Isms as New Gods and Political Rituals

Jung wrote “The Undiscovered Self” in 1957, opening with “What will the future bring?”, as the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and nuclear weapons gained enough momentum to threaten survival. He argued that mass-mindedness, amplified by state power, corporate bureaucracy, and scientific rationalism, reduces people to statistics, numbs conscience, and makes evil all the easier to project.

When institutions promise safety and efficiency, what happens to individual responsibility?

If religion is an instinct, what strange substitutes will it flow into when it’s suppressed?

What can we do to strengthen our Ego-Self axis to resist groupthink?

Late in his life, Jung sought to restore the value of religion by freeing it from specific dogma and defining it as a conscientious regard for the irrational facts of experience. As he watched various nations lose their footing and careen into extremes that swept the populace into unthinking obedience, he quietly stated over and again, a vital connection to the transpersonal was the only stable alternative to the deification of the State.

We discuss how crowds crush self-reflection, why turning individuals into units of human resource makes people feel replaceable, how projection turns rivals into demons and justifies violence, why psychologies that seek to make us fit in are agents of compliance, how shadow integration grants inner authority, how secular isms capture our religious hunger by harnessing their agenda to archetypal rituals of purity, heresy and sacrifice, how art might save us and why dreams will always offer a refuge that the collective cannot steal from you.

Mentioned:

The Undiscovered Self

Present and Future

God, the Devil, and the Human Soul

Jung, His Life and Work

The Apotheosis of Washington

Nuremberg

The Wall

Infinite Jest

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