In recent posts we sketched out The Devouring Mother archetype in detail with specific attention given to the manifestation that is most relevant to corona – Munchausen by Proxy. We then took a look at the meaning of masks in the collective unconscious and how they are exclusively reserved for the ‘bad guys’. To put it in Jungian language, they are exclusively reserved for people or characters who are in their shadow. This is fitting because The Devouring Mother is a shadow archetype. As we’ll soon see, it also fits the archetype of the acquiescent child. Finally, in the last post, we described how the rebellious children of The Devouring Mother found their voice politically with the Trump and Brexit votes and culturally through the rise of Jordan Peterson. The corona event brought all three rebellions to an end in 2020 and archetypally represents the fightback of The Devouring Mother against her rebellious children.
The relationship of The Devouring Mother to her rebellious children is always going to be unstable. The mother seeks co-dependence and she does that by stunting the growth of the child. Because the rebellious child demands its autonomy, the two are incompatible. The same is not true of the mother’s relationship with her acquiescent children. That relationship is an equilibrium position for both mother and child and can continue indefinitely if external circumstances do not intervene. That is the whole problem because the relationship is not a healthy one. The Devouring Mother and her acquiescent child are both in their shadow. To use a phrase from popular culture that explains this nicely, they have gone to the dark side. Imagine if Luke Skywalker quit The Rebel Alliance (synchronicity much?) and joined his father working for the empire. That wouldn’t be good for him or Darth Vader who would have lost his chance at redemption. Neither is it good for The Devouring Mother and the acquiescent child to be in their relationship. Jung believed all people have a desire for individuation and a natural part of the individuation process is transcending your shadow. However, The Devouring Mother deliberately prevents her children from individuating. It is this that the rebellious children are fighting against. They are striving to become adults which means they are striving to individuate themselves, to come to fruition, to grow and expand and ideally to flourish. The acquiescent child is different. It submits to the mother and accepts being stifled. In so doing it does not come to fruition, does not flourish and gets stuck in a rut. So does the mother. In this post we will describe this relationship in more detail at the individual level and then extrapolate it to the societal level where we’ll see that, much like Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump became leaders of the rebellious children, so too did a leader appear for the other side. Superficially, this leader symbolised the acquiescent child but, as we are about to see, it is much more complex than that as the leader symbolises the relationship between The Devouring Mother and her acquiescent child and therefore embodies the combination of mother and child together. That leader is Greta Thunberg and it was her rise to fame in 2018 which symbolised the initial fightback of The Devouring Mother against her rebellious children and portended the corona event as a whole. I suggest you buckle up cos things are about to get weird. Or should we say, Jungian.
In this post we are going to see that the acquiescent child itself belongs to a specific archetype but before we get to that it’s worth zooming out a little and positioning The Devouring Mother more broadly within the larger Jungian framework. Each archetype has a positive side which is what the archetype strives for and a shadow side which are the negative traits that the archetype can fall into. An old fashioned way to think about this would be the battle between good and evil where you have your angel sitting on one shoulder arguing with your devil sitting on the other shoulder. Each archetype has its own specific angel and its own specific devil. The Devouring Mother is the shadow version of the archetype known as The Caregiver. The Caregiver itself could be thought of as a variation on The Mother archetype but the more general title captures the fact that the characteristics of the archetype are not related to personal circumstances. One only becomes a biological mother when a child is born or alternatively one can be become a mother via adoption. But The Caregiver archetype denotes general psychological properties that can apply to anybody. The positive properties of The Caregiver are generosity, compassion and selflessness. The Caregiver desires to help others. Obviously, these are characteristics that are desirable in a mother as a young child is completely defenceless and requires constant attention and care. But it’s also possible to apply these to other areas of life such as volunteering to help the needy, working in health care or social services or what have you. We would expect Caregiver archetypes to do well in these fields of endeavour. Like every archetype, The Caregiver has a shadow side. The shadow traits of The Caregiver, the temptations this archetype can fall into, are martyrdom, seeking the control of others through emotional manipulation, seeking a co-dependence relationship; essentially all the things we have described about The Devouring Mother in recent posts including the Munchausen by Proxy behaviours. These are the archetypal temptations that must be overcome by a Caregiver in order to achieve individuation. Stories and movies are a useful model here because the classic hero’s journey is about this battle that takes place in the individual to overcome the temptations of the shadow. To use Luke Skywalker again, he must overcome anger and desire for revenge. That is the shadow side that tempts him. He must resist that temptation. The Caregiver’s archetypal temptations are to manipulate others emotionally and to martyr themselves supposedly on behalf of others. What The Devouring Mother denotes is an archetype that has given in to these temptations. Just as Darth Vader gave in and went to the dark side, so The Devouring Mother has given in to the temptations inherent to The Caregiver archetype. She martyrs herself, manipulates others, lies, guilt trips and seeks a co-dependence relationship with her child.
A Devouring Mother can come into being only when there is a child to partake in the co-dependence relationship. The problem is that children grow up and most people have an innate desire to assert their independence and autonomy no matter what archetype they belong to. For that reason, the rebellious children of The Devouring Mother will come from all archetypes. All they demand is the freedom to become themselves and to escape the stifling atmosphere of The Devouring Mother’s household. There is, however, one other archetype which is susceptible to the co-dependence relationship that The Devouring Mother seeks. Up until now I have been referring to this by the phrase acquiescent children but now we can be more specific about it. The archetype in question is The Orphan. As the name suggests, The Orphan bears the characteristics one might expect from somebody separated from their parents as a child. The primary goal of The Orphan is to regain the safety they lost in childhood. There is an implied wound in the nature of The Orphan that comes from the lack of development suffered because of the (symbolic) separation from its parents. The Orphan’s archetypal mission is to heal that wound and make up for lost development they suffered. That is their pathway to individuation. The positive traits of The Orphan are realism, empathy and the ability to connect with others. The shadow traits are playing the victim, excessive complaining, feelings of hopelessness and apocalyptic fantasies, expecting favourable treatment as compensation for their suffering and giving up in the face of (mostly psychological) difficulties. We can see that these shadow traits fit in perfectly with The Devouring Mother. The Orphan can become addicted to being powerless because when one is powerless one gets rescued. The Orphan’s task is precisely not to get rescued but to learn to do it themselves but that is difficult. Far easier to let somebody else take charge and that is where The Devouring Mother comes onto the scene. A powerless child is exactly what The Devouring Mother needs for her desired co-dependence relationship. The trouble for The Orphan is that lapsing into powerlessness is its shadow side. Its other shadow traits such as playing the victim, expecting favourable treatment and engaging in predatory behaviour towards others also fit in nicely with The Devouring Mother who will happily encourage all of these behaviours knowing (unconsciously) that these are shadow traits that will prevent the child reaching autonomy and leaving the house. Thus, The Devouring Mother and The Orphan in their shadow side are a perfect match. This is why intervention, usually in the name of protecting the child, needs to come from outside in order to break this relationship up. We saw this already in our discussion of Munchausen by Proxy but it is true of the relationship in general. This was why the writer D.H. Lawrence spoke of having to “rescue” his nieces and nephews from their (devouring) mother, his sisters.
The Orphan is the necessary other half of The Devouring Mother archetype which has been on the ascendant in our culture in recent decades. We know what the mother side of this equation looks like and we covered the rebellious children in the last post. What about The Orphans? Where do they fit into the picture? Recall that The Orphan’s main drive in life is to regain “safety” and that is exactly what The Devouring Mother will promise although not in the interests of securing genuine safety but in the interests of keeping The Orphan dependent. The Orphan’s shadow traits – desire for illusory safety, insecurity, anxiety, apocalyptic fantasies, victimhood and blaming others for its own problems have all been at the core of corona. The latter maps effortlessly onto both the mandatory mask and the vaccine issues which are primarily justified as being things other people must do to ensure the safety of The Orphan. Of course, this has no basis in science. We know masks don’t work and we are now being told that, unlike practically every other vaccine, the corona vaccines do not prevent infection. Ergo, they don’t work either. None of that matters in this case because it is not actual security that The Orphan desires but the illusion of safety. That’s why it’s not uncommon to hear a politician say we won’t be safe til everybody has taken the vaccine. It’s a complete fantasy but it’s a fantasy that is specifically tailored to The Orphans. However, it goes further than this. The Orphan in its shadow form doesn’t merely require safety, it likes to use its feigned powerlessness to control others. If it was just about personal safety, The Orphan could wear a mask and take the vaccine and feel safe. That is not good enough, though. Everybody must wear a mask, everybody must take the vaccine and everybody must stay at home. The Devouring Mother wants those things for control purposes but it has been The Orphans among the public who have most fervently supported such measures. Just like The Devouring Mother’s pretence of protecting her child hides deeper shadow desires, so The Orphan’s pretence of powerlessness hides the desire to make others act on its behalf. The need for special treatment is the primary addiction of The Orphan. If that special treatment involves overturning an entire society and coercing others into doing things that make no sense, that is of no concern. In fact, the more outlandish the special treatment, the better. This explains why there have been a sizeable section of the public for whom it is not an exaggeration to say that they have been exhilarated by the corona event. They are The Orphans living out the ultimate Orphan fantasy of having the entire world rearranged on their behalf all supposedly in the name of safety. The Orphans are the Branch Covidian True Believers in the cult of corona, the ones who have actually been happy to have been locked up at home and even happier that everybody else got locked up too. We too were supposed to be defenceless against the virus and to need to be saved, a ridiculous claim when you look at the statistics but the truth does not matter when archetypes are involved. Being returned to the (symbolic) safety of the home is exactly what The Orphan archetype desires and so the lockdowns were a perfect fit for both The Devouring Mother and The Orphan.
The whole corona event has supposedly been about safety. Boris Johnson got up in the British parliament last year and announced “We can hear the toot of the scientific cavalry coming over the hill”. The scientific soldiers were coming to the rescue. They were going to save us. The doctors and nurses were going to save us too. Earlier in 2020, it had become the thing to do in Britain to go outside at a certain time of the day and cheer for the NHS. Doctors and nurses were the heroes all of a sudden. So too the scientists. Just this week at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, the crowd applauded the woman who had helped design the Astra Zeneca vaccine. She’s a saviour too. We needed saving and the doctors, nurses and scientists were the ones who were there to do it. It is both ironic and synchronistic that in Britain the official line at the start of corona was that the public needed to band together to “save the NHS”. We needed to save the experts who were going to save us. There’s been an awful lot of saving going on and all of it largely illusory. Of course, it has all been for the benefit of The Orphans. In its shadow form, The Orphan wants to be saved. The truth is, it must save itself. But The Orphan’s temptation is to let others do it. It can easily slip into a self-destructive mode where it will hurt both itself and others in order to avoid the challenge of indviduation. In fact, The Orphan will lash out against those attempting to help it by telling it the truth. We have also seen that behaviour on display during corona. All dissenting expert voices have been silenced; a very strange thing given it was supposed to be the experts who would save us. You would have thought we would listen to them but this has not been the case. The True Believers have had no problem dismissing the advice of people such as Luc Montagnier and Professor Bhakdi. More recently we have had the absurd situation where the very inventor of the mRNA vaccine, Robert Malone, has spoken out against the vaccination program only to be de-platformed from at least one social media site. The same thing happened to videos of the man who discovered Ivermectin. You would have thought we’d want to hear what such people have to say, but that hasn’t been the case. The truth threatens the co-dependence relationship between The Devouring Mother and The Orphan. Anybody pointing out the truth can expect the wrath of both parties and that is exactly what we have seen in recent times starting with corona and then ramping up substantially with the Trump de-platforming. Seeing prominent figure de-platformed is now a daily occurrence. This has led to the absurd situation where people were de-platformed only months ago for suggesting the virus escaped the lab in Wuhan only for that story to now become the accepted narrative. It’s got nothing to do with the search for truth. It is, in fact, the denial of truth, something that both The Devouring Mother and The Orphan need in order to protect their relationship of co-dependence.
The Orphan archetype in its shadow form has been ascendant in our culture in recent decades in lockstep with the rise of The Devouring Mother. Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of The Orphan can be seen in the concept of safe spaces. As we have already seen, The Orphan primarily seeks safety and what better place to find it than a safe space. The safe space movement goes hand-in-hand with the victimhood ideology that has come to dominate in the universities and corporate culture. We saw in the last post that Jordan Peterson left college campuses and took up the role of leader of the rebellious children preaching a gospel of personal responsibility, accountability and truthfulness. It’s not hard to see why that had to happen. Universities have been progressively weeding out people like Peterson for some time, especially in the humanities faculties. Peterson’s message is completely incompatible with the woke politics of the modern campus with its dizzying array of victim groups. Thus the woke ideology along with the safe space is the precise manifestation of The Orphan archetype in its shadow form. Remember that The Orphan archetype’s mission is to return to a place of safety but it is something they must achieve for themselves. By letting others do it for them, they lapse into their shadow side of powerlessness and victimhood. Almost by definition, providing a safe space for The Orphan archetype is encouraging them to lapse into their shadow. But that is exactly what The Devouring Mother wants because The Orphan in their shadow side is exactly what The Devouring Mother needs for the co-dependence relationship she seeks. That is why both woke ideology and safe spaces have been encouraged and facilitated by the establishment. No surprise then that safe spaces have been primarily located on college campuses, the very place where people go to graduate into adult life as fully educated members of society. In the 60s, university campuses were places of genuine education and genuine rebellion against the status quo. Not anymore. The woke ideology of university campuses is shared by the marketing department of every major corporation as well as Hollywood and the mainstream media. It is encouraged and facilitated by the establishment. The Orphan loves to play the victim and woke ideology allows it to do just that while being encouraged to do so by the powers that be. Thus, the woke ideology and the safe spaces are there to feed The Orphan’s shadow side and prevent it from attaining autonomy. The Orphans will graduate into a world of salary class bullshit jobs where autonomy and independent thinking are the exact opposite of what is required and so the education system is matched to the world which its students will enter. The world of The Devouring Mother.
Having sketched out the main points about The Orphan archetype and its relation to The Devouring Mother, we are finally ready to unpack the symbolic complexities of the rise of Greta Thunberg. We saw in the last post that the rebellious children found their voice in 2015-2016 through the Trump and Brexit votes and the emergence of Jordan Peterson. This is exactly one generation after globalisation went into hyperdrive and threw much of the western middle class under the bus. Of course, it wasn’t just that Trump won. He beat Hillary Clinton, the ultimate political manifestation of The Devouring Mother. The Trump victory, like the Brexit one, represented a huge shock to the system. The first time the public had explicitly rejected the ascendance of The Devouring Mother. It is therefore not a coincidence that another leader would arise immediately afterwards. With the rebellious children finding leaders and seemingly taking charge, The Devouring Mother and her Orphan children needed their own leader and that is where Greta Thunberg enters the picture in the northern hemisphere summer of 2018. Before we get into an archetypal analysis of Thunberg, it is important to understand a bit of historical context about the environmental movement which she has “led”. Just like universities used to be sites of real rebellion back in the 60s and 70s, so the environmental movement at that time was a real grassroots movement that aimed for real change in society. Like every grassroots movement, the environmentalists were initially concerned with tangible issues on the ground. They achieved some genuine wins by highlighting a number of obvious and easily fixed problems such as lead poisoning from petrol and paint. These were the low hanging fruit. Once the easy wins had been realised, the movement continued to push for measures that were more costly to the status quo. It became in the interests of the establishment to buy them out and that is precisely what happened. The environmentalist leaders took up well paying positions on advisory boards or consulting to the marketing departments of corporations and government and the whole thing, the real grassroots movement, promptly disappeared in a puff of environmentally friendly smoke. What has been called “green” ever since is simply whatever is in the interests of the establishment including and especially the enormous infrastructure spending on so-called renewable energy. By the time 2018 rolled around, environmentalism was run through various NGOs which are simply fronts that hide the real financial interests at play. It was into this world that Greta Thunberg decided to skip school and protest alone in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.
In the previous post I noted that Jordan Peterson’s rise to fame was partly due to his authenticity. The same can certainly be said for Greta Thunberg. She’s definitely one of a kind. There’s no way some marketing department or paid political hacks could come up with somebody like a Thunberg. If you want to know what they would come up with, go back and look at the Clinton campaign of 2016. Just like with Peterson, Thunberg’s rise has been facilitated by social media but it is here that there is a crucial difference between the two that reveals what has really been going on with the Thunberg phenomenon. Recall that Peterson had been putting his material online for some time and had built a small following in the years before 2016. His videos about the pronoun issue were picked up by mainstream media with the intention of holding him up as an example of everything that was wrong in the world and this brought him the attention of the people who were looking for somebody to speak against the system. That gave his existing online channels a big boost and over the next years Peterson learned to use the online tools to build his audience. Just like Trump, Peterson benefitted from the negative media coverage and used it to his advantage to become a leader of the rebellious children. The situation with Thunberg is very different and gives us the first hint about what has really been going on. In many ways, Thunberg is an inversion of Peterson. Peterson is a 59-year-old male who is a teacher and scholar at a university. In 2018, Thunberg was a 15 year old girl who was a student in high school. Old vs young. Male vs female. Teacher vs student. If Peterson was leading the rebels, it would follow that Thunberg must be leading the establishment. However, Thunberg’s whole thing was that she was supposed to be rebelling. After all, she was skipping school and speaking out against the powers that be. This is true at the individual level. She did skip school against her parents wishes and so this was rebellion within the Thunberg household. So, it’s probable that Thunberg believes she is rebelling. The problem is to what use this rebellion has been put because Thunberg’s rise was not organic like a Peterson or a Trump. It was manufactured. Thunberg’s school strike and her social media posting about it were immediately picked up and shared by high profile social media accounts. Within two months, Thunberg was getting speaking gigs at demonstrations around Europe and then came her famous speech at the UN. Thunberg went from unknown schoolgirl in Stockholm to giving speeches at the UN within four months. In 2019 she became Time’s Person of the Year and was a given a string of other awards as long as your arm. All awards granted by the establishment. As the saying goes, it takes years to create an overnight success. Peterson’s story shows that formula very clearly. Thunberg’s does not.
To put it in the archetypal terms we have been using, Thunberg was embraced by The Devouring Mother. We would therefore expect her to be The Orphan in the relationship and given her age and social status this would be fitting. But his where things get symbolically weird because Thunberg herself is clearly of the archetype of The Caregiver in its shadow form. She is The Devouring Mother. Recall the properties of The Devouring Mother: it seeks martyrdom, it emotionally manipulates others, it aims to win control by guilty tripping others. Thunberg ticks all the boxes. People in the mainstream media talk unironically about how Thunberg wants to “save the world”. That may actually be true of what she believes but that is a prime case of martyrdom and delusion. It is also fake. Although theoretically giving up her education for the greater good and therefore acting selflessly, Thunberg has in the process become a global phenomenon who has met world leaders, attended famous events and gone on adventures that no normal sixteen-year-old could dream of. Whatever that is, it’s not martyrdom. Real martyrdom involves real sacrifice. By any rational account, Thunberg is not a martyr but we not dealing with reason here but the unconscious. The archetypal perception that has been created for Thunberg is that she is a martyr for the climate cause. Of course, Thunberg herself probably believes that to be true. To understand Thunberg, we must be very careful to differentiate between what she thinks, what the public relations machine around her wants us to think and what she actually is. What she appears to be is The Devouring Mother, or, to be more clear about it, she is a young girl who is The Caregiver archetype in its shadow form. The story of how Thunberg got started with her activism also shows the shadow traits of The Caregiver. We are told that she attempted to convince her parents of the climate problems using graphs and numbers but when that didn’t work she told them they were “stealing her future”. That is guilt tripping and emotional blackmail both prime traits of The Devouring Mother. Thunberg as a child was using them on her own parents and it worked. The official story goes that she convinced her parents to take measures like giving up flying to reduce their carbon footprint. The desire for martyrdom, guilt tripping and emotional blackmail are all traits of The Devouring Mother. To the extent that Thunberg demonstrated those traits prior to her rise to fame we can conclude that her individual psychology is The Caregiver in its shadow form i.e. The Devouring Mother.
If Thunberg is a Caregiver in shadow form, how have the people who have hoisted her to fame wanted us to perceive her? We can find the answer in another snippet from Thunberg’s biography. In May 2018, Thunberg submitted an entry to a climate change essay competition held by a Swedish Newspaper. In it she wrote “I want to feel safe”. That should set off your synchronicity alarm bells because “I want to feel safe” is the very catchphrase of The Orphan archetype we described above. This might tempt us to re-evaluate and say that Thunberg is really an Orphan archetype except that the line itself is a form of emotional manipulation. Just like Thunberg had blackmailed her parents saying they had destroyed her future, she was pulling the same stunt in the climate change essay. It was the same stunt she would pull later on at the UN. According to the official story, after winning the essay contest, Thunberg was contacted by somebody from a climate NGO. We don’t know what they talked about, but it was just three months later that she went on her school strike that on the very first day, with just her sitting by herself in front of the Swedish parliament, was massively amplified by climate NGOs and other establishment players. It went viral but the players who made it go viral were of the establishment. The “I want to be safe” line, the image of a solitary young girl in front of the seat of power, combined with climate apocalypse fantasies are all traits of The Orphan. That is how the establishment wanted to portray Thunberg. Thunberg played along and gave lip service to that perception but her behaviour and words are straight from The Devouring Mother playbook. Let’s just take some of the phrases from Thunberg’s famous speech at the UN.
“Our house is on fire.”
“You are still not mature enough to tell it like it is”.
“Your betrayal”.
“We will never forgive you.”
“We will not let you get away with this.”
And, of course, the most famous one – “How dare you!”
These words could all be straight from the mouth of The Devouring Mother. Thunberg had said exactly the same thing to her parents back in Stockholm. Then she got elevated to saying them to the whole world. In amongst this language is the language of The Orphan. Just as she had previously told her parents, Thunberg told the UN that “you” (she almost always uses the second person pronoun in her speech) have stolen my future. That again is classic Orphan speech: the victimhood, the guilt tripping. In Thunberg, we have a combination of The Devouring Mother and The Orphan. More specifically, The Devouring Mother pretending to be The Orphan. Thunberg comes from the upper class of Swedish society but is portrayed as just a lowly schoolgirl. She plays the victim while travelling around the world to meet international leaders. She speaks as a mother in the body of a child. She declares that she just wants to be “safe” while fighting political battles against world leaders, taking round-the-world boat rides and generally doing things that almost no teenage girl (or teenage boy for that matter) would ever have the courage to do. Thunberg is the Devouring Mother at the microcosmic level brought to fame by The Devouring Mother at the macrocosmic level. Where the whole thing gets very uncomfortable, of course, is that The Devouring Mother is a shadow archetype and so we have the image of a young girl being encouraged not to individuate herself and overcome her shadow but to indulge in it for the benefit of others. That is what The Devouring Mother does to The Orphan at the individual level and also at the societal. She prevents their growth and hinders the individuation process. Sadly this wilful and shameful disregard for the welfare of a young girl is all too common now in our culture and has been on full display throughout corona. Like The Devouring Mother, our society only pretends to care about the interests of the young. Our actions speak very differently. Thunberg is being denied her normal childhood development and so will quite likely inherit the problems of The Orphan archetype. She has become reliant on The Devouring Mother (the establishment) for her fame. If and when that gets taken away, the results for her are likely to be very painful.
The lifting to prominence of Thunberg by the establishment has happened because the entire climate movement these days is funded by the establishment. Climate change has become a weapon in the hands of The Devouring Mother as well as the financial interests that are happy to come along for the ride. In order to hide those interests, the climate “debate” has become a form of gaslighting and emotional manipulation at the societal level in just the same way that the vested interests have been hidden behind the hysteria of corona. The whole thing is one giant guilt trip to make rich westerners kowtow to The Devouring Mother. That is not to say there aren’t real issues at play, there are. But the real issues went out the window decades ago and were replaced by propaganda. Did you notice how all the climate stuff came abruptly to an end as soon as corona kicked off. We haven’t heard a peep about it in a year and a half. Cory Morningstar has an excellent article describing the massive environmental problem we have created by producing billions, if not trillions, of disposable plastic face masks, gloves and other PPE gear in the last year and a bit. That should have been the kind of thing the environmentalists were talking about if they were really worried about the environment. But they’re not really worried. It’s all for show. The truth is of no relevance to either The Devouring Mother or The Orphan in its shadow form. In fact, the truth is anathema because it threatens to break up the relationship between the two and they are both very comfortable in that relationship. However, it is that relationship which is exactly what must be broken up because both parties are in their shadow. To be confronted with the shadow is not necessarily a bad thing. It as an opportunity to individuate. We all must learn to incorporate our shadow and make it a part of a well-rounded self. For The Orphan archetype, that is learning to be yourself, by yourself, without letting others do it for you. For The Devouring Mother, than means learning compassion that is not grounded in selfishness; allowing others and oneself to grow and change without the desperate clinging need to smother everything in order to retain an illusory control. If The Devouring Mother and The Orphan have been increasingly dominating our culture in recent decades, we would expect these issues to be the ones we need to confront as a culture.
All posts in this series:-
The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)
The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet
The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing
The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle
The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death
The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science
The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic
The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun
The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents
The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona
The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic
The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism
The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)
The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book
The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology
The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers
The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?
The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)
The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects
The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria
The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story
The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?
The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs
The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature
The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction
The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate
The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother
The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy
The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask
The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude
The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children
The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!
The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement
The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom
The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone
The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe
The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available
The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale