There is a dream that has haunted human society since its development in the primordial past – the dream that a chosen group of elites, educated and enlightened far beyond the abilities or knowledges of the average man, could design, through a complete application of their cunning and brutal legal force to compel the recalcitrant, create the perfect society in which all the sorrows and trials of mortality have been either rendered negligible or completely eliminated. This dream today goes by the modern term “the State,” the form of government where those in power use the violence at their command to extort monies from the public (taxation) and to terrorize the masses into compliance with their edicts (laws) by vowing to rob them (fine them) or to beat, cage, and kill them (arrest and imprisonment) if they disobey. The common belief is that by doing so the government will use its power to avenge the innocent, protect the people, provide for the masses, and ensure that peace and justice reign in the land. This dream has been tried in multitudinous forms – monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship, republicanism, constitutional monarchy, Socialism, minarchism, democracy, etc. In every instance it has failed. In every instance it has delivered the exact opposite of what it has promised. In every instance the dream has proved to be a nightmare. So why on Earth do we keep trying it?
That is a question I have puzzled over for some time now because I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it. But, I’ve finally found an answer. I have found the answer to not only why we keep reverting again and again to the State in all its different forms, but I’ve also found the answer to the question of why democracy always slides in to autocracy – one man authoritarian rule. Additionally, I have discovered exactly why minarchy – the belief that a minimal state can be maintained that will safeguard our rights with its violence and power but never violate them – also always fails and descends first into populism and finally into oligarchy or dictatorship. In short, I have found the explanation of why voluntaryism and anarchism are the only ways in which to build a functional society which allows for any form of social governance without descending either into authoritarianism and autocracy on the one hand or chaos and self-destruction on the other. And I didn’t find it in any political treatise as such. Rather I found it in a place that, for me, is a total surprise – in the writings of Carl Gustav Jung.
Dr. Carl Jung is one of the most important men in the history and development of psychology. The founder and father of analytic psychology, Jung believed that if we are to understand the mental health problems people have we must begin by analyzing their immediate life and seeing how it related to their problems and not just trying to tie current problems to past childhood trauma and/or sexual problems, as Sigmund Freud did. In 1958, towards the end of his life, Jung published The Undiscovered Self, a fascinating book about the conditions of modern society and the situation that people find themselves in relative to the State. He essentially psychologically analyzes humanity and the way the State functions. In doing so he explains why any form of the State will ultimate develop along authoritarian and autocratic lines, diminishing the liberty and humanity of the individual in exchange for collectivized identification and action. All the various rivers of the State eventually flow into the ocean of autocracy. Additionally, Dr. Jung insightfully ties this into the threat of what we would today call technocracy, the idea that political power should be held by a group of highly educated elites who use their technical and scientific prowess to manage all functions of society in the name of the common good and how this inevitably ends up in totalitarianism.
In reproducing the excerpt below, taken from pages 7 to 11 of the book, I have done some slight editing in that I have broken some of his larger paragraphs into smaller ones. Hopefully this does nothing to diminish Dr. Jung’s arguments but enhances the ability of the more casual reader to understand them. I have done this so that I might offer commentary on what Dr. Jung has to say that I may make a more direct application to our current situation. I have likewise introduced pictures of concepts that he discusses as a way to illustrate his point and interject a visual element to the overall reading. Other than this, all quotations are Dr. Jung’s in full. We pick up as Dr. Jung has begun to explain the differences between general knowledge and an individual understanding of a person, and how these ideas conflict when a doctor, in order to treat a patient, must refuse to treat him or her as a statistic to which the doctor can apply scientific knowledge and instead seek to understand the patient as an individual and arrange all methods of treatment solely upon the individual needs of the patient.
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Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or normal man to whom the scientific statements refer. What is more, most of the natural sciences try to represent the results of their investigations as though these had come into existence without man’s intervention, in such a way that the collaboration of the psyche – an indispensable factor – remains invisible. (An exception to this is modern physics, which recognizes that the observed is not independent of the observer.) So in this respect, too, science conveys a picture of the world from which a real human psyche appears to be excluded – the very antithesis of the “humanities.”
Dr. Jung here makes an invaluable point about the way that looking at society through purely scientific lenses – through, data, studies, statistics, and tests – does more to obscure than it does to reveal. Humans do not act or exist as collectives, conglomerates, and near-identical groups. We are individuals. And individuals do not act in ways that can be understood without knowledge of that individual person. In this sense individuals are irrational, the things we think, believe, and do are not bound by scientific exactitude and are driven as much by our desires as they are by any sense of cold logic. We value our life based on how much we are able to pursue our hopes and dreams without the constraining hands of others telling us what we can or cannot do in order to pursue happiness as we understand it. In this sense the individual, in all his unscientific irrationality is the vessel of true reality, the only real being that exists as no one ever exactly matches the results of scientific study and the pronouncements of statisticians.
Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the psyche but the individual man and, indeed, all individual events whatsoever suffer a leveling down and a process of blurring that distorts the picture of reality into a conceptual average. We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical world picture: it displaces the individual in favor of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations. Science supplies us with, instead of the concrete individual, the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality. The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State (raison d’état). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard.
Here Dr. Jung is talking about the difference between what experts believe should be and what really is, the difference between what we would call collectivism and individualism. The collectives we try and place people with – based on religion, sex, gender, orientation, race, ethnicity, etc. – are fictions. Only the individual exists. But this truth is lost by those experts who run the State. Disconnected by their position and power from the individual, all they see are data reports and statistical analyses. For them these unrealistic reports become the basis for reality and the basis from which they launch their programs to try and remake reality in their own image. The morality of what they are actually doing to individual people – the violence, extortion, and poverty visited upon the public in pursuit of getting the wealth and power they need to fund and carry out their mass programs – is lost as they try to impose their ideals upon the world. The individual no longer matters, only what the data says about the collective.
The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled and are distinguished only by the fact that they are specialized mouthpieces of the State doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgment, but thoroughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied.
As the power of the State increases, its control over society grows proportionally. Over time all things are brought under the rule of the government and those in power can dictate the beliefs, actions, and lives of those over whom they rule. Nothing – not birth, not life, not marriage, not love, not sex not the job you do, not what you eat, not what your drink, not who you meet, and not even what you think – escapes the regulation and control of the State as those in power seek to enforce their fictional ideals onto the reality of the individual. As this happens the individual’s ability to decide what he or she thinks, loves, or lives decreases and is brought more and more in line with the dictates of those who hold the levers of power. Our moral decision making power, our liberty, disappears as the power of the State grows.
Dr. Jung also makes an essential observation here that many, even among the critics of the State such as myself, miss. The State’s critics often talk about it as if there is a secret cabal of the rich and mighty – a George Soros or the Koch Brothers, for example – who are plotting the domination of the nation and the destruction of liberty. This is, of course, nonsense. There is no secret cabal. There doesn’t need to be one. Those who gain power are exposed to the same mental conditioning that all of us are and believe in it just as much as most of us do. The politicians who gain power do so exactly because they are grand evangelists of the doctrines of the State, able to preach its glories the best by promising t use its power the most in the name of the collective, are the ones who attain the highest levels of power. It isn’t because they’re members of the NWO, Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, or Bilderbergers. It is because they are mouthpieces for the Cult of the State and preach its doctrines in the way their supporters most wish to hear. And Dr. Jung was absolutely right about they’re not needing to be men of good judgment or wisdom, as we’ve seen with Trump and Biden. The most important thing is that they are experts and believers in the doctrines of the State. They will then naturally act according to their statist (“state-ist”) beliefs, resulting in their maintaining and increasing the power of the government.
The seemingly omnipotent State doctrine is for its part manipulated in the name of State policy by those occupying the highest positions in the government, where all the power is concentrated. Whoever, by election or caprice, gets into one of these positions is no longer subservient to authority, for he is the State policy itself and within the limits of the situation can proceed at his own discretion. With Louis XIV he can say, “L’état c’est moi.” [“The State is Me,” or perhaps “I am the State.”] He is thus the only individual or, at any rate, one of the few individuals who could make use of their individuality if only they knew how to differentiate themselves from the State doctrine. They are more likely, however, to be the slaves of their own fictions. Such one-sidedness is always compensated psychologically by unconscious subversive tendencies. Slavery and rebellion are inseparable correlates. Hence, rivalry for power and exaggerated distrust pervade the entire organism from top to bottom.
There is a saying among those of us who challenge the power of the State which goes something like, “The President should be so weak it doesn’t matter who he is, not so powerful it doesn’t matter who he is.” The idea is a simple one – that the President should have little to no power to control the lives of the people in the country. This was how the system was originally design. Just go read the Presidential powers as laid out in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. It spends more space talking about how the Electoral College would work than it does laying out the powers of the Presidency. And of the powers delegated to the President, almost all of them he has to have the permission of the Senate or Congress generally to use. There is almost nothing he can do on his own. Yet today the opposite is true. The President is at the head of a vast bureaucracy whose reach extends to the most minute parts of the lives of every person, every day. HIs orders must be acted upon as law and his decisions can determine the lives of millions of people domestically and internationally. In the full glory of his office the President becomes the personification of the entire apparatus from which he draws his political power. He is the State itself.
With such power he should be able to do almost anything he wants. So what prevents him from doing so? Only that he believes what he preaches. You do not spend decades of your life submerged in the system, suffering indoctrination from childhood into its beliefs, doing everything you can to become Pontifex Maximus of the faith without actually believing what you preach. They believe the lies that prop up the power of the government and thereby become slaves to those very fictions. Yet you cannot become a slave without developing a subconscious desire for rebellion. Liberty, after all, is the desire of every human soul. This is why there is so much lying, backstabbing, and betrayal in politics. Being a slave to the State is the only way to gain power within it, but being a slave is exactly what you hate the most. You externalize this hate by blaming others. “It is the Republicans fault;” “The Democrats are to blame;” “Trump is a Russian troll;” “Biden is a Soros stooge;” “S/He is a traitor and must be brought down;” ad infinitum. You then do whatever you can to remove them and gain their position and power for yourself.
This also explains the vitriol and hate you see among the masses regarding politics. Subconsciously individuals know they’re slaves to the State. When they’re chosen Master is in power it becomes easier to accept the fiction of elections and ignore their slavery because they can choose to see only the policies they like and pretend the one in power is merely a representative doing what they want. When those they oppose come to power their slavery becomes more obvious and the chaffing of their chains becomes a bit more sharp, and they buck against it. But because they cannot change that which actually enslaves them, the doctrines of the State, because they believe it so deeply and foundationally, they instead externalize that hate to another, the opposing political party, blaming it and its leaders for the feelings of rage and powerlessness they feel.
Furthermore, in order to compensate for its chaotic formlessness, a mass always produces a “Leader,” who almost infallibly becomes the victim of his own inflated ego-consciousness, as numerous examples in history show. This development becomes logically unavoidable the moment the individual masses together with others and becomes obsolete. Apart from agglomerations of huge masses of people, in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity. As a social unit he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics. He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance. Looked at rationally and from outside, that is exactly what he is, and from this point of view it seems positively absurd to go on talking about the value or meaning of the individual. Indeed, one can hardly imagine how one ever came to endow individual human life with so much dignity when the truth to the contrary is as plain as the palm of your hand.
Dr. Jordan Peterson argues that hierarchy in human life is a nature product of our biology, that we naturally want to order society in a way where everyone knows and understand their place relative to everyone else and where we know who those in authority are and who they are not. Dr. Jung seems to be saying something similar here. Out of the chaos of human relationships, especially those organized by the State where our natural inclination towards competition and rivalry is exacerbated exponentially by the contradictory nature of living in a statist society (slavery vs instinctual drive for liberty), humans naturally seek someone to take control, to tell them what to do, and to promise to fix everything. We want a Leader . The problem is that in order to do this we must submit our individuality to the demands of the group, we must fit within the ideological and social confides of the group if we wish to belong. We must give up our individuality for the collective, the individual for the State and, by doing so, imbue the Leader with the power he or she needs to rule.
The resulting abdication of individuality and responsibility caused by this Dr. Jung labels “mass mindedness” but it reminds me of the description of groupthink. As people are consumed in the identity of the group they reject information that would contradict what the group teaches and they suppress their own thoughts when those thoughts might challenge their belief in the doctrines of the group. Therefore, while claiming to be an individual they are actively working on obliterating their individuality, while claiming to champion liberty they are in fact proposing slavery – especially when we begin to talk about the State and its power to use violent force to compel mass obedience. In this I am also reminded of George Orwell’s definition of doublethink as given in his seminal work 1984, “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them …DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” (Pgs. 44, 270) Political mass-mindedness/groupthink necessitates doublethink, otherwise one could not in good morality support the State as it is founded on violence, brutality, and control.
Dr. Jung further explicates the dehumanizing effect of reducing individuals to scientifically defined and studied statistics. Having forfeited, had stolen, one’s individuality results in the loss of the individual’s dignity and worth. After all, as a collective you are not a person with thought and feelings, hopes and dreams, life and liberty. You’re a number. Not even enough to qualify as a rounding error. Why should I care about a number? Why should we let numbers get in the way of Utopia?
Seen from this standpoint, the individual really is of diminishing importance and anyone who wished to dispute this would soon find himself at a loss for arguments. The fact that the individual feels himself or the members of his family or the esteemed friends in his circle to be important merely underlines the slightly comic subjectivity of his feeling. For what are the few compared with ten thousand or a hundred thousand, let alone a million? This recalls the argument of a thoughtful friend with whom I once got caught up in a huge crowd of people. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Here you have the most convincing reason for not believing in immortality: all those people want to be immortal!”
In such dehumanizing conditions is it no surprise that people are dehumanized? Is it no surprise that people can champion the murdering of children when each is merely thought of in a purely scientifically rationalist approach – as a clump of cells that is one among billions? Is it no surprise that people can champion the murdering of millions of people across the world as long as it doesn’t effect someone they know? Is it any surprise that people can see themselves as a champion of people of color here in America while murdering millions of non-white people all over the world through the War on Terror? Those abstract numbers being eliminated aren’t people with hopes and dreams, with a divine history and eternal promise within them. They’re just statistics to be shuffled from one category to another. Likewise, is it no surprise then that State power is increased, justified on the way it may effect the collective mass numbers no matter how it may destroy the individual? As Josef Stalin is reported to have said during the Holodomór, the Ukrainian genocide caused by Stalin’s Socialist agricultural policies, “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”
The bigger the crowd the more negligible the individual becomes. But if the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning – which, after all, is not identical with public welfare and higher standards of living – then he is already on the road to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has becomes its proselyte. The man who looks only outside and quails before the big battalions has no resource with which to combat the evidence of his senses and his reason. But that is just what is happening today: we are all fascinated and overawed by statistical truths and large numbers and are daily apprised of the nullity and futility of the individual personality, since it is not represented and personified by any mass organization. Conversely, those personages who strut about on the world stage and whose voices are heard far and wide seem, to the uncritical public, to be borne along on some mass movement or on the tide of public opinion and for this reason are either applauded or execrated. Since mass suggestion plays the predominant role here, it remains a moot point whether their message is their own, for which they are personally responsible, or whether they merely function as a megaphone for collective opinion.
Individualists are individualists not because they’re arrogant or selfish – just the opposite. It is because we recognize that every human being is worthy of dignity and respect and those aren’t just political platitudes for us. Every person is worthy of being able to pursue happiness, to choose to live the sort of life which he or she believe will greatly magnify his or her joy upon this Earth and add value and beaning to his or her existence. And the only person who can possibly determine what those things are which bring so much joy for the individual person, what make that specific person happy and gives meaning and value to that individual’s life, is his or her self. No other person or conglomerate of people are omniscient enough to know how to design the perfect pencil at the perfect price, much less design the perfect human life. This is something we all intuitively understand when confronted with individuals giving us orders – most people will not do what you order them to do on the streets no matter how many Ph.D.’s you have – but which we forget, or doublethink away, when it comes to the State.
When it comes to the State, to the government, we accept the political doctrine that because of its data, because of its scientific experts, because of its vast array of resources, it can do what we otherwise know is impossible – that it, through judicious application of its power and wealth can design the perfect human life and wipe away the problems of human existence. This powerful delusion not only ignores the fact that in most of the problems of the world it is some action of the State – the problems of war, crime, poverty, and famine are all made exponentially worse by the State than they would be without it – but it actually contradicts everything we actually know about reality and human nature. If people are evil, corrupt, greedy, sinful, in short untrustworthy, then the last thing that makes sense to do is to give them the power to realize their lusts by placing into their hands the powers of government. But we do it because, as Dr. Jung notes, we are overawed by the apparent omnipotence and omniscience of the State. Its indoctrination and its apparent grandeur lull us into believing that it can do what no one can and in that conviction we surrender ourselves to it.
In comparison to to the State and its dazzling (but false) glory the individual is made to feel and appear insignificant. And it treats us as such – something you can see clearly in the recent pandemics where governments have overridden the ability of individuals to make their own medical and life decisions. The State’s experts, its technocrats, claim all the authority and all the knowledge necessary to run our lives and ensure our comfort, safety, and health if we would but obey them. People are merely data that can be manipulated as needed for the State’s ends. This, of course, always falls apart. Just look at the lockdowns. The State technocrats promised that through lockdowns, masking, and social distance and isolation that Covid-19 could be controlled and its spread arrested. And when the lockdowns failed, famine spread, and the suffering became so great that people would rather die from Covid-19 than be cut off from humanity anymore, the government technocrats treated all the suffering of those people as statistics to be discarded in the goal of the “collective good.” Individuals are clearly too stupid to make their own choices, only the strutting sages of the State are smart enough to decide how you live, what your life is worth, and how you die.
Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, i.e., is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real-life carrier, whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the State. Both are hypostatized, that is, have become autonomous. The State in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus, the constitutional State drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society, namely, the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.
As I’ve written before, one of the big benefits people perceive they gain from the State is that it allows them to avoid responsibility for their lives. People delegate the thinking and decision making to the State in exchange for obedience as long as it protects them and provides for them. Even when it fails to live up to these promises, and it never does live up to them, the mere fact that it promises to do so is most often enough for people. In delegating away their liberty they are essentially surrendering their individuality and the responsibility it places upon them to the corporate identity of the State. The State then begins to act as if it were the person or persons it claims to represent – justifying all its actions in their name and by their authority. As this process occurs its power grows, as its power grows the more those at the top claim to represent the cation itself, and the more the individuals in society allow themselves to be submerged into the collective, the volk, the people, the Nation. Pieces of land go from property to the Homeland, the Fatherlands, and the Motherland while the governments which run them becoming the voice of the Parental State which oversees the masses as if they were children, incapable of survival without those in power to direct them in the same way babes would starve without the mother’s teat or wander into traffic and die without father’s hand to guide the and discipline them. Thus, as Dr. Jung says, no matter what State you have you eventually end up in an authoritarian state, ruled by either oligarchs or an autocrat. Or, as the Prophet Joseph Smith put it, “We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” (D&C 121:39)
I love that Dr. Jung notes that for all the ink we spill and words we waste talking about them – concepts such as “society” and “the State” are actually merely fictions. Society doesn’t exist. Groups don’t think. Groups don’t have a voice. Groups don’t act. An individual thinks. An individual speaks. An individual acts. That is all their is. Society is a fiction that can be expand or shrunk at will according to those doing the speaking because it has no definitive meaning and therefore no existence at all. It is whatever you say it is and having no definition, no parts, no personality, no passions, no mind, no will, no ability to act, it is nothing. Likewise, the State. It only exists because we buy into its fiction. If we disavowed it and became voluntaryists then the State would simply cease to exist, left behind in the dustbin of history along with such ideas as feudalism and Marxism. That we believe in the State is a result of the intense indoctrination within it that we are subjected to from childhood, not because it objectively exists. People objectively exists. Human beings objectively exist. The State is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. All forms of the State, including minarchy, eventually degrade into authoritarianism. How you organize your government and what you put into your written constitution might slow the process down or speed it up. But the outcome is inevitable.
This is why Voluntayism is the only solution. The only way to form governments that don’t descend into autocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny is to make them voluntary. When the government has no power to compel obedience or any power at all then it cannot warp, twist, and transform into totalitarianism. Voluntaryism is prevents tyranny and maximizes liberty, prosperity, and human equality by recognizing the inherent and inalienable rights of each and every person. It does not deal in collectives, but individuals. Individualism is the foundation of voluntaryist interaction. All forms of government are voluntary and are as various as there are individuals. Thus, there is no centralized government which collectivizes society or political parties which to collectivize into. By refusing to lay down the foundation upon which the edifice of totalitarianism is built -the State and its doctrines – you prevent the State and its inevitable slavery and totalitarianism from coming into existence. And if you truly wish to maintain the liberty of the individual and to maximize the possibility of people to enjoy their liberty, maintain their safety, and pursue happiness then you must nullify the State. You must abandon its false doctrines and leave its churches. Only when we have forsaken it completely and thereby torn it apart root and branch can liberty prosper and society have lasting peace. In political terms, Voluntaryism is the way forward.
