4th Turning and Jung

Guest Post by Don Murphy

Reading some Carl Jung tonight and two very important observations intersected like a bolt of lightning and understanding was gained. This may get a bit involved…

First, understand that societies in general can be viewed from a mass psychiatric viewpoint just like an individual. An excellent fictional story in this vein is ‘The Foundation Trilogy’ by Isaac Asimov.

Second, understand that history is cyclical in nature. It may not have appeared so to people in times past (a point which I would actually argue) but in our modern age we have no excuse for not realizing that. The preeminent work on this in my opinion is ‘The Fourth Turning’ by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Easily one of the books that made the greatest impact on my life!

So while reading Carl Jungs work on dream interpretation this evening he noted that when a society takes symbols that have a religious value and importance to them and repress them, they dont just disappear. The energy they carry in particular does not vanish. Energy, of any kind, is not created or destroyed, just ask Newton. It merely changes form.

In this instance, the energy is repressed into a sort of dark, societal shadow, just like the shadow archetype hat Jung wrote about at length for the individual. As a result, it will manifest in unpredictable manners down the road, and generally unpredictably bad.

So I realized that this is the general driving factor behind the chaos and entropy that drives and feeds the Fourth Turning portion of the saecular cycle. Society spends the better part of 60-70 years repressing things and those things then turn right around and destroy the society.

In our current case, we have been told by the people with the megaphones (i.e. media, government, Hollywood, education, medicine, all the usual suspects) that the biggest problems with modern life, at least here in the west, are whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, Christianity, conservatism, etc.

So all the energy that could have gone into a healthy expression of these things and kept the bedlam to a dull roar will instead resurface with a vengeance. And I tremble for our world once it breaks loose. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war indeed. As Remus would sagely advise, stay away from crowds!