“If science is an end in itself, man’s raison d’être lies in being a mere intellect. If art is an end in itself, then his sole value lies in the imaginative faculty, and the intellect is consigned to the lumber-room. If making money is an end in itself, both science and art can quietly shut up shop. No one can deny that our modern consciousness, in pursuing these mutually exclusive ends, has become hopelessly fragmented. The consequence is that people are trained to develop one quality only; they become tools themselves.”[1]
Jung (1927)
“Each individual is a new experiment of life in her ever-changing moods, and an attempt to add a new solution or new adaptation.”[2]
Jung (1924)
“… does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales?”[3]
Jung (1956)
“…scientific rationalism… robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity.”[4]
Jung (1956)
“In the olden days men were brutal, now they are dehumanized and possessed to a degree that even the blackest Middle Ages did not know.”[5]
Jung (1945)
“…a State… on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals and, on the other, continually threatens to paralyze and suppress the individual.”[6]
Jung (1956)
“Oh, come on. People are fungible.”[7]
Donald Rumsfeld (2004)
In his public statement on April 14th, 2004, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called American troops then fighting in Iraq “fungible,” that is, they “were as interchangeable as automotive factory parts.”[8] Seventy-seven years earlier, Carl Jung warned us about “State suppression” of the individual, and how our focus on money and power would result in people coming to be regarded as little more than tools. This essay is an examination of how we got into this lamentable situation, how Jung perceived human beings, and what he suggested we do to counter the dehumanizing tendency in our culture.
The Human Being in 21st Century America
Since Jung died in 1961, the depersonalization of individuals has only grown worse. Where, in 1956, Jung could write that “… over the whole field of medicine, it is recognized that the task of the doctor consists in treating the sick person, not an abstract illness,”[9] now, in the American disease care industry, human beings are referred to as just that–their illness, e.g. “the hematoma in 349,” “appendicitis” in 503, etc. Forty-six years before Jung wrote this statement, Abraham Flexner was charged by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching with making American medical education more scientific,[10] i.e. objective and rational–just what Jung knew would rob “the individual of his foundations and his dignity.”[11]
Jung actually sat facing his patients,[12] fostering a “dialectical relationship”[13] between the person and himself, whom he regarded as “a new and unique combination of psychic elements,”[14] deserving of his focused attention. Go to a doctor now and you are lucky if he or she glances up from the computer a few times during your visit.[15] Given how money has become the driver of our society, it is unusual for a person to have contact with the allopathic system without coming away feeling like “an income-generating biological structure.”[16]
The situation is hardly better in education, which now is regarded as little more than training for some career, ideally one likely to generate lots of income. Jung warned that: “The more ‘scientific’ our education attempts to be, the more it orients itself by general precepts and thus suppresses the individual development of the child.”[17] Heaven help the young person who hopes for a career in the arts or humanities: parental responses are likely to be “There’s no money in it.” Young people are pressured to train to become “tools,” e.g. a CPA, a lawyer, an architect, a plumber–a cog in the wheel of the larger social system, rather than a human in the fullness of his/her being. The humanistic ideal of mens sana in corpore sano[18] has little traction now, as true education (i.e. “drawing out of”[19] the person his/her unique combination of gifts) has given way to a focus on instruction (inculcating the particular skills needed for a money-making job).[20]
Organized religions also seem threadbare–Jung likens the “creeds”[21] to “worn-out clothes”[22]–in their failure to satisfy the needs of the individual. Jung knew that in the Middle Ages, with its “vertical orientation,”[23]religion fed people’s souls, and the individual came away from a religious service having experienced contact with a “spirit not of this world.”[24] Jung was blunt in his criticism of clergy and theologians:
“… the guardians and custodians of symbolical truth, namely the religions, have been robbed of their efficacy by science. Even intelligent people no longer understand the value and purpose of symbolical truth, and the spokesmen of religion have failed to deliver an apologetic suited to the spirit of the age…. Symbolical truth is exposed undefended to the attacks of scientific thought, which can never do justice to such a subject, and in the face of this competition has been unable to hold its ground…. Instead of insisting so glibly on the necessity of faith, the theologians, it seems to me, should see what can be done to make this faith possible. But that means placing symbolical truth on a new foundation – a foundation which appeals not only to sentiment, but to reason.[25]
The subjective side of human life is no longer nourished by mainstream religions, leading modern people to try “on a variety of religions and beliefs, as if they were Sunday attire,”[26] but finding no solace in any.
As for the world of business and commerce, Jung was explicit about the plight of the typical American financier: “Nobody can get so one-sided as a financier.”[27] By his pursuit of money as “an end in itself,”[28] the financier “… has become hopelessly fragmented…trained to develop one quality only;”[29] and the result is that 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,”[30] financiers live unbalanced lives and make money their God. They also tend to fancy themselves, in Tom Wolfe’s memorable phrase, “masters of the universe,”[31] an idea Jung called “a Godalmightiness.”[32] Such an attitude reflects “inflation and man’s hubris”[33] in making “the ego, in all its ridiculous paltriness, lord of the universe….”[34]
Besides inflation and hubris, egotism is linked to greed, which is insatiable. Our experience in 2008 illustrated just how uncontrollable greed can become, how it can evolve, for example, into private equity firms grabbing “the money or property of others… to get more loot,”[35] e.g. the houses in foreclosure, which they then turned into highly profitable income streams by renting these homes to would-be buyers.[36] These financiers have become heartless tools of their own greed.
While Jung was critical of the trends and developments in most of the components of Western society, he was vitriolic in his opinions of politics and politicians. Politics deals with polls, aggregates, masses of voters, putting a premium on “big.” Jung was not a fan of big. In his mid-20’s and early 30’s Jung followed with approval the trust-busting work of American presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.[37] Decades later, when the Great Depression, World War II and the New Deal had restored bigness to the government, business and politics, Jung wrote that “… the real dangers that threaten our lives… are the present politico-social delusional systems….”.[38] Jung wrote these words sixty-two years before Trump and the Republican Party would make delusion a key feature of our political discourse.
How did this delusional situation come about? As a physician, Jung had some diagnoses. A major item on his list of causes is projection: “… today most people cannot see the beam in their own eye but are all too well aware of the mote in their brother’s. Political propaganda exploits this primitivity…”[39] (e.g. political leaders describing other countries as the “axis of evil.”).[40] Closely related to projection is the phenomenon of “moral complacency and lack of responsibility,”[41] which Jung recognized “has a … divisive and alienating effect upon society.”[42]
Combine these with the “monkey tricks”[43] which Jung regarded as a feature of politics, with the politicians’ rhetoric that Jung saw as a “poison” for “the utterly incompetent mind of the masses…”[44] and you have other explanations for the delusions we witness now.
Spiritual malaise is another of Jung’s diagnoses for our delusional situation. We live in a time of “unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism,”[45] a time when “God is dead”[46] (as Nietzsche said) and the gods turn up as “psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious.”[47]
Which brings us to what Jung regarded as the most serious cause of our current situation: unconsciousness. Jung was blunt: “… the operative factor… is not man’s intellect but an authority above and beyond consciousness.”[48]“We have not understood yet that the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.”[49] This diagnosis is as true in 2024 as it was in 1949.
Until we undertake the spiritual task of becoming conscious–as citizens and voters–we will remain the tools of the politicians, who, in turn, are the tools of the moneyed elite who pay for the elections and call in their chits afterwards, reflecting the famous “golden rule of politics:” “Those with gold, rule.”[50] How very different was Jung’s attitude!
Jung’s Regard for Persons
Jung was a psychiatrist, that branch of medicine which was known as “the talking cure,”[51] and Jung (who did not have to deal with insurance companies) would engage with each patient differently, recognizing each man or woman as an individual, with “a new and unique combination of psychic elements.”[52] Jung never treated two people the same way, and he taught his students to do likewise.[53]
As advances in pharmacology and brain research began to be applied to the treatment of mental illness, Jung would have none of it. He recognized that the simple dispensing of pills could not provide the deep, interpersonal connection that formed in the transference process, nor could manipulation of brain chemistry minister to the needs of the psyche.[54] To Jung, people were much more than biological structures to be treated like machines, or objects to conform to the dictates of faceless insurance company bean counters.
Jung took his stress on individuality beyond the consulting room: he felt that the human being was “the center of events, and all things revolve around him.”[55] Persons could not be robbed of their unique foundations and their dignity–a process that Jung saw happening all around him in the post-war years. As money became more and more the driver of Western society, people became tools in the capitalist system, and “bigger is better” became the mantra pervading most aspects of modern life.
As I noted above, Jung hated bigness, mass actions, mass-mindedness, and any situation in which the single human being was ignored, diminished or unable to make his/her mark. Having lived through the cataclysm of World War II and witnessing first-hand some of Hitler’s rallies,[56] Jung knew personally just how dangerous masses are–how sound, reasonable individuals can get caught up in hysteria, irrationality and delusions. When the war ended with the detonation of atomic bombs, and the whole world came to realize just how tenuous life had become on our planet, Jung realized that mass-mindedness could literally wipe out all living systems.[57] His response was to offer suggestions for what we might do to bolster individuality and the dignity of persons.
How We Might Counter Dehumanization
Not surprisingly, Jung’s suggestions focus far more on what individuals can do than on societal responses. Changes clearly are needed, and Jung knew all change begins with individuals: “Everything begins with the individual.”[58] “As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will undergo it and carry it through. The change must begin with one individual; it might be any one of us.”[59]
What was Jung asking the individual to do? First, to be “conscious of his own singularity,”[60] i.e. to recognize how s/he is unlike any other person, “different from others and … in possession of his own individual consciousness.”[61] Second, in order to become aware of one’s “singularity,” a “fundamental change of attitude (metanoia) is required,”[62] and this can occur only with courage–to stand against the mainstream culture with independence of mind. Third, Jung would have the person work consciously and conscientiously on his/her individuation, giving time to self-reflection, treasuring the “life-preserving myths of the inner man” which the various spiritual traditions have “treasured up for”[63] us, and becoming one’s self.[64] Fourth, all these steps can be easier if we draw on the wisdom that lies within each of us. Jung knew there would be times when we would be without a clue as to what to do, so Jung advises us to “be bold enough to ask [ourselves] whether by any chance [our] unconscious might know something helpful, where there is no satisfactory conscious answer anywhere in sight.”[65] In my experience, Jesus was right when he said “Ask, and it shall be given to you.”[66] The Self is very supportive of our efforts at individuation.
Jung was well aware of how many people had bought into the culture’s idea of the individual as “puny” and “impotent,”[67] in terms of possible impact on the culture. He felt this attitude put the person “already on the road to State slavery,”[68] when, in fact, by undertaking the steps noted above, the person could create for him/herself “an opportunity to influence others of like mind.”[69] Jung went on:
“I do not mean by persuading or preaching–I am thinking, rather, of the well-known fact that anyone who had insight into his own actions and has thus found access to the unconscious, involuntarily exercises an influence on his environment. … It is an unintentional influence on the unconscious of others, a sort of unconscious prestige,…“[70]
which need not be spoken of at all, but which will have a salubrious effect.
By the individual changing his/her attitude, Jung felt that s/he “can initiate a change in the psychology of the nation,”[71] “a renewal in the spirit of the nations,”[72] and Jung drew on his knowledge of history when he noted how “the great problems of humanity were… solved… only through regeneration of the attitudes of individuals.”[73] As I read these words, I was reminded of the seeming miracle in 1989, when the nations of Eastern Europe peacefully threw off the yoke of the Soviet Union. Jung predicted this in 1917, when he wrote that “the destruction of huge organizations will eventually prove to be a necessity because, like a cancerous growth, they eat away at man’s nature as soon as they become ends in themselves and attain autonomy.”[74]
Besides breaking up large institutions, Jung also sought to dampen our “fascination” with “statistical truths,”[75]and to temper modern society’s reliance on scientific rationalism[76] with an equal appreciation for subjective traits like intuition. He would also have us balance theorizing with empirical experience, in our explorations of “the meaning of the individual psyche.”[77]
Finally, as an incentive for us to take on this challenging task, Jung would have us remember that we are “the makeweight that tips the scales”[78]–the very person whose inner work could save the world from the catastrophe of Armageddon.
Bibliography
Hannah, Barbara (1976), Jung: His Life and Work. New York: G.P. Putnam.
Jackson, Derek (2004), “Rumfeld’s fungible facts,” Chicago Tribune (April 26, 2004)
Jung, C.G. (1956), Symbols of Transformation. Collected Works, 5. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1966), Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works, 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1960), The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works, 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1959), Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, 9i. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1959), Aion. Collected Works, 9ii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), Civilization in Transition. Collected Works, 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (19 69), Psychology and Religion, West and East. Collected Works, 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1963), Mysterium Coniunctionis. Collected Works, 14. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), The Practice of Psychotherapy. Collected Works, 16. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), The Development of Personality. Collected Works, 17. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.
________ (1976), The Symbolic Life. Collected Works, 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1975), Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler & Aniela Jaffé. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1984), Seminar on Dream Analysis. Princeton: Princeton Univerity Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1954), The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin Books.
Parker, Brant & Johnny Hart (2015, “Remember the Golden Rule, The Wizard of Id (August 28, 2015); https:// economicsociology, org
Stahnisch, Frank (2012),”The Flexner Report of 1910;https://www.hindawi.com/ journals/ecam/2012/647896/
Wagner, Suzanne (1998-1999), “A Conversation with Marie-Louise von Franz,” Psychological Perspectives, 38 (Winter 1998-1999), 12-39.
Wolfe, Tom (1987), The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Bantam Books.
Zavere, Mirhi & Wesley Parnell (2023), “A Private Equity Might Be Your Next Landlord,” The New York Times(August 15, 2023).
[1] CW 8 ¶731.
[2] CW 17 ¶173.
[3] CW 10 ¶586
[4] Ibid. ¶501.
[5] CW 18 ¶1363.
[6] CW 10 ¶587.
[7] Quoted in Jackson (2004).
[8] Ibid., quoting Jackson.
[9] CW 10 ¶497.
[10] Stahnisch (2012).
[11] CW 10 ¶501.
[12] CW 18 ¶321.
[13] CW 16 ¶10
[14] CW 17 ¶173.
[15] I base this statement on the 15 years I spent taking my mother and my aunt to their doctor appointments–their primary care doc, the foot doc, the blood doc, the heart doc, the skin doc–none of whom engaged with their patient: they kept looking at their screens, claiming they had to record everything for Medicare!
[16] This is not my term; I read it years ago, and the author might be Uwe Reinhardt, the Princeton University economist specializing in the health care industry.
[17] CW 10 ¶894.
[18] Latin: the Ciceronian ideal of a “healthy mind in a healthy body.”
[19] Latin: ex + ducere: to draw out from.
[20] “Letter to J.A.F. Swoboda,” 23 January 1960; Letters, II, 533.
[21] “Creed” was Jung’s term for organized religions; CW 18 ¶1637.
[22] CW 10 ¶168.
[23] CW 9ii ¶150.
[24] CW 10 ¶168.
[25] CW 5 ¶336.
[26] Ibid..
[27] Jung (1984), 632.
[28] CW 8, ¶736.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid., ¶515.
[31] Wolfe (1987), 10.
[32] Jung (1984), 223.
[33] CW 11, ¶144. I have retained the English spelling of hubris.
[34] Ibid.
[35] CW 11 ¶772
[36] Zavere & Parnell (2023).
[37] CW 10, ¶719.
[38] CW 9i ¶49.
[39] CW 14, ¶342.
[40] George W. Bush used this phrase, referring to Iran and North Korea.
[41] CW 10, ¶577.
[42] Ibid.
[43] CW 9i ¶477.
[44] CW 18 ¶1302.
[45] CW 9i, ¶50.
[46] “The Gay Science, Book V;” Nietzsche (1954), 447.
[47] CW 9i, ¶50.
[48] CW 11, ¶222.
[49] “Letter to Dorothy Thompson,” 23 September 1949; Letters, I, 537.
[50] Parker & Hart (2015).
[51] This, of course, was before psychopharmacology became the standard treatment for mental health disorders, giving the patient 15 minutes with the doctor, to conform to the insurance company’s protocols.
[52] CW 17 ¶173.
[53] Hannah (1976), 202.
[54] “Letter to Father Victor White,” 10 April 1954; Letters, II, 173.
[55] CW 8 ¶928.
[56] Jung (1977), 126-127.
[57] Wagner (1998-9), 24.
[58] CW 10 ¶45.
[59] CW 18 ¶599.
[60] CW 10 ¶893.
[61] Ibid.
[62] Ibid. ¶719.
[63] Ibid. ¶586.
[64] CW 7 ¶266.
[65] CW 18 ¶599.
[66] Matt. 7:7.
[67] CW 10 ¶503.
[68] Ibid.
[69] Ibid. ¶583.
[70] Ibid.
[71] CW 7 ¶266.
[72] CW 10 ¶45.
[73] CW 7 ¶266.
[74] CW 7, p. 4 (Preface to the 1917 edition).
[75] CW 10 ¶503.
[76] Ibid. ¶501.
[77] CW 17 ¶173.
[78] CW 10 ¶586.
