ExclusiveMattias Desmet and Aaron Kheriaty: Understanding the Age of Loneliness

Basically all age groups, with the exception of the very elderly, have seen marked rise in suicide in the last 20 to 25 years. It's very highly correlated with use of technology. The more technology used, the more lonely people feel in a country. Today, two of the world's leading thinkers on bioethics and group psychology join me together for the first time. Dr. Aaron Cariotti is a former psychiatry professor and director of the medical ethics program at the University of California, Irvine Medical School. He is the author of The New Abnormal. Matthias Desmet is a professor of psychology at Ghent University and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Totalitarian leaders can only seize control in a society where a lot of people feel lonely. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Aaron Cariotti, Matthias Desmet, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders and together, amazingly. It's great to be with you, and it's great to be with my new friend, Matthias. Likewise. Happy to be here together with you, Aaron, and thanks for having us on. So 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. 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 Vivek Murthy said himself that there was this crisis or huge epidemic of loneliness, which is very much the case. That's right. Yeah, Murthy, a man with whom I have many disagreements, but on this point he was absolutely right, announced in 20—I believe it was 2018, somewhere around then—that there was this epidemic of loneliness in the United States. And he wasn't just using that word sort of metaphorically to describe a social phenomenon. He was looking at it as a surge in 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 heart disease, cancer, other things that the surge in general sort of traditionally pays attention to. In connection with that, there was 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. And deaths of despair are deaths by suicide, alcohol-related illnesses, and drug overdose, which since 1990 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, but that had ballooned to 70,000 a year by the year 2019. And then with COVID lockdowns and a response to COVID, we basically threw gasoline on that fire. And so that 70,000 number jumped in 2021, after lockdowns, to 100,000 a year. 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. The suicide numbers from the CDC have continued, tragically, 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, and both men and women, have seen marked rise in suicide in the last 20 to 25 years. That's hit adolescent girls especially hard, with a tripling of suicide rates among adolescent girls. And all of these tragic, horrifying numbers, and of course there's a devastated family behind each and every one of those statistics, and a ruined life. Is this epidemic of loneliness that is contributing to social fragmentation, isolation, being locked behind a screen, fewer face-to-face interactions? If you asked polling questions from some Gallup data back in the 1980s, if you asked people, Americans, 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 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. 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? So before we continue, I'd like to introduce you to today's sponsor. Like many of you, I was initially quite skeptical about investing in gold, but with rising inflation and a lot of economic uncertainty, I finally decided to give it a try at the beginning of this year. Since then, gold prices have skyrocketed, reaching a record high of nearly $2,800 an ounce in late October, so the two ounces that I've purchased have already increased in value by over $1,100. You too can protect and grow your wealth with Patriot Gold Group. 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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. This is 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. 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. Loneliness which spontaneously emerged and which was used or abused by totalitarian leaders because they probably didn't know, but they just noticed that their propaganda was very efficient because there was a lot of loneliness. Once people feel lonely, propaganda, people are very vulnerable for propaganda and a new type of mass emerged in the 20th century, which Jacques Ellul called the lonely mass, meaning that in medieval times there were also mass formations and masses, 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. So 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 to meet physically, propaganda is extremely successful. You have perfect control over 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, 17th century, when the human being left the religious view on man and the world behind and replaced it by the rationalist, materialist view on man and 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. So that metaphysical revolution in which the religious view on man and the world was replaced by the materialist view on man and 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 the 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 bond gets weaker, the real human bond. And that, at the same time, explains this rationalist view on man and the world, at the same time, led to isolation and narcissism. And you could see that in Living Color as young people are curating and airbrushing their ideal image and projecting it literally onto Instagram. And they can't experience the real being together with other people in spontaneous, convivial friendship and relationship. 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 a 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 Matthias's comments about the rise of a kind of rationalism over really the last 500 years, is that the endpoint of that hyper-rationalist programmer process can be seen, for example, in 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. 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 is 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 sort of 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 Matthias, you could say if you disagree, ends up not being enhancing. 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 sort of reprogrammable software. We're human beings. We're 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 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 sound, that's kind of denuded by technology when we're just interacting over Zoom, and we don't have the physical presence of the other person, 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. And that can only lead to unhappiness and misery and all kinds of downstream social problems. I definitely want to talk more about this relationship between narcissism and loneliness. I had never, frankly, thought about that, and it would make 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 ironically or just obviously, through technology. So it's almost like the connection gets, to use a word, denuded through the fact that it's all seems to be, 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. 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 you, either of you, to comment. I think it runs in both directions. The technological developments obviously have an impact, but also the ideologies drive the technological developments and the widespread embrace of those technological developments. So you think about lockdowns during COVID, which is the most extreme example of what Matias was describing before. I mean, the 20th century totalitarian dictators from Stalin to Hitler never dreamed of such rigid controls on...I mean, they never told people to stay six feet apart. They never told people that they 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 already had available Zoom technology, then lockdowns never would have been possible. And there's certainly truth to that. But I think also we had 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? Of course, how did we get to the point? Maybe first this, 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 authoritarianism. 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 wider project where they want to introduce 15-minute cities, a digit cosmos where people don't have to leave their house anymore, and where they can travel to China or no matter where, in the virtual reality. And then you see a different picture emerge, of course. And exactly how did we come to this point where people accept this? That's a very good question. I think it was clear that the human bond had become already very painful for most people. Most people felt lonely. Most people suffered from angst. Or 25 percent, I believe, 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, actually, like many young people in Japan don't have sex anymore. Many young people just prefer virtual reality over in-person contacts and conversations. And I feel it as well. Something that is very enticing in the use of your mobile phone. Mobile phones are our major addiction, I think, and the most dangerous one, definitely, in our era. And in that way, as soon as you start to see how throughout the last two, maybe three centuries, the social fabric deteriorated step after step, how, for instance, the introduction of television, radio, reduced the number of in-person contacts we had, maybe with 50 percent or more, and then the introduction of the internet with another 30 percent. How the disappearance of the physical labor, working together in a physical way, also destroyed the direct contact between human beings, and so on, and so on. 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 in particular, how these people started to feel that maybe the next step could be taken, and that we slowly could get people 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, better to protect you from dangerous viruses, and so on, and so on. So that's indeed the situation we find ourselves in now. And 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. It's a kind of bizarre thing to think about. It's a funny image. You have to laugh, but it's kind of a very dark future, right? Well, there's a real lack of intellectual humility behind these converging ideologies, if you will, and converging uses of technologies. I think there is a lack of self-awareness and understanding, first of all, that the world is enormously and beautifully complex and complicated, and this sort of hyper-rationalist ideology says, no, we can figure everything out, and then we can put the really smart people into positions of permanent power, and 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 kind of 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 Matias would say the same thing, both of us are a fan 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 and the environment, but to put those things at the service of human beings, and put those things at the service of the actual complex world in which we live in, is going to require a very, very different approach than the one that we're, that the path that we seem to be going down now. No. Yes, the strangest thing is that I know no major scientist who, or rationalists. All major scientists, that's exactly what they conclude, that the essence of everything you study always transcends rational understanding. That's the strangest thing. But in a strange way, while in the beginning, I believe scientific discourse initially, 16th century, for instance, I believe that scientific discourse initially was a fine example of truth-telling, truth-search. 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 a 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, as 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. And then, that's one important thing. That is something that happened in science. And somewhere along the road, science, and now, I think, in the academic world, what the academic world produces now, for me, has nothing to do anymore with truth speech. Most sometimes it happens, exceptionally. And let me add one more thing to that. Another very important phenomenon is the following. As soon as science emerged, and in its wake, the rationalists, materialists who 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, what was the smartest way to do? So, as rational knowledge accumulated, our ethical awareness declined. And the combination of the two is extremely dangerous, because rational knowledge, accumulation of rational knowledge, makes you more powerful. It gives you more power. And if your ethical awareness, at the same time, declines, you have the recipe for evil on earth. And that's what happens. But the first thing you could see was that these Western countries who had this scientific knowledge at their disposal, they started to colonize the world, for instance. They started to use it to oppress others, and so on and so on. Well, 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 ideology that I call scientism, which is different than science. And scientism is the non-scientific claim smuggled through the back door that science is the only valid form of knowledge. And that claim contradicts itself, because science is the only valid form of knowledge. It's itself not a scientific claim, 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 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 in positions of authority in our society saying absurd things like, I am the science and he questions me questions the science, which no real credible scientist would ever dream of saying such an absurdity. And so I think 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. Is it a foregone conclusion that as the rational view of the human being, or perhaps the universe entirely grows, the moral view declines? Or can there be a synergy? For me, it's the rational view. It's important to mention that for me, a rational view is completely opposite of a rationalist view. That's a strange thing. Rationalism is the illusion that ultimately you can grasp the essence of the world, of nature, of everything around us, in rational categories. That's not true. Science rejected that idea. The essence of things always transcends rational understanding. So 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. Read, for instance, Harari, his Homo Deus. That's rationalism. The belief that in the end, you will be capable of understanding, controlling, and manipulating the essence of life. And that's strangely enough, this rationalist illusion always leads humanity into the complete absurdity, for instance, of totalitarian systems. It leads to complete irrationality. If you're really loyal to rational understanding and walk the path, the way of rationality, step by step, you will soon arrive at the end where you will see this is the limit of rational understanding. Here we have to move on. Here we have to find a new way of knowing, which is this Einfühlung where Einstein talked about. It's this sixth sense where Samir Al-Ghoshal talked about. It's everyone knows that the 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, not at all. So I think one thing that is important to mention, I believe, is that real science has nothing to do with to the contrary. It's opposite to rational. It involves, there's an aesthetic dimension to science. I mean, 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 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 because of his, I mean, it was almost a mystical intuition. And then you can ask, well, how do, you know, 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 some, it's not irrational, 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. You need sincerity. Yes. That's something that Einstein literally said in a foreword of a book of Max Planck. He said, many people think that science is born from rational thinking. It's not, he said, it's born from a capacity for Einfühlung, which is a German term, which means feeling one or feeling into what you observe. And in a talk, in a speech he gave at a certain American university, I forgot which one exactly, maybe it was Harvard, I'm not sure. He said, I believe he said that the best starting point for science is a cosmic religious awareness. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And as you said, he didn't, 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. So art and science are perhaps less, real science, not so much the fake nonsense that turned out in our so-called peer-reviewed journals today, but real science, real, very significant contributions to our understanding of things is perhaps not as far apart from art, let's say, or even religion as our contemporary ideologies might have us think. I want to build on, we have a few minutes left, 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. At least that's what it's like for me. Maybe you can build a bit more on this, what you mean by this sort of finding the sincerity that you... Yes, 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 a human rationalist hubris that automatically this rationalism leads to two things like interconnected things, loneliness of disconnectedness and narcissism. And 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 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. Something people usually hide behind their outer ideal image. And you can almost feel that physically. My next book is about that. You can almost feel it physically. Sometimes you are in a situation, social situation, you feel like, oh, everyone is buying into this, but they do not agree. And you feel it doesn't feel well. And if you take this courageous decision then to say, I will articulate what I feel. You know two things. You will destroy your ideal image in that group. You know that you will say something that destroys the socially shared ideal image. And 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. And then the effect is that usually if the other people can open themselves a little bit, can put aside their own prejudices and cling 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 hole and follow the ego and make them resonate. And that's connection. That's why truth connects people. It creates true social bond. And that's why sincerity is the only remedy for a society sick of lies, propaganda, manipulation, deception, and so on and so on. And that the possibility for that relies on a more ancient philosophical doctrine that all of us participate in a shared... Well, 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 I see, when the light of my intellect sees that 2 plus 2 is 4, or Matthias 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. And I think if courageous people begin trying to live in that way, that will grow. People will find one another. And we can then begin to create small communities of people who are trying to live differently. Yes, yes, yes. I agree. 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, step by step, growing, becoming stronger, as Mahatma Gandhi did. Step by step, every day again, try to become more sincere. Try to practice the art of sincere speech. I was wondering, Aaron, would there be something we disagree about, you think? Could we find something? Well, I don't know. Maybe if we started talking about God, we might find some disagreements. We haven't gone there yet. Yeah, we'll definitely have to do this again. By the way, we could go back to what you said about logos. Also very interesting is the Greek concept of parrhesia, bold speech in public space, which always is very risky, the ancient Greeks said. The one who speaks the truth might be hated. There is a good chance because he destroys the illusions people find their stability in, so they will be angry with him. But if there is nobody anymore, the ancient Greeks said, who lives up, who lives up to the ethical duty of parrhesia, of speaking out these painful truths in public space, the Polish or society is ready for the plague. Should we give a homework assignment to all of us here, towards the sincere? Well, I've been working a lot and we've talked, Jan, about the issue of government censorship. And 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, everyone's surveilling everyone else. And everyone's kind of controlling themselves to not do that. Right. They're self-censoring. So a practical homework assignment is to notice 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, there's propriety, there's all, you know. 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. And so recognizing when there may be moments where, no, this is a time for me to actually say what I believe to be the case. And 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 ripe for, 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 Matthias described so beautifully. Matthias, a final thought? Well, it's just 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. John of the Cross. Yes, John of the Cross. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Saint John of the Cross. And it means that you will always, 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. Well, Matthias Desmet, Aaron Cariotti, such a pleasure to have had you on together. Thank you. Likewise. Thanks for having me. Thank you all for joining Aaron Cariotti, Matthias Desmet, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.