Only, the suggestive parade of State power engenders a collective feeling of security which, unlike religious demonstrations, gives the individual no protection against his inner demonism. Hence he will cling all the more to the power of the State.”
Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self
Just under a year ago, in the initial stages of the mass movement that dominated the summer of 2020, I was struck by some of the posts I was seeing on social media.
Only weeks after Easter, many ‘non-religious’ friends were posting about a man’s death motivating them to embrace a new philosophy. They were sharing their new found holy texts and priests. This man was not Jesus and the philosophy was not Christianity, but the similarities in communication were striking.
In the past, I had thought about how social movements use a religious structure before (doomsday environmentalism for example), but my thought was through the lens of a group of sociopaths manipulating the gullible.
All human organizations follow a structure and create a mythology that is in some way religion-like. But there was something different about the scale and obviousness of what happened in 2020 that seemed remarkable.
Over the past year, I’ve begun to believe that religion is inescapable for humans. We need to have a god, a holy text (or texts), priests, and holy rituals.
In The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung talks about how this takes form in atheist totalitarianism:
Offerings are made to invisible powers, formidable blessings are pronounced, and all kinds of solemn rites are performed. Everywhere and at all times there have been rites d’entrée et de sortie whose magical efficacy is denied and which are impugned as magic and superstition by rationalists incapable of psychological insight. But magic has above all a psychological effect whose importance should not be underestimated.”
– Jung, The Undiscovered Self
If you reject the explicit religious faiths of your time, you fall into worship of some other kind. Maybe that is super-fandom, self-destructive hedonism, or a new-age mystical system of belief, but it tends towards investment and involvement in mass social movements.
The great hope that links all popular social movements of our day is that resolution to the ills of society are found through a righteous government. Therefore the great power (god) is the State.
Through history there are countless examples of divine rule, and part of the myth we tell ourselves as a society is that we have overcome that. Democracy and rule of law have done away with god-kings and we have evolved to a new plain of rationalism.
Perhaps that was true for a moment, but as the belief in God has faded, it appears we not have replaced it by evolving to a higher point of rationalism, but by regressing into paganism.
The dictator state has one great advantage over bourgeois reason: along with the individual it swallows up his religious forces. The State has take the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship.“
But the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed so as to avoid conflict with the prevailing trend towards mass-mindedness. The result, as always in such cases, is overcompensation in the form of fanaticism, which in its turn is used as a weapon for stamping out the least flicker of opposition.”
— C. G. Jung in The Undiscovered Self
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