Caleb Anderson: The psychopathology of the left - and the Magna Carta

The following question is being asked with telling frequency. "How do we reverse the decline of the West before the point of no return, and is this even possible, are we already beyond this point?"

New Zealand is daily subject to assaults on the hard earned foundational principles of our nation, the principles that have delivered a stable democracy, economic prosperity, and social cohesion, unlike few nations of our time, and certainly historically.
Psychologist Carl Jung (a once student of Freud) is undoubtedly one of the great minds of the twentieth century. In his book The undiscovered Self (published first in 1957) he makes the following provocative comment.

"We have no reason to take this threat (subversive minorities) lightly. Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population." (1)

Jung conjectured that this subversive minority, if not held in check, had a potential upper limit of about 40% of a population ... but qualified that it was generally lower than that.

He comments further in The Undiscovered Self.

" ... the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man's outstanding peculiarities ... more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are ... and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional state should succumb to a fit of weakness. Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree." (2)

"... the possibility of reason's having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chemerical wish-fantasies ... developing into a psychic epidemic."(3)

"Their chimerical ideas, upborne by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there ..." (4)

In the mind of Jung, and of most of the early psychotherapists, the inner and outer struggles common to all humanity are only a matter of degree (or scale), and these predispositions lie latent and susceptible to activation.

At the collective level, generally stable individuals are foundational to stable groups, and stable nations, with the converse being also true, unstable individuals are magnets to other unstable individuals, which creates unstable groups and, ultimately, if left unchecked, unstable nations. Once instability takes root, it acts as a catalyst to further instability, creating a collective deafness to reason, and an inevitable leaning toward totalitarianism, and thought control. Thus posing an existential threat.

History bears ample testament to what happens when a disaffected and subversive ten percent becomes a disaffected twenty or thirty percent. Once the seed is sown, disaffection develops a life force of its own, and becomes near impossible to rein in. It bears remembering that Lenin, Mao and Hitler all started small, with most of the odds stacked against them. Interestingly, Jung was engaged by the American Government during World War Two to produce a psychological profile of Hitler. Jung took the position that Hitler, and the Nazi Party, were a manifestation of the collective shadow (collective unconscious) of the German people at this time. They simply tapped into a pre-existing potential for the development of a collective neurosis.

It is becoming increasingly apparent across the West, no less in New Zealand, that subversive elements have taken root and seeded themselves throughout our political parties (not only the left), the judiciary, educational institutions, universities, media, and the civil service.

It is also becoming increasingly apparent that the institutions, and conventions, established to maintain common order, to broker necessary and reasonable compromise, to accommodate gradual and constructive change, and to counter subversive elements, are struggling, or even absent.

To summarise Jung's position, the State can easily become susceptible to a paralysis that renders rational debate, the exercise of reason and virtue, the necessity of personal responsibility, and the ability to counter antithetical, unconstitutional, incoherent ideas, near impotent.

In doing so the state opens the door to what psychology calls the wish-fantasies (and projections) of those whose psychological defence is ...

1. The denial (and displacement) of personal (and/or collective) responsibility

2. The cultivation of resentment

3. The scapegoating of others ... including the projection of blame onto others and an insistence on the redistribution of wealth, power and opportunity.

4. The construction of a bogus reality, characterized by endless navel gazing and blame laying (as is often the case with any variant on clanship or tribalism).

Modern tribalism, in its many iterations and disguises, and the Marxism of which it is a variant, are simply manifestations of, and mechanisms for, the chaotic and ad hoc redistribution of power ... undergirded by a personal (and collective) denial of both reason and responsibility... coupled with an outward oriented resentment toward others.

It leads to the erosion of order, good-will, accountability and virtue ... while claiming the very opposite.

Jung prescribed critical reflection (and personal responsibility), adherence to constitiutional constants, the application of virtue (in the broader sense), and an insistence on coherence, as counters to the emotionality, sloganeering and resentment that has become typical of the collective psychopathy now evident across swades of the West, including New Zealand.

It is unlikely, in spite of the lessons of history, that the left has the slightest notion of the sort of beast that it has the potential to unleash, or that the population at large is even vaguely aware of the constants of history or the vagaries of human nature.

In 1215 the English nobility set their sights on a corrupt and incompetent king and, in doing so, set in motion an idea that would change the course of history.

The Magna Carta would, ultimately, make Britain, and the nations she birthed, the richest, fairest, and free-est of all states, and an example of what could be achieved when individual (not group) property rights, the right to a fair trial, the accountability of those who govern, and the rights of those governed, took precedence over clan, or tribe, race or class.

There is a clear choice for the West if the monsters within are not to become the monsters without. If the (Jungian) shadow within is not to become, ultimately, an enveloping darkness without.

The average punter is right when they assess the West as having gone quite mad! In lay terms it actually has!

When a former Labour Prime Minister is unable to define a woman. When a current "conservative" Prime Minister (of one of the world's oldest - modern - democracies) sees nothing of value in the principle of equal citizenship, assurance of property rights, and one person one vote. And when the wider body politic, and its bureaucratic masters, show themselves willing to play loose with the bedrock principles of democracy, including absolute equality under the law, then we have crossed the line into dystopian madness.

We are being enveloped by an epidemic of disaffection, fueled by the pathological wish fantasies of a disaffected ten percent (and growing) who are willing to throw all caution to the wind to level the playing field ... and we are being rendered impotent by the indifference and acquiescence of those who should know better, who were elected to know better, but who choose not to act.

This is never a good place to be, but that is where we (and the West more generally) seem to be inexorably heading.

We are witnessing the emerging collective neurosis of which Jung warned, and history should make us very uncomfortable about this.

References:

(1, 2) pg 4 The undiscovered Self
(3) pg 5 The Undiscovered Self
(4) pg 5 The Undiscovered Self

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.