which human beings are devoid of individual value and the ability to make rational choices. It strengthens the enemies of freedom while discouraging research into the enormously organized, highly coordinated threat of growing totalitarianism throughout the world. Worse yet, it could discourage well-meaning individuals from taking action to defend our freedoms — and that appears to be a major unwritten purpose behind his book.'

With some sense of humor: In this way a person learns something new about himself! Dear Peter, dear Ginger Ross, maybe we should have a virtual cup of tea together and talk quietly from person to person? Send me an email and you can ask me any questions you want, I will answer to the best of my ability. We can even make a podcast about it together. Indeed, I don't think that the world is destroyed in the first place because of a great conspiracy - society is destroyed in the first place because of a certain ideology, a certain view of man and the world. It is only in the second instance that all kinds of institutions and persons build up power and get the population under their control. And the population is indeed not innocent of that. Elite and population are a reflection of each other, both determined by and gripped by the same ideology. Seeing the population as a passive victim will not help the population. The solution to the impasse we are in is not to forcibly eliminate any elite. On the contrary: that is the recipe for self-destruction. The solution does consist in increasing the space for humanity. So is what you call 'the counter-movement'. This countermovement will not be destroyed by being infiltrated by a conspiracy controlled opposition. If the counter-movement of anything is damaged, it is the fact that, now that their object of fear has faded into the background for a while, they are at each other's throats and no longer make the effort to speak and talk to each other. listen. So feel free to tell me your story and I'll listen. For my part, I will also make an effort to tell my story as best I can, this time formulated as a response to your critiques and reservations. Mattias