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Lost in the crowd, reduced to a number, convinced that nothing we do matters — Carl Jung saw this spreading sickness long ago. He called it the spiritual problem, and this lecture from Academy of Ideas shows why it matters far beyond our private moods. Jung believed the rise of huge, distant state power is a direct result of individuals feeling small and powerless. When the old religions fade and mass society swells, that inner void curdles into a hunger for power — and tyranny steps in. His answer is startlingly simple: put yourself right first, and the world changes from the inside out.
Full Video Transcript
As a practicing psychologist and keen observer of the Western world, Carl Jung noticed that many people in his day were afflicted by debilitating feelings of insignificance, inadequacy, and hopelessness.
Over several chapters in Volume 10 of his collected works, Jung examined this issue and came to conclude that such feelings were caused by what he called a spiritual problem.
This spiritual problem continues to be an issue for many people in the modern world,
and its widespread existence poses a great threat to the freedom and prosperity of Western societies.
For not only do those afflicted by it suffer as individuals, but as more fall victim to it,
the stability of a society falters and the potential for political and social unrest increases.
Jung observed the social ramifications of this problem play out firsthand
hand, in the form of two world wars and the rise of numerous totalitarian states.
He was so appalled by these events that he tried his best to convey his insights to others
in the hope of averting similar occurrences in the future.
Jung believed that the emergence of this spiritual problem coincided with the declining influence
that traditional religions, most prominently Christianity, have had on Western societies
over the past several centuries.
Casting aside these religions has had many effects, but the one which Jung saw as most
pressing was the fact that it forced countless people to face the existential dilemmas of
human life without the helpful crutch of religious dogma.
How totally different did the world appear to medieval man?
For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the center of the universe.
Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for
eternal blessedness, and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct
themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence.
Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.
In addition to the rise of secularism, Jung suggested that the development of modern mass
society also played a significant role in the emergence of the spiritual problem.
society came into existence during the industrial revolution, when large portions of the population
were driven from small towns into big cities in search of work and opportunity, instigating the
birth of a mass society. While the development of a mass society generated benefits through the
intensification of the division of labor, it also brought perilous problems. This new form of
existence, Jung wrote, produced an individual who was unstable, insecure, and suggestible. The
insecurity of the individual in a mass society is partly a function of the sheer quantity of
people which surround him. The bigger the crowd, the more nullified the individual feels. But this
insecurity was also instigated, according to Jung, by the rise of a rational and scientific mindset
which accompanied the industrial revolution and, over time, saturated more and more corners of
society. In the 19th and even more so in the 20th century, social planners, politicians, and leaders
of various industries, mesmerized by the fruits which scientific inquiry was producing in the
fields of industry and medicine, came to believe that the methods of science could be used to
remodel society. The result of this movement was a massification of society, that is, an increase
in uniformity and a drastic decrease in the importance of the individual. For in order to
model and subsequently remake society based on scientific and rational principles, the uniqueness
of the individual must be negated in favor of statistical averages, and the redesign of society
enacted by a group of elites, or technocrats, who view humans as nothing but abstractions,
homogenous social units to be managed and manipulated. The perilous effects of this
attempt to use science to remodel the individual and society, effects still in play today,
were described by Jung. Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the psyche,
but the individual man and, indeed, all individual events whatsoever,
suffer a leveling down and a process of blurring that distorts the picture of reality into a conceptual average.
We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical world picture.
It thrusts aside the individual in favor of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations.
As a social unit, he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the Bureau of Statistics.
politics.
He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance.
The existential uncertainty brought by the decline of religions and the diminished importance
of the individual in mass society have combined to create a situation where the vast majority
of people view themselves as insignificant and impotent beings.
This mindset can be very detrimental, for as Jung discovered, when the conscious attitude
of the individual is deficient in a manner which is detrimental to psychological health,
The self-regulating mechanism of the psyche will produce an unconscious compensation in
the attempt to correct the faulty conscious attitude and bring the psyche back into relative
balance.
Those suffering from a spiritual problem, due to their feelings of insignificance, lack
the proper levels of self-efficacy required for psychological health.
Jung proposed that to compensate for this deficiency, the unconscious produces a compensation
in the form of a strong hunger for power.
The individual’s feeling of weakness, indeed of non-existence, is compensated by the eruption
of hitherto unknown desires for power.
It is the revolt of the powerless, the insatiable greed of the have-nots.
A compensation can be beneficial if one is able to integrate the compensatory contents
of the unconscious into their consciousness, thus bringing more balance to their conscious
mind and an overall improvement to their psychological health.
However, if the unconscious contents of the compensation, which in the case of a spiritual
problem take the form of a lust for power, remain hidden in the unconscious, the compensation
can prove extremely dangerous.
If such a compensatory move of the unconscious is not integrated into consciousness in an
individual, Jung wrote, it leads to a neurosis or even to a psychosis.
If a compensatory desire for power is not integrated into consciousness, Jung warned
one will become possessed by unconscious impulses for power, and thus seek it at any cost. Failing
to find it in their personal life due to profound feelings of impotence, such people are very likely
to gravitate toward collective ideologies, mass movements, and institutions which they view as
having the power they as individuals lack. If the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own
puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning, then he is already on the
the road to state slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte. When
this psychological process occurs on a mass scale, a society becomes highly vulnerable
to the rise of state tyranny. Jung described this process in the following chilling passage.
Instead of the concrete individual, you have the names of organizations and, at the highest
point, the abstract idea of the state as the principle of political reality. The moral
responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the state. Instead of
the moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare in the
raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life, which is the only
real life, no longer lie in individual development, but in the policy of the state, which is thrust
upon the individual from outside. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision
as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social
unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses.
This form of dystopia occurred in varying degrees in the 20th century, and seems to be re-emerging
in the West today. While many people realize the dangers posed by the existence of centralized
states, most react to the growth of state power with feelings of hopelessness, believing there
is nothing that they as individuals can do about it. Jung’s analysis is profound for the reason
that he suggests that the rise of state tyranny is a byproduct of the proliferation of the spiritual
problem afflicting the modern world, and thus can be subdued if more people learn to resolve the
spiritual problem affecting their own lives. Jung held out hope that many people in the West were
capable of achieving this, and saw evidence of such potential in the growth of the field of
psychology in the 20th century, and in the increased desire of many to explore the depths
of their psyche in search of self-knowledge. To me, the crux of the spiritual problem today,
he wrote, is to be found in the fascination which the psyche holds for modern man.
If we are optimistically inclined, we shall see in it the promise of a far-reaching spiritual
change in the Western world. At all events, it is a significant phenomenon, important because
it touches those irrational and, as history shows, incalculable psychic forces which transform
the life of peoples and civilizations in ways that are unforeseen and unforeseeable.
These are the forces, still invisible to many persons today, which are at the bottom of
the present psychological interest.
In times of desperation, ancient peoples looked to the gods which inhabited the oceans, the
forests, and the skies for regeneration.
In Jung’s view, the modern individual, for whom all the gods are dead, must look to the
forces within for answers to the spiritual problems which plague them.
In finding answers, he thought one will not only be curing the spiritual sickness which
afflicts them personally, but will also be contributing to the renewal of a world gone
astray in the darkness of state domination.
Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by countless prejudices,
mistaken assumptions, and fears. Always one wishes to hear of grand political and economic schemes,
the very things that have landed every nation in a morass. Therefore, it sounds grotesque when
anyone speaks of hidden doors, dreams, and a world within. What has this vapid idealism got
to do with gigantic economic programs, with the so-called problems of reality? But I speak not
to nations, only to the individual few, for whom it goes without saying that cultural values do
not drop down like manna from heaven, but are created by the hands of individuals. If
things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because
something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first.
For this I need, because outside authority no longer means anything to me, a knowledge
of the innermost foundations of my being, in order that I may base myself firmly on
the eternal facts of the human psyche.
Source: Academy of Ideas