The last month I have been exploring the ideas of Dr. Carl Jung, one of the most important men in the history and development of psychology. My source for his insights has been Dr. Jung’s 1958 book The Undiscovered Self, a fascinating commentary on the conditions of modern society and the situation that people find themselves in relative to the State, the government. Previously I have used his insights to discuss whether or not the existence of the State results in an inevitable slide into oppression and autocracy or not and why the governments of men always function in opposition to and as the enemies of God. This week I use Dr. Jung’s insights to explore why the State, once in existence, always seems to result in the omnipresent God-State, with the government being treated as if were omnipotent and omniscient, able to accomplish all things through the mere application of the power, wealth, and genius of its political leaders.
In the last article we read Dr. Jung had explained that the size of the State was so massive that the individual man, unless he was “as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself,” would be left existentially, and sometimes literally, crushed by the sheer might of the State on the one hand and, on the other hand, how the State could seduce people into a lifelong childhood by promising to provide all the person may need in exchange for the promise of subservience and obedience to those in political power. The result of this would be a terrible “physical and spiritual slavery” that would reduce individuals to begging for their individual freedom from “his executioners, the spokesmen of the masses,” – the politicians in power who have neither a need nor desire to hear voices of those crying for liberty. (pg. 42-43) Arrayed against this stood the power of religion with its ability to use mythic symbolism to teach morality and motivate human conduct through channels of influence and power not only separate from the State but, very often, at total odds with it. However, true religion requires great effort to study, to meditate upon, and to transform the inner Man. And because it is harder and ignorance is easier, many men find themselves lost in darkness looking for something to give him easy clarity and easy purpose. This is where we pick up with Dr. Jung talking about how “our opponents” – the politicians who wield the power and institutions of the State – benefit from this attitude. Note that all pages below are from The Undiscovered Self, unless specified otherwise.
This is not surprising, since practically all the trump cards are in the hands of our opponents. They can appeal to the big battalions and their crushing power. Politics, science and technology stand ranged on their side. The imposing arguments of science represent the highest degree of intellectual certainty yet achieved by the mind of man. So at least it seems to the man of today, who has received hundred-fold enlightenment concerning the backwardness and darkness of past ages and their superstitions. That his teachers have themselves gone seriously astray by making false comparisons between incommensurable factors never enters his head. All the more so as the intellectual elite to whom he puts his questions are almost unanimously agreed that what science regards as impossible today was impossible at all other times as well. Above all, the facts of faith, which might give him the chance of an extramundane standpoint, are treated in the same context as the facts of science. Thus, when the individual questions the Churches and their spokesmen, to whom is entrusted the cure of souls, he is informed that membership in a creed – a decidedly worldly institution – is more or less de rigueur for religious belief; that the facts of faith which have become questionable for him were concrete historical events; that certain ritual actions produce miraculous effects; and that the sufferings of Christ have vicariously saved him from sin and its consequences (i.e., eternal damnation). If, with the limited means at his disposal, he begins to reflect on these things, he will have to confess that he does not understand them at all and that only two possibilities are open to him: either to believe implicitly, or to reject such statements because they are flatly incomprehensible.
Pg. 45
The dichotomy of natural vs. supernatural – enlightenment vs. dark age superstition as Dr. Jung put it – is a perpetuated false dichotomy that serves the purposes of asserting false superiority, not revealing truth, and it leads to a manifold of errors. It exists so those who refuse to acknowledge God can use it to explain why their supposed all-encompassing rationalist and secular philosophy is unable to answer some of even the most basic questions about human existence. Think of the many people today who declare that they cannot believe in religion because of the way it clashes with the truths discovered by science? Here is a good example that gets to the heart of why there seems to be such a conflict and provides a perfect example of what Dr. Jung is talking about above, “I’ll construe ‘science’ as the set of tools we use to find truth about the universe, with the understanding that these truths are provisional rather than absolute.” The common error here is one that is repeated endlessly, that science reveals truths about the Universe. This, of course, is patently absurd. As Dr. Jung says above, religion and science are incommensurable, meaning that there are no common factors between the two by which they can be judged against one another. Science reveals facts about the way that the Universe appears to function. It doesn’t reveal truths about anything. Truth exists in discovering the purpose and essence of existence, not in describing its mechanical functions. Understanding the combustion engine doesn’t reveal the true purpose behind having a car and understanding evolution doesn’t reveal the truth of Creation.
The effect of having our intellectual horizons so stunted by scientism – that we are taught to believe that fact is the same as truth and that any scientific assertion of the moment is to be treated as Absolute Truth – is that it renders us unable to assert our individuality. No longer able to grasp the greater truths of the Universe because the limits of our comprehension have been reduced to mere mechanistic assertions about normal function and hubristic assertions of knowledge about how reality can and cannot work we find we have been mentally and spiritually reduced, crippled and unable to experience or understand truths beyond the limited comprehension and blindness we have been taught to have. Just because I cannot now walk upon water does not mean such a thing is impossible, it merely means that the means by which it is done is currently beyond my understanding. And my lack of understanding should be one that humbles me, unless of course I’ve been taught the arrogant belief that what I can’t understand can’t possibly take place. The ultimate outcome of all this intellectual hamstringing is that morality is strangled, reduced to the domain of mere statistics and collective action – the very domain wherein the State dominates and exerts control.
Whereas the man of today can easily think about and understand all the “truths” dished out to him by the State, his understanding of religion is made considerably more difficult owing to the lack of explanations. (“Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless some one guides me?” Acts 8:30.) If, despite this, he has still not discarded all his religious convictions, this is because the religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return. The leaders of the mass State cannot avoid being deified, and wherever crudities of this kind have not yet been put over by force, obsessive factors arise in their stead, charged with demonic energy – for instance, money, work, political influence, and so forth. When any natural human function gets lost, i.e., is denied conscious and intentional expression, a general disturbance results.
Pgs. 45-46
The mechanistic facts of science are easy to comprehend. One can see fire and feel the force of an explosion, which makes it easy for us to comprehend how the combustion engine would use that power to propel a vehicle. But the deeper truths of meaning, purpose, person, relationship, humanity, and eternity are hard to comprehend. We spend our lifetimes studying them only to discover by the end that we have only ever seen the tip of the iceberg. Thus it is easy to trust all those numbers and wordy pronouncements from our political masters when they promise everything to us if we would but bow down to them. They can always manipulate those numbers we have be taught to trust to show how their perfect world is just around the corner. It is much more difficult to understand religious leaders when the experiences needed to understand religion are extramundane – outside of our normal experiences and which come from the Divine – and are intensely personal – therefore resisting being reduced to a base lump of stuff that can be easily studied by others. We need both a teacher – a Prophet who can expound the Truth – and our personal experiences with Divinity to lead us along the way.
For those who refuse to walk the path, or for those who are merely members of a creed – that is they go to church but are not truly religious in that they are wholly dedicated to the experience of God – it then becomes very easy to look at the way that politicians make their utopias seem plausible through the manipulations of statistics and facts and conclude that they are omnipotent and omniscient, all wise and capable of the impossible. In short, whether we do it consciously or not, we begin to treat them as gods. The State assumes that role absent of a true reliance upon God, with the result being the worship of the State and its politicians as prophets, messiahs, and gods. This is unavoidable as the religious impulse in us looks for something greater than ourselves to which we can belong and follow and we are disturbed, mentally and emotionally anxious and fearful, until it is satisfied and we believe we have Something which can Save us. That things, for most everyone, is the State, the government.
Far too little attention has been paid to the fact that our age, for all its irreligiousness, is hereditarily burdened with the specific achievement of the Christian epoch: the supremacy of the word, of the Logos, which stands for the central figure of our Christian faith. The word has literally become our god and so it has remained, even if we know of Christianity only from hearsay. Words like “society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the “State,” far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the “State” is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is credited with positively creative capacities.
Pg. 54
Logos, one of the most ancient concepts in Western thought, can be basically understood as, “the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning.” The concept became the basic for Western ideals of the nature and purpose of all Creation as both purpose, power, and nature were manifested in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word (or Logos) of God. Thus the Logos was literally God as the Logos is Christ. Though our modern age seems to increasingly pride itself on its secularism it has adopted this reliance upon a singular Word to be the organizing and meaning giving principle of all existence. Today though it is not Jesus which is to act as the primary vehicle for meaning, it is the State. The State, with its endless bureaucracies, seemingly limitless supply of functionaries, its all knowing prophetic politicians, and claim to inexhaustible wealth and power to reorganize all of life and society on the whims of those in power. It is the State which tells us our place in society, our purpose in existing, that determines when and where we live, and claims the authority to dictate to us everything from who and how we can love to what we can what or drink, even how we can die. It tells us who to love and how to hate. From childhood we are indoctrinated into its ideology and taught to excommunicate those who question its authority. All that good comes from it and to question it is to be heretic to be derided in the worst terms the present age can muster – racist, homophobe, sexist, transphobe, greedy, callous, hateful, grandma killer, etc. – no matter how its actions destroy your individual life. The Logos of the present day, the God of the Modern Age, has become the State itself.
Having explained how the State has become God, Dr. Jung then begins to explore how and why we empower its godhood through our actions. He starts off by explaining how modern people find themselves divided between their conscious beliefs – the things they’ve been taught to think and understand about the world all their lives – and the subconscious truths that they know instinctually. The conflict between these two, if not reconciled, leads not only to a divided individual, warring between his conscious and unconscious selves, but a neurotic and divided society where the individual personal war is acted out externally through political action.
Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side. The accumulation of individuals who have got into this critical state starts off a mass movement purporting to be the champion of the suppressed. In accordance with the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world, the cry goes up for political and social changes which, it is supposed, would automatically solve the much deeper problem of split personality. Hence it is that whenever this demand is fulfilled, political and social conditions arise which bring the same ills back again in altered form. What then happens is a simple reversal: the underside comes to the top and the shadow takes the place of the light, and since the former is always anarchic and turbulent, the freedom of the “liberated” underdog must suffer Draconian curtailment. All this is unavoidable, because the root of the evil is untouched and merely the counterposition has come to light.
Pg. 58
I don’t think I’ve read a better explanation of the chaos in the streets – the protests and counter-protests, the violence, brutality, and hatred promoted as justice, the continual vacillation of society between political parties, always looking for one to save them from the other, of the poison of modern politics. Unable to solve what is essentially an internal problem – the emotional, mental, and spiritual malaise that seems to have infected all of society – we have externalized it. The problem originates not with us, but some Other group or problem and the masses must organize to destroy the existing order and reform it in conformity with the ideal. By doing this the masses, and the individual who belongs to that mass, hope to heal the division within their self. The natural organization to which one looks to exert such a powerful reformation is of course the government, the State, as it has the “big battalions and crushing power” to make the dream a reality by punishing the heretic and compelling the resistant though overwhelming force.
In this political competition, the political parties take turns acting as the individual shadow and light of the masses. For the Democrat the Republican becomes the shadow – the monster upon which the Democrat can externalize all those internal monsters which she hates about his or her self – and the Democratic Party becomes the light side which will act as the vehicle by which the member will achieve peace in political utopia. This holds true for the Republican vis-à-vis the Democrats. The Other is always lurking there, corrupting the process and poisoning the palpable possibility of perfection. If only the opposition would just get out of the way! But of course they don’t, monsters don’t do that. So they need to be derided and destroyed. Of course none of this ever works. Nothing is made better because you’ve exchanged your partisan light for the enemy shadow by electing the man or woman who you have idolized. The true problem, the internal problem, has never been healed. It merely becomes fodder for politicians to take advantage of in the next round of elections. Our individual and mass neuroses are their paths to power, wealth, and glory.
From here, Dr. Jung goes on to explain that the religious person, one who has a deep and overriding experience with God, has an advantage over all the others here. It is that he has long acknowledged that he is not the ruler of his life. It is God who rules and orders and who must always be obeyed, not the individual self or its desires, not the masses or their idol State. This, Dr. Jung says, places the individual religious believer under the guidance of his unconscious, usually termed the conscience, and allows it at least as much influence in his life as any ego driven internal or external power. Conscience then acts as a check upon the personal desires of the ego and the desires of the masses as conscience asserts that some things simply are forbidden because God said so. This actively limits the powers of the State and the actions of the masses. They of course try to either emasculate or destroy God as an active force by reducing it to delusion. Dr. Jung then observes whether God actually exist is largely a question which doesn’t really matter with this wonderful insight:
That religious experiences exist no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these experiences. The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of the experience. Anyone who has had it is seized by it and therefore not in a position to indulge in fruitless metaphysical or epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs
Pg. 64
The numinous is an overwhelming experience with Deity, one that defies description and which transforms the heart and mind of the person having the experience. In our language, we might describe it as the presence of the Spirit of God or the power of the Holy Spirit. Even though it is subjective, meaning it cannot be dissected, objectified, and rendered into inert matter for study, it is wholly Other, coming from outside the mind or experience of the person having the experience and through it is revealed both the power and grace of God. Our inability to render this experience into anything intelligible is why the Book of Mormon demurs from even trying, merely saying that the Resurrected Lord prayed in words that could not even be described (See 3 Nephi 17:15) and why we always end up talking about how the Spirit “feels.” Our language fails to capture the experience and communicate the absolute truth which can be gained only by revelation and for which no other proofs man can offer are necessary. Theology is unnecessary when one has revelation.
If in [the scientific] pursuit of the longing for light we stumble upon an immense danger, then one has the impression more of fatality than of premeditation. It is not that present-day man is capable of greater evil than the man of antiquity or the primitive. He merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize his proclivity to evil. As his consciousness has broadened and differentiated, so his moral nature has lagged behind. That is the great problem before us today. Reason alone does not suffice.
…The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.
Pgs. 70-72
No one wants to see themselves as a monster and therefore we always redefine our monstrosity as virtue. War is “self-defense” not the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, for example. As a result, mere knowledge of facts and information is not enough to slow down or stop the destructive nature of men. We project our own inner darkness, the evils we are capable of, on others and then make them the objects of our hatred which, if we could but destroy, would make the world a better place. And in this pursuit the pure rationality and detachment of the rationalist is a boon because if you are detached enough and through enough numbers around it turns out that any monstrosity can be justified.
Dr. Jung’s example of this (found in the referenced but not fully quoted section above) was nuclear weapons. Only monsters could use nuclear weapons to wipe out hundreds of thousands of people and set the stage for the final end of all life. Only madmen could build bigger and bigger weapons to wreak even worse destruction and threaten the obliteration of everything and pretend this was good. But that is exactly what the State does. It does not build connections between humans within its borders or between those under its rule and others in different nations. It dehumanizes them, turning people into mere collectives of ethnic or national groups, which makes their destruction more palatable because what is being firebombed aren’t people but faceless, nameless, numbers. Other examples of this would be the slave labor camps, the gulags, of the Soviet Union or the Holocaust perpetuated by Nazi Germany. Science and rationalism is incapable of discovering morality and anything can be justified, can be rationalized, given the right scientific parameters.
The State promotes this insanity as practicality and with no check of morality outside its figures and statistics it renders human lives and utter annihilation into mere abstract numbers. It then falls to the supposedly deeply rational men and women of the secular age to undertake absolute insanity. Reason is not enough to save the world. Indeed, reason alone will inevitably destroy it as the existence of such catastrophic weapons as atomic bombs makes their use inevitable. People denied their individuality and true community, rendered into mere social units terrified of all the horrors of society and the world at large, come to see the State, the perpetuator of the worst crimes of all, as their only savior. And they put into its hands the power that before had only belonged to God – the power of universal Armageddon.
I love that Dr. Jung draws a distinction here between the individual and the atomization caused by the State. Often today we hear the supposed dangers of individualism as if believing in the inherit value and dignity of each individual person and their right to live their lives peacefully according to the dictates of their own conscience is a threat to society. What many people today call “individualism” is in fact atomization. Under the pressures and propaganda of the State the human is reduced to a number whose life and dreams can be manipulated at will in order to achieve the utopian fantasies of those in power. The programs of State are always sold as being good for the individual but treat him or her as but one of the mass collectives by which the statist statisticians define society – black, white, male, female, foreigner, native, etc. This is what Dr. Friedrich von Hayek once referred to as “rationalistic pseudo-individualism which also leads to practical collectivism.” The State tells you that it thinks of you as a person when in reality it thinks of you as but a number – a statistic devoid of a soul. True individualism counters this and lays the foundations for true communities to develop voluntarily upon the basis of mutual relationships and peace across all boundaries.
So, if the rise of the God-State can be understood psychologically as the confluence of the removal of the conscience – the part of man that is deeply religious and not dependent on the dehumanizing rationalism of the modern age for its morality or truth – from society, the transfer of ancient ideals of God (Logos) onto the State through the abandonment of the religious for the statistical, and the way that politics allow us to externalize our own evils onto others – whether they be other political parties or other nations – and therefore target them for destruction, all coming together in one perfect storm then what hope is there for changing things? What hope is there for getting rid of the God-State and restoring morality and individualism to humanity’s forms of governance? Here Dr. Jung gives us some wonderful guidance as well:
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. A human relationship is not based on differentiation and perfection, for these only emphasize the differences or call forth the exact opposite; it is based, rather, on imperfection, on what is weak, helpless and in need of support – the very ground and motive of dependence. The perfect has no need of the other, but weakness has, for it seeks support and does not confront its partner with anything that might force him into an inferior position and even humiliate him. This humiliation may happen only too easily where idealism plays too prominent a role.
Reflections of this kind should not be taken as superfluous sentimentalities. The question of human relationship and of the inner cohesion of our society is an urgent one in view of the atomization of the pent-up mass man, whose personal relationships are undermined by general mistrust. Wherever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units. To counter this danger, the free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principle of a kind like caritas, the Christian love of your neighbor. But it is just this love for one’s fellow man that suffers most of all from the lack of understanding wrought by projection. It would therefore be very much in the interest of the free society to give some thought to the question of human relationship from the psychological point of view, for in this resides its real cohesion and consequently its strength. Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror.
The simplistic nature of the answer almost distracts from its depths of complexity. The cure for the inhumanity of the State is the humanity of the Gospel of Christ. What is the solution to violence, hatred, atomization that has taken place to the modern man or woman under the rule of the State? What do we do to counter its terror and mass violence? We Love. As Dr. Jung said, this is not a sentimentality or a generic truism he is uttering. The cure for the darkness of the world is the Light of Christ. Charity, “the pure love of Christ” (See Moroni 7:44–45, 48) is the most powerful tool available to the the minds and hearts of men. It teaches us to love and serve one another, that we should mimic Christ in all that we do. It is an ethic focused on the individual man and loving your enemies as yourself, not grand crusades using violence to destroy all that is wicked in the world. It is about healing the soul one person at a time, not about collective salvation and mass purification. We recognize that all of us are sinners, that within us all is the Natural Man, the Enemy of God, the Shadow that represents all that is wrong with us; but our solution that is to find spiritual reconciliation within ourselves and with one another.
Forgiveness, mercy, and healing are the order of the day – we both ask for them in regard to our multitude of failings and extend them to others for theirs. We build human relationships based on love with each others as individual people. In doing so we take the “depotentiated social units,” that is the weakened and dehumanized numbers the State and its statisticians turn us into, and restore their individual humanity and potential. We help them remember that they are Children of God and can become like him, “possible gods and goddesses” as C.S. Lewis perfectly out it. Just as it is true that power, violence, and terror – blood and horror – start where love ends, the opposite is also true. Where love is power, violence, and terror ends. When we respond to all with love then power, violence, and terror cease to exist. That is as good a definition of Zion as I have ever heard outside the scriptures.
Now I know that I have gone farther in the end by suggesting the Restored Gospel as the solution to the problems of the State than Dr. Jung suggests; though the language he uses is steeped in his experience with European Christianity he definitely seems to be talking about the power of religion in general as a manifestation of the unconscious and the lessons that can be learned from the stories of religion more than whether those stories actually occurred. Though perhaps not as much as one might think as my willingness to use the Gospel to check the State is one of the outcomes that Dr. Jung desired. In any case, the idea that humans are psychologically created to want to seek out God is no trouble to me. It makes sense to me that a Father God would create children who would have an inborn desire to have a relationship with Him. Further, because I have been seized upon by the numinous experience of the Holy Spirit and received repeated witnesses, testimonies, and truths that God is an absolute reality and that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is His Church and Kingdom upon the Earth.
I am convinced that within it especially is the power to heal the psychological malaise that threatens the world not only with mass oppression but nuclear annihilation. But it can only be so among those who are religious Latter-day Saints, not merely creedal Mormons. It is not enough to merely go to church and check the boxes. One must dedicate his or her Self to God and Christ above all. Their commandments must come before all the laws of men and their morality be held as superior to all earthly order or authority. When this becomes true, when we love God more than man, when we follow God’s ways before the ways of men, when we are loyal to His Kingdom more than we are the nations of the world, then we begin to tap into that reforming and transforming power of conscience which will lead us not only to handicap the State by our refusal to do what is evil but which also will empower us to truly revolutionize the world through the power of Charity, the pure love of Christ. In other worlds, we will be able to build Zion.