Revisiting Carl Jung, Part 5: A Warning

Carl Jung lived through some terrible times: the First World War, the rise of fascism, the Second World War, the Holocaust. . . . By 1959 the world had entered the perilous age we still inhabit, a time when humanity can annihilate itself with the touch of a button. (Side note: let’s not.) He saw the world materially but also through dreams–his own and those of his patients. This is the year he published the book The Undiscovered Self. He asked:

“What will the future bring? From time immemorial this question has occupied men’s minds . . . Historically, it is chiefly in times of physical, political, economic and spiritual distress that men’s eyes turn with anxious hope to the future, and when anticipations, utopias and apocalyptic visions multiply. . . . Today, as the end of the second millenium draws near, we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction. What is the significance of that split, symbolized by the ‘Iron Curtain,’ which divides humanity into two halves? What will become of our civilization, or of man himself, if the hydrogen bombs begin to go off, or if the spiritual and moral darkness of State absolutism should spread over Europe?” (11-12)

Neither of those fears has come to pass, not yet. What happened instead was a flowering of collective liberation movements. Already, in 1956, Martin Luther King had spread the idea of a “Beloved Community.” This was seven years before his famous “I have a Dream” speech. A new age was beginning.

But what is the age we live in now? How have we been impacted by our increasing global connectedness, the Internet, A.I., climate change, and the increasing concentration of wealth and power into a few hands? What will the future bring? Carl Jung’s words speak also to our time. He proposes that our ideas, which come from our primordial psyche, are not quite up to the task.

“Human knowledge consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial patterns of ideas that were given us a priori. These need certain modifications, because, in their original form, they are suited to an archaic mode of life but not to the demands of a specifically differentiated environment. If the flow of instinctive dynamism into our life is to be maintained, as is absolutely necessary for our existence, then it is imperative that we remold these archetypal forms into ideas which are adequate to the challenges of the present.

“Our ideas have, however, the unfortunate but inevitable tendency to lag behind the changes in the total situation. . . Only when conditions have altered so drastically that there is an unendurable rift between the outer situation and our ideas, now become antiquated, does the general problem of our Weltanschauung, our philosophy of life, arise, and with it the question of how the primordial images that maintain the flow of instinctive energy are to be reoriented or readapted.” (82-83)

What is our philosophy of life now, in the United States, in 2025? We don’t have one, we have many. We are and have always been multicultural. But two diametrically opposed philosophies have come to attention in the political realm: Christian nationalism, which worships the American Flag, and on the other hand a stubborn rationalism that worships Facts like climate change and vaccine effectiveness and expects the other side to do the same. Neither of those will save us.

Facts are great if you can find them. Most people, though, are wandering around the wilderness of the human psyche without a guide. Listen: what are facts? Look around you. You’re in a room. What can you see? What can you hear? I see a computer monitor, a stack of papers, a green curtain blowing. I don’t see a shelf full of books. That’s behind me, and so it exists only in my imagination. If I turn around I will find a book of poetry, Sound and Sense, right where I expect to find it, because I found it there the last time. Yep, there it is. One shelf lower than what I expected, but close enough. Physical reality matched my expectations. I found my Fact.

Let’s go over this again. Everything outside our direct sensory experience, even memory, we perceive through our imagination.

Today, the day I’m beginning this post, is October 6, 2025. Federal troops have been deployed to the city of Portland because the U.S. President was shown a video of protests from 2020. The Fact of the matter is that before the deployment, Portland was just as peaceful as any other city, with people walking to work and coffee shops and bookstores. But any image of Portland is a “psychic event,” which to the mind is just as real as any Fact.

*

We interrupt this regularly scheduled October 6th post with a note from the future. By October 17th, ICE agents have been confronted with protestors wearing inflatable frog suits. Wait, what? Stay tuned.

*

In the age of social media, of virtual reality, of TikTok, of AI, humanity has become alarmingly disconnected from both the material world. I suspect this will get worse before it gets better.

Humanity is also disconnected from its inner life, as Carl Jung notes, and cannot see its collective shadow. It therefore takes its own evil and projects it onto “the other.” Here’s a zinger:

“The horror which the dictator States have of late brought upon mankind is nothing less than the culmination of all those atrocities of which our ancestors made themselves guilty in the not so distant past. Quite apart from the barbarities and blood baths perpetrated by the Christian nations among themselves throughout European history, the European has also to answer for all the crimes he has committed against the dark-skinned people during the process of colonization.” (107)

I want to say, “Yeah, that’s not me. I’m nice. I’m one of the good guys!” Jung has a response to that, however:

“Since it is universally believed that man is merely what consciousness believes of itself, he regards himself as harmless and so adds stupidity to iniquity. He does not deny that terrible things have happened and go on happening, but it is always ‘the others’ who do them.” (107-108)

In other words, people project our own inclination to evil, our shadow, onto others. And then hurt them. It’s a terrible vicious cycle that can only be stopped if it is understood. “[O]nly the fool can permanently neglect the conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil.” (109)

When we project our shadow onto others, that disrupts our ability to create these bonds. But on the other hand, self-knowledge, the knowledge of our imperfections, forms the basis of human relationships.

“Recognition of the shadow, on the other hand, leads to the modesty we need in order to acknowledge imperfection. And it is just this conscious recognition and consideration that are needed wherever a human relationship is to be established. (116)

From there, he leads into a vision that corresponds to Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community: “[T]he free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principle of a kind like caritas, the Christian love of your neighbor.” (117)

I found the end of the book unsatisfying, however. Jung counters the threat of totalitarianism with self-knowledge of the individual:

“I hope, therefore, that a psychiatrist, who in the course of a long life has devoted himself to the causes and consequences of psychic disorders, may be permitted to express his opinion, in all the modesty enjoined upon him as an individual, about the question raised by the world today. I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being–that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal.” (125)

I can’t be satisfied with curing my own psychic disorders–today’s problems require a strong community. I will move on next to a community that Jung’s work helped inspire and shape. But not yet. What’s up with the inflatable frog?

Stay tuned.

Work Cited

The Undiscovered Self. Jung, Carl. Little, Brown & Company, Inc. 1959.