The next thing we’re going to divorce reality.

And you see there was three stages.

The first stage, they sold you information.

The second stage, they sold you attention.

We are now in the attention economy. Previously it was information economy.

Now it’s attention economy.

The next stage, they’re going to monopolize reality and they’re going to sell you reality.

So you’re going to consume reality. Now you’re consuming attention. Everyone wants likes and these and that.

The next stage, they’re going to take away your reality and they’re going to sell it back to you, package the way they want.

Now we have to hang up and click on the same link.

Okay.

Okay.

So can you discuss the relationship between psychology and politics, especially in how political movements and ideologies influence and drive the mind?

So there are two, two schools of thought about the relationship between psychology and politics.

One school of thought is that collectives, groups of people are actually extensions of individual psychology.

So you could have an narcissistic society or a psychopathic society in the same way you have an narcissistic or psychopathic individual.

It’s just multiplied somehow, writ large.

That’s one approach.

The other approach, which started more or less in the 1930s, the other approach is that when people come together, especially in a mob, especially if they’re in a political party or they change somehow, there is a hive mind. There’s a group thing, a group mind that takes over and supersedes, this group mind supersedes the individual minds of the people involved.

So you could have a group of very peaceful, nice, pleasant, law abiding citizens, each one individually.

But when they come together in the Nazi party, they murder people, they kill people because the Nazi party has its own mind, is a hive mind, and it supersedes the minds of the individuals involved.

And Le Bon and many others have written about this.

Now I think the truth is somewhere in between. I think collectives and groups do have their own personalities and they project these personalities in some way.

And then I think they attract specific types of individuals.

So if you are a psychopathic political movement or a violent political movement, white supremacists or terrorist organization or whatever, you’re going to attract people who need to express psychopathy and violence. You will legitimize, you provide an outlet for these people.

I don’t believe that group mentality or group psychology can somehow transform people. I think it legitimizes some things.

We all have a latent side. Latent means dormant, asleep, a side that is not expressed. Jung called it the shadow or complexes.

We all have this.

And yet, because of a process known as sublimation, we don’t express this side. It’s not okay to express it or socially unacceptable or you could end up in prison or whatever. You don’t express this.

And then suddenly, this legitimacy, it’s allowed to express this side. It’s okay to express this side. It’s even commendable.

If you express this side, you’re okay. You’re great. If you kill Jews, you’re a good Nazi.

So suddenly, this side of you that’s been latent and dormant all the time simply comes to the fore and expresses itself. It’s very similar in biology.

In biology, we have genes.

Now, many of these genes are asleep. They are not expressed. They don’t manifest themselves.

But you change the environment a little and suddenly, many of these genes come alive. And they manifest. They have a phenotype. They express themselves externally. And this is known as epigenetics.

This is when genes are triggered into being expressed by the environment and then they are passed on the generations. It’s the same, I think, same relationship between collective and individual.

The collective legitimizes science in individual psychology, which are somehow repressed, somehow sublimated, somehow ignored, somehow denied.

What this collective does is it deactivates your defense mechanisms and triggers others.

So I would say that a collective is a selective membrane.

It’s a collective triggers some defense mechanisms and deactivates others.

So I’ll give you one example.

Splitting.

Splitting is when I say I’m all good, you’re all bad. Black and white thinking.

Collectives activate splitting.

Israel is all good. Hamas is all bad. That’s an example of splitting.

So this type of defense mechanism is activated by belonging to a collective by allegiance and affiliation and historical background and cultural mores and so on.

On the other hand, some other defense mechanisms are deactivated by the collective and the collective also disinhibits you.

When you’re in a collective, you’re anonymous. Anonymity disinhibits. When you’re anonymous, for example, online, when you’re anonymous and you’re anonymous, you have a handle, but no one knows who you are.

You suddenly behave in ways which are not like you. You become a troll, become violent and aggressive and sadistic because you’re anonymous.

The collective provides anonymity and legitimizes antisocial behaviors and so on and so forth.

So there’s a lot of interaction between individual psychology and collective psychology.

And I regard the collective as a triggering mechanism.

It’s an environment that triggers simply.

How do you assess the current global tensions in relation to the possibility of a third world war, as well as the psychological and sociopolitical conditions that might lead to such a conflict? And in your opinion, how imminent is the threat of World War III?

First of all, the best thing that has ever happened to humanity was the invention of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the kind of weapons that you will never use.

So because they are the kind of weapons that you will never use, they force you to be basically peaceful. You’re either peaceful or dead.

So nuclear weapons created a mutually assured balance of destruction. It was known as MAD, mutually assured destruction. And I think nuclear weapons pacified humanity.

I know that we look around and we say, oh, there’s a war in Sudan and there’s a war in Israel and there’s a war in Ukraine.

But the last 80 years have been the most peaceful in human history, in a thing.

And I attribute this definitely to nuclear weapons.

That’s the first thing.

The second thing, whenever there’s a shift between in the balance of powers, whenever one superpower emerges and another declines, there is warfare. There are a lot of wars in the same areas, in the areas where the tectonic plates meet, in the fault lines.

So always when one global power emerged and another global power declined, there were wars in the Middle East. Always there were wars in what is today Ukraine. Always there were wars in the Balkans. Always there were wars in the area between China and Mongolia. These areas are prone to conflict when superpowers decline and others emerge.

Why is that?

Because this is where one civilization ends and another begins.

Russia likes to think of itself as European. Russia is not European. Russia is Asian. And so the Asian tectonic plate, if you wish, the Asian civilization, that is Huntington’s view. The Asian tectonic plate ends in Ukraine.

And the European one begins there.

Similarly in the Middle East. The Middle East is where the West ends. The West ends in Israel. That’s the furthermost colony of the West. So furthermost fortress of the West. That’s where the West ends.

And Arabs and Iranians and Islam begins. So Islam in the West clash in the Middle East. Always have. Always have.

Similarly, Europe ends in the Middle East. That’s why Rome dedicated one-third of its army to fighting in Palestine in the first century AD.

These areas are barometers. These areas are thermometers. They measure the temperature, the fever of global affairs.

They have nothing to do with the global war. They have nothing to do with the world war.

A world war happens when a colonial power, an empire, is trying to take over territories. So world wars are imperial colonial wars. They are not localized. They are not regional. And they do not reflect the rise of one megapower and the decline of another.

So Hitler, for example. Hitler wanted to establish an empire, a German empire.

But it was too late because by 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, everything was taken. Africa was taken. Asia was taken. There were no colonies available for Germany.

So Hitler tried to take Europe as a colony. Hitler was in this sense a revolutionary. He tried to colonize Europe rather than Africa, rather Asia, rather South America. Hitler tried to colonize Europe.

And he treated white people. He treated white people, Polish people, Ukrainian people, Russian people. He treated white people as if they were black, as if they were.

So Hitler brought mercantilism and colonialism and imperialism into the heart of Europe. And it was world wars are colonial wars. They are empire-building wars.

What we have today will not lead to war. What we have today is friction between China, the Eurasian, the Eurasian plate, which is Russia and China, conflicting with the Western plate, which is essentially the United States and Western Europe.

And in the normal places where it always has happened throughout history, it will pass. It will pass when one of them will be the winner.

If I had to bet, I think it would still be the West.

I think China is a Ponzi scheme. I think China is a lot of prestige, agitation and slight of hand. I think China is fake. We’ve got a long story short. I think China will disintegrate in a big way.

And of course, Russia is a non-entity. Russia’s economy is smaller than Belgium, smaller than the United Kingdom. It’s a huge country territory-wise, but economically it’s a midget.

And of course, Russia cannot support an army, as we can see. Russia’s army is a joke, an absolute joke. So Russia is a non-entity and should not be taken into consideration. It can make a lot of trouble, but it’s a troublemaker.

China is a threat. But China is being built on illusion and fantasy and delusion and fakery and lies. This can’t last long. It doesn’t hold water for long.

You can fool a lot of people for decades even. But ultimately you have to pay the price.

China’s banking systems, China’s real estate sector, China’s agriculture, China’s peasants who have moved to the cities, China, it’s all going to explode soon.

I think the West is going to win this one.

And then you will see all these conflicts disappear. Peace in Ukraine, peace in the Middle East, peace everywhere.

Until the next round.

Where do you see the field of psychology heading in the next decade or in the near future?

Psychology has been corrupted by the introduction of, overwhelming introduction of statistics, biophysics, neuroscience and so on and so forth.

There is an attempt to medicalize psychology, to render it objective as if it were some branch of physics. And this process is going to end badly. It’s going to end with the discrediting of psychology.

Psychology should be about human touch, human contact, the ability to observe and to gain insight, fostering and engendering emotions, healing and so on and so forth.

None of these things is quantifiable. None of these things can be studied in a laboratory or should be even.

And this correct attempt to convert psychology into a grant generating machine is going to end badly for psychology.

There have been numerous disciplines in the past and these disciplines have been very dominant.

For example, astrology, for example, alchemy, very dominant.

Newton was an astrologist and an alchemist, not a scientist, because these were the dominant disciplines in his time.

Where is alchemy nowadays? And where is astrology outside the horoscopes in the daily papers? Where are they? They’re dead. They’re finished.

And psychology is heading that way if it’s not careful.

As it is now, it is everyone is perceiving. The laymen are perceiving it that way.

Real scientists are perceiving psychology as pseudoscience.

And when a discipline or an area of study is labeled as a pseudoscience, it doesn’t have long to survive.

So I’m very worried about the future of psychology.

If it doesn’t wake up, if it doesn’t adopt, re-adopt the giants, like starting with Freud, but there are many others, if it doesn’t accept its own heritage and its own background, if it doesn’t recognize that it’s a form of literature, and if it doesn’t focus on what matters, and what matters is healing people, healing people, then it’s lost because it’s not necessary. It’s useless.

Psychology right now is useless, totally useless.

And most of its discoveries are nonsensical because they cannot be replicated. And it’s going downhill in my view.

I don’t see it surviving for long. It would be absorbed by neuroscience, or I don’t see it surviving for long because it became a reality, TV show.

It’s not a serious discipline.

What advice would you offer to young psychologists or researchers who are entering the field today?

Pay a lot more attention to yourself, introspect.

You’re a human, and you’re as good a human as any other. You’re a sample.

In psychology, there is no representative sample. You cannot compose a group of people. You cannot create a cohort or a compilation. It will teach you something that you don’t know already.

That’s a lie. That’s a myth.

Like the grades of psychology up to the 1960s, focus on yourself. Focus on people you know really well, intimately. Learn from them. Read a lot of literature. Fiction. Observe. Analyze, not scientifically. Analyze with your heart, not with your mind. Empathize. Focus on transformation, on healing. Forget statistics. Statistics is nonsense. Nonsense, not only psychology. And forget trying to convert psychology into a brain science. We have no idea. We know nothing about the brain. Nothing. We know nothing about it.

There have been massive discoveries in the last 10 years alone. We discovered microglia. It’s a whole group of cells in the brain.

Only 10 years ago. Microglia. It’s a giant and very important group of cells in the brain.

We discovered the brain disposal system and waste cleaning system. Only 10 years ago. We discovered the DMN 10 years. Everything we know about the brain now has been discovered in the last 10 years.

You can rest assured that in 10 years from now this knowledge will be considered obsolete. We know nothing about the brain.

So don’t try to reduce psychology to brain.

We also have no idea whether this is causation or correlation. We don’t know if you’re a psychopath because your brain has less white matter or if your brain has less white matter because you’re a psychopath. We don’t know. We simply don’t know. And we are too grandiose, too arrogant to admit that we don’t know.

We lost the humility of doing science. Neuroscientists walk around as if they are the greatest mind to have ever lived. And they are ignorant buffoons.

The overwhelming vast majority of neuroscientific studies are nonsense with tiny samples and mean nothing.

So there’s a lot of narcissism in science nowadays.

Avoid.

Avoid this.

Focus on the raw material of psychology, on human beings, on the human experience and start with yourself. You’re a human.

Study your experience.

That’s what Freud did.

And you know what?

If you want to do real psychology, go back to 1890 and go from there.

The next 70 years. These were the great years of psychology.

After the 1960s and 1970s, psychology is crap. Total crap.

Counterfactual, idiotic, useless, which is why people mock psychologists and therapists and don’t go to them anymore. They go online. They’re looking for support and support among peers and self-starred experts and charlatans and con artists online because they can no longer trust the profession in their right not to trust it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure talking to you.

For me too.

Thank you.

I will let you know when it’s uploaded.

Of course.

In regards to your father.

Thank you. Take care.