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Finding Yourself in all the Noise of Modern Life

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“Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations” – Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual. That’s something of a motto for Carl Jung, who believes that the “plight of the individual” in modern society is that we just aren’t all that individual anymore.

And no wonder – a society is a pretty big crowd. If you’re in the States, you’re a mere three-hundred-millionths of a whole. That’s an ink blot of a single letter of a single word on a single page in the entirety of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. That’s a slice of pie not even fit for an ant. It’s less than a crumb – it’s a crumb of a crumb.

That’s you. That’s me. That’s paralyzingly negligible us. Blots in oceans of ink. Crumbs of crumbs. Sorry excuses for ant food. And that’s a rough thing to realize.

That’s not to say that we should (or could) avoid crowds. It’s not that Jung wants us to become hermits. He doesn’t suggest that we wall ourselves off from society or establish towns with populations of one. He’s just worried that when our negligibility dawns on us (consciously or unconsciously), it might disturb us. Deeply.

He thinks those feelings of minuteness have a deep and elusive influence on our day-to-lives. Now, that doesn’t have to be something mystical or Freudian. He’s just saying that perhaps being a drop in an ocean might get to us. Perhaps it might make us desperate for something more. And perhaps “desperate” isn’t a good thing to be.

After all, desperate people aren’t very thoughtful. If we’re all starved of food, we don’t wait in line for rations. We storm the doors. We fight our way to the front. And we take more than our share. Desperation turns neighbors into competition and foes into something much worse. That’s a dangerous way to live, the desperate way. And it has a tragic history.

If we’re all born feeling negligible, then Jung worries that, in all our desperation, we might start doing things we wouldn’t normally do, thinking things we wouldn’t normally think, treating each other in ways we never thought we would. And we might just be oblivious of it – and if we’re especially far gone, as we’ll cover next, we might even feel virtuous or praiseworthy about it.

Mass-Mindedness

“The man who looks only outside and quails before the big battalions has no resource with which to combat the evidence of his senses and his reason.” – Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

Mass-minded – that’s a word Jung uses to describe people who voluntarily throw out their own thoughts, perspectives, ideas, and mental lives (all of which he packages into the term “individuality”) so that they can quell that sense of negligibility and feel like they’re a part of something – even if that “something” is irrational. Even if that “something” is dangerous.

Our plight is exactly that: the inherently desperate hand we’ve been dealt keeps us constantly on the fringe of falling into mass-mindedness. That means, if we aren’t careful, we might start associating ourselves with people or groups that we probably shouldn’t. And we might lose ourselves in the process.

Mass-mindedness makes you vulnerable. Especially to charismatic, impassioned ideologues – or anyone who invites you into their ideological club – because you might just accept their invitation, oblivious that the price of admission was yourself.

For Jung, trying too desperately be a part of something only makes you into nothing. All of the features that were uniquely your own – your values, moral codes, thoughts, mental life, principles, histories, ambitions, passions, eccentricities, goals – are exchanged for superficial versions tailored for the masses. He refers to these as “averaged out” ideas and beliefs, made to be accessible to as many people as possible. If we live by these uncritically, he thinks we voluntarily “average out” ourselves. And that’s much worse than feeling meaningless. That’s making yourself meaningless.

With this in mind, it should be clearer how en masse systems (which he calls groups that encourage mass-mindedness, purposely or not) struggle to account for the full complexity of the individual – it makes us pebbles think we’re just the average of our bed. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

It’s dangerous to start thinking that way. When you do, you start seeming a lot less like you and a lot more like a vague, anonymous member of an ideology. And that’s an absolute crime – you’re more than a doctrine’s mouthpiece, and a lot more than someone’s megaphone. You’re the most confusing and complicated thing out there, and Jung thinks you ought to act like it.

 Our Responsibility

“The psyche behaves like the body, of whose physiological and anatomical structure the average person knows very little. Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to him.” – Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

I don’t mean to imply that Jung wants us to avoid all groups, cliques, movements, faiths, philosophies, and beliefs that aren’t of our own making. (We’d fail the moment we start.) He just wants us to be aware of our deep-seated vulnerability to the dogmatic ones, and of how dangerous and irresponsible it would be to fall victim to them.

I also don’t mean to imply that there’s an international conspiracy going on where powerful figures across the globe try to con us into en masse systems. That’s certainly not the case. Instead, Jung sees our inclination to mass-mindedness as a marrow-deep characteristic of modern society (and, in some respects, human nature). It’s an elusive, all-encompassing fog that’s settled over all of us. Even the heads of the packs are fooled. And no one is free of it.

Now, don’t get the idea that we’re victims. Jung leaves no room for self-pity – as a psychologist and therapist, he knows just how dangerous that is. Rather, he sees this “plight of the individual” as self-inflicted. We aren’t captives. We’re volunteers. After all, we are the ones that ultimately give ourselves up to it, so we are the ones that must ultimately pull ourselves out of it.

And no matter how or where we’re raised, he seems to think it’s something of a moral obligation to overcome our past, circumstances, culture, tradition, and ourselves so we can figure out who we really are. That’s how we earn real value. That’s how we combat unreasonable, dangerous ideologies with no real basis in truth. That’s how we do our part to keep society healthy. And that’s how we keep ourselves admirable, rational, and good, in the process.

It’s important to note that obliviousness is no excuse. As Jung says in The Undiscovered Self, “Harmlessness and naïveté are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient…to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of his disease.” It’s our obligation to be aware that we’re always on the fringe of falling out of ourselves and into mass-minded ideologies that diminish our importance and exploit our longing to feel valuable. And it has to be that way, harsh as it may seem, because Jung thinks mass-mindedness has become the norm, which has put our relatively secure and prosperous societies on trial. And there’s only one real defense:

 Jung’s “Cure”

“It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique.” – Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

If the loss of individuality is our plight, then the discovery (or “cultivation”) of it must be our salvation. This Jung aptly calls “individuation”. He chose this word carefully – becoming an in-dividual literally means becoming non-divisible. This fits perfectly into his theory that individuating is integrating every part of the mind – good and bad, aware and unaware, virtuous and shameful, everything – into a whole. And keeping it that way.

Said another way, it’s becoming who you are. Completely. And that’s not easy. Individuation is a massive undertaking that most people fail to even start. It means we have to shine a light on every nook and cranny of our minds, scour our psyches, and properly cope with what we find. It means we have to be wary of outside influences breaking in and changing us. I could go into a discursive on Jung’s conception of the mind and what “shining a light” on it entails, but frankly, I’d be missing the point: regardless of what we believe, at least on a symbolic level, the idea of rigorous and honest self-analysis is of utmost importance. It’s how we figure out who we are, what we want, what we need, and how we can grow. It’s how we do our part to keep ourselves and others safe because society is only as strong and virtuous as its individuals.

Interestingly enough, Jung believes we all move naturally toward individuation over time. So, it isn’t something we start as much as it is something we cultivate. Factors, such as mass-mindedness, can disrupt our progression. Now, maybe “disrupted progress” doesn’t sound all that threatening, but if you aren’t moving forward, you’re either stagnant or regressing. Either way, you’re condemning yourself to a state of vulnerability and ignorance that harms you and the rest of society.

So, think of it as your obligation to yourself and humanity to be your own watchman, to keep an eye on what you subject yourself to, and to manage your own growth, hastening it where you can and uprooting obstacles to it when you must.

You ought to give yourself an honest look. You owe it to yourself, if not the rest of us. Perhaps you’ve fallen into a system that you can’t truly, deeply, and wholeheartedly justify. Perhaps you’ve gone along with it because that’s easier than changing. Perhaps it’s asking you for more than you should be willing to give. And perhaps you’re letting us all down by acceding. You wouldn’t be alone if that were the case. But you ought to climb your own way out of that pit before you lend a hand to someone else, before you earn back your meaning.

And that’s asking for a lot. It’s really asking for everything. But it’s necessary in the name of personal growth. That’s the only way you keep your side of the world running – by being rigorous in your self-analysis, by becoming an individual in the fullest sense of the word. That requires actively deciphering yourself across the lifetime. That requires giving your actions a good and thorough look. And it’s how you finally find yourself in all the noise of modern life.

Previously published on Medium.

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The post Finding Yourself in all the Noise of Modern Life appeared first on The Good Men Project.


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