Who controls us? - Árpád Szakács on the totalitarian society
"Speaking the truth is dangerous but necessary. However fruitful the false social consensus may be at a given moment, if it is perpetuated, after a while everything that surrounds humanity degenerates into stifling pretense and hypocrisy."
Mattias Desmet
For almost three years, our society has been terrorised by a phenomenon that is unprecedented in human history as we know it. Like an octopus, the tentacles of daily terror appear in our lives, and no sooner does one disappear than another one appears, and we are regularly getting another one crammed down our throats, and the mainstream media play a key role in this, with most of the news reports inciting and intensifying fear.
Anxiety, depression, resignation, indifference, fear, worry, anxiety, fear, despair, panic, uncertainty, as if they were the natural order of life, accompany our daily lives. Do we have to put up with this, is this how we are all going to live from now on? Will our children and grandchildren have to grow up in this fear and terror? What kind of life is this?
Why does it have to be like this? Can I do anything to change this? Is there any chance at all of a different future for the clouds of hopelessness that now surround us? There is hardly a person who has not asked questions like these, because we all feel, in some way or other, that the events of recent years do not bode well for the brave new world.
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Like in a mad movie, events are swirling: the right to privacy is being inflated day by day, (self-)censorship is spreading rapidly, people's health has become a state issue, where the authorities can do whatever they want with citizens. Technologies for monitoring the public are everywhere, and the European Parliament has even voted in favour of legislation to allow private communications to be monitored. This was supported by the right-wing and left-wing parties in Hungary, including MEPs from Brussels.
There was nothing special about this, in the whirlwind of chaos and upheaval, Hungarian national Christian conservatives, together with the balliberals, were competing with each other to see who would trample on the freedoms that were the basis of their ideology.
Until the spring of 2022, the forced sterilisation programme was carried out in Hungary with the greatest terror, for which no one took any responsibility, its contracts were secret, as were its clinical trial results. Thanks to the elections in April this year, the political parties that have orchestrated this global terror have a 94% majority in parliament. It is a clear signal to the politicians that society expects even more rigour, even more dictatorship, more crackdowns on those who do not belong to them.
Belonging to a minority is not the most rewarding of tasks, especially when a large part of the majority aggressively stamp out dissent. And the mainstream media have tried to pave the way for this in every area, portraying as idiots, imbeciles, conspiracy theorists, anyone who has not taken the great opportunity to belong to the majority and become part of the crowd.
This is how, in the eyes of many, I went from being the 'bravest, best right-wing journalist' celebrated and adored a year or two ago to a mad, deranged man who should not be seen, let alone spoken to, in public. My former colleagues, people I considered my friends, have mentioned my name among themselves with horror and regret, saying what a pity...
All my contacts, all my ties, 22 years of work, in short everything was connected to the world of media and public life. Yet, when I finally parted ways with my previous life, I felt an inexplicable euphoria, as if something incredibly good had happened to me. Yet I had left a comfortable, financially carefree life, and the alternative was the often excruciating reality of daily struggle, of total ostracism and hatred.
But there was freedom!
Many people forget that freedom always comes at a price. Freedom is not a permanent state that you just get. It was not before and it will not be any different now. Freedom has to be fought for. Freedom must be fought for. Even in our own lives.
Except that freedom is a strange phantom.
In October 2022, at the time of writing, the most significant resistance in the education sector in Hungary in decades is taking place. Teachers' strikes followed one after the other, and marched with children in spectacular demonstrations for better working conditions and for freedom, for the freedom to teach.
No one is more committed to supporting teachers than I am, and I have made countless speeches and written to draw attention to their undignified situation, but it is still my duty to do so: where was the sense of freedom of these teachers when they were supposed to defend the interests of children who were senselessly brain-masked, when they watched their unvaccinated colleagues go through a calvary, discriminated against and then dismissed, and later assisted in the vaccination of children with an experimental drug for which even science in all its letters dared not take responsibility.
Is the right to free education, to freedom, only infringed when there are no decent working conditions? Is the quality of working conditions a measure of freedom? Can it be that free education requires free people? And what kind of people are those who are freedom fighters in education conditions, but not in real life, who have been involved as enforcers in all measures restricting freedom? Is that an example for children?
And where was the intelligentsia then? This is perhaps the most embarrassing question, because the most shocking realisation of recent years is that there is no intellectuals. Those whose job it was to think, to ask questions, to point out connections, have almost all joined the dictatorship that crushed freedom, or remained silent. They stood by and watched or supported the discrimination, the discrimination, the ostracism that came to those who asked questions and expected meaningful answers.
The misconception that art and culture are a positive force in shaping society has persisted until today. It was only now that it became clear that our artists, regardless of left or right, had become cheap servants of the dictatorship. Popular ensembles, for whom the Hungarian identity meant artistic fulfilment, sang heartfelt songs about the 5 million Hungarians who are not heard by the world at large. All this at concerts that could only be entered with vaccinations that were forced upon people in a way that was both humanly and morally unacceptable. Today, there are Hungarian victims of this. Who will write a song about them?
And where were the churches? They joined the queue, as servants of the dictatorship, building that which every idea of which is contrary to their mission. The churches also failed this test, which will fundamentally shake their future. For where faith, human dignity and fundamental freedoms are secondary, the church is no longer the church. All of today's Hungarian churches have been reduced to a farming association, almost all of their priests were cheap kuffars in churches that once had a better past. Today, the Christian churches have ceased to exist as churches.
All those who should have defended freedom have not simply abandoned Hungarian society, but have supported the tyrants. And in recent months the surveillance state has continued to weave its web around us.
Let's just listen to the scattered rumours here and there:
- In October, a fact-finding video reveals that members of Interior Minister Sándor Pintér's economic holdings are appearing one after the other in private companies that are linked to public tasks, but at the same time collect large amounts of data on Hungarian society: IT companies, parking companies, camera and spy software companies. A system could soon be built that knows almost everything about us.
- Vodafone, a major telecoms company and a key player in surveillance, has been bought by a partly state-backed company for €800 billion. But behind it are private equity funds with opaque ownership structures. A mysterious company, state within the state.
- A few months ago, the Hungarian Parliament adopted an amendment to the health law to allow the use of Chinese-style monitoring software that can be installed on a telephone.
- In September, the Hungarian government announced the creation of the Digital Hungary Agency with 5,000 employees. The main goal is to create digital citizenship by 2023. Identification will no longer require an ID card, but can be done via mobile phone. Digital identification will be in place by 2026 so that everything can be done digitally.
- In the past months, we have read in several articles that the Magyar Nemzeti Bank is working hard to introduce digital money as soon as possible.
- In October, the government adopted the Digital Food Strategy. According to the government's decision, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán asked the Minister of Agriculture to develop a support programme for the development of the food industry to promote the digitalisation of the food industry.
- In October, the government asked the Minister for Culture and Innovation, János Csák, to review university courses together with István Nagy, with the involvement of higher education institutions, and to develop a programme to help professionals become digitally mature.
- In October, the government also asked the Minister of Technology and Industry, László Palkovics, to review the needs of the data centre, as set out in the strategy, together with the Minister of Agriculture, and to encourage the creation of various quality assurance and monitoring systems in the field.
These are just a few examples, which, when understood in context, slowly begin to reveal the web of cobwebs around us, the prison bars of our freedom. And it is the same in other countries. Hannah Arendt's dystopian vision of a new kind of totalitarianism, a new kind of all-seeing totalitarianism, led by boring bureaucrats and grey technocrats, after the fall of Nazism and Stalinism, is becoming increasingly realistic.
The rise to power of technocratic totalitarianism was foreshadowed decades ago by Herbert Marcuse in The One-Dimensional Man, David Riesman in The Lonely Mass, Oswald Spengler in Man and Machine, Gilbert Keith Chesterton in In the Name of Reason, among others.
We Hungarians have also been at the forefront of predicting the machine-man world, just think of Tamás Molnár's Soul and Machine, Jákó Blázovich's The Great Sphinx, János Szécsy's The Age of Violence, or Béla Hamvas' work.
Hamvas has captured this phenomenon with a special sensitivity: "It is characteristic of scientism that it does not know love, but sexual instinct; it DOES NOT THINK, but PRODUCES; it does not FEED, but FEEDS; it does not sleep, but restores its biological energies; he eats not meat, potatoes, plums, pears, apples, honey-butter bread, but calories, vitamins, carbohydrates and proteins; he drinks not wine but alcohol; he measures his weight every week when his head hurts, he takes eight kinds of powder when must gives him diarrhoea, rushes to the doctor, argues about the increase in a man's age, considers hygiene to be insoluble, because he can wash his nailbrush with soap, he can wash his soap with water, but he can't wash his water with anything... "
This is the perfect type of totalitarianism. Such a man looks to machines and technology for the answers to all his problems and fears. Just compare the above sentences, written in 1948, with the product ranges that appear in today's television and video-sharing advertising blocks. And do they not recognise the types of people in their narrow environment in the above characterisation?
These processes are partly rooted in psychology, and an intriguing tableau of them has been written by Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Department of Psychoanalysis and Counselling Psychology, University of Ghent. Desmet seems to be a continuation of the ideas of Béla Hamvas, just a short quote from his book:
"But it would be a great mistake to recognize the phenomenon of totalitarianism in totalitarian regimes alone. Even today, there is a constant current of totalitarianism, which stems from the fanatical desire to try to control and direct life on the basis of technical and scientific knowledge. Technocratic thinking always stands on two legs. On the one hand, it seduces us with the positive image of an artificial paradise on earth, suggesting that man can be freed from all hardship and suffering.
On the other hand, it promotes itself by exploiting fear as the key to solving the problem. Every time an 'object of anxiety' has appeared in our society in recent decades, such as terrorism, climate change or the crown virus, it has taken a step forward. The threat of terrorism requires the deployment of surveillance systems while our privacy becomes a luxury; to curb climate problems, we need to switch to lab-printed meat, electric cars and an online society; to protect against the coronavirus, we need to replace our natural immunity with artificial immunity created by mRNA vaccines."
In other words, this tyranny is actually being built by society itself. Just as Gyula Illyés wrote:
"where there is tyranny,
everyone is an eye in the chain;
It stinks of you, it emanates from you,
you are tyranny yourself;"
The greater the fear, the greater the expectation of severity, and the greater the hatred of those who are not under social psychosis. And this insanity is presented as normality, and even intensified by newer and newer schemes:
"The fourth industrial revolution, in which man physically merges with technology - in the spirit of transhumanist ideology - is increasingly seen as an inevitable necessity. Society as a whole must become an Internet of bodies, in which the human body is digitally monitored, controlled and tracked by a technocratic government. This is the only way to meet the challenges of the future. There is no alternative. Anyone who does not opt for technological progress is naive and unscientific."
The mind can be well influenced by fear. And by inculcating the object of fear, it can create images that can lead masses of people to do things they would not do under any other circumstances. People are truly afraid when they are alone and isolated, so it is important to cut them off from their social bonds and from nature. Does the "stay at home" message still ring a bell? And when the only time you could go out on the street was to walk your dog, and that too within 500 metres of where you lived. Then the introduction of digital curricula in schools, work-at-home schemes, the closure of community centres. And overnight, digital communication, loneliness and isolation took over.
The end result is that the individual becomes distanced from his fellow human beings and from nature, no longer resonating with the world around him, becoming an atomized subject who fears everything and supports, even demands, any tyrannical action that might protect him from the object of his imagined fear.
The erosion of the social bond leads to a questioning of the meaning of life. "Man, as an exceptional social being, lives for the sake of the other. If we lose our connection with the Other, we experience life as meaningless." - Desmet writes. The key to perfect manipulation and social psychosis is to have a lot of free-floating fear and mental unease in the population.
What follows from all this is "a high degree of frustration and aggression. The link between social isolation and irritability is logical and empirically proven. People plagued by social monotony, lack of purpose, indefinite fear and anxiety tend to feel more irritable, frustrated and/or aggressive and seek an object through which to vent their tensions.
What is relevant for the formation of a mass is not the frustration and aggression that is actually vented, but rather the aggression present in the population that has not yet been vented, the violent tendency that is still seeking an object."
And now we have come to where we started from in this introduction, and that is the fear and terror that is poured into society every day by the manipulation machine called the media. As Attila József wrote:
"The rich are afraid of the poor
and the poor fear the rich.
A persistent fear governs
We are not deceived by hope."
The most important point is to be afraid of something every day. And don't see hope! There will be no gas, petrol, electricity, jobs, food, or if there is, you can't afford it, another virus, skyrocketing inflation, etc. etc. And indeed a process is underway that will dramatically increase the ranks of the destitute.
The mass is now being multiplied, swollen, which will be the perfect subject of the aggression that will be used in a controlled way to completely eliminate the remaining autonomy, independence and freedom. As Desmet writes: 'Whenever a new incarnation of fear appears in society, our current thinking can only offer one response as a defence: more control.
The fact that man can only tolerate a certain degree of control is ignored. The need to control leads to fear, and fear leads to the need to control. Thus society is caught in a vicious circle that inevitably leads to totalitarianism. That is, to excessive government control and ultimately to the ultimate elimination of the spiritual and physical unity of the human being."
Can this possibility come to pass?
Totalitarianism based on technocracy is a machine system that will never take control of reason, and the theoretical premise of this is logical nonsense. Therefore, "the totalitarian system must therefore not so much be eliminated as, in a sense, survive, endure until it destroys itself."
Mattias Desmet's book helps us in this survival, as he tries to give us an unforgettable and instructive guide on how to get out of the dead end.
What a good ending that sentence could be, but it would certainly leave many people with unanswered questions. First, the lack of specifics.
Every fund is built on a strength. For the base is the strength itself. But how, in the mud of the last almost three years, can we find the solid ground on which we can at least lean for a short while?
Every forward action plan begins with a recognition. If the past three years have been good at anything, it is recognising the black and white in our own environment, and the people and values we can rely on. In the heat of risk aversion, nothing has meaning or value. Not even time itself. And there is nothing in the world more important and precious than time. Because time is priceless.
If I had to take stock of what has happened in my family and in my own life over the last two years or so, there is no doubt that, like you, it has not been an easy time for me. But can we appreciate the good without the difficulties, the struggles, the bad? Without the cold, could we appreciate the warmth?
In terms of my own trajectory, I was very high three years ago, and now I seem to be very low. And I have chosen this path, with a wife behind me who is not only a support but a real foundation. Many people have asked me in recent months if I have any regrets, if it was the right decision?
I always replied: what should I regret? That clichéd, provincial, unthinking atmosphere that was about nothing? That I wasn't a member of a club that steered the ship of the entire Hungarian nation like an iceberg? That, as a journalist and editor-in-chief, I did not talk people into an act that many have already died for?
The small units of society that surround us, we ourselves, the people, live side by side on countless levels of consciousness. We are next to each other, but often at distances from each other that cannot be expressed in light years. It is with this realisation that we should begin our daily lives. And perhaps by not seeing in each other only and exclusively what is our weakness.
But to see the strength, the strength of the other, because that is what unites us. Who's good at what, who's strong at what, who can grow stronger at what. If we focus on each other's weaknesses, we isolate ourselves from each other and we become vulnerable to the world of technocratic machine-man society. And this is worse than death, it is hell on earth. That, for me, is the real lesson of Mattias Desmet's book.
It appears in the foreword to Mattias Desmet's The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
