How the collective unconscious rules humanity
Forget the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, and the 1%. Much as it seems like they do, they do not hold the reins of human destiny. Humanity’s true ruler is its own morass of unprocessed feelings, the collective unconscious.
“Life is governed by those who are the least conscious,” spiritual teacher Georges Gurdjieff stated in Russia during the collective madness of World War I.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in Berlin in 1932 when Hitler came to power, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich states: “It is ridiculous to contend that the psychopathic general was capable of oppressing seventy million people all by himself” (Reich’s italics).
Fast-forward a century: It is ridiculous to contend that 1% of the population are capable of oppressing eight billion people all by themselves.
From this, we must deduce that the majority insist on their own oppression—and would rise up in arms, demanding a new demagogue, if they were not sufficiently oppressed.
Reich concurs: “In Europe every overthrow of the government carried out under the slogan of freedom inevitably led to despotism… All dictators have built their power on the social irresponsibleness of masses of people.”
This phenomenon is easily seen in America right now.
The unconscious
The cause of this social irresponsibleness is each individual’s deep unconscious.
The concept of the unconscious was popularised by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century.
Wikipedia gives Freud’s view of the unconscious as “a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression.”
Reich, part of Freud’s inner circle, was clear this repository ruled most people’s lives: “Your conscious action is only a drop on the surface of a sea of unconscious processes, of which you can know nothing—about which, indeed, you are afraid to know.”
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung echoed this when he stated that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.”
The collective unconscious
The collective unconscious is nothing more than the individual repositories of eight billion people aggregated at the group level.
What do these repositories contain? Working off the Wikipedia definition, the contents can be broadly classified in two groups:
- Traumatic memories and painful emotions; and
- Socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires
The first group comprises inherited and current-life traumas (instances of emotional overwhelm) that have never been recognised and healed. This psychic soup of festering hurt gives rise to the second group as a reaction to/compensation for the first group.
It’s easy to see how Nazism—and, indeed, Trumpism—is an unconscious outbreak of this second group. Reich wrote that “the fascists were not conscious of their technique;” they merely exploited volatile feelings on a mass scale.
While everyone argues for or against the second group of “ideas, wishes or desires,” the drivers—the first group—remain unrecognised and unaddressed.
Mother and father wounds
Yet the collective unconscious is not uniform. Races, religions, nations, classes, communities and other social groups each have their own overlapping emotional repositories. Each group has its own festering resentments, unfulfilled wishes, compensatory fantasies, those it would persecute should it come to power.
This variance also manifests in the left-right political spectrum.
That’s because the first group, traumatic memories and painful emotions, can also be broadly divided in two:
- Mother wound dominant
- Father wound dominant
Mother wounds relate to nurturing, communication, and community. They are projected onto the world, both personally and collectively, as inappropriate mothering, i.e., smothering, in a desire to whitewash the failed mothering.
Father wounds relate to boundaries, resources, and negotiating with the outside world. They are projected onto the world, personally and collectively, as emotionally absent fathering. The absent father may be present physically but absent emotionally.
People occupy different points of the political spectrum depending on which of these wounds are the most pressing.
Manifestations of the collective unconscious
Reich writes that “Your unconscious… reveals itself to you only in its manifestation.” This is true both personally and collectively.
The political left has many valuable qualities but its woundedness surfaces in the nanny state: the steady creep of once-familial responsibilities under government programmes, spending vast sums of money on dubious social plans, universal healthcare.
Universal healthcare is a great thing, but it provides no incentive for people to make responsible, healthy lifestyle choices such as dieting and exercising.
Inappropriate mothering longs to remove individual choice/responsibility and make everything right for everyone, without dissent. The current mania for cancelling is the social media equivalent of sending children to the naughty step or getting them to wash out their mouths with soap for behaving unacceptably (in Mother’s rose-tinted view).
The political right has many valuable qualities but its woundedness surfaces in its disregard for sustainability, the oppression of minorities, and the perpetuation of entrenched, exploitative authority.
Freedom is its catch-cry—yet what it craves is the freedom to trample over others and over the environment in a goldrush frenzy of exploitation. The absent father champions the free market regardless of the emotional, economic, and environmental devastation it wreaks; he is blinded by self-interest and short-termism.
The absent father dreams of returning from the hunt with a woolly mammoth; hitting the jackpot; the big payday… all will be well—until the woolly mammoth becomes extinct.
These are very broad generalisations—yet they are broadly accurate.
Irresponsibility
Drained by the vague and confusing pain of mother and father wounds, much of humanity longs only to be anaesthetised, entertained, and told what to do.
This is where the 1% come in. They are the few who’ve accepted the role of telling the many what to do—and be richly, often abusively, rewarded for it.
The Covid pandemic provided a stark and chastening illustration of all this. I’m not arguing for or against the decisions that were made—only to say that without collective unconscious agreement, lockdowns and mass vaccination would’ve been impossible to implement and enforce. The whole thing, for better or worse, was self-inflicted.
Only a society that is not fully conscious could bombard itself with sugar, fat, and carbohydrates to create the obesity crisis of the so-called developed world—and resist all attempts to impose healthy eating practices.
At the root of all these wounds lies an unwillingness to take responsibility for our feelings. Emotional responsibility requires that we do the hard work of recognising and releasing our unhealed trauma, whether inherited or from our own lives. Until then, as Jung stated, we—individually and collectively—will be ruled by our unconscious.
Dark cloud
Like the image above, the collective unconscious is a dark cloud hovering unseen over the whole of humanity, sending down occasional lightning bolts of cataclysmic change.
Yet there is light beneath its smothering veil.
Recognising that the collective unconscious rules humanity frees us from trying to change the world ‘out there’ and instead focus on making the unconscious conscious.
In Debugging the Universe, Laura Knight-Jadczyk describes the unconscious as “the realm from where our world manifests, in which are found unfathomable depths of the rejected, the unacknowledged, the unrecognised, the unknown and undeveloped elements of our existence.”
When we accept the rejected, acknowledge the unacknowledged, recognise the unrecognised, know the unknown and develop the undeveloped aspects of our being, we not only free ourselves from the destiny of unconscious humanity but reduce the darkness under which it blindly sails.
Photo by Rafael Garcin on Unsplash