Culture has changed in the last fifty years as in no comparable period in history. The religious perspective of the last century, indeed centuries, is quickly losing relevance for an increasingly material viewpoint. Media technology now serves and promotes a commercial thing-orientation as calculated and contrived as it is self-serving — and self-alienating.
Beneath the changing viewpoints lies a major shift in cultural values (in case you haven’t noticed). The social networking craze is only one small example of how unconscious effects turn conscious desires into their opposites. Though electronic devices bring the world to our fingertips, they alienate as much as they connect.
(I watched a young couple in a restaurant on Valentine’s Day spend most of the meal texting. Whether they ate or talked — maybe a quarter of the time — their phones were either in their hands or right next to their plates as ready as the silverware.)
The new technological reality is purely artificial: a commercial fantasy-world where relationships are secondary; emotions pre-packed, pictured, profiled, and projected. But, the partial focus required for its manipulation is an unconscious recipe for disaster. Few concede any personal contribution to it; but multiply it by several billion, and it’s easy to see how half the world’s animal species have disappeared since the 1970’s — of those still extant at that time.
The critical thinking which once threatened Church control need no longer be suppressed; merely diverted by subliminal ego-appeal — or simply ignored. A pre-arranged conformity curried to exploit mass consumers is the new norm. A compulsive herding process now begins to replace the values which have taken eons of human sacrifice to evolve. That’s not just personal judgment. The individual struggle for consciousness which has historically directed human evolution is quickly becoming the caricature of a manufactured individualism as collective as it is self-centered.
Jung showed empirically how human behavior is rooted in instinct — natural functions designed for a natural world. ‘Instinct’ and ‘compulsion’ are perceived only negatively — who accepts the idea of being subject to natural laws? Though conscious reality is no less real than its ‘objective’ counterpart, because the first is subject to the latter, conflicts and contradictions occur when they come into opposition.
Any intense interest has a compulsive (instinctual) character. Though its end-effects are as much creative as destructive, our ideas of compulsion are mostly negative descriptions of the mysteries of psychic life beyond our understanding. And if you don’t think our behavior is beyond our understanding, you don’t keep up with world events.
Jung explained compulsive behavior as psychic functions lacking the form and purpose for which nature intended them. When, for instance, the energy specific to symbolic understanding is too literally conceived, an unconscious opposition can give the loftiest ideal a destructive character. Only the symbol can direct the energy of opposed impulses toward a unified flow. Jung:
“… the symbol presupposes a function that creates symbols, and in addition a function that understands them. This latter function takes no part in the creation of the symbol, it is a function in its own right, which one could call symbolic thinking or symbolic understanding. The essence of the symbol consists in the fact that it represents in itself something that is not wholly understandable, and that it hints only intuitively at its possible meaning. The creation of the symbol is not a rational process, for a rational process could never produce an image that represents a content which is at bottom incomprehensible.”
This is the religious instinct: a vital function of value and relationship specific to our natures. It’s the first clue of the symbolic side of our commercial, social obsessions. The collective over-valuation of literal fact and the aversion to symbolic needs is balanced by an increasing egotism: the exaggerated effects of a decline in inner value which only deepens unconscious opposition. Jung:
“… to settle the conflict, it must be grounded on an intermediate state or process, which shall give it a content that is neither too near nor too far from either side… this must be a symbolic content, since the mediating position between the opposites can be reached only by the symbol. The reality presupposed by one instinct is different from the reality of the other… This dual character of real and unreal is inherent in the symbol. If it were only real, it would not be a symbol… Only that can be symbolic which embraces both.
“The rational functions are, by their very nature, incapable of creating symbols, since they produce only rationalities whose meaning is determined unilaterally and does not at the same time embrace its opposite. The sensuous functions are equally unfitted to create symbols, because their products too are determined unilaterally by the object and contain only themselves and not their opposites. To discover, therefore, that impartial basis for the will, we must appeal to another authority, where the opposites are not yet clearly separated but still preserve their original unity.
“It would… be pointless to call upon consciousness to decide the conflict between the instincts. A conscious decision would be quite arbitrary, and could never supply the will with a symbolic content that alone can produce an irrational solution to a logical antithesis.
“… Thus, besides the will, which is entirely dependent on its content, man has a further auxiliary in the unconscious, that maternal womb of creative fantasy, which is able at any time to fashion symbols in the natural process of elementary psychic activity, symbols that can serve to determine the mediating will.”
For more on the analogical thinking which would re-establish a sense of inner value, continue reading or visit Amazon.
“For the last almost 5 decades I have been studying how to remain stoic and yet do what Lord [Jesus or God the Holy Father, or God’s particle or Mysterious Quantum Intelligence or whatever name ] wanted some real man among the masses to do His Will . I have observed as did Gurdjieff that there are not even 100 people as a group, earnest enough to put in sustained single-minded effort to develop their human resources for carrying out His commandments. This is the Holy mission or objective if mankind is to be saved from extinction.”
I appreciate you comment, as well as your sentiments. Would that even those who are committed to serving a higher purpose could be single-minded enough to maintain complete focus on it. But then again, it might find us so out of touch with our animal natures that we’d be in danger of creating an illusory existence outside nature (that seems to happen often to those so devoted to religious feelings). I’m sure that’s not what you meant, but in my opinion, what Jung has shown about the nature of the psyche, and our assumptions of it, has complicated the matter of who we are considerably (along with our conceptions of God’s will), even in the last fifty years. Gurdjieff, though a very insightful thinker, apparently followed his intuition over the facts of Jung’s empirical studies which were more or less fully developed in Gurdjieff’s time.
To me, psychic facts are not so rational that we could put human reactions into equations, much less the symbols that represent the emotions in them. The modern mind seems to me crowded enough with scientific ‘facts’ (and assumptions, too!), unknown variables, personal limitations, specially conditioned, subjective evaluations and the like that such an ideal seems restricted to the mythological sphere.
“… and then actually wrote it giving all the meanings of various symbols.”
As Jung defined a symbol, it refers to ideas that are, for the most part, unknown; that we can only infer their many-sided meanings according to our own internal circumstances. To me, that’s their value — but it takes reflection to consider them subjectively.
Just some thoughts. I found Jung’s definitions of rational and irrational to be very important in this context. His definitions can be found in the appendix to his, Psychological Types.
Very interesting ideas, sir. Thank you for your comment, and good luck to us all!