Mattias Desmet Invites Dr. Breggin to Talk
Reflections on a disagreement.
Of all the disagreements I’ve observed in recent years, that between the Belgian clinical psychologist, Mattias Desmet and the American psychiatrist, Peter Breggin strikes me as one of the most peculiar.
Dr. McCullough and I are staunch admirers of Dr. Breggin and we devoted an entire chapter of our book to his life and ideas. At the same time, I greatly enjoyed reading Professor Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
I was therefore happy to see Professor Desmet’s recent post Dear Dr. Breggin - let's talk in which he wrote the following:
In a nutshell: Dr. Breggin believes that I am blaming the innocent victims of propaganda while excusing the propagandists. And it is not the first time I do so. According to him, I did exactly the same with my mass formation theory: blaming the innocent people and excusing the criminal elite.
…We have different opinions indeed. Unlike [what] Dr. Breggin seems to believe, I don’t think that the problems of this society can be reduced to the actions of an ‘evil elite’. We are all part of the problem, also the people who fall prey to the actions of ‘the elite’. Dr. Breggin seems to interpret this as ‘victim blaming’. In my opinion, I rather make people aware of the fact that they are not powerless. We are all part of the problem and hence we can all contribute to the solution.
In my interview with Dr. Breggin a couple of years ago, he mentioned Professor Desmet’s ideas in passing. If my memory serves, Dr. Breggin remarked that constant, frightening propaganda is extremely effective at manipulating the general public. Thus, the public’s response to propaganda should not be understood as an expression of mass psychosis, but as a perfectly understandable response to being psychologically conditioned by predatory manipulators.
It seems to me that the widespread irrational behavior we observed during the pandemic was indeed largely the result of manipulation by the “Global Predators” that Dr. Breggin expertly describes in his book. However, while our dreadful elites certainly played an instrumental role in fomenting the disaster, we also witnessed a stunning lack of virtue, prudence, intellect, and courage on the part of much of the population. Many people were all too willing to go along with the tyrannical nonsense inflicted on us by our rulers. That is why my circle of friends is now considerably smaller than it was prior to 2020. Life is too short to spend with avid boneheads.
The fact that many people did not go along with the tyrannical nonsense shows that resisting the barrage of propaganda is possible. Indeed, it seems to me that learning to identify and resist propaganda is not only possible, but is the responsibility of every adult citizen who aspires to live as a free citizen in a country with limited government.
I hope Dr. Breggin will accept Professor Desmet’s invitation to have a conversation. Even if they continue to disagree about things, it would surely be a fascinating talk.
I have also found myself falling in the middle of this disagreement. I see the logic of both arguments and feel that the reality falls somewhere in the middle. I love the Breggins and their views on psychology. I also loved Desmet’s first book. I did however disagreed with his chapter on how there wasn’t a coordinated effort to roll out the pandemic response (he even gave some evidence of a global conspiracy while at the same time dismissing it). And I disagree with the Breggins that the average citizens were merely helpless victims. I could provide numerous examples of both evidence of a global conspiracy, and evidence that people chose to be willfully blind to the reality of the situation and helped to enable horrific things to occur.
In my opinion, problems (personal, societal, political, national, etc) usually have multiple and complex factors that all play a roll and I think this is true of the covid fiasco. Plenty of responsibility all around for all who participated.
I sincerely hope the Breggins will have this conversation with Desmet.
Unlike Desmet, Breggin, you two - John and Peter McCullough, I have been in the vaccine critical work since 1981. Those who know me, and many do, know that my resume includes being part of vaccine damage cases in my own country and globally. Having worked with parents of severely vaccine injured children over more than FORTY years, and being the public face on radio, TV and written media constantly questioning the vaccine narrative, I know from experience, that both Desmet and Breggin are wrong for several reasons. Here are some.
And the canary in the gold mine are the MOTHERS of babies. Every mother has an intuition which the medical profession only approves of when it suits them. Even Dr McCullough would say, "Take the mother's words seriously because she knows...."
It has been my unfailing experience in EVERY single case I worked with that at some point the mother and occasionally the father would say, "From hours before they put the needle in my baby, my instincts screamed at me not to do this, but I didn't know any reason why not."
But it's not just intuition, it's a bullshit detector, and it's always on, when you are in a second hand car dealer, or buying a house, when you look for what is not being said. We all have a bullshit detector when it comes to daily life, and we use it. We know instinctively when you can't trust someone.
In the early days many parents "heard" what I had to say on TV and went and asked questions of their doctors, only to be told that I was a "fruitcake". Instead of taking the science I presented and checking it out, they chose to trust the alphabet soup after a doctor's name, who had been taught NOTHING about vaccines in medical school.
These are the people N.M. Mead, Ritaritabobita and Sue S., perhaps also recognise as failing the "grow up" IQ test. On the one hand education is supposed to teach you how to research and question everything. On the other hand, couch potato syndrome and personal intellectual laziness, means that most people want to "have fun" and leave due diligence to others - and THAT is how we lose democracy.
History is rarely considered useful today. Like you John, I have seriously studied history. for 15 years from 1981 to 1996, I had several medical history study focuses. Infection epidemiology and statistics as far back as they went in western countries. Vaccine history, development, ingredients and all the related cupboards where the skeletons were hidden. And the most important, the medical system itself. I did this for every infection for which there is now a vaccine.
Even back then without internet, if you used the Dewey system well, and cast a wide net, you could find a LOT of very good information. A medical library became my second home, and you would be amazed (or not) at the number of hugely valuable historical medical texts, which should still be in medical libraries, but which are not, because they threw them out and they are in my library.
As a mother with two young infants, I considered it my protective duty to check EVERYTHING a doctor said, because I'd already seen from my history study of the medical profession that the system can't be trusted and inch, and most doctors are flying on their own assumed magic carpet.
The very fact that I consistently spoke out over 40 years woke up the mothers of unvaccinated people in this country who are now frontline on the freedom movement. They have done due diligence and passed the "grow up" IQ test.
But quite apart from them, in 2020, a lot of people who would normally have just gone along to get along, found their bullshit detector screaming so loud that they had to do the difficult job of starting from scratch. Even some doctors who years later, admitted to me that they followed my facebook page, because I presented science they were never told about. One of them messaged me and said, "Thank you for holding my head above water for three years."
Okay they didn't speak out, but they knew bullshit when their radar pinged and and did what they could to indicate to patients to "do some research". (The medical council here gagged all medical doctors dentists etc from saying anything against the mRNA platform)
Given that the medical history shows that everything that happened between 2020 - now, has happened before, and not just once, Breggin cannot say that it's all the fault of the elite.
Given that many people woke up on their own, shows that this is not all the fault of the elite.
Desmet is also wrong. It is not mass formation to me, because that is almost involuntary. I do think it is a form of psychosis, which is defined as "a collection of symptoms that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality" In a way that is what it is. For whatever reason in their heads, they have lost of contact with reality because they have constructed their own "myth" and let others bend their minds..
I've watched this for decades.
It's a combination of intellectual laziness - a refusal to understand that history always repeats itself, and that democracy has to be guarded and protected, which you can't do if you are ignorant. It's an active choice to allow others to become in loco parentis even to yourself, It's even a type of arrogance of ignorance, in believing that those "in power", be they politicians, or doctors, know best.
How anyone can think that a politician knows best, beats me.
How anyone who has studied the history of the WHO or any other "organisation" in what they call "The delicate fabric of private and public collaboration" (Yes there is a 1997 medical article with that phrase in the title, on the beginnings of that behemoth which has now vastly expanded to include the likes of B Gates.)
How anyone can think their GP, who has five years of formal training then a residence, knows everything, beats me.
So both Desmet and Breggin are, in my opinion, on two opposite sides of the truth, which is that regardless as to what authority says, we have a duty to grow up. The classic example is right in front of every parent when suddenly their children consider that their parents know nothing... a child's way of growing up is to challenge everything and establish themselves for themselves. Okay, part of their brain might drop out at the age of 15, but if you are lucky, they've gone back and picked it up and put it back in by 24 - though some never do.
And if you as a parent, have done your job properly you will teach them that every story has two sides and a rim like a coin that join those two side, and the minute you stick one side of that coin on the table, then you cannot see the bigger picture.
We homeschooled our children, so they saw the stream of parents of vaccine injured children traipsing through the house. They came to many of my talks. They sat pan faced through many immunology lessons and science as I explained to them why they were NOT going to be vaccinated.
When they left they had had a guts full of it. But come 2020, it all fell into place for them, and they mentally went "Ah, right so that was what Mum was talking about. This is a repeat of X, Y and Z." and they stood firm and said no, and paid that price.
To me that is why Desmet and Breggin are both wrong, because instinct and bullshit detectors are not there to ignore. Schools "train" children to fit the system, but parents can EDUCATE children in how to think, logics, and to never trust anyone's word as "the truth"
it's called growing up, and most people who succumbed to very obvious lies which those with instinct and bullshit detectors picked up straight away had parents who did not do their job... did not pay attention, and failed an IQ test held out by the elites, because part of this was that they wanted to know just who had brains and who did not.
That is my opinion.