This week we continue our study into the nature of statism (“state-sim”) and political servitude based on the insights found in The Undiscovered Self by Dr. Carl Jung. Our last article on Jung we discovered that the increasing secularization of the contemporary world had led to psychic instability within individuals. This has caused pathological problems in secularized individuals and they have externalized their internal discord and chaos onto society, resulting in mass social discord, normalized hatred for any who disagree with you, and the treatment of political leaders/parties with religious fervor – the very problems that plague most nations today.
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)
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.
In this pursuit the pure rationality and detachment of the rationalist is a boon because if you are detached enough and throw enough numbers around it turns out that any monstrosity can be justified. As Josef Stalin is supposed to have said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Dr. Jung’s example of this is nuclear weapons. (pg. 70) 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.
But there is hope.
Starting on page 61, 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 secularized. The advantage is that the religious person 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. When enough people believe something is wrong then those in power cannot act without threatening the very foundation of their power, the acquiescence of the people. In response to this threat, the secularized (masses and political authorities) try to either emasculate or destroy God as an active force by reducing it to delusion. But for the truly faithful these efforts, and the efforts to expand the power of the State by doing so, fail for reasons explained below:
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 the familiar language of Christianity, we might describe the numinous as the presence of the Spirit of God or the power of the Holy Spirit. It is subjective, meaning it cannot be dissected, objectified, and rendered into inert matter for study, and it is wholly Other, coming from outside the mind or experience of the person having the experience and through which, it is revealed both the power and grace of God.
Our inability to render religious experience into anything intelligible is why we always end up talking about how religion “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. Man (and his governments) are nothing when compared to God. They can do nothing when enough people have a morality anchored in a system of ethics outside of the power of man to question, define, and control. They can only submit or perish.
Source: thelatterdayliberator.com