Psychic Refusal >Apocalyptic Projection >Everyone’s Destruction
Excerpted from Daniel Pinchbeck’s Substack: Armageddon Outta Here!
CULTURAL PATTERN
Apocalypse as Transformation Initiation, not Conflagration.
As we know, many evangelicals apparently view a convicted felon, with six bankruptcy declarations who now shows signs of cognitive decline, as “anointed by Jesus” to initiate the end times.
The reality is that MAGA is a fanatical religious cult...similar to Jim Jones’ following but in the tens of millions, with ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, killer drones, and Palantir. And, their beliefs as fanatic-extreme as the Taliban...made crystal in the Heritage Foundation’s recent report on the family.
I am fascinated with the sweep of Apocalyptic visions from different traditions...in both Western monotheisms and indigenous traditions.
The biblical book of Revelation is a bizarre, jumbled, surreal, self-contradictory text that reads as if it was written in a manic episode. It’s startling this murky text has maintained such ideological power...to the point where literal adherents of scripture are now murdering innocent Iranians and may blow all of us to smithereens to fulfill their vision of it.
In Archetype of the Apocalypse, Jung’s student Edward Edinger writes that when the internal “revelation” is blocked, it gets “projected onto the screen of history.”
By avoiding the threat of their own inner Psychic confrontation...some instead, Physically, kill “the other”...given it’s so much easier, more confirming, than showcasing their vulnerability...exposing their defining weakness, triggering shame, crippling fear.
Edinger argued this shadow projection is the apocalypse of Revelations and that it’s literally taking form in our current reality, right now.
“We have evidence all around us in our daily analytic practice and in contemporary world history that this Earth shaking archetypal event has already started...manifesting itself in international relations; in the breakdown of the social structures of Western Civilization; within the psyche of individuals.”
He considered the Apocalypse...with its structure of separation, judgment, destruction, and reintegration at a new level of wholeness...to be:
a profound psychological event, representing “the momentous event of the manifesting of the Self into Conscious Realization.”
For Edinger, the apocalypse...apokalypsis/ unveiling...is a transformative encounter with the Self that requires the ego to humbly surrender.
When we reject this archetypal process as inner event...transformation initiation...we project our own Apocalypse onto the external world.
Uninitiated people trapped in adolescent ego structures turn a psycho-spiritual necessity into a literal obsession with “end times,” political enemies, crusades, and Holy Wars, as Hegseth and his cronies in the Republican Party have done.
PSYCHOGRAPHIC PATTERN
MAGA’s Initiation Refusal via Doubling Down on Ideological Certainty
The rigid moral, marital and martial standards Hegseth demands for the nation are conspicuously absent from his private life.
Whistleblower reports and internal memos allege that Hegseth engaged in the mismanagement of org funds for personal expenses, fostered a hostile-sexist work environment, and struggled with alcohol abuse so severe that he was reportedly: drunk on the job. A former employee reported a heavily intoxicated Hegseth chanting "Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!" at 2:30am in a public setting; while his own mother chastised him for his poor behavior with women in a letter that went public.
Hegseth’s tattoos include a prominent Jerusalem Cross, an emblem of the Kingdom of Jerusalem established during the First Crusade. This symbol has been appropriated by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.
Hegseth is correct in believing there’s an erosion...breakdown...of the patriarchal control system. For decades, women and other marginalized groups have been naturally gaining more political-economic power in the relatively peaceful, post-industrial societies of the West. And it’s this control loss that’s an unbearable threat to him, Trump, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon...their cohorts.
So, they over-compensate by gripping onto ideological certainty...plunging the world into war-chaos, seeking to prevent further evolution toward collective emancipation and equity.
Christian Nationalists like Hegseth literalize the “divine plan” or “Armageddon” because they refuse to undergo an internal psychic process that requires initiatory surrender, humility and a certain level of ego death.
Instead of facing their shadow, they project it...externalize their psychosis on the world as a reality...which requires violence, control, domination, and terrorism. (all this rather than just get a shrink)
CULTURAL & PSYCHOGRAPHIC PATTERN IMPACT
Too Many Men’s Refusal of Transformation makes Humanity’s Destiny Too Vulnerable
Of course, this kind of fanatic extremism has always been with us, but it’s astonishing to witness in the early 21C...especially the Nazi mimicry now popular among young Republicans, stoked by Trump’s innuendos around racism, misogyny, and the marginalized “other”, where dissent is not an exercise of liberty but a sign of “leftist rot.”
Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) posits that as modern humans achieved “freedom from” the traditional constraints of the Middle Ages...such as the rigid hierarchies of the church and feudalism...they were left with a profound sense of isolation, insignificance, and ontological anxiety.
“The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.”
(I think being dispossessed of an innate Life Force Giving legacy...nor enduring the lifelong compromises in order to do so...has an immense amount to do with Men erring toward ungroundedness-isolation-purposelessness)
Fromm argues that this state is often psychologically unbearable, leading individuals to seek an “escape” by surrendering their hard-won autonomy to authoritarian leaders or totalizing ideologies that promise a return to certainty and belonging.
In doing so, they avoid the threat of an inner confrontation. Thusly, refusing to face the darkness within...protecting their egotism...which means killing the “other” on the physical battlefield. (their sacrosanct act proves them right and the other wrong)
Their failure to do the hard work of integration and initiation threatens all of us with ruin.
COSMIC PATTERN ASPIRATION
The Collective Unconscious requires Ego Death
For Edinger, the Apocalypse is an “event” within the “collective unconscious” also known by Jungians as the “objective psyche”...a human mind layer that exists independently of the ego. This Collective Unconscious is not our personal history, childhood traumas, or specific education; rather, it’s the vast, impersonal landscape of archetypes and universal patterns that every human being inherits by virtue of being human.
The Apocalypse is the moment when the Collective Unconscious breaks through the Ego’s defenses to reveal a larger, more Capacious Reality.
Here’s to a more capacious reality.
Carl Jung Original | The Shadow You Refuse to See Is Controlling Your Life & Relationships (click for video)
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