… “isms” [are] so fanatically believed in by modern man.
Jung (1947)[1]
Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with ism.
Jung (1938)[2]
… a hundred intelligent heads massed together make one big fathead… The masses always incline to herd psychology, … to mob psychology, hence their witless brutality and hysterical emotionalism….
Jung (1935)[3]
… I despise politics wholeheartedly:…even in my own country I am uninterested in politics, because I am convinced that 99 per cent of politics are mere symptoms and anything but a cure for social evils….
Jung (1936)[4]
Greed is uncontrollable except when counteracted by an equally violent morality. Morality, however, if it exceeds the norm, becomes a real danger to human relationship, because it is the direct instigator of compensatory immoral behavior and thus reveals its secret root, greed.
Jung (1948)[5]
Nobody can get so one-sided as a financier.
Jung (1930)[6]
Look at the men in Wall Street! At forty-five they are completely exhausted.
Jung (1930)[7]
Several years ago, when the “Occupy Wall Street” movement was making headlines, a student asked me what Jung would say about it. I replied that I could give no simple answer. It struck me that the question was complex. I told the student that, at some point, when I got around to it, I would dig around in Jung’s writings and come up with an answer.
Why did I think the question was complex? And why would I have to dig around in Jung’s works? For several reasons: First, Jung never wrote any essay specifically on Wall Street, finance, money, or investing. In fact, given Jung’s own money complex,[8] once he married Emma Rauschenbach, he never handled money.[9] The financier, as a money man, would have been much in Jung’s shadow. Second, finance, central as it is to modern capitalism, is one of the major “isms” of our culture, and Jung had a lot to say about “isms.” Third, the Occupy movement drew many people, and not just in Lower Manhattan: It became something of a mass global phenomenon,[10] and Jung had much to say about mass man and mass movements. Finally, this subject is linked to others—the masculine psyche, egotism, and greed—that Jung had strong feelings about. With so much connected to the question, I had to dig broadly in Jung’s works to provide an answer. This essay is organized around these themes: “Isms,” mass man and mass movements, Jung on politics, Jung on money, and Jung on financiers and Wall Street.
Jung on “Isms”
By “ism” Jung referred to the “supraordinate idea” or “représentation collective”[11] that functions for modern people the way organized religion did generations ago. In his essay “Concerning the Archetypes and the Anima Concept,”[12] Jung described an “ism” as “a modern variant of the denominational religions” that is “…charged with an extremely suggestive, emotional power….” And, in that same paragraph, Jung offers some examples: “…materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism,…”[13] We can add another to this list: capitalism.
Observing Western culture in his day, Jung felt the modern Western person relates to his/her favorite “ism” much as people generations ago related to their religious denomination: with fanatical devotion,[14] as if the word were magical:
With more foreboding than real knowledge, most people feel afraid of the menacing power that lies fettered in each of us, only waiting for the magic word to release it from the spell. This magic word, … always ends in ‘ism,…”[15]
As I read this passage I found myself thinking of the knee-jerk reaction we see in the United States now from certain political groups when they hear words like “liberal,” or “socialism.” Jung certainly was right about how an “ism” can be highly charged with emotional power! Whether positive or negative, an “ism’ can elicit strong feelings.
Why raise the subject of “isms” in an essay on Wall Street and the “Occupy” movement? Because one of the themes of the movement is a critique of modern capitalism, with all the emotional baggage that entails. As an “ism,” capitalism likely conjures up a wealth of irrational reactions, positively or negatively. Jung would not have been surprised to hear some of the highly charged statements that were made during the “Occupy” movement.
Jung on Mass Movements
Jung recognized that “isms” give rise to a “mass psyche”[16] and mass movements which “… destroy the meaning of the individual and of culture generally.”[17] Jung had no use for large groups, masses of people gathered together, or mob activities. He was quite blunt in his opinion in this regard, repeated in multiple of his writings. For example:
… the more highly charged the collective consciousness, the more the ego forfeits practical importance. It is, as it were, absorbed by the opinions and tendencies of collective consciousness, and the result of that is the mass man, the ever-ready victim of some wretched ‘ism.’…”[18]
People in large groups become “victims” because they lose their “link with psychic reality”[19] in groups. It becomes nigh unto impossible for the individual to remain connected to his/her inner life in a large group.
While many of the participants in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement were well-educated, well-intentioned individuals, by their “massing together”[20] Jung would claim their “… hundred intelligent heads… make one big fathead,”[21] causing them to lose their individual virtues and endowments. By massing in a large group they “inclined to herd psychology,”[22] and this left them vulnerable to being “easily stampeded; and to mob psychology,”[23] with its “witless brutality and hysterical emotionalism…”[24]
Given this attitude, what would Jung suggest the public-spirited individual do? Work on him/herself. Get wise to and integrate the shadow. Get to know the anima/animus. Develop trust in the Self (what Jesus meant when he urged his listeners to “lay up treasures in Heaven”),[25] and, by doing this, understand how powerfully this individual activity shifts the overall consciousness.
Our culture has little use for such suggestions. It is deeply imbued with the mistaken notice that “bigger is better,” that change comes about through marches and mass protests and other such outer actions. Jung knew that the most powerful way to effect change was by changing oneself.
Jung on Politics
Given Jung’s attitude on how to bring about change, it is not surprising that he had little use for politics. He felt 99 per cent of politics “are mere symptoms and anything but a cure for social evils.”[26] Jung’s use of the word “symptoms” suggests he saw illness in the body politic. What was one cause of these ills? Politics:
About 50 per cent of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. We are on our guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are exasperatingly careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind.[27]
Far from helping the body politic, Jung felt the profession of politics was a cause of problems, a poison for the nation!
In making this statement to reporters in New York in 1936,[28] Jung probably was thinking of the situation in Germany at that time, with Hitler seizing more and more power, inflaming the collective consciousness of Germany, and truly poisoning the minds of Germans. In our own day, we can see similar things with some of the irrational statements from our politicians, e.g. some members of the Tea Party, the “birthers,”[29] and Donald Trump.[30]
Jung on Money
Donald Trump gets to play politics in the United States because he is a multi-millionaire. Money is the driver of American politics now,[31] and Jung had even more to say about money than he did about politics.
In the series of experiments that initially made his reputation,[32] Jung developed an association test that revealed individuals’ complexes. One of the most common of complexes, Jung discovered, was the “money complex.” When Ludwig Binswanger gave Jung the test, it revealed that Jung had a complex around money.[33]
What does it mean, to have a “money complex”? Jung defined it as
a conglomeration of psychic contents characterized by a peculiar or perhaps painful feeling-tone, … as though a projectile struck through the thick layer of the persona into the dark layer. For instance, somebody with a money complex will be hit when you say: ‘To buy,’ ‘to pay,’ or ‘money.’ That is a disturbance of reaction.[34]
The key here is unconsciousness: In the association test, the person being tested hesitates a few milliseconds longer when the key words are spoken. Jung came to realize that this slight hesitancy was due to the interference of the complex.
Growing up very poor, and having to scramble to provide for his mother, sister and his own education after his father’s death, Jung struggled with money in the first two decades of his life.[35] After his marriage in 1903 to the second richest woman in Switzerland, Jung never had to worry about money again.[36] But that did not mean the complex disappeared: After Emma’s death in 1955, Jung reverted to his frugal ways, turning off lights, urging his staff to economize, and generally being far more concerned about finances.[37]
In part, this concern was due to Jung’s attitude toward money. He lived through the years of the stock market “bubble” in the 1920’s, followed by the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and he observed with alarm as an astonishing inflation overcame the economy of Weimar Germany.[38] Seeing the Deutsche mark loose its value day-by-day taught Jung the merit of having a sound currency, i.e. one backed by gold.[39]
But the world was moving in the other direction, and Jung watched in dismay as the “security of the gold standard”[40] disappeared and money took on “more and more [a] fictitious character’ that was vulnerable to “inflation, devaluation, and… dilution….”[41] Jung lamented that
Money value is fast becoming a fiction guaranteed by the State. Money becomes paper and everybody convinces everybody else that the little scraps are worth something because the State says so.[42]
Such is the nature of a fiduciary currency,[43] which is the type of money now common all over the world. No longer is it possible to redeem a paper bill for gold. Jung was not pleased with this financial development.
Nor was he pleased with how money has “become an end in itself.”[44] In many parts of the world—and certainly in the United States—money now is “…the very God of the earth, the ultima ratio of all things worldly–…”.[45] Jung recognized that “The American, unhampered by the burden of historical conditions, can make and spend money for what it is worth.”[46] unlike the European, for whom the medieval stricture against money-making still lingered.[47] No American makes money with more single-minded a focus than the financiers of Wall Street, and Jung had some pungent comments about them.
Jung on Financiers and Wall Street
Jung was explicit about the plight of the typical American financier: “Nobody can get so one-sided as a financier.”[48] By his pursuit of money as “an end in itself,”[49] the financier “… has become hopelessly fragmented…trained to develop one quality only; …”[50] and, as a result, “he [there are very few women playing the money game on Wall Street][51] becomes a “tool.”[52] Jung noted this: “… when you look at New York, it [the machine] really is on top of man; …”.[53] Financiers are cogs in the wheel of fortune. Irrational, forgetting “about the eternal things, the things that will be of the most importance in the long run,”[54] the financier lives an unbalanced life.
Many of these men “still have the boy in them,”[55] and, according to Jung, such men “can be beasts.”[56] They also tend to fancy themselves, in Tom Wolfe’s memorable phrase, “masters of the universe,”[57] an idea Jung called “a Godalmightiness.”[58] Such an attitude reflects “inflation and man’s hybris” in making “the ego, in all its ridiculous paltriness, lord of the universe….”[59]
Besides inflation and hubris, egotism is linked to greed:
Egotism always has the character of greed, which shows itself chiefly in three ways: the power-drive, lust, and moral laziness. These three moral evils are supplemented by a fourth which is the most powerful of all—stupidity. Real intelligence is very rare and forms statistically an infinitesimal part of the average mind. Viewed from the level of a more highly qualified mind, the average intelligence is very low.[60]
Jung is not alone in his questioning the wisdom of Wall Street investors. Many observers of “The Street” tried to alert others before the crash of 2008.[61] Given how “irrational exuberance”[62] had come to grip the collective consciousness of the time, few listened.
Our experience in 2008 illustrates just how “uncontrollable” greed can become, and how “For many, money is God.”[63] Jung felt that those for whom money had become God were alienated “from the unconscious,…”,[64] rootless,[65] and out of touch “with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of [their] being.”[66] As capitalists the Wall Street moguls were “projection-carriers,” projecting the values of capitalism, and thus becoming “the ever-ready victim of” the “ism” of capitalism.[67]
Jung was explicit about the features of such “victims:” “possessed”[68] by this “ism,” financiers “… substitute for God some other power, for instance… money, …”[69] and they become “… assiduous, fearful, … enterprising, greedy, and violent in [their] pursuit of the goods of this world: possessions, health, knowledge, technical mastery, … political power, conquest, and so on. …”[70]
What does this lead to? Jung goes on: “Attempts to grab the money or property of others and to protect our own. The mind is chiefly employed in devising suitable ‘isms’ to hide the real motives or to get more loot….”[71] “Concentrated upon a single goal (viz., the yellow god), and a bit handicapped by what certain English magazines call “Americana”—something on the border-line of mild insanity,…”[72] the Wall Street wheeler-dealer did not get much praise from Jung: “Look at the men in Wall Street! At forty-five they are completely exhausted. Modern life in America is more efficient than in any place in the world, but it completely destroys the man…. it means just destruction….”[73]
Jung would remind us that, as important and useful as efficiency is, effectiveness is equally so. Being “efficient” means doing a job right: little or no waste of time or energy, coming in on time and under budget. Being “effective” means doing the right job: choosing to do those tasks that are appropriate and aligned with one’s values and purpose in life. Americans are great at being efficient, but lamentably horrible with effectiveness. In the last few decades, as a culture, we have focused on wealth, money and making money, in the most efficient, fastest, easiest ways possible. One critic of our culture identified the three key values in 21st-century America as “need, greed and speed.”[74]
Jung would agree. Jung tried to point this out to the world in his 1948 memorandum to UNESCO, in which he warned about
The accumulated greed of a nation [which] becomes utterly uncontrollable unless counteracted by all the forces (civil and military) a government is equipped with. No suggestion works unless one is convinced of its power. Arguments are ineffectual.[75]
In 21st-century America, the civil and military forces are all aligned with the financiers!
Conclusion
So how would Jung have reacted to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement? I think he would have appreciated the core concern of the protestors, who were right in thinking that our culture has become much too focused on greed, money and materialism. Jung likely would have agreed with Wolfe and others about the dangers of the puerile egotism and arrogance of traders who fancied themselves “masters of the universe.” But I doubt that he would have fancied the mass movement. Rather than turning out to demonstrate on the streets, Jung would have individuals turn within, to work on themselves, to find the “inner financier”–that shadow figure that lives in all of us who will covet, grasp at an eight-figure salary, insist on a private jet, require multiple houses while others lose theirs in mortgage scams—and integrate it into consciousness.
Sue Mehrtens is the author of this essay.
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Belsky, Gary (2012), “Why We Need More Women Traders on Wall Street,” Time (May 15, 2012).
Blinder, Alan (2014), After the Music Stopped. New York: Penguin Books.
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Edinger, Edward (1990), Goethe’s Faust: Notes for a Jungian Commentary. Toronto: Inner City Books.
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________ (1973), “Experimental Researches,” Collected Works, 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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________ (1984), Seminar on Dream Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lewis, Michael (2010), The Big Short. New York: W.W. Norton.
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Mipham, Sakyong (2003), Turning the Mind into an Ally. New York: Riverhead Books.
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[1] Collected Works 8, ¶366. Hereafter Collected Works will be abbreviated CW.
[2] CW 7, ¶326.
[3] CW 16, ¶4.
[4] CW 18, ¶1301.
[5] Ibid., ¶1399.
[6] Jung (1984), 632. Jung spoke these words in the seminar in 1930, but the notes were published only in 1984, hence the difference in the dates.
[7] Ibid., 621-2.
[8] Bair (2003), 109.
[9] Ibid., 566.
[10] There were similar demonstrations in 951 cities around the world, including Cairo, Cape Town, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Jakarta, Tel Aviv, Manila, Seoul, Brussels, Prague, Copenhagen, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Athens, Rekyavik, Dublin, Rome, Amsterdam, Oslo, Lisbon, Moscow, Madrid, Stockholm, Geneva, Zurich, London, Canberra, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, Auckland; and in the U.S.: Birmingham, Anchorage, Phoenix, Little Rock, Denver, Hartford, Washington D.C., Orlando, Atlanta, Honolulu, Chicago, New Orleans, Portland (ME and OR), Baltimore, Boston, Springfield, Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Omaha, Las Vegas, Manchester, Trenton, Albuquerque, Buffalo, Raleigh, Fargo, Cleveland, Salem, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, Nashville, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Burlington, Norfolk, Richmond, Seattle, Madison, Milwaukee, in addition to New York City. Google “cities with Occupy demonstrations” for the full list.
[11] CW 9i, ¶125.
[12] Ibid., ¶s111-147.
[13] Ibid., ¶125.
[14] CW 8, ¶366.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., ¶427.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., ¶425.
[19] Ibid., ¶427.
[20] CW 16, ¶4.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Matt. 6:19.
[26] CW 18, ¶1301.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Jung made these remarks in an interview he gave to reporters on his arrival in New York to attend the tercentenary celebration at Harvard, where he gave a speech; CW 18, ¶s 1300-1304 and note 1.
[29] This is the term used by the media to refer to those who refuse to believe Barack Obama is an American citizen.
[30] For foreign readers who might not be familiar with American politics: Trump is a controversial business mogul currently running as a candidate for President in the 2016 campaign.
[31] We have the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Citizen United decision, to thank for this.
[32] See CW volumes 1, 2 and 3 for the reports of these experiments.
[33] Bair (2003), 109.
[34] CW 18, ¶99.
[35] Bair (2003), 31.
[36] Bair (2003), 69, 81; and Brome (1978), 44.
[37] Ibid., 566. I find myself wondering if Jung had projected his financial security on to his wife, and then had to take back this projection after she died.
[38] Palmer & Colton (1965), 762. By the end of 1923 it took 4 trillion paper marks to equal one U.S. dollar.
[39] CW 18, ¶1327.
[40] Ibid., ¶1306.
[41] Ibid., ¶1320.
[42] Ibid.
[43] “Fiduciary” comes from the Latin fides, “faith.” Money today only has value insofar as a person has faith in the government that issues it.
[44] CW 8, ¶731.
[45] CW 18, ¶1306.
[46] CW 10, ¶975.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Jung (1984), 632.
[49] CW 8, ¶736.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Belsky (2012).
[52] CW 8, ¶731.
[53] Jung (1984), 541.
[54] Ibid., 515.
[55] Ibid., 674. Tom Wolfe vividly describes some of the puer qualities of Wall Street traders; Wolfe (1987).
[56] Ibid.
[57] Wolfe (1987), 10.
[58] Jung (1984), 223.
[59] CW 11, ¶144. I have retained the English spelling of hubris.
[60] CW 18, ¶1398.
[61] Cf. Lewis (2010), Markopolos (2010), and Blinder (2014) for vivid descriptions of the prescient men who forecasted disaster before the bubble burst in 2008.
[62] This term was coined by Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, in a speech he gave to the American Enterprise Institute on December 5, 1996; see https://en.wikipedia./org/wiki/irrational_exuberance.
[63] Edinger (1990), 50.
[64] CW 10, ¶103.
[65] Ibid.
[66] Ibid.
[67] Ibid., ¶610.
[68] CW 9i, ¶125.
[69] CW 11, ¶772.
[70] Ibid.
[71] Ibid.
[72] CW 10, ¶946.
[73] Jung (1984), 621.
[74] Mipham (2003), 21.
[75] CW 18, ¶1401.
