While reading this depressing article, it occurred to me that the U.K. and the Continent, in their assault on free speech, might be half-wittingly acquiescing in Islamification and entry into dhimmitude. Why? Because of an excess of empathy unto cultural suicide? Maybe civilizations, like individuals, can get old and tired and just give up.
Bill,
On this, I asked the AI bot Grok the following question this morning: “How might Jungian theory explain the support by elites in the UK of the repression of free speech, with over 12,000 arrests, and the opening of borders to persons from societies with values inimical to those of the West?” You will find its response, heavily edited by me, below. Perhaps it is not a completely satisfactory answer to the question, since it ignores, for instance, the more material motivators of these phenomena, but I think that it captures something essential.
“Carl Jung emphasized that societies, like individuals, have a collective unconscious containing archetypes and complexes that can seize groups when conscious adaptation fails. Elites (political, media, bureaucratic, academic) often act as carriers of the dominant cultural persona while remaining unconscious of deeper forces.
Elites maintain a collective persona—the public mask of enlightened cosmopolitanism. Supporting expansive immigration while tightly policing speech critical of its downstream effects sustains that mask and the associated status within elite institutions. Jung observed that identification with a powerful persona produces inflation: the individual (or group) confuses itself with the archetype, losing humility and reality-testing. Practical questions—compatibility of values, social trust, policing capacity, parallel societies—are dismissed as beneath the elevated moral plane. At the same time, the repressed opposite (attachment to one’s own culture, preference for high-trust homogeneous norms, recognition of civilizational differences) does not disappear; it is projected outward or returns in distorted populist form. Jung saw mass movements and authoritarian turns as symptoms of such failures of individuation at scale. A society that cannot hold its own shadow or acknowledge limits invites compensatory extremes.
The [British] empire’s shadow is not integrated through honest historical reckoning but compensated for via moral inflation: openness to large-scale migration from culturally distant societies becomes a redemptive act, a way to ‘heal’ historical sins. The native culture’s particularity (its historically hard-won free-speech traditions, secularism, individual rights) is devalued as ‘problematic’ or ‘exclusionary.’ This produces a persona of boundless compassion and anti-racism that is brittle. Questioning the scale, selection, or assimilation of inflows from societies whose dominant values clash with Western individualism, free inquiry, or gender equality activates the complex, triggering defensive repression rather than dialogue. The elite identifies with the archetypal ‘Mother’ or universal benefactor, inflating the ego with moral superiority while remaining unconscious of the power dynamics, status signaling, or demographic consequences involved.
Post-imperial elites frequently project the shadow—the repressed, inferior, or denied aspects of the personality— onto the native population or critics of high immigration and speech restrictions: the ‘racist,’ ‘xenophobe,’ or ‘far-right’ becomes the repository of unacceptable aggression, tribalism, and intolerance. Meanwhile, cultural practices or attitudes from certain source societies (e.g., those with strong blasphemy norms, gender hierarchies, or limited free expression traditions incompatible with liberal order) are often idealized or minimized. Critics of those incompatibilities are treated as the true threat. This is classic projection: the elite psyche avoids confronting its own potential for coercion or the real conflicts of values by locating evil exclusively in the domestic ‘other.’
Jung described enantiodromia—the tendency of any extreme to produce its opposite. Classical liberalism’s emphasis on free speech, limited government, and individual conscience, pushed to an extreme of value-neutrality and borderlessness without regard for cultural preconditions, can invert into illiberal control. When the collective psyche senses that the open society is being undermined by incompatible inflows or by the inability to name conflicts, the response is not reassertion of the original principles but their suppression in the name of ‘harmony,’ ‘safety,’ or ‘inclusion.’ The same progressive framework that once prized open debate now pathologizes certain speech as harm requiring police intervention. This is not a conscious conspiracy but possession by an unexamined complex: the good of ‘diversity’ becomes so numinous (charged with sacred energy) that threats to it must be expelled. Jung warned that when an idea becomes absolute, the psyche loses the capacity for discrimination and proportionality.”
That’s good! When you say “heavily edited by me,” I take you to mean that you added, subtracted, and corrected, using your expert knowledge of Jung. The AI engine can’t complain: you are just giving it a taste of its own medicine. Of course, it doesn’t think or act, it merely simulates, mimics, thinking and acting. But it can fool a stupid person brought up and ‘educated’ by leftist knuckleheads. And of course the bot cannot accept criticism, it can only ‘accept criticism’ by swiping what you have written above and then ‘responding’ to it.
The points made, however, are good and convincing. The Brits and the Euros — by the way, I don’t consider the British Isles part of Europe, do you? — won’t let slip the mask of “enlightened cosmopolitanism,” which is an accurate appellation. More later. It’s 4:30 and time to suit up for my bike ride. Tempus fugit in excelsis for the old man.
Bill,
I too think of the British Isles as distinct from Europe. When and why it diverged from the nations of the continent, these already quite distinct from each other in terms of history and colure, to such an extent that we think of it as something other than “European” is, of course, of great interest to historians.
Vito,
The British Isles and the European continent are of course geographically distinct. I would also say that we shouldn’t use ‘European’ in a political-cultural-economic sense to to refer to a native citizen of any of the countries among the British Isles.
Nill,
One final point.
The Jungian approach allows one to account for the force/severity of the affect. Given that we are dealing with projected shadow contents, the recipient of the projection becomes the living embodiment of the renounced contents, whether personal or those of the culture, which, now unconscious, no longer retain their original, balanced form, but rather through the energy of repression and the autonomy of the complex become exaggerated, intensified, and distorted. In this way normal human tendencies, such as the attachment to one’s own culture; the realistic affirmation of ethnic group differences in values, norms, and behaviors; a partiality for slower demographic change; or an appreciation for the nation’s historical achievements, are rejected/repressed and inflated into the shadow figure as xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, hatred, and the like. The resultant projected figure or physic image–personal or collective—attaches itself to the characteristic, belief, behavior, and so on of a person or a group that resonates, however partially or incompletely, with the rejected contents. The unconscious grabs onto this “hook” and intensifies and distorts it with the full emotional charge of the shadow complex. And the actual existence of the “hook,” the embodiment of the repressed material, makes the projection feel completely justified.
Vito,
Since you have long been *en rapport* with the Jungian jargon, this makes more sense to you than to the rest of us. It would be good if you could sum it all up in simpler terms, using shorter sentences.
But I think I catch the drift of your Jungian analysis. The post-imperial elites in Britain and elsewhere fail to consciously integrate the Shadow. The Shadow comprises those traits that an individual or a group tends to reject, ignore, deny, suppress. These traits are those that run counter to their enlightened cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan, for example, ‘welcomes the stranger.’ That welcoming attitude is of course good. But he suppresses his shadow awareness that this welcoming has limits and that some foreigners are toxic and unassimilable. Suppressing this awareness, not wanting face it and integrate it, he projects it outward and downward into the nasty nativists, racists, xenophobes, those our dear Hillary called “deplorables.” The suppressed psychic contents then become personified in the ‘deplorables.’ The raging inner conflict of the cosmopolitan is then taken out on the fish-and-chips low class Brit. This accounts for the ferocity of the projected affect.
But you and I are highly educated cosmopolitans with doctorates who have lived abroad for extended periods, know foreign languages and cultures, etc. What allows us to avoid the errors of the ones we are criticizing? Is it our propinquity to the lower orders of society? The fact that we are first-generation intellectuals?
Bill,
I wrote the little paragraph below before I read you reply, but I think that it relates to the question that you are asking on our “avoiding the errors of the ones we are criticizing,” in that it stresses the importance of a strong ego if one is have a chance of remaining true to the central core of oneself. I know that I tended from an early age to make my own way, rejecting the accepted path that my family, my religion, and, later, the profession that I trained for set out for me. I was determined to makes sense of the world for myself, making many mistakes in the process.
I would add to this the fact that we benefited from attending the university when thought and speech were not regulated. I had many professors with whom I ideologically disagreed, but since they were liberals in the old, decent sense of the term, they saw my worth and encouraged me, one actually going on to be my thesis advisor and improving a Marxist inspired dissertation on the dominant mode of production of early modern Tuscany.
And I also think that your mention of one’s “propinquity to the lower orders of society” is also important. Although of the commercial middle class, I grew up in an extended family of many cousins, most of whom were working class, and my mother was the daughter of skilled workers, her father a machinist and her mother a seamstress. All my friends were working class Jews, from whom I learned the values of books and of ideas. If you grow up in this kind of socially rich environment, I believe that you are more likely to live with contrasts and contradictions in thought and be more respectful of material reality.
Here is the little paragraph on the ego/persona/shadow that I was about to send:
The insistence on ideological conformity, both in thought and speech, that we find among the Left of this country, one inculcated in our academic institutions, endlessly promoted by the media, and enforced in so many professions, is certainly a primary cause of the rise of this shadow complex among so many of its adherents. Many of these people lack the ego strength to hold and affirm their own perceptions of reality, to live with ambiguity, and abide with conflicting notions, and, as a result, their psyches overstress the persona, the social mask, of the convinced progressive with all the right ideas, commitments, and behaviors. Such a rigid persona provides the sense of self that a weak ego cannot offer and ensures group approval. But the price paid for it is the repression of all those aspects of the self deemed as negative or unacceptable, which leads to the formation of a powerful shadow. Rigid personae marked by such conformity is found in both sexes, but it appears that young, college educated, progressive woman are the group most afflicted by it.
P.S. As usual, since you are a better writer, you express in your reply the core of my argument better than me.
Vito,
Your little paragraph is an excellent statement with which I agree. It deserves discussion in a separate post. The EGO is a topic of great psych and phil interest from many different angles.
Thanks Bill.
This subject fascinates me, so allow me one more observation.
Consider for a moment the fact that the personae of so many progressive women are structured around solidarity with designated marginalized groups, such as biological men suffering from gender dysphoria who identify as females and demand the right to participate in women’s sports and share women’s private spaces. In this case, a persons with egos of some strength are able simultaneously to hold onto (1) the observable fact that human sexual dimorphism results in marked disparities in strength, speed, and endurance between the sexes and (2) that opposing discrimination against marginalized groups is a worthy public policy position. Thus, a healthy ego rejects any resolution of this tension by simply effacing the rights of women in sports or private spaces. For progressive women, however, once the status of marginalized groups is elevated inside their personae to a sanctified status then any acknowledgement of sexual differences, however empirically evident, appears as a betrayal; such perceptions are thus repressed or relativized (“sex is a spectrum,” etc.). These repressed perceptions pile up in the shadow, where they are intensified and distorted, and are projected onto critics, who are viciously attacked, their arguments denounced as “hate,” rather than countered rationally, as in the case of J.K. Rowling and so many other advocates of women’s rights. This all ends up in enantiodromia, the abandonment of earlier, hard fought for, feminist goals.
“”O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed” (G. M. Hopkins, “No Worst, There is None”).