Author: Simon Sheridan

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

Arbeiten zum vergessen is a phrase associated with the post war years in Germany. It means “working in order to forget”. You fill your days with things to do because if you allow a little bit of space you might start reflecting on unpleasant matters. So, you put your head down and ensure you don’t have any free time. This work ethic is partly credited for giving rise to the wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the West German economy in the post war years. Arguably, the consumerism of that time served a similar purpose of forgetfulness. When you weren’t working, you were shopping or otherwise entertaining yourself. Nowadays we have the internet, Youtube, Netflix and a million other distractions. There’s an almost unlimited number of ways to fill up your day and prevent any pesky free time from causing troublesome thoughts to arise. Thoughts like “what am I doing with my life” and “what’s the meaning of it all.” The exact kind of thoughts that should be dealt with during the initiation/individuation process.

Although the baby boomers are remembered mostly for free love, rock festivals, protests and other rebellious activities, the truth is that it was a small but vocal minority who were driving those trends. Most boomers got a job and settled down in the suburbs with a house and 2.3 children. It was the era where it was still possible to work for a single company your whole life and get a gold watch when you retired. It was also the era when active participation in religion dwindled steadily as the Sunday church service was replaced by the Sunday drive.

I mentioned in the last post a phrase uttered by ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, “work is our religion”. This is especially true here in Australia which is the most bourgeois society on the planet (Canada and New Zealand being the main competitors for the title. It’s not a coincidence that these countries had the most hysterical corona response). Once upon a time, I volunteered as an English teacher to refugees here in Melbourne. As part of the program, us volunteers were given a couple of days training during which we were shown a video of one of the sessions held with the refugees when they were being settled. The facilitator of the session stood in front of the group, who were mostly of African and Middle Eastern origin, and told them “you have to work. In Australia, everyone must work.” What she meant was “you have to get a job. You have to be in paid employment.” Why did she need to spell it out so explicitly? Because where they come from everyone doesn’t have to have a job and, in fact, the idea that everyone must have a job is fairly new even to western countries.

Ask the average person why everybody has to have a job and they’ll say it’s because there are things that need to be done. But, as we found out during corona, this is not really true. It turns out there are entire industries that are “non-essential”. So, we don’t really need to work. We work because work is our religion. Using the terms of this series of posts, we say that paid employment is the exoteric framework of society. That’s what the facilitator was trying to convey to the refugees. In order to fit in here, you must get a job. She’s right. By most metrics, people who are unemployed do worse than people who are employed. We assume this is because the unemployed are poorer but there’s much more to it than that. To be unemployed is not to fit in. It is to be a social outcast. For that reason, the unemployed are far more likely to commit crime, become drug addicts and have mental health problems.

To use another term from this series of posts, getting a job is an initiation. As with all initiations there must be a preparation and the preparation for the initiation of work has become incredibly long in the modern west. A full sixteen years is now the norm as even our universities have reoriented around what purports to be vocational training. Teachers and professors are therefore the elders and the process ends in your becoming a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. After tribal initiations, you might have been known by your spirit animal or the moiety to which you belonged. After an initiation into the religion of work, you’re known by your job title. “What do you do?” is usually the first question anybody asks a stranger.

The religion of work is so ingrained in western culture that most people couldn’t imagine life without it. But, a quick look back in history reveals that many cultures viewed work in a very different way. “Only slaves work”. That would have been the attitude of your average Athenian or Spartan in ancient Greece. If a citizen of those societies ended up working for a living, that was proof that something terrible had happened to them. They must have made some gigantic mistake. There could be no other reason to demean oneself by working.

In his classic essay “In praise of idleness”, Bertrand Russell pointed out that modern society has long had the technical and organisational means to almost entirely do away with work. This had been proven in the centralised economies of the war years. It would have been a trivial matter to rejig those economies to satisfy basic needs and allow every citizen in western countries to live a life of leisure. We didn’t do it and a big part of the reason why is because of the work ethic which is traditionally associated with Protestantism (Max Weber’s famous Protestant Work Ethic) but also has strong roots in the catholic tradition too.

The religious origins of the work ethic are no coincidence and it is here we must differentiate between work and paid employment. Paid employment can be thought of as the exoteric form of work. It’s the societal structure that organises the activity. It should be counterbalanced by an esoteric side which we can call the spiritual aspect of work. This is the higher meaning of the work and it comes through to the extent that you feel your work is a manifestation of what we could call the spirit or even God.

The same is true for leisure time. The word holiday means “holy day”. It was not the time to visit the local shopping centre. It was the time to celebrate the sacred. Both work and leisure are sacred to the extent that through them you are celebrating and manifesting the spirit. A “religion of work”, on the other hand, puts the cart before the horse. Work should be in service of the sacred, not an end in itself.

The whole problem with work in the industrial era is that the sacredness has been taken out of it. This was true right from the beginning of the industrial revolution. The fire pits of the factories even looked like the flames of hell. Those fire pits have been replaced by office suites but from a spiritual point of view the situation is not really much better as I outlined in my post on the trauma of bullshit jobs. Similarly, the filling of leisure time with consumerism removes the sacredness from that activity as well. The religion of work and the associated religion of consumerism are just facsimiles of actual religion.

Thus, although work in the form of paid employment has taken up the role of initiation in our society, it is not a proper initiation in any sense of the word. Businesses are in business and must prioritise finances over people. Strangely enough, many people appear not to understand this. Back when the GFC hit, the company I was working at fired about 1/3 of its employees. I had fully expected to get fired myself but through a stroke of luck was not. What was surprising was how surprised my colleagues were. Many seemed genuinely shocked. “How could they do this to us?” was a phrase one of my teammates uttered. This was a middle aged man who had much more experience of work life than I did and yet he seemed unaware of the realities of the business world. He seemed to think the company owed him something other than the legally prescribed severance package.

In traditional religions, you only got kicked out if you became a heretic or an apostate. In the religion of work, you can be kicked out at any time based on unknown market forces. Nobody is responsible. Nobody can be held to account. It’s just the way it is. And if the market forces are severe enough, you may find yourself excommunicated into permanent unemployment with a skillset and experience that the economic gods no longer deem worthy. If work is our religion, it’s a heartless one. Wolfgang Giegerich was right, there is a brutality to it all. It is, in fact, an anti-human system or at the very least ahuman. Humans are merely incidental to the process. If they can be automated away or their jobs shipped overseas, all the better.

These free market forces just happen to also fit the archetype of The Devouring Mother: arbitrary, vindictive (from the employee’s point of view) and callous. The outward shows of empathy like “we value our employees” or “we encourage diversity” only apply as long you toe the line and as long as there is a need for you. It is certainly not the unconditional love of the true Mother archetype. And things are getting even more arbitrary now that your job can be judged “non-essential” based on unknown criteria cooked up by a room of unelected bureaucrats. No correspondence will be entered into and the judge’s decision is final. Sorry, not sorry.

As Sir James Goldsmith noted back in the 90s, the economy is supposed to work for the people and not the other way around. One way to look at the globalisation agenda of the 90s is that we deliberately put the economy above the people. Where that happened most clearly, however, was not the west but China. China instituted an old-fashioned form of uber-capitalism, albeit one wrapped up in a socialist façade. In China there are no labour laws, no health and safety laws, no unions and, in fact, almost no protection in law at all for citizens and workers. As bad as The Devouring Mother nanny state is in a country like Australia, it’s ten times worse in China. Hence the social credit scores and facial recognition and all the other wonderful technological innovations going on over there.

In March 2020, the west decided to copy China. Is that a coincidence? Is it a coincidence that the complete disregard for human rights, civil liberties, rule of law and democracy that we have seen the in west in the last two years mirrors the situation in China? The west shipped our jobs to China and with it our anti-human religion of work, consumerism and greed. To use an old phrase, we helped create a monster. In 2020, we got it all back with interest. There is a certain karmic justice to the whole thing.

But since then the story has taken a twist. The side effects of globalisation had already been building in the west in the form of real estate and asset bubbles and general decline in the quality of life. To take just one example from Melbourne, the length and quality of the average person’s commute, whether on public transport or by road, had become steadily worse in the years leading up to corona. Many people were already feeling the pinch of this hidden inflation. The religion of work was already bursting at the seams. Then corona hit and now you have mandatory gene therapy and masks to add to the top of the list of “inconveniences” just to earn a living. To this day, many workers still have to wear a mask at work even though they are vaccinated not to mention all the other arbitrary rules enforced without rhyme or reason.

All that would have been bad enough, but now we’re seeing the return of not just hidden inflation but real headline monetary inflation. The religion of work entails participation in the consumer economy. It also entails the notion of building wealth, what is called The Australian Dream (copied from The American Dream). But neither the consumer economy nor the building of wealth works with rampant inflation. If we think of this as the Holy Trinity of the Religion of Work – employment, consumerism, building wealth – all of these are now directly under threat. No surprise then that the effect of all this is that some people no longer want to work. In seemingly every industry in Australia there are shortages of workers at the moment. Companies complain that they can’t even get people to interview for jobs.

Part of what the rebellious baby boomers were complaining about was that the esoteric content of work and leisure had already disappeared. That’s also what Jimmy Carter was talking about in his addresses to the nation in the late 70s. The religion of work has lacked esoteric content for a long time. Nevertheless, it has fulfilled the exoteric function of ordering society in the post war years. What happens if that structure breaks down? There will be practical consequences. After all, not all jobs are “non-essential”. Some jobs actually need to get done for things to continue working.

But the more interesting consequences might be cultural. If work loses its ability to provide exoteric structure to society, what will replace it? We would need something new to fill the void and that is where Spengler’s second religiosity becomes relevant. We’ll talk about that more in the next post.

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

I mentioned in post 3 of this series that I am an accidental Jungian. Although I was aware of the basics of Jung’s work prior to corona, my main contact with it was a practical one. I had been using the character archetypes as a heuristic device in my fiction writing. They were something I was introduced to early on when I started writing fiction and I found them a useful way to guide character development during the writing process. I then found myself applying them to works of fiction that I was reading or movies that I was watching in the same way that I would break stories down by act and beat structure. This happened quite automatically the same way a musician might automatically analyse the key of a particular piece of music or a chef might know what ingredients have been used in a dish they were eating at a restaurant.

By the time corona came around, I was well practiced in the art of analysing behaviour in this archetypal fashion but I had never thought to apply it to the real world. It wasn’t until I read Jung’s Wotan essay that I started to apply that analysis to the public discourse and to take more seriously the idea that the archetypes were real in the sense that they were driving world events. I was encouraged in my analysis by a number of commenters on this blog and a couple of acquaintances of mine who had personal experience with Devouring Mothers and who had recognised the same pattern of behaviour in the public discourse.

Now that I’m the author of a book of applied Jungian psychology, one of the things I have been trying to do is figure out where my analysis fits within Jungian scholarship in general. This process has been slow going due to the inconvenient fact of having a day job. But, in the two months since I began writing these posts, I have gotten an outline of the situation. As it turns out, my approach sits right in the middle of a couple of live issues within the Jungian community.

What I have been doing in this series of posts and also my Devouring Mother analysis is talking about the collective psyche. I have mentioned James Hillman in earlier posts. Hillman was one Jungian who had criticised the field for a lack of attention to the collective. A commentator on last week’s post (thanks to Shane) put me on to a second, Wolfgang Giegerich, and from there I found among this essay in which Giegerich calls the confusion between individual and collective psychology’s “basic fault”.

Hillman and Giegerich are also relevant to this series of posts because they deny individuation as a process, albeit for different reasons. Giegerich states that the lack of individuation in modern society is part of the soul (or collective psyche) of modern society and is therefore not something to be criticised. He goes further and states that the desire to reintroduce individuation is nothing more than a romanticised delusion attempting to reinvigorate outdated practices that have no relevance to the modern world. Giegerich would criticise my literary analysis of Orphan stories as “archaeological psychology”. We can appreciate such stories the same way as we appreciate museum pieces but they are not part of the live culture. The fact is, there is no individuation in the modern world because the modern world has no use for it and, according to Giegerich, any yearning for a return to it is invalid. Rather, we should honestly face the world we live in and accept that individuation has no role in it. What that further implies is that individuals have no role in it and this is also what Giegerich claims. He states that the “profit motive” has erased the need for individuals.

“The true opus magnum of today takes place in an entirely different arena, not in us as individuals, but in the arena of world affairs, of global competition, in the arena of the psychological District Commissioner, who in our case, as we said, is the overwhelming pull towards maximizing profit. The individual merely feels the effects of the opus magnum as those of a blind fate, but remains absolutely disconcerted, helpless, and dumbfounded as to what it is that is happening to him and why.”

I have 99 problems with Giegerich’s position and I might write a post at a later time spelling them all out. Nevertheless, Giegerich is interesting and relevant to this series of posts for two main reasons. Firstly, he denies that individuation is still relevant to the modern world. Given that individuation is a core component of this series of posts, it’s worth working through Giegerich’s objections to it. Secondly, and following from the first point, Giegerich wants psychology to move away from the individual and towards the collective or supra-individual level. In both of these points, he and James Hillman are in agreement although they seem to have very different takes on the ramifications with Hillman desiring a re-mythologising of the world while Giegerich envisages some despair-laden epochal metamorphosis similar to Christianity. Given this series of posts has been about the collective psyche, we can use Giegerich’s analysis to try and place our analysis within current Jungian debate.

Hillman and Giegerich both address what they see as a deficiency in Jungian thought which is its focus on the individual at the expense of the collective. This imbalance makes sense for historical reasons. Both Freud and Jung earned their fame by treating individuals for personal psychiatric conditions. Most Jungians to this day earn their living in psychotherapy. Psyche means “soul” and so is tied up with millennia of religious debates focusing primarily on the individual soul. Anybody with an interest in studying collective and societal issues is not going to go into psychology. Rather, they will gravitate towards sociology, anthropology, political science and even theology. That is what those disciplines are for.

Nevertheless, as Giegerich points out, Jung was interested in supra-personal psychology and much of his later work is focused in this area. The collective unconscious was so important precisely because it provided a link between personal psychic experience and the collective. Where Giegerich differs most from Jung and other Jungians is in rejecting the idea of individuation. Giegerich sees this as part of the excessive focus on the individual which, while it may have been relevant historically, is no longer so.

“If…the telos and meaning of the opus of maximizing profit is to render people redundant, does this moment of the symbolic life not serve as our initiation into what I call the ‘psychological difference’, the difference between human and soul? Do we not have to acknowledge it as our psychopomp guiding us out of the anthropological or ontological fallacy dominating the present consciousness and into a new form of consciousness?”

One of the 99 problems I have with Giegerich is that he ascribes to the “profit motive” a quality of existential despair that, by definition, must have been missing in previous societies because he says it is the very thing that has ushered in a new era in our time. However, this seems clearly wrong. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is perhaps the ultimate investigator of existential despair but he was writing primarily from the context of Protestantism in northern Europe. Similarly, the existential crisis that Jung suffered was not because of the profit motive but partly the stifling atmosphere of Victorian era Switzerland and partly as a premonition of WW1.

The collective soul is almost identical with what has traditionally been called God. So, the idea here would be that God is dead and he has been replaced with the profit motive (materialism). Nietzsche had already identified this and there is a very Nietzschean tone to Giegerich’s writing. He sees this development as being cataclysmic. We now live in a world that doesn’t give a damn about us except as a component in the profit machine. However, for Giegerich there is nothing to be done except to live with this state of affairs and see where it takes us. He sees in the concept of individuation a desire to return to the old religious practices which are no longer relevant.

I would argue that understanding that what society wants for you is not the same as what you want is precisely what the individuation process is all about and always has been. Thought about another way, individuation is partly about fusing the social and individual. That’s why the natural time for individuation is the teenage years as that is the time when you must find your place in society. Individuation should allow you to find your place without sacrificing the individual. To the extent that you just follow the social script and do whatever society asks of you, you have an imbalance. You have sacrificed your individuality. The individuation process has failed. The reason people do this is because the individuation process entails exactly the despair that Giegerich talks about and people prefer to avoid that despair.

Jung was quite explicit that the unconscious is disorder, chaos and meaninglessness. But one only confronts such things when one is not willing or able to find solace in society. As we have noted in past posts in this series, you must be called to individuation by an elder. What Giegerich seems to be arguing against is the notion of individuation as “self-improvement” i.e. as a kind of bourgeois hobby. In other words, people who are not called by the spirit of the depths as Jung put it but rather pursue individuation in a casual manner by personal conscious choice.

If this is what he meant then I think Giegerich is onto something but this is precisely why the concept of initiation is crucial because initiation is the bridge between the personal experience and the collective. The elders are the holders of the tradition. They represent and channel the supra-personal. Their duty is to guide the Orphan through the same process they once went through. In doing so, they bring about the fusion of the collective and the individual. Initiation and individuation are two sides of the same coin. One faces the collective and the other faces the individual.

We noted in earlier posts that Jung had to self-initiate and this is what Giegerich seems to be objecting to. The current world soul doesn’t require this individuation, he says. It just wants profit. And we already have an initiation into this profit-driven world soul. It’s called getting a job (I suppose our current education system would also count as part of that initiation since it is now shamelessly devoted to vocational training). The ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, touched on this issue when she said “work is our religion”. Giegerich accuses Jungians of hiding from this reality and pursuing an individuation process that is just a historical relic. For Giegerich, the reason we don’t have elders or old-fashioned initiations is because our world soul does not require them. We can complain about that fact and yearn for a past where it wasn’t the case or we can face up to reality and deal with the world as it is. In that world, individuation is not necessary because individuals are not necessary. What is necessary are human resources that can be used in the production and consumption of goods and services.

It is noteworthy that Giegerich presupposes that we have entered a new era because this matches up with the analysis in this series that the post-war era has ushered in something new. He even uses the word initiation but for him we are being initiated into a completely new kind of consciousness, one where the individual is not relevant. This entails a Copernican revolution for psychology because the individual human psyche would no longer be the locus. Rather, the collective psyche would take pride of place.

While I disagree with much of what Giegerich says, I admit it is an interesting perspective. Giegerich wants to take the hero out of the Hero’s Journey. This has actually been done in the literature of the 20^th century under the genre of “literary fiction”. In literary fiction, there is no discernible plot and no discernible characters. When you remove plot and character, the effect is to foreground the “environment” and this matches with the collective or supra-personal that Giegerich talks about. So, it seems to me that literary fiction is an example of a form of art that shares Giegerich’s aim. The problem is that literary fiction is spectacularly boring and, contrary to the pretensions of the people who read and write it, unskilled. The world that Giegerich has in mind would be much the same. As replaceable cogs in the machine, none of us would have any distinguishing features including special skills by which we stand out. Our compensation could only be that we would rejoice in the workings of the machine. All this fits in with the life of a corporate worker: dull, dreary, repetitive and unadventurous. Giegerich does not deny that this is depressing, but he says it’s what our society is and we must learn to love it. For Giegerich, Agent Smith is the only character in The Matrix who has it right. He’s the only one able to set aside petty egotistic concerns and marvel at the beauty of the machine.

Is there a way to address the imbalance between personal and collective psyche without giving up the former? Yes, there is. Partly it’s in the initiation-individuation concept. But it’s also there in the collective unconscious. Giegerich doesn’t talk about the collective unconscious in the essay linked to above. Rather, he suggests that the problem with modern Jungian practice lies in the method of giving priority to dreams, visions and active imagination while disregarding social developments. He calls the former personal and the latter supra-personal. But this seems to me wrong in terms of what Jung himself said which is that dreams and other personal psychic experiences are our way to access the collective unconscious. Therefore, they are not personal and the Giegerich’s dichotomy breaks down.

Giegerich’s dichotomy breaks down in another way if we assume that the world of social affairs is at least as much driven by the collective unconscious as by the collective conscious. That is the approach which inspired my Devouring Mother concept. It shares with Giegerich the assumption that the consciousness of the individuals in question is irrelevant because they are being driven by larger forces. When we say, for example, that the Australian or Canadian governments were manifesting The Devouring Mother, we assume that the individual politicians and bureaucrats are acting as nothing more than channels for the collective psyche. The difference with Giegerich is we assume this is an anomaly that is caused precisely because of a lack of individuation in our society. It is because we don’t have initiation/individuation rituals that individual psyches are open to manifesting collective psychic forces from the collective unconscious. When you get rid of individuation, you open the way to mass psychoses.

Giegerich assumes that all societal events are the product of the conscious mind. This is a very ingrained habit of the modern mentality as can be seen in the variety of conspiracy theories that abound nowadays whereby every single thing that happens in the world must have a cabal of evil geniuses behind it. Of course, we should not rule out conspiracies which are an everyday part of political life. The problem is when we assume every single event is 100% defined by the conscious mind. Instead, we can simply allow the possibility that the unconscious is guiding supra-personal affairs. Again, this is nothing new and one could argue that it is only modern society which ignores the effect of the collective unconscious on world affairs. By the microcosm-macrocosm assumption, we assume the structure of the collective psyche matches that of the individual. Therefore, we assume the collective psyche has an unconscious which can drive events, especially at moments of high stress. That is why corona is far better explained by a psychology of the unconscious than the conscious.

I agree with Giegerich that a refocus on the supra-personal would be valuable but it seems to me he throws the baby out with the bathwater. We don’t need to reject the individual. In fact, rejecting the individual would cause exactly the kind of imbalance that Giegerich complains about only in the other direction. Individuation/initiation is the process which marries up the collective and the personal. It connects personal psychic experience to the collective via the unconscious. All of this is already part of Jungian thought. Giegerich’s position, by contrast, is quite illogical. If we take the individual out of psychology, what is left? We might as well just close down psychology altogether and stick to economics or sociology or any of the other disciplines that aspire to “objectivity” and which treat individuals as mere data points.

As a final note, Giegerich’s position has an awful lot in common with the Great Reset. You will own nothing and you will be happy, says Klaus Schwab. You will be nothing and you will be happy, says Giegerich. Some very powerful people hold these views and seem intent on pushing them to their logical conclusion. So, this is not a mere academic debate. It’s a real live issue that we are living through right now and most of the public appears completely blind to it. We do need to refocus on the supra-personal. But the only way to do that is via the process of individuation. So, I’d say Jung was right. The only way to save the world is through the individual.

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The current state of play

Many years ago I recall seeing a video advertisement for Google. A grandfather is driving his grandson in a car. The grandson asks a question about Chinese history and the grandfather, not knowing the answer, makes up some elaborate and ridiculous story. There was a better way, said the advertisement. You just had to give the kid access to Google and he could find the answer himself.

I’ve been thinking about that ad recently in light of the themes explored in this series of posts. The young boy is The Orphan looking to his grandfather for guidance. But he can’t rely on his grandfather to give accurate information about the world. He can, of course, rely on a multinational corporation. They’re never wrong and only have his best interests at heart. The ad is designed to strike fear into the hearts of parents who will no doubt be terrified that their child is going to be left behind if allowed to do silly things like ask their grandparent for advice. Once again we see the post war trend of replacing the elders with the experts. The grandparent has no authority or moral standing because he doesn’t have access to the latest abstract, exoteric knowledge. It is that knowledge which the child needs in this world and not any kind of wisdom which an old man may be able to impart.

If you were to fast forward in the world of the grandfather and his grandson to the time after the parents had sorted out the problem, you would no doubt see the child sitting in the back seat of the car with his head stuck in an iPad while the grandfather tries vainly to engage him in conversation. That’s a scene that plays out in family cars and households around the world nowadays. Children barely bother to ask for the answer to a question anymore, they just type it into google and get the answer. Of course, the naivete of children hasn’t changed. They still believe whatever they are told. It’s just that now the child believes whatever google tells it rather than whatever grandpa tells it. And google, ultimately, is just computer code. It’s just a machine. So, the light-hearted scene in the family car hides a more fundamental development.

In post five in this series, we posited that the boomers failed the archetypal task of individuation in the 70s. It seems synchronous that the 80s was the beginning of the computer revolution leading into the IT revolution that now sees young children tuning in to google and a host of other multinational corporations on a daily basis. We see in this the same trend we saw with Dr Spock at the start of the boomer generation. One of the sure fire ways advertising executives found to sell products was to play to the fear of missing out that aspirational parents have for their children. Parents have always been an easy demographic to market to and the use of experts was an obvious strategy. The elder was replaced by experts like Dr Spock. Fast forward a few decades and now Dr Spock has been replaced with algorithms. Real-world doctors have also been replaced with tests and tele-health calls while Big Tech wants to go one step further and replace it all with computer code. What could go wrong?

It would no doubt surprise the average person if they understood how little is really known about these algorithms even by the people who work on them. The censorship which now takes place on social media is algorithm-driven. It’s a very common story to hear that such and such a person has been banned due to some innocuous post. Most people blame political bias and, although there is reason to be suspicious on that score, most of the banning of perfectly acceptable material is done by accident. More specifically, it’s done automatically. The algorithm judged that you were a bad guy and automatically shut down your account. Just like spraying fields with insecticide will kill the good flora and fauna as well as the “bad”, algorithms represent an industrial-scaled approach to an industrial-scaled problem. One of the side effects is a threat to free speech and democracy.

The main issue with the machine learning algorithms, however, is not the bugs in the system but the fact that most of the time they do “work”. They work because they do not require any intelligence whatsoever. Rather, they just apply processing power to the problem. The advertising industry discovered AB testing back in the early 20^th century via mail order marketing. The data had to be crunched by hand back in those days. Computers do the same thing in seconds flat. They can crunch enormous amounts of data. There was a story from one of the Obama presidential campaigns, for example, where it was found that making the Sign Up button on the website purple (I think that was the colour) achieved the best the result. Nobody needed to know why purple was better. You didn’t need any colour or sociological theory to explain it. You just try all variations and let the data tell you the answer. So, we remove human intelligence from the matter just like we remove all the other faculties of the human mind, little things like wisdom or morality. Who needs those?

What’s interesting about the IT revolution is how quickly it went from promising new freedom to delivering dystopia. Twitter was a great platform in the early days but now resembles a giant pit of the damned screeching into the abyss. Google used to have a magic ability to return exactly what you were looking for. Now it’s almost impossible to find what you’re looking for. Recently the search engine Duck Duck Go announced that it would start deliberately modifying its search results about the Russia-Ukraine war to ensure users received the “right” information. This from a company that had marketed itself as being one of the good guys.

In the larger arc of post war history which, according to the analysis in this series of posts is the history of the West trying to manifest a new archetype, the IT revolution belongs to the shadow side of the story. It comes in right after the failed individuation attempt of the 70s. It actually has its roots in some of the more positive developments of the boomer era, specifically the systems thinking movement. Steve Jobs and Stewart Brand were hanging around with the hippies in California back in the day. Open source software and other anarchist political theories actually work in the field of programming. There was a lot to be enthusiastic about.

But, of course, it all got bought out and is now controlled by mega-corporations. Apart from anything else, there’s just way too much of it. It’s information overload. Ultimately, it’s all just abstractions; pixels on screens. It’s ended up becoming denial (of reality), obliviousness, passive consumption, victimhood and victimisation; all traits of the shadow side of The Child. Steve Jobs hoped the iPad would be a tool for creativity but anybody who’s watched a child (or an adult) using the thing knows that’s not how it ended up.

As we have seen the last two years, the IT revolution has also become a very powerful weapon in the hands of The Devouring Mother. Faux-compassion is a trademark of the modern corporation. But, as we saw recently with the freezing of bank accounts in Canada, that mask can be dropped very quickly to reveal arbitrary, vindictive and abusive behaviour. It’s interesting that even the machine learning algorithms come across as arbitrary and vindictive, almost as if the computer code itself is channeling the archetype.

At this point, we re-join the story where my previous analysis of The Devouring Mother – Orphan dynamic began. We can now incorporate the extra detail provided in the posts in this series to place that dynamic in its larger historical process.

The dominant European archetype of The Warrior had come to an abrupt end with the world wars. The shift to a new archetype matched the shift of hegemon to the United States and it’s in the US that the new archetypal developments have manifested most clearly with other nations in the west following the lead. The new consumer society based on the Freudian pleasure principle sprung into action. The role of the parent in the nuclear family was foregrounded. Suburbia became the dominant lifestyle paradigm. The nuclear family was increasingly geographically removed from the older generation as multi-generational houses disappeared. The older generation no longer had an economic role, which was replaced by the consumer society, or a cultural role, which was replaced by the experts. What unfolded was a long period that manifested the mostly positive traits of The Innocent and The Mother archetypes.

It also should be noted that there were attempts to address genuine problems. Again, these looked successful early on and brought a long period of peace and prosperity to the west. The environmental movement was initially a grassroots movement aimed at dealing with environmental degradation in all its forms and it produced a number of positive results. More specifically, it harvested the low hanging fruit i.e. the reforms that could be implemented with little economic cost. Once the economic cost started to appear in the 70s, the environmental movement was shut down in the time honoured fashion of buying out the leadership. This is also part of the story of the failed individuation process. Those people could have rallied around Jimmy Carter’s call to live within their means, instead they took up well-paying jobs with corporations.

As noted in the last post, a failed individuation process does not just return things back to normal. Rather, it leads to the manifestation of shadow archetypes. The failure of The Orphan to individuate means it does not achieve autonomy and independence. It does not become a fully-fledged adult archetype but falls back to The Mother for support. Thus, we see both the shadow forms of The Child and The Devouring Mother emerge in the 80s but accelerating significantly from the 90s until today.

Is it a coincidence that at around this time the divorce rates in the US went through the roof? With mothers massively favoured by family law, this led to the role of the mother being foregrounded in many homes. The post war period had seen the removal of the grandparents from the nuclear family. Next came the removal of the father from the nuclear family. Looking at current developments, the parents are apparently being removed altogether. We saw this during corona with questions about what age children could consent to getting a vaccine without their parents knowing. Similarly, the teaching of sex education to primary school children without parental consent is an actual debate at the moment in the US. Is this an urgent social problem in need of rectification? Of course not. It makes sense archetypally, however. Just as grandparents were airbrushed out of the equation in earlier decades, it looks like parents are next on the chopping block.

There’s no point enumerating all the other developments of the last few decades. Suffice to say that the current state of western civilisation is rivaling the late Roman period as world-historically decadent. But the madness is not random. It is the shadow form of The Child enabled and abetted by the shadow form of The Devouring Mother. The two go together and you cannot have one without the other. This is the dynamic that has been driving social affairs since the 80s.

In my book on The Devouring Mother, I noted there were two types of Child: the acquiescent and the rebellious. Within the language of this series, we can now be more specific about these. The acquiescent children are those who manifest the shadow form. What about the rebellious children? I think we can call them Orphans in the sense that they are trying to individuate.

The rebellious children emerged exactly a generation after the ramping up of globalisation in the 90s. That ramping up process was a last gasp attempt to prop up the economic system. The political result of globalisation was to the reduce the power of nation states vis a vis corporations and so the rebellion process took the form of a rejection of that process and a return to nationalism in the form of Brexit and Trump.

However, the rebellion starts to look like an attempt at individuation when we factor in the rise of Jordan Peterson as an elder figure. I noted in earlier posts that Peterson was as much chosen by his audience as he chose them. The audience which chose him is primarily the younger demographic, those at the most likely age for individuation. One of the things this demographic wanted and Peterson provided was a link to the past. They wanted to know what made western civilisation worthwhile. Make America Great Again and Brexit also tapped into these sentiments. This can be seen as the desire to connect with the ancestors, a key part of The Orphan’s journey of individuation. It’s also fitting that Peterson would write self-help books as the desire for self-improvement can be seen as an attempt at individuation in a culture which has no formal processes to facilitate it.

According to this analysis then, what the rebellious children represent is a new attempt to individuate following the failed attempt of the 70s. Given that corona brought about the derailment of that movement (Trump lost; Peterson’s health problems), what that now looks like is the archetypal intervention of The Devouring Mother to prevent individuation on the part of the rebellious children. That makes perfect sense within the archetype because The Devouring Mother does prevent individuation in her children. That is how she retains power over them.

What was it that brought Peterson and Trump undone? “Science” and specifically “vaccines”. These both need inverted commas as neither are accurate descriptions of the reality. It was the simulacrum of science and a simulacrum of a vaccine. We might even say the shadow side of science and vaccines. But science and vaccines are two of the foundation stones of modern western society, at least from a cultural point of view. As Trump and Peterson had set themselves up as defenders of that tradition, they had to support the whole thing. Science and technology can solve all problems. That is the underlying message. That’s part of the reason why Trump is still pushing the line that the vaccines were a success. If the west doesn’t have science, what do we really stand for?

Where does this leave us? On the one hand we have The Innocents in shadow form who represent the political block voting for an increasingly vindictive and manipulative Devouring Mother whose gaslighting now encompasses the rejection of the most basic facts (all in the name of “science”, of course). I fully expect any day now to hear how gravity doesn’t exist. When that happens, there will no longer be any truths left to deny.

On the other hand we have a movement that seems to be trying to individuate but we must be honest about the state of that movement. In comparison to the one that Jimmy Carter had earlier failed to implement, it has some serious flaws. It promises of a return to a golden age that, like all golden ages, was never that golden start with. On a day-to-day basis, its primary political reason for existing is to curtail the worst excesses of The Devouring Mother. Don’t want your six year old to be taught about sex in kindergarten? Vote for me. This is not a forward thinking movement with a tangible vision. It is reactionary.

In the meantime, we look all set for an economic re-enactment of the 70s, only this time round there is almost certainly not going to be a reprieve in the form of new oil discoveries. The globalisation agenda of the 90s has given rise to the ascent of the Eurasian bloc which will now take place alongside the west as a power centre. We will probably see another cold war but this time the west is not well placed to win (although nobody is likely to “win” this time around). Any recognition of these facts is completely missing from the public discourse and a new Jimmy Carter who might once again rally the public to deal with the real underling problems is nowhere to be seen.

In the archetypal story of The Orphan, including the initiation rituals of hunter gatherer tribes, there is significant physical hardship to go alongside the spiritual journey. Although this doesn’t appear to be a necessary element in the individuation process, as Jung’s life shows, it might be required for less spiritualised individuals and cultures like modern western society. Perhaps there must be a literal bearing of the cross and not just a metaphorical one. If so, that is an “opportunity” that is coming our way as we speak. The Devouring Mother can no longer afford to keep all the children in the house. One by one, they’ll have to make their own arrangements and that may be the thing that finally triggers The Orphan to fulfil the archetypal mission. Until then, we look to be stuck in eternal childhood. Not the one James Hillman described but the shadow form of obliviousness and denial.

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

In this series we’ve been jumping around all over the place in terms of the theme of each post. So, I figure we might as well keep the trend going by throwing in a post that makes explicit some of the theoretical and metaphysical propositions and assumptions that guide the approach we have been taking. Probably should have done this at the start of the series, but, better late than never. Without further ado, let’s jump in.

Psychology vs “Reality”

In some of his writings, particularly the earlier ones, Jung is at pains to note that he is talking about psychological phenomena and not making metaphysical claims. This was probably a necessary hedge on his part as the ideas he was promulgating go against the materialist dogma of modern society. A big part of the reason, I think, why Freud gained more attention than Jung was because he stuck to that dogma. For example, his focus on the animal drives accords with the “bottom up” philosophy of materialism according to which the “lower” explains the “higher”. Using biology to explain psychology is one manifestation of this. Of course, Freud was also primarily concerned with sex and, as the old saying goes, sex sells.

It was later in his career that Jung became more interested in the idea that archetypes are fundamental not just to the psyche but also to the world in general. This was the basis of his collaboration with the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, which gave rise most famously to the notion of synchronicity: the strange habit of reality matching up with psychic occurrences in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect. Jung posited a more general notion of “ascausal orderedness” to account for this phenomena. By that time he was becoming elderly and so he asked his collaborator, Marie-Louise von Franz, to follow up on the idea. She later published the work “Number and Time” which explores the notion that the archetypes of number unite psychic and physical reality.

In this series of posts, we follow Jung and von Franz in assuming that the archetypes are not just psychological but work to bring acausal order to the world.

Objectivity vs Subjectivity

In the field of linguistics, it is accepted that a native speaker’s intuitions about their native language are valid. The reason is because we assume there is a universal grammar that sits at the foundation of language learning and any speaker who has learned to speak must have activated that faculty. The judgements of a native speaker are not “subjective” because the language faculty is common to all.

The same goes for psychic judgements. By virtue of being human, we all have the psychic faculties that enable access to the collective unconscious. Unlike the language faculty, however, the faculties needed to access the subconscious are not equally activated in all people. One could argue that we are born with them “switched on”. But as we get older we are encouraged to ignore or disbelieve them by parents and society in general. This is especially true in the modern materialist West.

One must learn to use those faculties but also to harness them in an appropriate fashion and that is what the individuation process is for. It is that process which integrates the subconscious and conscious minds. It is not enough to have access to intuition, imagination or other relevant faculties, they must be brought into balance and integrated with the ego. If they aren’t, we see phenomena such as projecting the shadow. The final product of the integrated psyche is what Jung called The Self.

What separates the sage from the madman? It’s that the former knows how to integrate the content of the subconscious while the latter is overwhelmed by it. As we have been discussing in previous posts, this process is not easy or straightforward. It carries significant risks, especially in cultures such as ours which have lost the ability to guide people through the journey.

All that would be complicated enough, but there are also hierarchies of individuation so that the Orphan’s metamorphosis is not the final stage but more like the first hurdle on the path. At this point we get caught up in much larger discussions about the nature of truth and hierarchies of being etc. Psychic truths are not capable of measurement, quantification or calculation. From the point of view of materialist science this is a failing but the counter argument would be that such truths are only attainable on the material plane which has traditionally been seen as the lowest level of existence. As you move up the planes, you must bring more of yourself to the task and at the highest level you must bring the whole of your being. This calls into question the whole idea that “objectivity” is of more value than “subjectivity”. As G K Chesterton put it, objectivity may just be a fancy word for indifference.

If we think of individuation itself as a path, people who are at different points along the path will have different interpretations of the same phenomena. That starts to sound like relativism and yet the paradox is that true objectivity only comes “on the other side of” relativism. That’s what the sages say.

The good news is that we can still judge interpretations based on results. It’s because of the assumption that archetypes bring acausal order to the world that we can sense check archetypal accounts against the world to see if they fit.

The “data” of psychic analyses

Dreams, oracles, intuition, imagination, literature, myth, art, in short, anything that taps into the unconscious. There is also the concept of inspiration. People involved in creative endeavours such as music or writing will know the phenomenon of an idea just appearing in the mind. Where does this idea come from? Is it just the random firing of neurons which, like the random mutations of Darwinian theory, then get selected for by environmental pressures? What if these ideas are coming from somewhere and that somewhere is the collective unconscious. If so, then this data has an “objective” property. The ideas don’t belong to us. They were given to us. This has been the assumption of artists, prophets and everyday people for most of history.

It’s noteworthy that such a conception implies a lack of egotism. The ideas you have are not the product of your own special snowflake genius. On the other hand, it’s also true that your ability to interpret them and bring them to fruition is based on individual talent, ability and experience. Traditional societies recognised this by having specialised roles for people engaged in these practices such as oracles, medicine men and the like. But just as your appreciation for art is enhanced by having a working understanding of how art works, so too the appreciation of the talents of a medicine man are enhanced by knowing something about the unconscious.

Of course, our society assumes that such matters are invalid by default. This is part of the reason why the last two years were able to happen. Most of the people in modern society are completely blind to the psychic “data” and psychic explanations in general.

Microcosm vs Macrocosm

Gregory Bateson once said it takes a mind to know a mind. We assume that the structure of the psyche or mind in the individual is the same as the psyche or mind that exists at “higher” levels eg. society, civilisation, world (or “nature” as Bateson called it). Just as we each manifest archetypes, so the archetypes can manifest at the societal level. It’s this assumption that allows us to extrapolate from individual instances to broader socio-cultural trends.

We should also acknowledge with Walt Whitman that we are large and we contain multitudes. Archetypes are not mutually exclusive. Rather, we say that the Devouring Mother or the Orphan are dominant while the others are latent or subdominant. At the individual level, each of us has a dominant archetype that does not necessarily match with the dominant archetype of the society we live in. We might be a Warrior stuck in a society of Orphans or a Mother surrounded by Sages.

There’s also nothing stopping us from manifesting different archetypes. As previously mentioned, Socrates was both a Sage and a Warrior at different times and any functioning society must be constituted of enough of each type of archetype to stay viable eg. Warriors for defence.

Transcendence and Transformation

Of particular relevance to the concept we are exploring in this set of posts is the idea of transcendence and transformation. Individuation is a transformation during which we integrate different archetypes into our psyche. We are qualitatively different on the other side of that transformation in the same way that a butterfly is qualitatively different from a caterpillar.

The notion of individuation was rejected from within the Jungian paradigm by James Hillman who founded a branch of psychology called Archetypal Psychology. Hillman would not have recognised the Orphan and Elder as valid archetypes. Rather, he posited the more abstract concepts of puer and senex, or the new and the old which he believed can manifest at any time and at any age.

Other Jungians have criticised Hillman on this score. It is noteworthy that Hillman described his psychology as being that of the puer aeturnus or eternal child. This is exactly the archetype we have described as The Innocent in earlier posts. Within our framework, Hillman’s psychology is the fully fleshed out and realised psychology of The Innocent. His focus on imagination, therefore, makes sense as this is one of the main traits of The Innocent. Given that The Innocent has not yet matured into The Orphan, it’s also fitting that Hillman rejected the need for individuation.

As mentioned above, the transformation process is not limited to The Orphan’s journey. It can occur throughout one’s lifetime. One of the distinguishing features of post war western culture is that it shares Hillman’s desire for eternal childhood. The absence of initiation and coming of age ceremonies and the lack of elders are manifestations of this pattern.

The Shadow archetype

A further assumption of our analysis is that not only does individuation exist as a tangible metamorphosis of the psyche, but that if that process does not occur properly the subject will not just carry on as normal but will begin to manifest shadow traits. Star Wars still has probably the most memorable description of this. Thinking metaphorically, Luke Skywalker is being called to individuate. Vader and Palpatine encourage him to “join the dark side”. He has a choice to individuate or manifest the shadow. If he chooses the latter, he will end up like Vader as a permanent shadow personality (although not without a chance at redemption).

This assumption allows us to make specific predictions and diagnoses. An Orphan who fails to individuate and falls back to the shadow form of The Innocent will be in denial, dissociative, oblivious, seeking instant gratification and engaging in childish dependence on the mother figure. We can see this in the recent phenomenon of the 30 year old man who still lives with his parents and spends all day in the basement playing computer games. Similarly, the emergence of The Devouring Mother is the emergence of a shadow form. Both of these are indicative of a failed individuation process.

The Hero’s Journey

The notions of transcendence and transformation are fundamental to The Hero’s Journey which is built in to the structure of narrative fiction. Each archetype has its prototypical hero’s journey. For example, the story of Macbeth is one where a Warrior archetype succumbs to his shadow, leading to death and destruction for himself and his society. As we have outlined in detail in post 2 of this series, the story of The Orphan is the story of transitioning from childhood to adulthood.

Individuation is “heroic” in the sense that it requires courage, bravery and strength. As those are qualities are The Warrior, we find an excessive number of hero’s journey stories that focus on physical confrontation, violence and war. This is especially true in the age of film where the visual medium lends itself to great battle and fighting scenes. The Matrix is really a story about a man coming to embody The Sage archetype, yet it includes gratuitous amounts of violence and much was made of the cool special effects used. Metaphorically, the violence is there to symbolise the difficulty involved in individuation. Nevertheless, it has the effect of misrepresenting the individuation process. A Wizard of Earthsea is a far better representation of what is really involved and the solitary act of reading a book matches better to the solitary path of confronting the soul.

The Hero’s Journey is a journey away from comfort, security and safety and into the unknown. For that reason, it is always a journey away from the metaphorical “mother” who represents the safety and comfort of the status quo. The journey begins with desires that manifest at a lower level of being and ends with an incorporation into a higher level of being. That’s why the Hero’s Journey is the story of transcendence and transformation. Given that the Hero’s Journey appears to be a universal of human culture, this lends weight to the idea that transformation and individuation are universally recognised aspects of human nature.

Conclusion

So, these are the foundational assumptions of this series of posts. We assume that the Orphan is an archetype with positive and shadow attributes. We assume that this archetype can manifest at the individual and societal level. We assume this is the dominant archetype in the modern West (alongside The Devouring Mother) and that it co-exists with all other archetypes which are subdominant or latent. As outlined in post 5, we assume that the boomers failed the archetypal mission of The Orphan which is to transcend into an “adult” archetype and that this failure has led to the West manifesting the shadow properties of both The Child and Mother archetypes in the last several decades.

In the next post, we’ll have a look at that failure in more detail and also address an implied question about the future. Can the West try again to individuate into an “adult” archetype? If so, what archetype might that be? If not, what does that imply for the future when other societies are now rivaling the power of the West and have no incentive to coddle an archetypal child?

All posts in this series:

The Age of The Orphan Part 2: Defining the Archetype

The Age of The Orphan Part 3: A Short Theoretical Introduction

The Age of The Orphan Part 4: Initiation, culture and civilisation

The Age of The Orphan Part 6: The Spirit of the Depths

The Age of The Orphan Part 7: The Metaphysics of Archetypes

The Age of The Orphan Part 8: The Current State of Play

The Age of The Orphan Part 9: How to learn to stop worrying and love The Matrix

The Age of The Orphan Part 10: Work is our religion