'THE PARADOX IN MASS FORMATION THEORY' DESERVES A PLACE AT THE STAKE TO BE BURNT!

This article is about James Paul Roolvink his book 'The paradox in mass formation theory' (https://uitgeverijaspekt.nl/product/de-paradox-in-de-theorie-over-massavorming/), he says a number of things that go directly against our (moral) intuitions.? Among other things, the author claims, that 'mass people', his word for people formed by mass formation/the masses/the crowds, do not lose their self-consciousness in the masses, so their self-consciousness is not hypnotised, but that mass people actually find/constitute their self-consciousness in the masses which leads us to conclude that mass formation is an even more dangerous process than previously thought; that atrocities by mundane mass people stem from their high morality; that morality is profane and that framing those people who go against the truth of the masses in terms 'conspiracy thinker', ‘dissident’, and so on, should instead be seen as a sign of humanity. (Those non-main stream ‘dissidents’ who go against the truth, the narrative, of the masses also show a sign of humanity in call mass men ‘mass men’ or dormant ‘sheep’). These assertions find their grounding in an idea of how self-awareness arises and what layering self-awareness has. In short, the self-evident intuitions are certainly not refuted without reason.

That the author thinks against all main stream and non-main stream ways of thinking makes the text below difficult on a first reading, but also makes it very valuable. After all, there is still something at stake, namely our own intuitions (or preconceptions) about what is true. A difficulty that lies in having to think against the grain/stream of our own self-awareness, because the book is also precisely about what all 'goes on' before we are self-aware.?? ???

How to read: read it, read it again, put it away and after week read it again. Even though you will understand a lot on the first reading anyway, you will really understand a lot more on a second and third reading, especially if you let the text sink in for a while.

This book deserves to end up on the fire step, because then it will get the attention it deserves! (25-4-2023).

This article is based on interview questions by Maurice de Hond among many things a famous pollster. This article (that is translated into English with a translation machine) was the bases, the ground, for a much smaller article on his website that has been translated as well and can be found on LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/paradox-mass-formation-theory-james-roolvink-7lhae%3FtrackingId=x6Sc428bRoWgAaOf0fKO5Q%253D%253D/?trackingId=x6Sc428bRoWgAaOf0fKO5Q%3D%3D.

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Maurice. What intrigues me is that now that the panic about covid is out of society people still don't tilt towards the 'camp' that retrospectively got it right in many cases about the danger of covid, the existence of aerosols, the importance of ventilation and so on.? During the covid period, I expected people to be open to rational argument once the panic had passed, but I was wrong.

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How do you explain that the panic, the fear, was apparently not the reason for not being open to argumentation during the covid period after all?

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So, in fact, you observe that it has nothing to do with rational argumentation. That is an entirely correct and very sharp observation.

Let me state, not argue, that those who follow the government and its institutions are ‘mass people’. A ‘mass man’, a (wo)man of the masses/crowds, is not a lonely more or less self-aware human being, as Desmet somewhat suggests, who manages to rid himself of his loneliness by heroically fighting together with others against a government-designated fearful object, covid in this case, combined with providing a strategy on how to defeat this fearful object so that you know in advance that you have the best strategy to win. By fighting a holy battle together against covid, you can bond together fraternally and the loneliness is dispelled. You can then say as an outsider who is not fighting in this battle that people are losing 'themselves' and that they are losing their self-awareness in merging into this mass(ive) battle, by merging into the masses.

If this is your explanatory framework then you are compelled to say that the warring 'insiders' cannot be rational outsiders in retrospect, i.e. after the covid period, because the government has given the mass man another fear-like object, i.e. the climate or the advancement of the 'Red Army' towards the West with yet another associated strategy, i.e. reducing nitrogen and sending weapons to Ukraine.

To be clear, the government is not made up of a bunch of manning conspirators in this 'desmetian' explanatory framework, but most of the drivers of the masses are also mass men themselves. They may be driving the population into this or that, but they are themselves being driven by a 'narrative', an 'ideology', a human and worldview, that tells them how the world works, what is true, what is right, and so on.

In short, from this explanatory framework, you simply haven't had time to take a breath and quietly reflect on all that happened during covid now and all because you have been thrown into a new battle. A battle you are eager to fight because you don't want to be lonely. Nor do you want to unwind because that would mean facing loneliness again.

The basic premise of this explanatory framework is: a self-conscious person in freedom self-consciously seeks out the masses in order to make his loneliness vanish successfully in the ritual of a battle. My premise is very similar to this, but with a subtle difference that makes my explanatory framework really quite different in the end. My premise is this: mass man does not lose his free self(consciousness) in the mass(es), but rather gains a self(consciousness) in the mass(es) and its mass(ive) struggle against a fear-like object (covid, inflation, war, asylum seekers, Russia). The mass man's self happens from within the masses.

To explain my premise, I would need many pages to explain how self-consciousness arises and that is certainly very interesting for those who do not shy away from long and deep thinking and also finally want to see the solution to the mind-body riddle. Of course, I cannot explain that in the context of this interview and so I ask you to assume for now that my premise is true. Consider it a 'hypothesis', as it were. If it is true then it means that if you reasonably challenge the 'narrative' of mass man with rational arguments, mass man literally feels in his living soul that he himself is under attack in his vitality. A rational argument may have the effect of hitting someone in the stomach. You think you are merely attacking a narrative, but the mass man really feels an attack on his or her self-consciousness, his living soul, his living organism, because the mass man accomplishes and maintains his self-consciousness in and through the narrative, which tells what a fearful object is and how to defeat it, and thereby win the battle. Mass man cannot self-consciously listen to arguments, because those arguments are like arrows shooting at his self(consciousness). Mass man literally does not hear you. Let this sink in for a moment what else this means. How can he hear you(r rational arguments) if you make him loose his self(consciousness) so he can only hear you, but not listen to you?

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Maurice. We can explain why people literally cannot listen to rational arguments, cannot see the evidence, even if you tell them. Reasonable speech then makes no sense.

What else can we do with this explanation or your explanatory framework?

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You can explain the vehemence with which the masses approached dissidents, like you Maurice, who did not believe in the narrative. You were portrayed not only as someone who has no clue about science and as an immoral person who wants to make a buck from his website via covid, but as a disgusting person. The attempted assassination of your character, your living soul, by the media (especially KRO pointer) is telling in this regard. Dissidents of the mass-narrative were and are seen as disgusting by mass people. Calling people disgusting is even worse than calling them immoral. Saying they are disgusting is essentially saying they are impure. The mass people, the people of the crowds, consider the dissidents (as purely) unclean. You cannot equate the unclean with the immoral. Let me first explain that briefly.

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The unclean has many meanings and can even be associated with the sacred and holy, but in this case, the unclean primarily means danger (for you as a living organism). A danger that is not rationally reasoned along the lines that being an unclean person makes you more immoral than the immoral because you not only kill others, including innocents, but also yourself by not wanting to wear a mouth mask or spread a theory that says good ventilation stops spread of viruses. You apparently hate life so much that you not only kill others with your immoral behaviour, but also consider your own life worth nothing. You hate life in itself. You are an unclean disgusting monster. ?

It is immoral for you to kill someone for a good political reason, even if you sacrifice yourself for the common good. It is disgusting if you go and shoot innocent toddlers for no reason, only that you feel lust for it, and then kill yourself, so that victims cannot be granted revenge either, mediated or not by the legal system. Intuitively, we immediately find that the second 'situation' is worse and are really disgusted by it.

The Nazis believed that the Jews were unclean, not because they would not wash with soap, but because they believed that the Jews and actually all religious people despised life in the hope of an afterlife that the Nazis did not believe in. Unclean is what weakens life and the Nazis also called a certain religious attitude to life unclean. The Nazis were very conscious about the term unclean and during covid this went very unconsciously, incidentally also from the side of the dissidents to the mass people, the people of the masses. Moreover, it turned out that there was still plenty of charity between people within the masses and the dissidents and the polarisation did not even lead to the will to kill. Even wanting to force the other to vaccinate could in some cases still be explained by 'charity' by thinking that what you think is best is what you want for another. So the difference between the impure/unclean and the immoral exists.?? ?

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A peaceful attack with reasonable arguments on the narrative of the masses is thus experienced by mass people as an attack on the self-conscious body and on the whole mass, the whole collective. A danger that is thus literally felt immediately in the body of mass people. It 'enters' so immediately that there is no time to rationalise why someone would be disgusting. You immediately feel the disgust rising. Only after the unquenchable disgust can you start 'rationalising'. When you attack the narrative of mass man you attack his self-awareness, his living soul. The living soul, your self-awareness, is of your living body (although your self-awareness is not caused by that living body), so attacking the narrative of the masses literally experiences the mass man as attacking his living soul, his self-awareness. ?

The dissident is thus by definition itself a fear-like object for mass man. We can see that the dissident is necessarily a fearful object by the strategy that is provided on how to deal with this fearful object. You call them 'crazies', 'conspiracy thinkers' and throw an academic sauce over it and it is suddenly a fact. This is a ritual incantation of danger, but consider for a moment that this incantation saved mass man from proceeding to total savage atrocities. Calling someone a stupid conspiracy theorist, 'a crazy person' and so on discharges fear. One should not think that during the covid era the dissidents would have been taken seriously and the creative ability to use words to ward off danger to oneself would not have been given to the mass man. Then we, the dissidents, would have been burned at the stake!

The dangerous unclean disgusting monstrous human is actually not a human but a monster and it is immoral not to defuse a dangerous monster. So it is moral to eliminate monsters. Mass man is precisely very dangerous where he is a highly moral human being, because it is precisely then that he starts hunting 'monsters'! Therefor that is another explanation of ferocity/vehemence: the will to want to be moral.

You could also say that our salvation in some cases has been that some mass people actually lacked high moral standards, were indifferent, or were too cowardly to go monster hunting. In other cases, many mass people are actually very clean in the sense of innocent. By innocent, I mean they just want to do good for the sake of doing good, without their egos wanting to accumulate moral (karma) points. In that innocence, they actually continued to see the human in the dissidents. They still saw something human in the inhumanly monstrous, namely the human behind the dissident behaviour. Because of that 'seeing', they did not burn the dissidents at the stake, but merely 'cancelled' them with words like 'conspiracy thinker', 'anti-vaxer', 'crazy', 'science denier'. The innocent is more 'good' than moral goodness, it is better than the moral good. Mass man is also very diverse and not a monster, though of course the term 'mass man' implies the monstrously unclean disgusting just as much. Incidentally, a shift in ritualistic words is noticeable, as the conspiracy thinker is now also associated with 'terrorist danger'.

Another ritual incantation of the dissidents themselves is to call mass man, whom they may (rightly) fear in many cases, a stupid non-self-conscious sheep (simultaneously patting themselves on the back about how awake/self-conscious and 'spiritual' they themselves are) or calling them ‘mass man’ or accusing him of neurotic or narcissistic behaviour, i.e. saying that mass man is sick. The sick and sickening also belongs to one of the many dimensions of the unclean, but that aside.

In summary, I would say that you cannot interpret the whole covid situation in terms of moral right and wrong nor in terms of self-consciousness and non-self-consciousness. Therefore, I don't want tribunals. Should I, as a judge, have to pass judgment on the 'mass people' and rule that there will be no tribunals, no pyres, I would again be 'cancelled' by many dissidents, the church of dissidents, who would then want to throw me around the pyre or defuse me by saying I am not awake.?

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But surely it has to do with self-awareness? How else do you explain that precisely very intelligent people could not see simple obvious facts like the existence of aerosols?

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Yes, you are right about that. What I am trying to say is that self-awareness has several layers and that self-awareness arises. That self-awareness arises and is not just (a) given we see, for example, in the development of children's self-awareness. Put more simply, but less precisely: it involves a dimension prior to self-awareness. If, for convenience, you identify the term self-awareness with brain intelligence, that dimension precedes something even more physical than the grey matter in your head, which is at the level of sensory perception, locomotion and sexuality. That is a dimension where your 'I' is not there yet, but still there is a self.

The logical paradox in the form of a question is this: how to be self-aware of what precedes and enables your self-awareness? How to overcome this paradox? I show that in 'The paradox in mass formation theory' (https://uitgeverijaspekt.nl/product/de-paradox-in-de-theorie-over-massavorming/). Still, let me say something briefly about that. What I am about to say does not give contours of an answer, but gives the contours of understanding the question. You must first understand that there is a paradox.

Suppose you are very concentrated on getting a thread through a needle. That is all you are paying attention to and you are not thinking about yourself at all and that you are trying to get that thread through the needle. Someone walks into the room where you are and asks what you are doing. You say 'I'm trying to get that thread into the needle'. Then it turns out that even though you were not aware of yourself, were not (aware of your) self-conscious(ness), you were still somehow self-conscious, because now that the other person is asking you a question you can say that you were busy with needle and thread. When you were self-consciously answering the other you can speak of a 'self-conscious self-consciousness' and when you were so concentrated with all your attention you can speak of a 'non-self-conscious self-consciousness'.

In logic, the expression 'self-conscious self-awareness' is called a tautology, like 'life is life'. The expression 'non-self-conscious self-awareness' is a logical contradiction. With the tautology, you don't actually say anything meaningful, and a contradiction is completely meaningless. The tautology and the contradiction have no meaning, like the full sentence 'Tomorrow it will be 32 degrees'. The sentence 'Tomorrow it will be 32 degrees' can be verified by recording tomorrow's temperature. That sentence has meaning because that sentence can be true or false. A tautology is always true and a contradiction is always false and in that sense they have no meaning (if having meaning would mean being able to represent the truth and falsity of a sentence – and saying that is true cannot be verified either).??

The first observation you can make is that talking about the 'non-self-aware self-aware' sensory dimension, which precedes the intelligence of the self-aware brain, is not logically possible. The second observation to make is that it is precisely that intelligent self-conscious brain that thinks logically. Therefore, an intelligent self-conscious human, by definition, cannot understand that sensory 'animal' level in which you are self-conscious in a non-self-conscious way.

It is precisely this level that is the level of vitality, the life force, where mass man feels attacked the moment you try to have an intelligent rational conversation. In other words, you can try to have a rational conversation/dialogue as long as you don't reduce rationality to logic.

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What is the connection between what you now say about the different levels within self-awareness and what you just said about the impure?

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The terms pure and impure take on meaning only at the level of the non-self-conscious self-conscious physical sensory level. Mass man is precisely that intelligent rational logical man who cannot be self-consciously aware of this vital sensory domain. You have to have more than intellectually logical brains to at least understand that logic has limits and that if you try to think beyond those limits you end up in logical tautologies and contradictions. If you are reasonable you see limits of logic and can understand that the sense level, domain, dimension, of non-self-conscious self-consciousness must logically exist. If you are not reasonable, then you will be governed by logic and you will operate in iron logical chains or better you will be governed by an iron logic. You then no longer hear the 'is' and that is then replaced by the '='. For example: dissident = danger = terrorist. In that '=' you hear the doggedness of being right.

In 'The paradox in mass formation theory', I link logical understanding to ethics and reason to morality. I differentiate within the moral domain by distinguishing between the moral and ethical. Briefly, you can say that ethics has to do with rules and morality with principles of how to follow rules, i.e. apply them. I then call that moral domain profane in distinction to a sacred dimension where the terms pure and impure have meaning. My book could rightly be called an anthropological-theological work. Even if I say so myself, that is a unique perspective that will be of great use to anthropologists and theologians in particular.

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What is good advice to get people to see the facts?

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The most important tip is to first make someone happy and feel completely safe with you prior to a conversation in order to have that conversation reasonably. The body, the living soul, must feel safe otherwise you can argue until you weigh an ounce. You must first begin to understand the other person without any moral judgement. Why does the other person see in the other camp? What are his or her motives (for themselves, so how do they express their motives)? You should certainly not start trying to convince with your reason and all your rational arguments before the other person feels safe and you have at least tried to understand that other person (from within their own perspective). Again: don't judge. If you point at another person, three fingers point at yourself. Wanting to convince another is often because you yourself lack an overview and understanding of the whole and you want to convince yourself. Sacrifice your own truth, which really is a truth, for a higher truth instead of dealing with the untruth of others. That way, people can come to feel your conviction even if you remain silent. The best thing - in my view - is to convincingly radiate the truth discovered through struggle. There is no democratic right to truth. You have to fight for it. If you fight for it with all your body and soul, people will be able to feel at a very sensory level that you have something to say. It is this power of persuasion, which does not have to prove itself in rational argumentation, that makes people feel safe and heard which may make them want to start having a rational conversation with of their own accord. Paradoxically, it is the irrational persuasion of truth that can open all to rationality. (30-3-2023, additions 4-4-2023).

Books by James Roolvink that are translated into English are:

The power of Oedipus: A small phenomenology of religion on: appearances, the unclean, the sacrifice, seeing & the wound (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQYCVKJV?ref_=pe_93986420_774957520). For all those who want to go beyond ‘The Idea of the Holy’ (1917, Rudolf Otto) ‘The sacred and the profane’ (1959, Mircea Eliade).

Ways to and of the Qu'ran: A magical reading (https://www.amazon.nl/Ways-Quran-James-Paul-Roolvink/dp/B0C63RYC9X/ref=sr_1_22?crid=2PVEGSDE8NQIX&keywords=james+paul+roolvink&qid=1703191822&sprefix=%2Caps%2C3485&sr=8-22).