The founder of analytic psychology, Carl Jung, proposed the existence of something he called the "collective unconscious." He said it was the most misunderstood of his "empirical concepts." Its reality could be inferred from the presence of "archetypes," most readily discoverable in dreams, which are involuntary and spontaneous. Here is something about which the conscious mind knows nothing. And yet, the unconscious mind -- from the moment of birth -- is filled with built-in "mental contents."
Jung explained that while the personal unconscious is made up of complexes, the collective unconscious is made up of archetypes. Rich archetypal material may be found in the delusions of paranoiacs, and the fantasies of early childhood. Jung relates the story of a schizophrenic patient standing at a window, blinking into the sun. Jung asked what the patient was looking at. The patient replied, "Surely you see the sun's penis -- when I move my head to and fro, it moves too, and that is where the wind comes from." Jung admitted that he didn't understand the patient's delusion. Four years later, Jung was reading a book on ancient mythology that included the following passage: "...The path of the visible gods will appear through the disc of the sun, who is God my father. Likewise the so-called tube, the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube."
How could a schizophrenic have seen, in the disc of the sun, ancient symbolism referred to in an obscure Alexandrian text? Here is proof that the collective unconscious is real. The matchup between the schizophrenic's delusion and the ancient mythological text is no mere coincidence, asserted Jung. "Now it is quite out of the question that the patient could have had any knowledge whatever of a Greek papyrus published four years later...."
Sometimes, when a thing falls apart, we see how they are put together. For example, as the schizophrenic loses his mind we find deeper contents spilling out in bizarre ways. And with regard to that collective madness which threatens to overwhelm us today, one merely has to consider the mass political delusions and projections of the moment. Totalitarian impulses, utopian promises, mass psychosis, and the insane destruction of the country's economy through the passage of crushing taxes. The socialist bangs his head against the wall of economic reality. And he will continue to bang his head against the wall. Vladimir Lenin, like many socialist intellectuals, held that running a business was "extraordinarily simple." Any literate person could do it. Those in charge of enterprises need not be paid more than the average worker. As Thomas Sowell points out in his book, Intellectuals and Society, "Just three years after taking power ... and with his post-capitalist economy facing what Lenin himself later called 'ruin, starvation and devastation,' he reversed himself...." The socialist millennium, where the lion lies down with the lamb, was yet out of reach. It will always be out of reach. What was true for Lenin will be true for Obama. Socialist theory, which is a form of madness bubbling from the depths of the disturbed modern mind, posits an archaic return to the Garden of Eden (primitive communism) through the "dialectic" of class warfare.
In his book, The Myth of Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade argued that archaic societies disregard "concrete, historical time" in favor of "nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythical time of the beginning of things, to the 'Great Time.'" According to Eliade, archaic society is hostile to the kind of history that is "not regulated by Archetypes." Here we see a rejection of profane, continuous time. In its place, suggests Eliade, we find "a certain metaphysical 'valorization' of human existence." Man returns to himself, to the collectivism of the hunter gatherer. Such is the Marxist view of history: from primitive communism to modern communism, with capitalism as a waypoint in between.
In his book, The Undiscovered Self, Jung wrote: "Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum." As this so-called "stratum" weakens, through the decline of literacy and the rise of modern media, the subversive minority with its incendiary torches bursts into the halls of state. "Our times have demonstrated what it means when the gates of the psychic underworld are thrown open," wrote Jung. "Things whose enormity nobody could have imagined in the idyllic innocence of the first decade of our century have happened and have turned the world upside down. Ever since, the world has remained in a state of schizophrenia."
Jung noted that civilized Germany had "disgorged its primitiveness," and that Russia was ruled by this same primitive impulse. "No wonder the Western world feels uneasy," wrote Jung, "for it does not know how much it plays into the hands of the uproarious underworld.... It has lost its moral and spiritual values to a very dangerous degree. Its moral and spiritual tradition has collapsed, and has left a worldwide disorientation and dissociation."
It is our so-called scientific worldview that has dehumanized us. "Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos," wrote Jung. "At least the surface of our world seems to be purified of all superstitious and irrational admixtures. Whether, however, the real inner world of man -- and not our wish-fulfilling fiction about it -- is also freed from primitiveness is another question."
An attempt to return mankind to an earlier state is unspeakably dangerous. Can the government provide medical care to everyone in the same way that a witchdoctor once provided? Can a faltering economy bear the weight of a massive tax increase (needed to pay for the medical care)? And once we return to the state of nature, and the mentally stable stratum of the population is brushed aside, will our society not resemble a madhouse wherein the inmates sees a tube dangling from the disc of the sun? "Look," we say to ourselves, "that is where the wind comes from."
