Zeitgeist
the spirit of the time
Looking back, it is striking that the complex, multi-dimensional shockwave which was 'covid' coincided with many other problems: The global economy was already precarious and disinformation was already endemic. The fallout from Brexit was ongoing and racial-equality campaigners were burning cities and toppling statues in the USA and beyond. For the first time in history, a US presidential inauguration was surrounded by razor wire and armed soldiers, rather than a viewing public. The hovering spectre of Jeffrey Epstein's dark empire was re-animated by the arrest of his close associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. And the lead-up to those years had seen cycles of interventionist war and terrorist backlash, as well as recurring economic trauma and malevolent political polarisation. In truth, even the infection problem itself was not really so new: Preceding years brought HIV, SARS, swine flu (H1N1 through H2N3) and MERS, new outbreaks of cholera, ebola, tuberculosis, zika, vaccine-resistant polio, and others. Throughout, those things have been met with sensationalism, deliberate cultivation of fear, and strategies which were as questionable as they were primitive: Responses like the one which met the emerge of SARS-CoV-2, “Virus emerges, go to war with virus” are reactionary and do not represent the best we are capable of. They are not untypical however of the institutions which currently call the shots. “Twin towers destroyed? Invade Afghanistan and Iraq”. “Ecological destruction? Tax CO2”. “Economic collapse? Print money”. And so it goes. There is little to indicate that such thinking is making the world a better place however, and it should be clear that a change of orientation is needed - both where virus problems are concerned, and for the wider and more generalised crisis.
In looking for pathways into new understanding, we could do worse than start from the concept of 'zeitgeist' – the spirit of the times: There are moments in history when something seems to move in the psyche of all humanity at once, and extraordinary circumstances erupt on multiple fronts simultaneously. In 1989/1990 for instance, the first Gulf War was fought and the Berlin Wall came down. At the same time, extensive rioting marked the end of Margaret Thatcher's era, persecuted dissidents Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela all rose to become national leaders, and the Soviet Union disintegrated. In 1968/1969, the most horrific fighting of the Vietnam era took place and both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. There was Woodstock, free love, mass rioting in Paris, and dramatic T.V. footage of a man walking on the moon. Swiftly followed by the breaking of the Watergate story. The three years from 1913 to 1915 meanwhile saw the birth of the Federal Reserve, the outbreak of World War One, the worst peak (by far) of polio in the USA, Mahatma Gandhi's first arrest, and the publication of Einstein's general theory of relativity. This time followed quickly by both the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish flu. It may be that the long term consequences of 2020 / 2021 will be as great as, or greater than, all of them.
Sometimes then, the 'zeitgeist' is positive, as it mostly appeared to be in 1989. At other times it is not only negative and destructive, but goes all the way over into mass-psychosis. To clarify, 'psychosis' is a mental state which has lost contact with reality. And 'mass psychosis' is a situation in which a whole society loses contact with reality. Overwhelming problems are denied or buried until they slide down, for the most part, into the unconscious. From where they at some time erupt – sometimes savagely. Distortions begin in which otherwise reasonable people do, or allow to be done, things which normally, and as individuals, they would find unspeakable.
The subject of the unconscious is not something which features very much in public discourse. One might say that developing a clear distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind has been among humanity's biggest achievements in recent centuries, and that ignoring that discovery when attempting to understand global problems has been one of its biggest failings. On its own however, the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious is not enough. For the the current context, we must also take a further step: Not only does there exist an unconscious level of mind in each of us, but also a 'collective unconscious' - a shared level of mind, which must surely be the only explanation for the well-recognised phenomenon of 'zeitgeist'. That is, for the undeniable way societies move and think, at certain levels and in certain ways 'en masse'. Global communication systems might intensify it, but the phenomenon existed long before 'the wired society' did.
The failure to be aware of such phenomena is no small problem, as they are close to many of the worst episodes in world history. One example is the witch hunts of the seventeenth century, in which normally decent people participated in the burning and drowning of many thousands of women across Europe and USA. Another is 'Reign of Terror' which followed the French Revolution. The most recent emerged in 1939/1940/1941: As 1939 dawned, Mussolini was already in power in Italy, the Spanish civil war was already in progress, Japan had already occupied China, and Germany had occupied Austria. As the year progressed, Germany added Poland to its conquests and Russia invaded Finland. During 1940 and 1941 all these conflicts merged into a single conflagration known as World War 2, the insane horrors of which need no elucidation here. In the same three years, reflecting again a kind of zeitgeist, Ho Chi Min rose to power in Vietnam, Lenin had Trotsky assassinated, what proved to be the final and decisive Indian uprising against British colonialism began... and plutonium was discovered.
Let us return to the present: The theme of mass psychosis has become somewhat fashionable and, as would be the nature of it, controversial. But what exactly is the nature of it? Post World War 2, psychologist Carl Jung - credited with fully establishing the existence of the collective unconscious - devoted considerable energy to exploring large scale 'psychotic episodes'. The one which had recently happened in Germany, he said, had quite literally been an outbreak of epidemic insanity.1 Such moments, Jung asserted, are characterised by a situation in which the population are immersed in uncontrolled fear, and nobody is fully aware of what they are doing and why.2 Such situations cannot be entirely blamed on political leaders, Jung claimed, but affect populations in their entirety - with political leaders expressing it especially strongly and / or seizing the opportunity to intensify it in the population, the better to achieve their ends. Around the same time, Dutch-American psychologist Joost Meerloo wrote that in such situations, the sense of an omni-present enemy, and an atmosphere of fear, are pervasive. And that the result is society turning against itself, often driven on by the goadings of government.3
The resulting damage and suffering can be vast, causing, according to Jung, infinitely more damage than both epidemics of physical disease, and natural disasters.4 Yet 21st century society is awake to any and every other kind of danger more than this one - despite the fact that history has shown us its horrifying consequences on multiple occasions. Part of the reason for this is that when mass psychosis begins to manifest people in its grip are entirely unaware of what is happening. More primitive aspects of the mind take over, and people are entirely oblivious of the shift. Indeed, as one of Jung's successors, James Hillman, wrote in 1997, one of the defining characteristics of such powers of the unconscious (both personal and collective) is that they in a way bedazzle and possess, such that people become entirely blind to their own stance.5
It is surely clear that, on a cyclic basis, the 'shared level of mind' moves with striking co-ordination and significant impact. It is also abundantly clear that from time to time that process can become dangerously psychotic. Are we once again in such a cycle? There is very much to say in exploring that argument and its implications, so I will take it up in forthcoming posts.
Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, 1958
Carl Jung, After the Catastrophe, 1945. Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, 1958.
Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, 1961
Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, 1958
James Hillman, The Soul's Code, 1997