Cultivating Collective Consciousness

Speaker 1
I
Speaker 2
was thinking of JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. It's a different kind of story, but this, young boy raised in environments that are tremendously averse and tragic. So I think it's there is a willingness as you're experiencing advances and I'm sure others to hear and to listen and to see. And how that's going to enter into the collective and what the collective will do in response to that remains to be seen.
Speaker 3
This
Speaker 2
whole capacity to influence the collective consciousness of a country. I mean, this was something that psychologists have been interested in a long time. And of course, the horrific example was in what we saw in Germany, leading up to World War II. But this understanding that as media has continued to expand its influence, the ability to influence the collective grows for good or ill. But I remember the campaigns, for instance, in the 70s, there was an enormous anti-littering campaign. That was very, very effective. I mean, it looks bizarre to see somebody throw a bag of garbage out of their car window on the highway. That's like shocking now. down most any highway you drove. It was ubiquitous to see somebody throw a mattress, you know, and that's really changed. But there does have to be this feeling often at a federal level that there was a particular virtue. It goes
Speaker 3
to the cultivation of virtue, doesn't it? Yeah, Exactly.
Speaker 2
The cultivation of a virtue and often relatives of the collective, something that can be seen in a very concrete way. Don't smoke, don't litter. Again, very short slogans. But to be able to stimulate affect and be able to, I can still remember the anti-lettering commercials in my mind, The Weeping Indian at the side of the highway, totally iconic and it changed the nation. So I feel into what you're saying, the difficulty of course, is what is the message that the unconscious of the nation will take in and make their own? And by the way, if you haven't seen the Century of the Self, it's a fantastic BBC series about the birth of mass marketing, which which interestingly was founded by Freud's nephew, who applied psychoanalytic theory, who was the one who convinced women that they should smoke as a symbol of establishing their freedom and taking power into their own hands. And then the massive amount of effort it has taken to unwind that idea in the collective, as if the collective is its own psyche, one great vast psychology.

LUXURY BELIEFS: Has social class shaped your mind?

This Jungian Life Podcast

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts