I wanted to throw in a quick post about Biden’s speech this week which represents a new phase in the evolution of the corona event. It came at the same time as this deeply weird article in the Australian media. In the article, the scientist who designed the Astra Zeneca vaccine admitted what has been obvious from the start which is that the vaccines do not stop you getting the virus. Thus, both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated can expect to be infected. She stated that the goal of eliminating the virus is over. This should have been good news because if somebody with a high profile is finally telling the truth, then maybe we can start to deal with this issue properly. Did the article point that out? Did it say that the only way forward is to assume that everybody will catch the virus and devise a strategy based on that fact? Of course not. It promptly went on to tell the reader that the unvaccinated needed to be “shunned”. This is both a non sequitur and a logical contradiction of what the expert had just said. If everybody will test positive anyway, your vaccination status is completely irrelevant. This new rhetoric against the unvaccinated marks a dark turn in the corona event and Biden’s speech, which announced new measures against the unvaccinated, was indicative of the new phase we are entering.
Readers of the posts in my Coronapocalypse series may have recognised the language Biden used. There were a couple of key quotes that mark the change in rhetoric that has occurred in the last month or so starting with the Israeli Prime Minister (Israel is the canary in the corona coal mine) and then eagerly picked up by Trudeau in Canada as well as the state premiers here in Australia. It was always going to be a very small change to take the language used about the virus and start to apply it to the unvaccinated. That is what we are now seeing. Let’s look at the key phrase from Biden’s speech:
“We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.”
The vaccines, of course, are supposed to protect people from the virus and our leaders assure us that they do in fact protect people. Biden himself was at pains to point out how well the vaccines worked. According to this logic, the vaccinated are already protected against the virus. So, why would the vaccinated need further “protection” from the unvaccinated? This makes no logical sense just as the article in the Australian media made no logical sense. Of course, as we know by now, we are not dealing with logic here but with the archetypal takeover of the rational mind; specifically, The Devouring Mother. Biden’s phrase is the exact catchcry of The Devouring Mother who hides her intentions behind the pretence of protecting her children. Until now, the children have needed protection from a virus. Now they apparently need protection from the other children. Again, this makes sense within the archetype. The vaccinated are the acquiescent children and the unvaccinated are the rebellious children. So, the whole thing maps on to the archetype perfectly. The Devouring Mother is rewarding the acquiescent children and punishing the rebellious. What we are seeing with this new change of rhetoric and the new measures against the unvaccinated is the full and unvarnished manifestation of the archetype unencumbered by any last vestiges of science, logic or reason. I can’t make any sense of Biden or Trudeau or others except in archetypal terms. These people are supposed to be the leaders of their countries and leaders do not divide the public. What is going on now is punishment, pure and simple. Another quote from Biden’s speech makes this clear:
“We have been patient but our patience is wearing thin”.
Is this how a president, a public servant, a leader talks to the public? No. But it is how a parent talks. It is how The Devouring Mother talks. The rebellious children need to be punished. That is the explanation for these measures which not only don’t make scientific sense, they don’t even make political sense. Let’s take the current situation in Australia. Apparently each state government is going to individually implement its own vaccine passport. They will do this even though the federal government controls the data on vaccination status and has said it will not make that data available to the states as this would be a violation of the law. The solution? Each state will need to create its own system to track vaccination status. They will make people download an app and then upload their vaccination paperwork to the app. All this will need to tie in with the QR code system. Bear in mind that Australian government IT is famously incompetent and the states have about a month or two to get these systems up and running so the promised freedoms can be delivered to the vaccinated. Even if they miraculously get the systems to work, the whole thing is a disaster in the making. Twenty percent of the population will not be vaccinated and I’d estimate at least another 10% will not use these apps either because they can’t (elderly people who aren’t tech savvy) or out of moral principles. How many restaurants, cafes, pubs etc are going to be financially viable with a 30% reduction in revenue? Not many. Then consider that you’d need multiple apps to use if you travel interstate. The whole thing is a logistical and political debacle waiting to happen and a total waste of money. Our Devouring Mother-in-chief here in Victoria, Dan Andrews, called this a “vaccine economy”. If ever there was economy designed to fail, it is that. What that should mean by extension is political failure. I’ll be watching the upcoming Canadian election with great interest as this is the first time a western public will be able to vote on such measures. We have an Australian federal election due next year just in time for the failure of the vaccine program and the vaccine passport program to become a reality. That’s going to open up all kinds of possibilities.
I noted in a previous post that things were about to get weirder and now they have. We are now, I think, in the peak of the archetypal takeover. The Devouring Mother is out to discipline her rebellious children. Will it be a slap on the wrist or something far darker. We’re about to find out.
After I graduated from university, I did the Aussie-backpacker-in-the-UK thing. My first stop was London where I arrived with what, in hindsight, was far too little money. I didn’t have any contacts there and London was much more expensive than I imagined. Had things not gone well, I may have been flying home with my tail between my legs in short order. Fortunately, I managed to pick up a job almost immediately working as an administrative assistant in a small law firm. The principal was an Australian expat who was also from Melbourne originally, which no doubt helped my chances in landing the job. The offices of the firm were in Gray’s Inn, which is one of the four Inns of Court in London and which is over six hundred years old, three times older than the country I had just arrived from. Because of the location of the Inn, I would often go on foot to carry out various tasks such as lodging paperwork at the Australian Embassy down on The Strand. It was almost the perfect job for a young man wanting to experience the sights and sounds of London.
The work itself was mundane but what was really interesting were the people you got to meet and the aspects of human psychology that were revealed by the various cases we dealt with. I was amazed by how much money people would waste on matters which clearly had no merit. We had people coming to us with cases they were never going to win often because they were the ones in the wrong. As a lawyer there is a code of ethics you must abide by in such matters so that you don’t take money for cases that have no basis in law. But in practice there is a huge grey area and there is almost always some glimmer of merit in a case; some thing where the other person was to blame. In fact, that’s true of almost all cases. Both parties are at fault but both parties think they are wholly in the right.
I was reminded of my time at Gray’s Inn recently when an acquaintance spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees. It was obvious from her story that she was just as much at fault as the other person. But she thought she had been wronged and it was that grievance which led her to take legal action thinking that justice would be done. I did my best to talk her out of it explaining that the only people who win in such cases were the lawyers and that she would be far better off negotiating an end to the matter with the other person directly. But she had to learn the hard way. When it was all over, she complained of all the money she had spent even though she didn’t get “justice”. Actually, from an objective third party point of view, she did get justice as she was also to blame for what amounted to nothing more than a communication problem. As Robert Plant once sang: “Communication breakdown/It’s always the same/Having a nervous breakdown/Drive me insane.” Lawyers earn an awful lot of money because of such communication breakdowns.
One of Australia’s most famous lawyers, Geoffrey Roberston, once noted that the justice system does not guarantee justice, it only provides the possibility of justice. He needed to point that out because the average person seems to think the system does guarantee justice where “justice” means prove they are right and the other party wrong. That’s rarely possible, however, for the simple reason that there are always at least two versions of justice: yours and the other person’s. But the main reason the justice system doesn’t guarantee justice is because it would be enormously expensive to do so. In the real world, systems are set up according to cost-benefit considerations. We don’t optimise, we satisfice. This follows from the 80/20 rule which states that eighty percent of the value comes from twenty percent of the cost. Every extra percent of value after that becomes more and more expensive so that the last one percent costs more than the other ninety nine and the last 0.1% more than the other 99.9% and so on. That’s why murder cases get more resources than fraud and fraud gets more resources than traffic infringements. There are no doubt all kinds of crimes that occur every day that never get addressed because the system doesn’t have the resources to attend to them. Ideally the major crimes do get dealt with but even then there is still only the chance of justice not a guarantee.
It’s a strange fact of our culture that so few people understand this. People seem to think systems are these flawless machines that deliver a fixed result every time where the result just happens to be what they want. They think that if somebody does you wrong, the justice system will make it right. They think that if you get sick, the medical system will bring you back to perfect health. Actually, the justice system and the medical system are there as a safety net when things go wrong. The best thing you can do is avoid them. If you never have to see a lawyer or a doctor in your life you can consider yourself very fortunate. And you should try and make it so you do avoid lawyers and doctors. You can avoid the justice system, especially in business dealings, by making all expectations clear upfront and signing agreements and contracts that stipulate clearly what people are agreeing to. It’s far cheaper to get the lawyers involved at the start than at the end. Same with the medical system. Keep your health in order, eat well, exercise, practice basic hygiene and you will avoid the medical system as much as possible. That’s the best strategy. But many people seem to think that they must go to the doctor in order to be healthy even for things which are obvious lifestyle problems like high blood pressure.
No doubt there are many factors that have led us to this strange position but one that I think is a big part of the issue is that people apply the consumer mindset to such systems. The consumer economy works by providing an item that does a fixed thing for a fixed price. You buy a toaster for $30 and it cooks your toast. You buy a microwave for $150 dollars and it warms your food. Simple, linear and reliable. Of course, the consumer economy itself relies on an enormously complex system of mining, manufacturing, transport and electricity generation but all that is hidden from the consumer. With the rise of consumer society, people have learned to think in a linear, simplistic fashion. They then apply that model to domains where it doesn’t belong. They think that they can just pay a lawyer to get “justice” or a doctor to get “health”. But the legal system and the medical system are not the consumer economy. They are irreducibly systems and in systems there are no guarantees, only probabilities. They should be used as a last resort but that’s not the way that people think about them these days. Thus, the medical system and to a lesser extent the legal system have come to be seen through the consumer mindset.
When the system doesn’t deliver the desired outcome, some people blame the practitioner. Lawyers already have a low reputation for this reason but it wasn’t long ago that doctors did too. We used to call them “quacks”. My grandmother always used to say “we better get you to the quack”. Doctors and lawyers were seen as necessary evils. They didn’t guarantee you an outcome but they did guarantee that you had to pay them. Fancy offices at Gray’s Inn don’t pay for themselves after all. On current trajectory, I wouldn’t be surprised if we again start referring to doctors as quacks in the near future. That won’t be a bad thing. It will be a recognition that systems don’t guarantee outcomes, that self-responsibility is the best bet and, to use another favourite phrase of my grandmother, “life was never meant to be fair” (where “fair” means almost exactly what my acquaintance meant by “justice”).
In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher takes a very hard line against the arts in general and the poets in particular, even going so far as stating that Homer should be banned by the philosopher kings ruling over the ideal state. Plato’s main objection to poets was that they are just imitators and imitation is devoid of knowledge. More specifically, the arts engage the emotions and not the higher rational faculties. They throw the Platonic psyche out of balance at the individual and the societal level. Were he to be transported to 2021, Plato would be horrified by the sheer volume of “poetry” we consume via television and the internet in modern society. Even if all our storytellers were as good as Homer and accurately imitated life in their art, we would be out of balance in Plato’s eyes by constantly stimulating our emotional and imaginative faculties without subsequent stimulation of the reasoning faculties. As it turns out, our society provides quite a lot of evidence to suggest that Plato was right. Our public discourse runs very much on emotions and very little on reason these days and it’s entirely possible that this tendency is in direct proportion to our proclivity to watch movies and tv shows rather than engage the rational faculties. It doesn’t help that the propaganda machine formerly known as the news media also indulges in the blatant fabrication of reality. If imitation was bad enough in Plato’s eyes, what would he make of the fabrication and distortion that is now business as usual?
As somebody who enjoys both writing and reading stories, I would disagree with Plato’s objections to the artform primarily on grounds that stories and art in general are a bridge to the unconscious mind and the unconscious mind can reveal truth. Of course, the unconscious mind does not exist in Platonic psychology. His psyche has reason, spirit and emotion and in The Republic he extrapolates this structure at the individual level to society at large. Thus, the philosopher kings represent reason and should rule. The armed forces represent spirit and should be subordinate to reason. The rest of society represents emotion and this should be subordinate to both spirit and reason. If we were to introduce the unconscious, and in particular the collective unconscious, into the psychic equation and give it a prominence of equal weight to reason, then the poets, storytellers, priests and others who were concerned with it would have a great responsibility to ensure that the symbolic representations of their craft were faithful to whatever truths were to be had through the unconscious. As a storyteller, I believe that to be true. It’s the duty of storytellers to make sure a story is accurate and this goes for the plot, the psychological and biographical accuracy of the characters and even the symbolic meanings of the story. When all these are taken care of, the story resonates at multiple levels at once in much the same way that harmony functions in music.
It’s for this same reason that I tend to be very critical of stories and movies where the author or screenwriter gets it wrong. Let me give one example that’s always annoyed me from the movie Gladiator. Those who have seen it will remember the scene where Maximus is arrested and taken by a troop of praetorian guards to be killed in the forest. He manages to break free and kill the first few guards. There are a couple of others who are on watch at a distance and don’t know what has happened. He kills the first by throwing a sword from behind, a very low risk technique. Then he kills another. There’s one guard left; one man standing between Maximus and freedom. This guard has managed to remain blissfully unaware of everything that has happened. His attention is off in the distance. Maximus is standing behind him with sword in hand. We’ve already seen Maximus kill one guard by throwing a sword from behind. He could easily do the same with this one. Alternatively, he could get the horse of one of the other guards and ride away without even bothering to kill the man. Both are zero risk options which get him what he wants. Instead, he challenges the guard to a duel where he is at a significant disadvantage by not being on a horse. He kills the guard buts gets injured in the process and the rest of the movie unfolds from there. This scene makes sense as a plot device. It gets the story where it needs to go. But it doesn’t make sense in terms of characterisation. Are we really to believe that Maximus, Rome’s greatest general, who has just shown great discipline and fortitude leading his troops into battle, is going to take a completely unnecessary risk that leaves him at a significant disadvantage in a fight? I don’t think so. He would have thrown the sword, killed the last praetorian guard and ridden away on his horse. Nevertheless, the error is minor and I’m sure most people watching the film didn’t even pick up on it. Gladiator is an action movie, after all. People are not watching it for an in-depth psychological analysis. Sometimes, however, errors like this are revealing about the culture. I find science fiction to be a rich source of such errors which are interesting to the extent that they reveal something about our culture’s understanding of science.
Robert Heinlein defined science fiction as “realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.” In other words, science fiction should be accurate in its depiction of science in the same way that a story’s plot should be accurate in relation to its characters. In Plato’s language, it should imitate reality. We’ve all had the impression while watching a movie or reading a book that the character “would never do that”. In that case, the storyteller has failed to marry the plot and the characterisation. In the same way, we might have the impression while watching a science fiction move that “science doesn’t work like that” or “that could never happen [because it breaks the laws of physics]”. An example of this is The Matrix. In the movie, we are told that humans are being farmed for energy because the sky was blacked out and the sun blocked. This makes no sense from a thermodynamics point of view. Even assuming you could keep humans alive in such a world, how are you going to feed them? What sort of plants are growing when there is no sunlight to photosynthesise? And how much energy does The Matrix itself use up just keeping the humans distracted? If you were a smart AI, you’d be better off capturing whatever energy is still coming from the sun directly rather than running it through human beings. That would be more energy efficient and, let’s face it, humans are a pain. They have a nasty habit of not doing what they’re told, even when they’re stuck in little pods in the sky. Better off to get rid of them and do whatever it is that AIs like to do with their time. So, this plot device doesn’t work within scientific theory. Another common problem in science fiction is the portrayal of scientists in movies.
Let’s take just one example that bugged me so much I stopped watching the movie: the film Sunshine released in 2007. The story is set in the year 2057. The sun is dying and the earth is getting too cold to live on. Humans come up with a plan to nuclear bomb the sun back to life. They have already sent one spaceship to do the job but communication with it was lost. They send a second ship and that is where the movie begins. While en route to the sun, the second ship establishes communication with the first. They have a choice to carry out the mission as planned or deviate and unite with the first ship. They decide to try the latter. The ship has a supercomputer on board which handles the calculations but, for reasons not explained in the story, they have the ship’s mathematician override it and do the calculations himself. The story makes a big fuss about how difficult the calculations are and how much pressure the mathematician is under to get the done before it’s too late. He makes a mistake and the story goes from there. What is the error here? The error is that you would never let a human calculate by hand when you have a computer there to do the job instead. One things computers undoubtedly do better than humans is calculation especially when there is a time constraint and high pressure situation. Within the plot of Sunshine, it is no surprise that the mathematician made the error. The problem is that nobody on the ship should have allowed it to happen. This is supposed to be a team of scientists and smart people. They should have known better.
So, this is an error just like the one above in Gladiator. Something happens in the story that would not happen in real life. But I think this error reveals something about our cultural understanding of science. We have the stereotype of the genius scientist or mathematician and we think the genius lies in calculation. This ties in with the whole issue of IQ testing where it is assumed that ability to manipulate symbols quickly and accurately is the sine qua non of intelligence. Ask the average person why Einstein or Newton were so smart and chances are they will say they were better at maths than others where “better at maths” means able to calculate things that other people were not. That’s kind of true except the real difference lies not in the calculation ability but the ability to re-define a problem so that it can be calculated or invent new techniques that enable calculation. It does not lie in the ability to do the calculations but that’s what the mathematician in Sunshine was doing; pretending to be a computer. That’s the first problem.
The second problem with the stereotype in Sunshine is the idea of the solitary genius. The ship has just one mathematician aboard and he has to work alone to solve the calculations. In reality, the whole point of science is that others are there to help check your work. You have to explain your methodology and your results and let others reproduce them. The Apollo space program had an estimated four hundred thousand engineers and technicians working on it and a huge part of that effort was in checking and re-checking each other’s work to find mistakes. Even Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants. But in our culture, we have the idea of the solitary scientific hero. The solitary hero was already common in western culture and specifically US culture prior to science fiction. This is the lone rider motif. What we have done with much of science fiction is map that motif onto science where it does not belong.
Most scientific breakthroughs are based not on calculations by super high IQ individuals but by one of two primary methods: 1) an imaginative/intuitive re-definition of a problem or theoretical framework; 2) a stochastic process (read: blind luck) that leads to a re-definition of a problem or theoretical framework. These are not mutually exclusive and in fact one almost certainly leads to the other by opening up new areas of exploration which then force a re-defining of theoretical frameworks. In real life stories of science, we find both of these elements. Let’s take a couple of examples that are very topical right now as they relate to vaccines.
Louis Pasteur is credited with the invention of the attenuated vaccine. At that time, trying to prevent mass death by viral disease among livestock herds was the main driver for vaccine research. Pasteur had been working away for years on the problem and making no headway. On the last day before the traditional August summer holiday in France, one of Pasteur’s lab assistants was supposed to do the processing on the latest batch of trial vaccines but forgot. When he returned from holiday he realised his omission but, rather than own up to it, simply injected the chickens with the batch he had left untreated expecting them to die like all the other lab animals previously. But they didn’t die. They got better. For the first time, the test seemed to work. The lab assistant told Pasteur what had happened, they investigated and did more tests and eventually came to the attenuated vaccine. That kind of luck is common throughout the history of real science but is absent in our science fiction. Note that Pasteur is credited with the invention of the vaccine when, in reality, you could argue that it was his lab assistant who was at least partly responsible.
Teamwork is also not emphasised in our cultural depictions of science though it is crucial to real life science. Take the story of the invention of the mRNA vaccine as told by Robert Malone. It features a little bit of a luck and also teamwork as it was one of the scientists on the team who insisted on doing a negative control test when everybody else was thinking of other things that helped the evolution of the process along. Malone is very happy to point those facts out as any real scientist would. That is how science works in real life. As Woody Allen said, showing up is 80% of success. Show up each day and do the work and “luck” falls into your lap. That’s how vaccines came into being: luck and teamwork. Of course, that doesn’t make for a dramatic movie or a good story. Neither does the other process by which scientific breakthroughs are made. These are the Eureka moments where a scientist has a sudden intuition that reveals the solution to a problem. One minute you’re taking a bath and the next moment you have the answer. That doesn’t make for good film either. Almost by definition, storytellers must fabricate the truth in relation to science in order to make it fit into the structure of good fiction.
I could go on with my list of gripes about science fiction. One day I might do a whole post about the movie Interstellar which actually made me angry to watch. It takes some of the tropes I have mentioned here and added others which reveal something about modern culture that is directly relevant to current events. In any case, the problem is that such art is not even a good imitation of reality. To return to Plato, our poets do not even imitate. They fabricate and distort. In doing so, they are creating and re-creating the underlying mythology of the culture but what we now know is that the mythology, through the collective unconscious, has a real effect in the world especially in a society which consumes such a huge amount of myth and fiction relative to reality. It’s tempting to agree with Plato that banning it all would be the best idea. Imagine the current world if somebody flicked a switch and there was no more television, cinema or Netflix. It’s hard to see that as being anything other than a godsend right now. How many of the current social neuroses are fed through that apparatus and would promptly disappear if the apparatus went away? Maybe Plato was onto something.
I published my first post on corona way back on 25th July 2020. At that time, I had topics for about the first four posts and, although I never expected to write thirty-seven posts, I figured I should come up with a catchy name. Just for fun, I’d been mucking around with inventing some corona neologisms and had created a pretty long list. It turns out corona works very nicely as a prefix. Some examples: coronamusement, coronatentment, coronaphoria, coronannoyance, coronasentment, coronaversion, coronavulsion, coronaffender, coronaformer, coronapentance, coronappointment, coronanimity and, of course, coronapocalypse. A year and a bit later, I now consider my choice of title to be another synchronicity because what we are witnessing now is, if I’m correct, the end of not just one but several historical cycles including perhaps the biblical meaning of apocalypse as the end of the Christian era. In order of time and importance, these cycles are: the neoliberal period of the last thirty years, the US/British empire and the global dominance of European civilisation of the last couple of hundred years, the era of materialist science which drove that empire and, taking the theme from Jung’s Aion, the end of the period of the Antichrist which was itself the second half of the Christian era captured astrologically in the Age of Pisces giving way to the Age of Aquarius. Here’s a graphical representation.
In my first book on corona – The Plague Story – I was primarily concerned with the materialist science part of the story. My main guides were the works of Gregory Bateson, James C. Scott, Gerald Weinberg and others who had written some of the major critiques of materialist science in the 20th century especially in relation to its manifestation in bureaucratic-authoritarian governance structures. I argued that corona was exactly the error caused by what Scott called High Modernist Ideology which, in a nutshell, is the notion that science was the solution to all our problems and all we have to do is put experts in charge of everything and a shiny, high-tech utopia will inevitably follow. This ideology was very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was common to many political theories including Marxism. It was in the name of Marxism that the idea was pushed to its ultimate conclusion in both the USSR and Maoist China. The result was the deaths of tens of millions of people mostly from starvation. That should have been enough real world evidence about the matter but the 20th century also saw the ideology implode from within science itself most notably quantum mechanics. That’s why Shroedinger, Niels Bohr and others ended writing a lot on philosophy because they had seen materialism’s failure in practical, scientific terms. Corona represents the first time the high modernist ideology has been applied on a mass scale in the West. Scott’s work showed in grim detail where the interaction of that ideology enforced through rigid bureaucracy leads and we are now experiencing it directly in our daily lives. That explanation made sense to me but I had the intuition I was missing something. I had tried to find it in the chapters of The Plague Story which dealt with the denial of death, the declining economic conditions implied by corona and a few other bits and pieces. After finishing the The Plague Story, I continued to write the other posts in this series until finally I arrived at Jung and the pieces fell into place which led to the notion of The Devouring Mother as the archetype that had taken over during corona. I realised that what was missing from the High Modernist Ideology expalanation was the psychological background which Jung had already described in detail and with great clarity.
The psychological requirement for an individual or society to fall into the high modernist trap is the dissociation of the conscious mind from the unconscious. This happens in a number of ways. The breaking from tradition, often involving the break up of the family structure. The rejection of religion as the primary mode of symbolising the contents of the unconscious and bridging the gap to the conscious mind. The debasement of art as another bridge to the unconscious. The replacement of all these with state-sponsored education which, in the high modernist period, means a “scientific” education (although very little real science is conveyed in our modern education system). The encouragement of rational thinking without the counterbalancing input from the unconscious leads to psychic dissociation. When combined with the bureaucratic structure where the decision maker’s decisions are based entirely on abstractions with no connection to the real world, the results are disastrous. We don’t normally notice the problem because such dynamics are normally only mild inconveniences such as when you need to get your driver’s licence renewed or get some piece of paperwork from the government. When applied to important matters like the growing of food or the management of a pandemic, the results are exactly what we saw during the 20th century and are seeing now. Within the Jungian perspective, it is no coincidence that both the USSR and Maoist China waged war on religion, that they censored art, that they featured the uprooting of populations and the attack on traditional values to be replaced with state-mandated education. It was those measures which created the psychological conditions that enabled the high modernist ideology to flourish. A very similar thing happened in the years prior to Nazi Germany: the defeat of WW1, the humiliation at Versailles and then the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic. All these had the impact of destroying traditional values and upending the natural relationships in society leaving Germany ripe for archetypal takeover. The High Modernist Ideology is the symptom. The underlying problem is psychological. Destroy art, religion and tradition and replace it with scientific materialism and you leave yourself open to psychic epidemics.
Thus, it is no coincidence that our archetypal takeover by The Devouring Mother during corona was preceded by thirty years of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, along with the information revolution (the internet, social media etc) have psychologically done to us what was done in Weimar Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. To my mind, the most eloquent critic of the neoliberal agenda was Sir James Goldsmith. The interested reader can check out this video filmed in 1992. Fittingly, it was Goldsmith’s Schumacher Lecture named after another of the 20th century’s great critics of materialism, E.F. Schumacher. Among other things, Goldsmith warns in the video about the dangers of mucking around with the genetic engineering of viruses. It doesn’t get much more prescient than that given what we now know about the lab in Wuhan. But it’s Goldsmith’s warnings about the social and psychological effects of neoliberalism that I think are even more important in the corona story because they mirror the warnings that Jung had already made. With neoliberalism, we kicked those psychological processes into overdrive: the deification of (materialist) science as a secular religion transmitted through the education system, de-socialisation caused by the uprootedness of the population, broken families representing a break from tradition (note: this is why The Orphan archetype has been dominant during corona), the increasing dissociation of people from “nature” as they leave the land and take to the cities. Every one of Goldsmith’s warnings now rings true. They have come true right before our very eyes and we can trace them directly back to their cause: neoliberalism. The only thing that Goldsmith missed, and he couldn’t have known in 1992, was the advent of the internet. The information revolution has heightened all the processes that were already at play. We are drowning in information these days but we have completely lost the ability to make sense of it. The internet presents us with a sea of abstract information without the corresponding wisdom to understand it. Thus, the voices of the real experts have been there from the start of corona but they were drowned out by the noise. Governments have stepped in to try and fill the void, to be the wise voice of reason (actually, more the stern voice of authoritarianism) but that has just given rise to the high modernist intervention. That’s all modern governments working through their bureaucracy are capable of.
The neoliberal movement is, of course, run by the same kinds of people who have always thought government and the “experts” should run things. The comparisons to communism are valid in that respect. The pattern is the same. Traditional society, what Goldsmith calls the “real nation”, is to be corrected, put in order and, if necessary, overturned so that society can be restructured according to rational principles and materialist science. But this is just another way to frame the psychic disconnect that Jung had identified. It’s the separation of the conscious mind from the unconscious. The rational mind wants to take over but it gets lost in a field of abstractions that bear no relation to reality. Goldsmith identified GDP as one abstraction. Nobody cares about GDP anymore. What we care about are corona “cases”. It’s the same error at work. Meaningless abstractions manipulated by bureaucrats with no tacit understanding of what is going on. It’s part of every real scientist’s training to know very precisely what is and is not being measured by abstractions such as “cases”, but government bureaucrats are not required to know. That’s the high modernist ideology at work. But the ideology is just the symptom. The underlying issue is psychological and it was this which Jung had already identified. Let’s take a few choice quotes from him:-
“Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism.”
“Hence the ever-widening split between conscious and unconscious increases the danger of psychic infection and mass psychosis. With the loss of symbolic ideas the bridge to the unconscious has broken down. Instinct no longer affords protection against unsound ideas and empty slogans. Rationality without tradition and without a basis in instinct is proof against no absurdity.”
“But a predominantly scientific and technological education, such as is the usual thing nowadays, can also bring about a spiritual regression and a considerable increase of psychic dissociation. With hygiene and prosperity alone a man is still far from health, otherwise the most enlightened and most comfortably off among us would be the healthiest. But in regard to neuroses that is not the case at all, quite the contrary. Loss of roots and tradition neuroticise the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorisation. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.”
That is, of course, where we are now in western societies: a lunatic asylum.
Get rid of religion, get rid of sacred symbolism, get rid of stories, get rid of history, break up family ties and community and replace it all with “rationalist education” and the results seem to be the same every time. You get the decoupling of rationality from the unconscious. In the modern world with materialist science, you get the high modernist ideology. It’s because the underlying psychology is the same that the high modernist ideology can occur in cultures as diverse as Russia, China and the West. The psychological structure of man is the same everywhere in the world. Corona is the first time a high modernist intervention has been tried in the West but its arrival signifies the deeper psychological problems wrought be neoliberalism and the information revolution.
That is the psychological and ideological-political background to corona but the corona story, The Plague Story, is falling apart as we speak. The vaccines are not going to “work”. All the elements that make up modern western culture are involved in that failure: neoliberalism, the British-US empire, bureaucracy, the healthcare system, materialist science. What’s more, the failure is going to involve every single citizen in western nations. We have all been pulled in to this business, some willingly and some unwillingly. That failure would have been significant enough by itself, but it comes at a time of the rapid deterioration of the US empire and the global dominance of western European culture that has been in place for a couple of centuries. The neoliberal program was the last hurrah of that empire. It created the conditions for the rise of China and the forming of the Eurasian block as the counterbalance to western power. It is also created the conditions for Trump and Brexit causing a split within our socities. It is yet another synchronicity that the virus came from China during the presidency of Trump and that it was funded by neoliberal money. Some have suspected foul play; that the virus was a conspiracy either by China or by the neoliberal enemies of Trump. Those explanations posit the “cause” in the ego (conscious mind). With The Devouring Mother, I have tried to explain it by recourse to the unconscious mind and in the larger forces that are at play beyond the realm of human consciousness. In any case, neoliberalism had already hollowed out western societies from the inside and led to the rise of Trump and Brexit. At some point in the near future, I expect something will happen that will make clear exactly where the balance of power lies. We will see plainly that the US is no longer the sole superpower and perhaps no longer even the main power in the world. The Eurasian block will assert its strength. That is going to be a great shock to westerners and another blow right at the time when we are already psychologically, economically and politically frail. The fallout is going to hit hardest in the US and the countries in the inner circle of the US empire. I expect the fallout may actually hit hardest in Canada, Australia and New Zealand for several reasons. Firstly, unlike the US, we have benefitted, at least nominally, from the neoliberal agenda. As a result, politics in our countries have been stable, boring and monotonous for the last few decades. What that means in practice is that we have no alternative narrative on offer. If our leaders have any clue what is coming they are doing a very good job of hiding it. There is certainly no talk that I have heard about a Plan B. More importantly, our societies were founded by the British empire and our culture is based on materialist bourgeois society. Corona strikes at the heart of our very identity. I am sure this is the reason why the corona response has been so much more hysterical in our countries than elsewhere. What is at stake here is fundamental in a way that is not true even in the United States.
As corona has been conducted in the name of “science”, its failure is going to be a huge blow to the prestige of science. I think the blowback will be big enough to put an end to the age of materialist science (aka the Antichrist). It was this which I addressed in detail in post 11 of this series, giving it the name that Kenneth Clark gave: heroic materialism. Heroic materialism was the application of materialist science to bourgeois society creating the material abundance that we all enjoy. Applied to the natural world, it works wonders for building bridges and flying rockets to the moon. It doesn’t work in the biological world. That was the lesson learned the hard way in the USSR and Maoist China and it is the lesson we are learning the hard way right now. As I have alluded to above, we should already have known this from the lessons from quantum mechanics, cybernetics and systems thinking. But those lessons did not filter through to the broader culture. The broader culture is still running on the heroic materialist idea that science can solve every problem. Corona is going to destroy that illusion. The best case scenario now is that the vaccines will be ineffective. The worst case scenario is that they will be actively harmful. Either way, I don’t see a pathway through this where the whole thing is not an abject failure. That failure has already affected every citizen in western societies. Thus, the magnitude of the matter is enormous and the political and cultural fallout will be equivalent. It may take months or it may take years, but I expect that to happen. In the process, the reputation of institutionalised science will have been dragged through the mud and heroic materialism with it. With any luck, we can use this failure to re-establish the limits of the materialist paradigm so that “science” in general does not disappear entirely.
Finally, we come to the last and longest cycle outlined by Jung in his book Aion. The Age of Pisces is coming to an end and the Age of Aquarius about to begin. These have astrological significance which most people nowadays would not take seriously. What is more crucial is the meaning which Jung gave to this. To summarise an entire book in a few sentences, he believed the Age of Pisces was the age of Christ who was a symbol of the archetype of the Self. The Self represents the psyche consisting of the ego (consciousness), the shadow, the anima/animus and the unconscious. Religion and art are, among other things, a way to connect the conscious mind with the unconscious through symbols and the Christ symbol was the way in which knowledge of the Self was made manifest and brought into a form that consciousness could incorporate. No coincidence then that the fall of religion in the west has been tied to the rise of hubris and egotism. Our unconstrained ego is no longer counterbalanced by the unconscious. This leads to psychic epidemics and corona is the latest of those. The rise of materialist science occurred in the period of the Antichrist which had already been predicted at the beginning of the Christian Era. What was also predicted was the apocalypse, which was the end of the whole cycle. Jung believed we were coming to the end of that cycle right now. The period of Christ was the time when we were invited to understand the Self but the understanding of the self is not a pleasant experience. In Jungian terms, Christ on the cross is a symbol of the pain of individuation i.e. incorporating our shadow and facing our soul. That seems to me to be exactly what is happening right now in the West. The failure of corona is going to be enormously painful mostly because we will realise that it is we who have done this to ourselves. It is happening most acutely here in Australia. We have turned our country into a kind of hell. It is a very bourgeois hell. The pantry is still full of food (for most people) and we can all sit on the couch and share our opinions on facebook (as long as we have the right opinions). This is fitting. Australia was founded on the bourgeois ideal just like New Zealand and Canada. It’s that ideal, backed by the empire which secured it and running on materialist science which created it, which is going away. The end of the Aion of Christ/Pisces is the invitation to face the Self and that is precisely what seems to be coming our way. We think we are fighting a virus but we are really fighting ourselves. The “invisible enemy” is the unconscious mind that the ego has become untethered from. The process of individuation is the re-establishment of our connection to the unconscious and the facing of the Self. That is what is portended by the Age of Aquarius. The Age of Pisces was the formulation of the Self through the figure of Christ. Now we must put that formulation into action. That is how I understand Jung’s meaning in Aion.
Corona represents the last hurrah of the period of the Antichrist/Materialist Science. We are stuck in a hall of mirrors grasping at “scientific” abstractions that no longer work. Our leaders and the “experts” have been wrong at every turn for the last one and a half years. Not just a little bit wrong, but exactly the opposite of correct. That, in itself, is weird. Politicians are experts in not making statements to which they can later be held accountable. That is almost half the job of a politician. Yet our politicians, especially here in Australia, have made statement after statement that instantly and continually turned out to be wrong. If the Prime Minister of Australia came out this morning and said the sky was blue, I would fully expect it to turn green by sundown. That is a fitting end to the age of the Antichrist; the inversion of everything. Democratic societies turned authoritarian, truth turned to lies, authority turned to absurdity. It is this we are going to have to face in the years ahead. How we get there is the only question. We may blame the unvaccinated, we may then blame the “science”, we may finally blame the politicians, but ultimately we will have to face ourselves. That would be a fitting way to start the new Aion. A mass, collective individuation process at the societal level. Of course, the alternative is the one that Jung warned of: an extended period of barbarism of exactly the kind we are seeing now in Western nations. Perhaps that is what is needed to trigger the individuation process.
That is the conclusion I have reached through more than a year of blog posts on this subject and seems a fitting way to end this series. I can see now that The Plague Story was an ego-based, conscious explanation for what had happened during corona while The Devouring Mother is an explanation from the unconscious. This conclusion, therefore, presages a third book which would be a combination of the two perhaps against the backdrop on Jung’s Aion. The thesis would be that corona is the turning point to the new Aion. I’m not sure I’m ready to tackle that project yet and in any case I might be wrong. I suspect the answer will come very shortly. I think the next six months are going to be decisive. Lenin once said that there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. I wonder if the same applies to centuries and even to millennia? We may be about to find out.
Well, the editing process on this took a lot longer than I was expecting but I wanted to take the time to get it right. The book comes in lean and mean at about 120 pages. There were numerous ways to expand it but each time I felt I was either straying too far from the main theme and/or repeating myself. Those who’ve read any Nassim Taleb book know what it’s like to read a book that could have been fifty pages but took up two hundred and fifty. I was keen to avoid that outcome. Anyway, I’m happy that it’s finally through the sausage grinder and out in the real world. For anybody interested in grabbing a copy, it should be available in your favourite online bookstore. Here’s a few suggestions: Booktopia (AUS), Book Depository (UK), Barnes and Noble (US), Kobo, Amazon and more.
