Causes of Mass Psychosis

Excerpt from the video above:

...And in light of that situation, we have no defense, we have no immune system against psychological infections. "In this broad belt of unconsciousness which is immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know what is attacking us, and how, and where and when the attack will come. Since self- knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories are of very little help." So this raises the question, why would "mass mindedness" as Jung calls it, take hold right now? Why is it definitive of the modern era, and not some earlier time in human history? Jung's argument, that I anticipate will be the most controversial thing, at least in this comment section, is that religion is the counterbalance. Or rather, it was the counterbalance until the statistical worldview overthrew it. Jung defines religion this way, "Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. These do not refer directly to social and physical conditions, they concern far more the individual's psychic attitude."

So, what does it mean to submit to the irrational facts of one's experience that do not have to do with the physical, but with your psychic attitude? In other words, this means intuition, conscience, the way one feels in spite of the statistical reality or what have you? So for a real example, and I mean real in so far as I've heard people utter these words to argue for their religion, for many people they will come to terms with the fact that the scientific understanding of the world tells their reason that it's impossible that there's a continuation of Consciousness after the destruction of the brain. But the irrational fact of their psychic experience as we might put it, how they feel is that I just have to believe there's a world beyond this, that death isn't the end. Something deep within me tells me that right? That's the kind of irrational experience Jung is describing. He also later uses the term "metanoia" which is means "Rebirth of the Spirit" in discussing the potential, with religious conversion, for total personality change, which is an odd phenomenon. Those who commit themselves wholly to a religious conviction are sometimes capable of making sweeping life changes that are extremely difficult for most people. But, we might say in the experience of metanoia, in a rebirth of the spirit in a religious conversion, a genuine religious conversion, what is happening is somebody is submitting to an irrational fact of their own experience, their own psychical experience. And so, it's certainly an interesting way of defining religion that Jung puts forward here. And furthermore, his argument for the function that religion fulfilled, the aspect of religion that allows it to serve as a counterbalance to that "mass mindedness" is a very creative argument, and I'm not sure I buy it personally, but it's an interesting dialectical maneuver that's worth considering, and that "it is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of Life only when there is a point of reference outside them." In other words, religion posits a world "Beyond", and by that token, we acquire the ability to make judgments about this world.

I will do my best to give a strong defense of this position, which you know, normally I don't preface my defenses of perspectives I don't agree with that way, but I would guess that many of you who have listened to the podcast for a long time would know that, going back to the first episode of the podcast, the thing that really enchants me about Nietzsche is the rejection of the other world and the world Beyond. And so Jung directly opposes that, and he gives a rather interesting argument that is worth considering. So he says, that religion speaks from the perspective of the other world as dictates of God, or guidance of Eternal Buddha, whatever the case may be, and so there is in the religious worldview, a higher authority above the physical reality. And that provides, Jung says, a point of reference for making judgments within reality. Because we might say, from a counterfactual one might be forced to conclude that if reality is purely the physical world only, a material existence, no Transcendent reality above it, one might be forced to conclude that all the goings on within the world are innocent. This is the innocence of becoming. That's Nietzsche's view, it's Heraclitus's view. In other words, all things that happen are necessary. We might also consider Spinoza's perspective. While one might be able to make a judgment about what is good, or what is bad from the perspective of a certain mode of existence, such as to speak of the good of The Lion, and the good of the gazelle, there's no absolute good that Reigns over both of them. And so judgment, from that perspective, true judgment, would seem to be rendered impossible. Now granted, Nietzsche certainly thought it was possible, he says that every "Thou shalt" was once an "I will", and that as part of the revaluation of values, the individual could become a self- legislator of their own values. But even Nietzsche would admit that most people don't have that kind of wherewithal, they will likely have to submit to someone else's value judgments.

Jung's argument is that the individual, within the religious worldview, is afforded the ability to exercise his own judgment, and his own power of decision. Again there's an obvious objection to that, that might be well, under a religious Dogma the individual is actually discouraged from exercising his individual judgment. That's not so much what Jung is talking about, and he kind of has a counter for that that we'll we'll get into in a in a moment. What he means here is that in the religious worldview that teaches that "Every Man Has a Soul, something Eternal and of everlasting value, that all are equal in the eyes of God, all are subject to the laws of God." And so it puts every man on a kind of equal footing as a moral agent, such that a peasant could make a moral judgment about the behavior of a king, and he might politically submit to the king, you know, "render under Caesar that which is Caesar's". But religion sort of gives him the right to judge. It posits that man is ultimately a free being, and that man is given a responsibility to make moral decisions. And thus, by that token, the right to make them, with rights come responsibilities and conversely, with responsibilities have to come rights. The absolute moral standard, and the absolute metaphysical reality of God, of the Divine. It becomes that reference point around which every individual can Orient themselves, as the source of their own admittedly "irrational judgments". But in this way, religion as submission to those irrational facts of experience, is a grounding for the individual that resists massification. It resists the statistical overtaking the Real. In Absentia of that reference point however, the Statistical Reality would be the overriding reality. It would be the the highest reality. In some sense, individual judgment vanishes in the face of its' power, it becomes absurd and impossible. Because, what is your submission to your own irrational facts of your experience in the face of a statistical truth? And indeed, in the modern world when you put up your anecdotal understanding, or your lived experience, against a statistical truth in an argument, you're likely to be laughed out of the room.

Now, I mentioned earlier the objection that sort of sees religion as a source of Dogma, or Doctrine. And Jung defines religion here in a way that separates it from that, that separates it from worldly instantiations of religion. He separates the "religious experience" from the "religious in institutions", and uses the term "Religion" versus "Creed". The Religion is that which relinks you back to the Divine, which is the ultimate authority over the world, the source of Life, the moral guide, the various ways that religions see the Divine. Whereas the Creed is the compromise that the "other world" has to make with mundane reality in order for it to exist within it at all, and to be effective within it. So the Creed is the public institution whose members may not actually be religious, in other words. I mean, perhaps they are. Perhaps most of them are. But the moment your religion becomes a public institution, with an internal hierarchy and a bureaucracy and has to establish a payroll, and has to collaborate with the state, or at least exist within some sort of relationship to the State, right? You have to "strike that bargain with the mundane world". And so all of that sort of comes to define what the Creed is, the institution. And perhaps the most forceful statement of Jung's argument that "religion serves as this bullwark against becoming part of the mass" is that he makes the assertion that of being grounded in the Divine, linked to the Divine in some way. So in other words "real religion" not the "Creed" offers man the ability to go against the moral judgments of the masses. This is a huge theme in Nietzsche as well. We also see this in Renee Gerard. What people think, and the kinds of moral judgments they make, even the nature of their desires, this is powerfully shaped by the collective judgments that are expressed and impressed into the individual on a daily basis. And so therefore, in light of that, how could one endure against having their own individual judgment pressed and molded into the shape of the collective judgment? By what means could the individual resist? On what basis would they resist?

From the modern perspective we tend to think of the religious mindset as Conformist, that's the Stereotype. But Jung would argue that Conformity is found in adherence to the Creed, and becoming part of the public institution that demands a certain level of commitment to the Doctrine, and so on. But that religion is the sole mean of combating Conformity, not the Creed, the Religion. It's a very, very important distinction. So Jung writes, "Just as man as a social being cannot, in the long run, exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy anywhere except in an extra-mundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. The individual who is not Anchored In God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this, he needs evidence of inner, Transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. Merely intellectual or even moral insight into the stultification and moral irresponsibility of the mass man is a negative recognition only, and amounts to not much more than a wavering on the road to the atomization of the individual. It lacks the driving force of religious conversion since it is merely rational."

There are historical examples of this, if there are modern types in the audience who are doubtful, the most powerful examples being Martyrs, figures from history such as Joan of Arc, and many of the Apostles such as John the Baptist. I mean somebody from very recent history, lived during Jung's time, during World War II, we might think of somebody such as Martin Neer. He was a Lutheran Pastor who opposed the rise of Hitler, and he was imprisoned for it. And you've almost definitely heard his famous quotation, "First they came for the Socialists and I did not protest because I was not a Socialist..." and so on, and so forth. That was him. That was Martin Neer, and he spent his years after the war regretting that he did not do more. Admittedly, he did quite a bit, I mean he opposed the Nazis area in paragraph, he opposed the Nazification of the churches broadly, he opposed the mounting political sentiment of the time that was overwhelming everything because of a personal religious conviction that the Church cannot be allowed to be corrupted by a racialist political movement. And so, we find throughout history that many of the figures that found the strength to oppose the overwhelming moral convictions of the masses leaned heavily on religious faith in order to find the strength to do that.

But Jung goes on to make a striking claim here, that religion is not based on Faith. Rather he says, Faith is something that comes about as a result of the religious experience. The fact of having an inner experience, or contact with the Divine. The sense of Faith, the sense of trust in God is based on the experience, not the other way around. And I don't think you have to extrapolate this to mean in a mystical experience, on par with say, Pascal's Night of Fire. More so, that one develops a certain conviction out of, as Jung said, earlier irrational facts of their own experience that lead them to feeling, for example, there's a life after this one, there's a Divine hand moving the forces of nature, so so on, and so forth. It's that grounding, that experience, that feeling, that produces Faith. And in Jung's view, produces morally autonomous beings capable of judgment. Religion in that way is an individualizing force, and by confusing Religion with the Creed, we only see the ways in which religion has to negotiate with the world, the ways in which it gets bogged down with the Practical realities of operating in the mundane world, the Practical realities of politics, bureaucracy, hierarchy, and so on. And that's because we've lost the religious experience. The modern person only perceives the various religions as Creeds, as public institutions, because they don't believe there's any religious experience behind any of that, because they've never had one. And Jung says this is true of many of the Believers as well. I mean that many of the people who are members of a religion are, in fact, just members of a Creed.

And so, to get back to the what we were sort of searching for, that of the psychological immune system. The advantage of religious thought is that it it takes account of the unconscious side of the psyche. It acknowledges the dark impulses in every person's heart, even if it speaks of them in metaphysical or spiritual terms, you know, like speaking of the sinfulness of the flesh, or selfish craving that the Buddhists say is "like a poison", right? It nevertheless gives us that understanding. But that understanding again, it it has to come out of a genuine metanoia, a spiritual rebirth. That is the cause of finalis of religion. If that does not happen, even the voice of your conscience will, yet again, speak with the voice of the Collective.

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The Remedy: "Know Thyself"

Rene Girard on "Resisting Crowd Mimesis"