Notes about Sexuality and Religion

It is this rationalist man and world which led, on the one hand, to the emergence of a new kind of leadership which used and uses propaganda as the main organizing principle, and on the other hand, which produced or created this population which is lonely, disconnected, and very vulnerable to propaganda.

Mattias: Some people might know I wrote this book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, and I explained in that book that I believe that, at the moment, in this era in Western culture, we are witnessing the, or we are seeing the, emergence of a new kind of totalitarianism which might be the ultimate totalitarianism: a technocratic totalitarianism. Yes. Led not so much by, as Hannah Arendt said, gang leaders such as Hitler or Stalin, but led by dull bureaucrats, technocrats, and experts.

And for me, you know, I started to write about this, I believe, back in 2017 or something. And then during the Corona crisis, I accelerated my writing because I had a feeling that, well, I shouldn’t wait much longer to publish a book about it. And for me, the challenge in the book was to connect what is happening at the level of the state system—the globalist state system that is emerging now in the world—to connect this with our basic worldview, with our view on man and the world, which is the materialist, rationalist view on man and the world.

For me, that was a challenge: to just try to make people aware that the problem we are facing is not so much concentrated in one single point. For instance, an evil elite; but it’s rather a problem that is a problem of everyone in our society. We are all, to a certain extent, in the grip of a certain worldview and a certain way of trying to live our lives, which contributes to the emergence of totalitarianism.

In a nutshell, I believe that as soon as you start from the idea that people should live their lives on the basis of rational knowledge and rational thinking, rather than on the basis of ethical awareness and intuition for instance, you inevitably end up in a totalitarian system. That’s the point. As soon as you—like a few centuries ago, we started to think about the world in terms—we started to consider the universe to be one big machine, one big mechanical system which can be understood, manipulated, and controlled in a rational way. And as soon as you consider the world to be a machine, then the logical ultimate consequence is that this big machine has to be led by technical experts. And that’s ultimately—we will never overcome totalitarianism if we do not move on, if we do not change our elementary worldview.

It’s very easy to show, I think, that it is this rationalist man and world which led, on the one hand, to the emergence of a new kind of leadership which used and uses propaganda as the main organizing principle, and on the other hand, which produced or created this population which is lonely, disconnected, and very vulnerable to propaganda. And it’s the combination of these two factors—this elite which relentlessly uses propaganda to keep control of society and, on the other hand, a disconnected, lonely population. It’s a combination of the two which is the essence of totalitarianism.

Hannah Arendt talked about the diabolic pact between the masses and the elite. She was one of the first, I think, to understand that totalitarianism can never be reduced to just the totalitarian elite. No, but if that would be the case, the problem could be solved in a relatively easy way. We could just destroy the elite and there would be no totalitarianism anymore. But everyone knows in totalitarian systems, if you destroy a part of the elite or even the entire elite, it will just be replaced by other people. And that’s because the point of gravity of a totalitarian system is not the elite or a totalitarian elite. The point of gravity is the masses which are in the grip of this fanatical rationalist ideology.

So that’s my work. And with my work, I try to show people the roots, as I understand them, the roots of contemporary of this newly emerging totalitarian system in the world. And I try to show people that we cannot reduce the problem just to an evil elite or something. It’s much more complex than that. The root cause of the problem is a certain view on man and the world, a rationalist view on man and the world—the human hubris which believes that the essence of life can be reduced to the categories of its own rational thinking.

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Mattias: Someone who really uh was aware of that in a very early stage was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche I I when when he wrote his first book I think he was only 24 years old um uh the birth of the of a tragedy tragedy I guess and and it will be translated in English but it was exactly about that he said there is something fundamentally wrong with our enlightenment culture and it is that it only honors Apollo the god of rationale and it forgot uh Dionisius and that’s what we are seeing now.

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Mattias: I sometimes quote, because it’s just so profound, Goethe’s lines on nature: that nature—the work of nature—is divine, dividing the united, uniting the divided. Yes, yes, I agree.

And still I prefer the terms ego and soul. My next book is all about that; part one is about the soul. And I referred to Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg, the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, who wrote this wonderful short essay on the soul and in which he said—one way he defined it in a very simple but a very profound way—he said the soul is always what is inside, and the ego refers to the surface.

And you can see that very well. Like, in the first six months of its life, a child has no ego yet, at least not in my conceptualization. And it means like the ego is born at a moment the child recognizes itself for the first time in the mirror. It sits on the mother’s arm, the mother points to the mirror, and she says, “Look, that’s you.” And the child does something then, something very specific. When it can first understand that the mirror image refers to its body, it starts to love in a very enthusiastic way. And that’s the first narcissistic enjoyment.

Because at that moment — at that moment — what the child sees in the mirror is not only its self-image, it’s also the ideal image of the mother, because she’s happy when she points to the mirror. So, it’s the first recognition that the mirror is a privileged moment where the self-image is identical to the ideal image of the other. And that’s what we always try to re-experience: that feeling like, “Ah, my self-image is identical to the mirrored image in the mother.”

And in this way — in this way — all our psychological attention, our energy, our love, is absorbed by the surface of our body, by the image in the mirror. And that’s the moment, strangely enough —that’s what I describe in my new book — that’s the moment where a child loses its celestial openness, as the romantic philosophers said. It loses its connection. It loses this enormous empathic connection with the world. It loses this feeling of unity and it loses the capacity to distinguish between all the phonemes of all languages in the world.

Before a child is six months old, it can distinguish between all the phonemes of all the languages in the world; that disappears at the moment it recognizes itself in the mirror because after that, it’s disconnected. It’s enveloped by its outer ideal image. And rather than constantly imitating the other’s face, constantly internally resonating with the sounds the others make, it’s absorbed—all its attention, like Narcissus in the Greek myth, is absorbed by its own mirror image.

And that’s the moment where I think also rational thinking starts, because then you can see at that moment that a child starts to use language in a different way. Before it was six months old, language was like a resonating medium which connected a child to the world. After that, the words start to refer to objects and language starts to become a semantic system — a semantic system to understand and to grasp the world.

And that’s what disappears when you use mescaline. For instance, Aldous Huxley says exactly this: when you use mescaline, he says the meaning of words—you couldn’t care less about what a word means—but the words still have a musical quality that you like. And so, I believe for me the soul refers to the resonating substance of our ensouled body which is inside of us, and then the ego is the surface which isolates us from the world.

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Iain: Now, what I’d like to just chuck out here is maybe the left hemisphere is an expression of a drive and maybe the right hemisphere is an expression of another drive. So one is towards power, um, triumph, to uh, selfishness, to um, to, to, to eternity; and the other is towards embeddedness in the world, towards compassion, towards something deep that is in the heart of most religions.

Now, maybe these two elements exist because they seem to exist in a way — these drives towards differentiation and union — in the simplest organisms we have at a very deep level that is not referable to the DNA, but somehow to the forms that influence the way in which the thing creates itself. We need, as you say, both drives, but it’s terrible when this malignant, potentially malignant drive takes the lead. This is really the story of, um, of God and Lucifer, and Lucifer who, who is thrown out of heaven and becomes Satan.

Mattias: Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Like the ego is a, is only a problem when it takes the lead. When it takes the lead, I think it represents Thanatos of the Greeks. That’s clear. I think Freud, Freud defined Thanatos, or the death drive, in exactly this way: the tendency to reduce everything to separate entities, to parts. And but that’s, it’s only a problem — like the ego is not, uh, uh, the devil was not a problem, Satan was not a problem, as long as he was subjected to God. But the problem was when he took the lead, that then he became a problem.

It’s with the ego; it’s exactly the same. I think having, having an ego is something very funny and, and it’s great, but if it takes the lead in your life, then you’re getting into trouble. So I, I, I would agree that yes, the left hemisphere has the the potential to become the hemisphere of the death drive, I think. Uh, uh, and, and, and, and the right hemisphere rather represents, uh, uh, uh, Eros or the absolutely, uh, yes.

Iain: No, it’s, it’s Eros understood in the, in the broader sense that that Freud was using it and indeed the Greeks used it. I mean, at times they use it just to mean carnal love, but they also, it was also the drive behind all creativity. And the universe is creative, if not, if it’s anything at all. The one thing we can say about it is it’s powerfully creative. And yet this drive to manage, control, pin down is the opposite of creativity. It stamps out creativity.

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QUESTION: That sort of implies that we’re building our own prison?

Iain: Yes, we are. Oh, absolutely. We’re certainly building — we already have built — our own mental prison. We built our own emotional prison.

We’ve made ourselves unhappy by cutting ourselves off from society, i.e., from a real social group that lives together, works together, worships together, trusts one another, shares values. We’ve cut ourselves off from nature, which is so very profound — a source of wisdom about the nature of life. Just observing it, being in it, changes one’s mental well-being, changes even one’s cognition; gets rid of things like stress, anger, and aggression.

And we’ve also cut ourselves off from the idea that there’s a higher power, there is a divinity, there is something sacred, whatever it is you call it. And these three things are the things that most matter to human beings. They are the things they always seek. They are the things that seem very real until you adopt the mindset of the modern left hemisphere dominated rationalist.

GEMINI: The Three Pillars of Connection
The text suggests that to escape this “mental and emotional prison,” we must reconnect with:

• Society (The Human Connection): Moving away from individualism and back toward real social groups that live, work, worship, and share values together.
• Nature (The Ecological Connection): Re-engaging with the natural world as a source of wisdom and mental well-being, rather than just a resource to be exploited.
• The Sacred (The Spiritual Connection): Acknowledging a higher power or divinity—something beyond the self—which the rationalist mindset often dismisses as unreal.

And if we’re to get to a place where we can survive after the collapse of civilization, which I fear may not be avoidable, we need to grow these small communities now. We need to start them, and people are doing. And I’m honored and privileged to be associated with a few such projects where people are growing their own food together, living together, sharing together, and modeling something that is sustainable, which is not demanding on the earth.

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