Why is Modern Man so Weak and Powerless?
– Carl Jung
The following is a transcript of this video.
Many believe that the most important social divide in the West today is between the political left and right. Much of the discourse in the corporate and independent media revolves around this battle, and many believe that its outcome will have existential ramifications for the future of the West. But is this political conflict acting as a distraction from the true divide that shapes a society; that being the age-old divide between the rulers and the ruled? In this video we argue that the power disparity between the ruling class and the citizenry has reached such pathological levels that a form of slavery is emerging. This slavery is fueled by a ruling class that suffers from a pathological condition Carl Jung called psychological inflation, and a citizenry that has become too weak and powerless to resist the growing corporate and State takeover of almost every aspect of life.
“. . . helplessness and weakness are the eternal experience and the eternal problem of mankind”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 9
Decades of research led the American psychologist Susan Fiske to conclude that men and women have five core social motives that are essential to psychological and social well-being. These include the need to belong, the need to understand ourselves, other people, and the world around us, the need for self-enhancement, which is the ability to cultivate a positive self-image, the need for trust, whether it be trust in other people or in the effectiveness of social institutions, and finally the need for control, autonomy, and competence over the course of our life. Most of these needs require the possession of personal power, for power is not merely the ability to control others, it is also the ability to shape and influence the course of our life. Or as the philosopher Bertrand Russell stated, power is “the production of intended effects.” Power, therefore, is necessary for self-enhancement and for attaining the goals that can improve our life. Furthermore, as all social relations are structured by dynamics of power, power, or the lack thereof, affects our ability to form healthy relationships.
In his writings, Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave turned social reformer, emphasized that what distinguishes the slave from the free man is the level of power each possesses. In his book My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass defined the slave by “the utter powerlessness [they have] to decide their own destiny.” He also notes that we have a natural aversion to powerlessness. We are attracted to the powerful and unless we have been psychologically broken, we aspire to power in ourselves. Or as Douglass writes:
“A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even that it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.”
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and Freedom
A free society provides individuals the opportunity to cultivate the power required to sculpt a good life, to enhance well-being, and to cultivate healthy relationships. Most societies in history, however, have only granted this opportunity to members of certain classes, races, or ethnicities, as the institution of slavery reduced millions of our ancestors to powerless agents of a master’s will.
“Slavery has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.”
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death
While the West has done away with the institution of chattel slavery, where the slave is the personal property of a master, we are descending into a form of State slavery. State slavery, or what amounts to totalitarian rule, occurs when the State gains total control over the lives of its citizens and rids them of the autonomy to create a life of their own choosing. Under State slavery, citizens are limited in their movements, spied on constantly, free speech is abolished, dissent is not tolerated, and to fund the massive state apparatus that is required to maintain these suffocating levels of control, wealth is extracted either through forced labour, direct taxation, or the indirect taxation of an inflation of the money supply. The State slavery of totalitarianism creates a citizen who approaches the utter powerlessness of the chattel slave, while elevating the ruling elite to the position of masters. During Covid, most Western states implemented totalitarian controls, and while many of those controls have been walked back, the increasing power divide between the ruling class and the average citizen is setting the stage for this form of slavery to re-emerge in a more permanent form.
Carl Jung suggested that one of the primary factors that contributes to the rise of totalitarianism is a psychological inflation among the ruling class. Psychological inflation is an extension of the personality, or more specifically of one’s ego, beyond healthy limits. Or as Jung explains, psychological inflation occurs when: “The ego has appropriated something that does not belong to it.” (Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 7). The psychologically inflated individual identifies with an unrealistic self-image that leads them to believe they are somehow better, stronger, wiser, or more powerful than they really are and as Jung explains:
“A very common instance [of psychological inflation] is the humourless way in which many men identify themselves with their business or their titles.”
Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
In the political, corporate, and military realm, where those who control the levers of state power reside, identifying with one’s title is extremely common. Whether it be as CEO of a large corporation, President of the United States, Chief Medical Advisor, Charmain of the Board, Speaker of the House, or Secretary of Defense, titles make the man in the upper echelons of power. Tied to these titles are immense powers that are not a product of the individual who holds the role, but a product of the institutions, resources, and historical legacies that support the role. If an individual comes to identify their self-image with one of these titles, they may come to believe that the power associated with their role resides within themselves, rather than being a product of the social constructs that support the role. Or as Jung explains:
“The office I hold is certainly my special activity; but it is also a collective factor that has come into existence historically through the cooperation of many people and whose dignity rests solely on collective approval. When, therefore, I identify myself with my office or title, behave as though I myself were the whole complex of social factors of which that office consists, or as though I were not only the bearer of the office, but also and at the same time the approval of society. I have made an extraordinary extension of myself and have usurped qualities which are not in me but outside me. . .”
Carl Jung, Two Essays in Analytical Psychology
Internalizing, and identifying with, the power of the State is what accounts for the psychological inflation of the ruling class, and it leads, in the words of Jung, to “an extension of the personality beyond individual limits, in other words, a state of being puffed up.” In Volume 7 of his Collected Works Jung suggests that the apocryphal saying attributed to King Louis XIV “L’etat c’est moi [I am the state, the state it is me] is the motto for such people”. The more a man in a position of power inflates his personality in this manner, the more he suffers from what Jung called God-Almightiness – he starts to believe that he is omnipotent, that he is above the law, that moral codes don’t apply to him and in the process, he loses touch with reality, or as Jung writes:
“God-Almightiness” does not make man divine, it merely fills him with arrogance and arouses everything evil in him. It produces a diabolical caricature of man, and this inhuman mask is so unendurable, such a torture to wear, that he tortures others.”
Carl Jung, After the Catastrophe
In order to maintain the belief in one’s God-Almightiness, members of the ruling class repress the personal weaknesses and moral inferiorities that clash with their idealized self-image. And according to the laws of the human nature, what is repressed has a tendency to be projected onto other people. Projection is “the erroneous attribution of an individual’s … unconscious qualities to the environment or to another individual or group [and] projections serve as defence mechanisms that help an individual or a group avoid facing the incompatible and disturbing contents of the psyche.” (Volodymyr Walter Odajnyk, Jung and Politics) The individuals toward which we direct our projections usually possess, to one degree or another, the traits that we deny about ourselves. Or as Jung explains:
“Not that these others [the victims of the projection] are wholly without blame, for even the worst projection is at least hung on a hook, perhaps a very small one, but still a hook offered by the other person.”
Carl Jung, On Psychic Energy
The victims of a ruling class’s projections tend to be the men and women over whom they rule, as such individuals, to one degree or another, possess similar weaknesses, flaws, and moral inferiorities to those in the ruling class. This act of projection can help account for the superiority that the ruling class displays toward its subjects. For when we burden other people with our flaws, it is inevitable that we see them as inferior. Throughout history there are countless examples of psychologically inflated men and women justifying their exploitative dominance of another group, as though it were for their own good. Among the slaveholders of the American south, for example, Orlando Patterson wrote:
“. . .almost all masters genuinely believed that they cared and provided for their slaves and that it was the slaves who, in the words of one southern ex-slave owner, had “been raised to depend on others.””
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death
But what makes the psychological inflation of the ruling class even more dangerous, is that most normal people today are suffering from its mirror opposite – a psychological deflation. A psychological deflation is a contraction of the personality where one loses touch with character traits and potentialities that are an important part of a healthy personality. The mechanism that causes psychological deflation is similar to that of an inflation – it occurs when an individual identifies with a social role that is too restricted to encompass all the character traits that are needed to flourish. Odajnyk provides the following example in his book Jung and Politics:
“. . .the members of the “pariah” or lower classes, or members of socially despised national or racial groups frequently identify personally with their socially defined status and roles. . .The result. . .is the atrophy of the individual personality, which fails to develop beyond the limits imposed by the social role.”
Volodymyr Walter Odajnyk, Jung and Politics
Psychological deflation is no longer limited to those in the lower class – for to identify as a normal member of society, is to contract our personality and to lose touch with our will to power. For the good citizen, in a world approaching total state control, is not powerful and self-reliant, but obedient and docile, and the more the state controls his life, the more powerless he becomes and the more deflated is his personality.
Like psychological inflation, psychological deflation leads to projection. But instead of projecting weaknesses and flaws, when we deflate our personality, we project the strengths that our constricted social role has led us to deny. When we disconnect from our need for power, for example, it becomes unconscious and primed for projection. The most likely targets of this projection are strong political leaders, powerful political parties, or the all-powerful institution of the nation state – as in a world where the State is the most powerful institution, these provide easy hooks to hang our repressed will to power. Or as the psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz explains:
“…there’s always been a tendency in humans to project the uniqueness and the greatness of their own inner self onto outer personalities and become the servants, the devoted servants, admirers, and imitators of outer personalities. It is much easier to admire a great personality and become a pupil or follower of a guru or a religious prophet, or an admirer of a big, official personality – a President of the United States – or live your life for some military general whom you admire. That is much easier than following your own star.”
Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream
When we project our will to power onto members of the ruling class, or the institutions or political parties they control, a dangerous feedback loop is set in motion. The projections of the deflated masses further empower the ruling class, while the projections of the ruling class lead them to view the citizenry as increasingly weak, dependent, and in need of strong leaders to rule over them. This feedback loop paves the way for the total control of State slavery and as Jung writes:
“The increasing dependence on the State is anything but a healthy symptom, it means that the whole nation is in a fair way to becoming a herd of sheep, constantly relying on a shepherd to drive them into good pastures. The shepherd’s staff soon becomes a rod of iron, and the shepherds turn into wolves.”
Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition
To escape from this dangerous feedback loop, responsibility lies with the citizenry. For the inflated members of the ruling class will never voluntarily give up control. Like the slave masters of old they believe they are of a different breed and that without their rule, the citizenry would run amok, and chaos would ensue. Many in society have become so deflated, so weak and psychologically fragile, that they crave control by the state. But for those of us who have not been psychologically broken, it is up to us take the steps necessary to counter the rise of State slavery. One way to do this is to recognize our need for power and to cultivate it if we are deficient. We can cultivate personal power through learning and mastering skills, strengthening the body, setting goals and working toward them, or emulating powerful role models. These steps will help counter the effects of psychological deflation and the fewer psychologically deflated men and women in a society, the fewer who participate in the feedback loop of mutual projections that empowers the ruling class and disempowers the citizenry.
In addition to cultivating our power, we can also disarm the power of the ruling class with humour and ridicule. For humor is the Achilles’ heal of tyrants as they desire to be feared and respected, not laughed at or mocked. Laughing at those who strive to control us shatters their aura of invincibility and reveals them as the flawed, petty, and morally inferior individuals they really are. The use of memes, comedy skits, and satire, can highlight the absurdity, contradictions, hypocrisy, and lies by which the ruling class operates. Furthermore, humour and ridicule disarm a ruling class of their greatest tool of oppression, that being fear. When we laugh at tyrants, we show that we are not intimidated by them, do not admire them, and are not easy prey to their fear-based propaganda, or as Joost Meerlo explains:
“We must learn to treat the demagogue and aspirant dictator in our midst . . .with the weapon of ridicule. . . Humor is, after all, related to a sense of perspective. . . . Put the demagogue’s statements in perspective, and you will see how utterly distorted they are. How can we possibly take them seriously or answer them seriously?. . . The demagogue relies for his effectiveness on the fact that people will take seriously the fantastic accusations he makes; will discuss the phony issues he raises as if they had reality, or will be thrown into such a state of panic by his accusations and charges that they will simply abdicate their right to think and verify for themselves… In their defense against psychological attacks on their freedom, the people need humor and good sense first.”
Joost Meerlo, The Rape of the Mind
