Notes on Jung 05: A Newfound Appreciation for Institutions

 Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

“The unconscious no sooner touches us than we are it—we become unconscious of ourselves. That is the age-old danger, instinctively known and feared by primitive man, who himself stands so very close to this pleroma. His consciousness is still uncertain, wobbling on its feet. It is still childish, having just emerged from the primal waters. A wave of the unconscious may easily roll over it, and then he forgets who he was and does things that are strange to him. Hence primitives are afraid of uncontrolled emotions, because consciousness breaks down under them and gives way to possession.”

The objective mode of thinking has only been around for a few centuries. In the time of the primitive man, when his consciousness had just been born, he viewed the world in a predominantly subjective perspective and it served humanity well. It is unfortunate that in the modern era, we are so wrapped up in our objectivity and materialism that we have forgotten those ancient modes of interpretation, and lose out on all they had to offer. In some ways, we are not unlike the primitive man, whose existence took place for the most part in the subjective realm, and his unconscious took the reins far more than he would have desired. Gradually, the consciousness of primitive man walked upright along with the bipedal creature whom it inhabited, and usurped the territory of the unconscious. In the case of the modern man however, it is the other way round: we spend most of our lives in the objective realm, and we are driven mostly by our consciousness. This leaves us especially vulnerable to unpredictable fits of the unconscious, which seeks to regain its dominion.

“All man’s strivings have therefore been directed towards the consolidation of consciousness. This was the purpose of rite and dogma; they were dams and walls to keep back the dangers of the unconscious, the “perils of the soul”...It is these barriers, erected in primitive times, that later became the foundations of the Church. It is also these barriers that collapse when the symbols become weak with age. Then the waters rise and boundless catastrophes break over mankind.”

To protect us from Terrible Mother Nature, the hero ventured out into chaos itself and brought back invaluable wisdom that we used to formulate rules. We see rules everywhere: the rules of games that children play, the rules of the schools we attend to become educated, the code of conduct we are expected to abide by at our workplaces, the laws of land that we, as citizens, live by, the oaths of marriage that we swear to live by, the tenets of the religious faiths we practise, the traffic regulations we follow on the roads, the schedules that trains run on, the clock that decides the time we eat and sleep, and the implicit rules and etiquette we follow in the day to day interactions in our neighbourhoods. Some of these rules turned to laws, and the laws turned to institutions. The brave ones confronted formless potential itself and made new forms emanate from it. These rules and rites help to narrow our perspectives to new tasks at hand. They limit the amount of complexity of choices that we would be faced with, had we not learnt to live by rule and habit. 

“Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods “factors,” which comes from facere, ‘to make.’ The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the “factors” themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors.”

Jung believed that ideas and perspectives that are not made conscious will be played out in the world as fate. Some ideas that draw strength from our wilful blindness towards them. Unfortunately, failing to address these ideas does not dispense with them altogether. They remain in us, growing strong enough to take hold suddenly and unexpectedly, either because we underestimated their importance, or overestimated the degree to which we can keep them at bay. Once we are their instruments, they carry out their objectives by trickery and force if needed, and we are often left aghast on witnessing our own capacity for betrayal and deceit.

“To know this is decidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy. It can even give rise to primitive panic, because, instead of being believed in, the anxiously guarded supremacy of consciousness—which is in truth one of the secrets of human success—is questioned in the most dangerous way. But since ignorance is no guarantee of security, and in fact only makes our insecurity still worse, it is probably better despite our fear to know where the danger lies.”

In addition, we also experience a shattering of the most beloved delusion in which we have grown comfortable - the belief that we are the masters of our own house. On discovering our gullibility to spirits that live within us, we are alarmed that the world is no longer what it was and neither are we who we thought we were. All kinds of threats, within and without, suddenly become manifest. This the threat of spending most of one’s time in the conscious, objective realm - it makes one feel so much in control of ourselves, that we forget that we are not.

“Discerning persons have realized for some time that external historical conditions, of whatever kind, are only occasions, jumping-off grounds, for the real dangers that threaten our lives. These are the present politico-social delusional systems. We should not regard them causally, as necessary consequences of external conditions, but as decisions precipitated by the collective unconscious. This is a new problem. All ages before us have believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious.”

A newfound appreciation for institutions of all kinds (social, legal and cultural) is reached, when one contemplates deeply on the origin of these systems, and the extent of the services they carry out. It is imperative to codify humanity-serving behaviours of our ancestors into habits and rules, so that at times when we suffer a loss of our faculties due to one form of chaos or another, we can follow the wisdom of our forefathers rather than put to use our unreliable senses. For the sake of objectivity itself (if no other reason appeals to you), we must learn to establish rules, so that we can observe them and deliver ourselves from chaos even when we are at our most subjective.