The Shamelessness Crisis
Collective Identity vs The Truth is just the tip of the iceberg
In her September 14th NYT post: Why Scandals Don't Bring Down Politicians Anymore, Amanda Taub makes clear the inverse proportionality of political scandal and societal strength. As our threshold for absurd governance related antics lurches forward, our civilization framework recedes, inch by invisible inch.
Her claim, as to the undergirding culprit of this slow motion train wreck?
Ever exacerbated 1) political polarization along with 2) the media’s fan-flaming of it. Cry wolf has totally desensitized us...the primary objective of the far right in most instances.
“Allowing wrongdoers to keep power encourages more misconduct, which further erodes voter trust & widens polarization.”
“Widening polarization thwarts consequences...a devastating feedback cycle.”
“And with every round, the system grows weaker.”
Easy to agree with Ms. Taub...AND there’s more to the culprit than meets the eye.
So, what is a meaningful way to analyze Our Collective: Desensitization, Polarization, Shamelessness? What does this disposition, at the current moment, tell us about where we’ve been and where we might go as a result of our present, very particular, Shadow showcase?
MAKE A BLOCK
An egregore is a distinct non-physical entity, possessing a powerful psychological feedback loop, that arises from a collective group of people.
What is an Egregore?
Group Mind: It is an independent force born from collective human thoughts.
Two-Way: People create the egregore, but once it is strong enough, it starts to influence the people back.
Analogy: ‘corporate culture’ at a big company. Nobody can touch it, but everyone feels it and acts differently because of it.
Egregores are composed of collective ego and shadow, manifest through a shared mythology that generates autonomous energy and alters individual behavior, now fed by algorithms.
IMAGE
Egregore examples: religion, corporate culture, tarot, Santa Claus, Apple, memes, manosphere, crypto, evangelical, identity politics: politician serves as mirror, reflecting the raw desires, anger, and survival instincts of the group that created their power.
Pin for Now: 3rd Space Loss Impact
Ntm, how much sense the rise of this post-truth/hyperpartisan-group-identity egregore coincides with wide scale 3rd space deterioration...the church/formalized religion is incredibly incorporate with of our recent identity-constituting past...and as the 3rd most group-oriented identity constructing realm...we’ve yet to authentically satisfy its dematerialization with social media...yet to evolve out of needing it...as part of the long sacred identity tryptic: family/work/religion. So, now, politics is filling that essential need of higher-order symbology in our lives: gathering in groups, sharing in convos about something bigger than ourselves, singing the same song together which, now,looks likes feelings-splattered posters and yelling-chanting hashtags. Deeper dive for another post.
How Best to Analyze our Predicament?
ICEBERG IMAGE > identified as Jungian Worldview
Given all the myriad ways we can poke at the seminal essence of this shared pathology at scale: theosophy, anthroposophy, gestalt psychology, memetics, more...I’m choosing a Jungian lens because: 1) Politics is so undeniably a theatrical spectacle of Archetypes by definition, 2) Jungian Analysis is devoted to the unearthing of how the primordial workings of our unconscious-subconscious drives us, and it’s clear to see that in the 21st C we literally have EVERYTHING at our disposal, in the conscious realm, to fix things...but we’re choosing not to.
“Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives, and we’ll call it fate.”
Here we go...
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Jungian Read: Scandal, Shadow, & the Death of Accountability
Core Archetype: weaponized Shadow projection
Politicians (Trump, Sánchez, LePen, Farage, Putin, Bolsonaro, more) aren't disowning their shadow...they're relocating it onto the system, deep state, witch hunt. Typical shadow projection at scale: can't integrate it? externalize it onto an enemy. Cheap trick.
Voters cooperate because their own in-group shadow is unbearable to face. Easier to believe persecution than corruption, preserves their station.
Projecting is easy way, feels good, immediately gratifying, misperception of strength. Integrating is hard, exasperating, vulnerability inducing, misperception of weakness.
Secondary Archetype: persecuted Hero / Martyr
Each accused politician reframes indictment-as-crucifixion. This isn't spin, it's mythic scaffolding: Martyr Archetype converts liability into loyalty fuel. Followers don't see a wrongdoer; they see a scapegoat for their own resentments. Cheap trick.
Collective Consciousness State: Participation Mystique + Mass Identification
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's term, appropriated by Jung: individuals fuse with group identity to the point where the group's fate is their fate...like a young child’s inability to distinguish themselves from their parents. Explains why my side's scandal doesn't register as scandal...it's not experienced as separate from self.
This is regression, not politics. Jung: when individuation fails, people fall back into collective identity for psychic safety. Bullying with assurance of your body guards.
“Our Polarization is a symptom of Mass Anxiety Driven Regression, not a standalone cause.”
Individual vs Society Tension
Old model: individual conscience → public shame → social correction. Requires individuated citizens capable of moral judgment independent of tribe.
Current model: tribe conscience → tribe shame denial → social corruption. Society segments have absorbed individual conscience. You feel shame only for what threatens the group, not for what violates your individual moral standard. This is a collapse of the transcendent function, the psyche's capacity to hold opposing truths without splitting...refusing to admit wrong doing, instead of ‘my side messed up’ AND ‘I/we will own that, do better next time’.
Identity Framing
Political Identity has become a persona so total it's swallowed the Self. (maybe due to missing religious affiliation).
When Identity = Party, an attack on the politician IS an attack on the self. No psychic distance = no capacity for critical judgment.
“This is inflation, ego fused with group archetype...dangerous because inflated systems don’t self-correct...they escalate..”
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Past, Present, Future
Where we've been: Individuated Conscience + Shared Media Reality → scandal mattered (Watergate).
Where we are: Splitting + Tribal Participation Mystique → scandal is Rorschach test, not information. Scandal, now, just forces people to project their own hidden unconscious onto a messy situation because they feel inextricable to it.
What it points to: Civilization-Level Regression from ego-consciousness back into Group-Mind.
Historically, all the above precedes Authoritarian Consolidation...
“...not because people want tyranny...but because they want relief from unbearable ambiguity.”
Even false certainty beats the anxiety of holding complexity.
Where We are Now, and likely to Remain the next 5-7 Years...
Full Shadow Inversion...scandal as credential. *DARVO as proof of virtue...’if they're attacking her, she must be a threat to their system.’
Archetypal Arms Race...both sides deploy Martyr/Persecuted-Hero framing simultaneously; scandal politics becomes pure narrative warfare, evidence irrelevant.
Institutional Collapse via Attrition...courts, media, oversight bodies lose legitimacy not through single events but slow erosion; eventually only tribal loyalty adjudicates truth, aka totally biased truth.
Backlash Correction...super severe scandal neither camps' shadows can project... triggers a Watergate-style reset. Requires a violation that threatens in-group survival, not just narrative blah-blah. But honestly, if Epstein didn’t shift things, feels like nothing will.
Fragmentation into Micro-Tribes...polarized two-party binary splits further into multiple, factionalized identity groups, each running its own Martyr/Enemy myth. Accountability becomes structurally impossible because there's no critical mass left to emerge as lead. Broadscale community goes extinct.
“Not a shamelessness crisis, a psychic containment failure. Society has lost its capacity to hold tension...between ‘my group’ vs ‘the truth.”
In the U.S. we’re deep within a ‘preserve the status quo, because I don’t want to change, because change is scary’ mental model mode.
And that worldview has been unaddressed, yet percolating since, at least, the early 1990s when the internet created a modernity sea change, that humanity has yet to fully sort through-cope with. We haven’t even scratched the surface of how worldwide web connectivity and exposure to all global content all the time has transformed our brain and emotional quotient...and here comes AI posing mass extinction...but worth the risk.
While on the other innate human condition side, the U.S. has never absorbed-assimilated deep, psyche-searing, tragedies like: slavery, the Great Depression, WWI-II, JFK-RFK-MLK assassinations, Vietnam War, 9-11, January 6, others. Our population remains in a vacuum about all of these brain-heart scrambling, seismic existence shifts...suppress, move along, invest more...Kalshitification!
Putting a Pin in It for Now
IMAGE > MALE FEMALE
Ultimately, this profound imbalance of tech/intellect/content/quantitative/masculine energy over human/emotional/context/qualitative/feminine energy is finally immense enough for us to say enough, something’s off here...don’t know what...hold my fetal position. Regression.
This energy imbalance is a prominent academic and philosophical argument. Surely it’s clear to all that we live in an Androcentric, not Gynocentric, perception of what’s important. All to say, the overly expressed Rational-Tangible, without adequate Irrational-Intangible emphasis, is tipping us into deleterious Destruction. Also, for another post.
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Future Scenarios 5 Years Out
Given, globally, we’re currently in the middle of: Polarization, Media Complicity-Futility-Toxicity, Post Truth, Shadow Projection, Archetypal Arms Race, Institutional Erosion, and MicroTribe Fragmentation, our arc is inching toward:
Escalation → Authority Bleed-Out → Frozen Split-Nonintegrated Shadow on both sides
Options?
1. Entropic Drift (most likely)
What we’re in now sustains. Unresolved Frozen Split continues reaping decay. No dramatic collapse, just slow legitimacy bleed until governance becomes purely performative. Jungian: our psyches remain stuck in permanent split mode...increased disinterest-exhaustion, no breakthroughs...a long depressive plateau...just tribes that can't even internally agree on what winning means...because the ones that can RULE-WIN.
2. Caesarian Charismatic Consolidation
What we’re in now sustains. One camp's Martyr-Hero figure achieves enough consolidated power to stop needing the opposing tribe's consent at all...bypasses institutions. Shadow projection completes its arc: the enemy is formally locked out of legitimacy, not just distrusted. Jungian: the group's shadow has a face and a throne.
3. Exogenous Shock Driven Re-Integration
An outside crisis big enough it can't be shadow-projected onto the other tribe (pandemic-scale, war, economic/climate collapse, alien invasion)...polar camps forced to work together forges unity. Jungian: the transcendent function gets externally imposed rather than psychically instilled...so it's fragile, not integrated, historically rare, short-lived; most likely, the old split resumes when the acute threat passes.
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Solution:
Cultivating Elevated Engagement below the Waterline
We’re witnessing many of our political leaders misconducting themselves, by even the most minimal standards of leadership, and without impunity. 167 countries are led entirely by men and make up roughly 90% of all top government leaders globally, while 28 countries are led by women.
Jungian Analysis basically points to the fact that, many of us as individuals...the ones most visible-vocal in the context of this failed leadership era...have not yet integrated our Shadows, a mature step in the Process of Individuation...as per Jung, a state of optimized beingness:
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Individuation
Becoming your true, unique self
by balancing your Conscious mind with your Unconscious one.
The Core Steps
Meet the Persona:
realize your public mask is not the real you.Integrate the Shadow:
accept the your hidden, dark, ignored parts.Balance Inner Energies:
connect with your opposite inner gender traits...Anima or Animus.Unite Yourself:
reach a state of inner wholeness and harmony.
The Main Goal
Stop living based on what others expect, become the complete person you’re designed-meant to be.
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I want to utilize this moment to call this invisible, yet crucial, transformation process out!
The only way to take on our invisible, under the waterline, problem...the Metaphysical one.
It’s past time for a serious perception shift. All our Western institutions are geared toward upholding the patriarchal authoritarian gaze that suggests themselves and the Nature of Reality are completely: rational, knowable, controllable...and only through these lenses we need bother to tackle the challenges of our times. Yet, it’s precisely this foundation/way of perceiving that we inherited from the all male Greek-Roman Philosophers, that we’ve built our American Empire on...begetting it more recently via Jefferson, Rockefeller, Musk, and thusly world collapse by way of human devaluation, natural environment ??, or machine edgelord overrun.
So, it’s imperative to NAME what Ms. Taub has so deftly laid out, in full. Yes, at the Conscious Level our society is engaged in: Polarization-Exploitation-Enshitification. AND at an Unconscious Level we call that: Unaccountability-Shadow Projection-Gaslighting.
EVERYONE HAS A SHADOW SIDE. AND YOUR CHOICE IS TO EITHER PROJECT OR INTEGRATE IT. PERIOD.
#Unaccountability = #ShadowProjection #Gaslighting #DARVO #Hoodwinking #Exploitation #Enshitification
By naming-knowing that’s happening within our everyday experience, our choice is: 1) deny-ignore it 2) recognize-acknowledge it, bring these new linguistics into our mainstream discourse. ‘It’s a fact that every human has a Shadow...do you project yours onto others? or re-integrate it? HIVE 5.
Without leveraging Jungian Philosophy, this clearly unproductive, out of control way of perceiving-being will continue-escalate. We’re clear the egregore/invisible cloud of our own unaccountability catapults a leader, of self-similar contempt, does exist...such that the feeding frenzy dynamic perpetuates/strengthens the egregore, on-going. And if you’re not in this group, you are the victim of it.
But what if the majority of us pivot toward leveraging the secret-sauce that integration is about?
We commit to grappling with ourselves, by visible example...a quest involving our deepest-darkest demons, plus the support of our peers’ to subsume-parse-accept it. External blame, as our go-to, recedes while internal introspection-vulnerability with like-minds toward reversing the Tragedy of the Commons, and so much more, progresses.
We must self love and care to face our daunting Shadow, surmount its messy, ugliness, and do our damnedest to positively utilize it. Not only is this more than a priest confessional exercise...especially if, as a child, we had too little love-care from others...it’s a population scale journey: owning what happened during the Civil War, world wars, assassinations...all the pernicious perpetrations committed by the Powerful, by any means, primarily in their exclusive interests.
Exactly that which the Shadow Projectors are rabid to cast opaque shade on.
Will we lose something? Yes.
Will we win something? Yes.
Is it worth it? Yes.
Only with excruciating submission, unthinkable daring, hot coals walking, humiliating-sobering exorcism can authentic integral self-reimagining occur. Curiosity, courage, authenticity, warmth, paradigm changing willingness, seeing the forest instead of just the trees, concern for others experiencing the same...is the result.
Our current lack of Psychic Saftey begetting Personal Regression begetting Societal Violence-Collapse is due to our refusal of confronting exactly the things we least want to confront.
This widespread uninitiated internal confrontation, aka Shadow Projection, simply transposes our strife onto the external world...rather than leveraging it to transform each and everyone of us for the better.
#Trump
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#Musk
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#Thiel
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#Hegseth
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#Voight
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#StephenMiller
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#ClarenceThomas
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#BrettKavanaugh
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#Putin
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#Netanyahu
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#Trump 〰️ #Musk 〰️ #Thiel 〰️ #Hegseth 〰️ #Voight 〰️ #StephenMiller 〰️ #ClarenceThomas 〰️ #BrettKavanaugh 〰️ #Putin 〰️ #Netanyahu 〰️
#PersonalTruth hurts then #SetsUsAuthenicallyFree
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#PersonalTruth hurts then #SetsUsAuthenicallyFree 〰️
Blaming political polarization and the media is like telling a terminal patient their hair and energy loss are the focal issues.
So, the little shift we can start asap is naming-trafficking at our iceberg’s lowest depths. #Unaccountability #ShadowProjection #StrategicIgnorance #DARVO What else?
Mind you, the roosted will reject-deny, cry woke-hocus-pocus, but it’s less about shifting them than it is about accurately naming-identifying for the undecided drifters, in the back few rows.
Ntm, it’s literally a play out of the projectors’ own book...repeat something enough wills it into existence, eventually becoming the norm. Both Pete Buttigieg and James Talarico are starting to emerge victorious within this well-naming-language face-off.
With a nomenclature strategy and a few solid models let’s go.
Emerging World Naming-Claiming over Dying World Shock-Jocking.
Humanity is ready for a step up in Consciousness.
We know because so many of us can feel it.
Metaphorward…
Let’s incorporate #Shadow starting now.
And #StartegicIgnorance https://www.instagram.com/reels/DdUH_W9lDlU/
I feel like we’re allowing the
Conclusion /
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#Trump #Musk #Thiel #Hegseth #Voight #StephenMiller #ClarenceThomas #Kavanaugh #Putin
#PersonalTruth hurts and then it #SetsUsAuthenicallyFree.
The typical politician who seems completely unaffected by their own bad deeds is not an egregore itself, but they can be seen as the physical face of one.
An egregore is a big, spooky word for a simple idea: it is a "thoughtform" or a non-physical entity that is created when a large group of people all focus on the same thoughts, values, or goals. Think of it like a giant, invisible cloud of energy that grows bigger and stronger the more people feed it with their attention and belief.
Here is a breakdown of how this idea connects to modern politics, explained simply.
What is an Egregore?
Group Mind: It is an independent force born from collective human thoughts.
Two-Way Street: People create the egregore, but once it is strong enough, it starts to influence the people back.
Everyday Analogy: Think of "team spirit" at a high school or the "corporate culture" at a big company. Nobody can touch it, but everyone feels it and acts differently because of it.
The Politician vs. The Egregore
A shameless politician is a flesh-and-blood human being. They are not a mystical thoughtform. However, they are often acting as the puppet or the representative of a political egregore.
The Political Party as an Egregore: A political party, an ideology, or a fierce "us versus them" movement is a massive egregore. It is fueled by millions of people feeling angry, loyal, or fearful.
The Shield of Shamelessness: When a politician does something bad and does not care, they are relying on the power of that invisible cloud. They know the group energy will protect them because the followers care more about "their team winning" than holding the individual accountable.
Feeding the Monster: Every time the politician behaves badly and their supporters defend them, the political egregore grows more powerful and more toxic.
Why Do They Seem Impervious?
Politicians often seem completely safe from scandals today because of hyper-partisanship (when people divide sharply into deeply loyal groups).
In the past, if a politician did something bad, society's shared rules would force them to step down. Today, the collective mindset of a political group creates a protective bubble. The politician behaves like a mirror, reflecting the raw desires, anger, and survival instincts of the group that created their power.
If you want to explore this idea further, tell me:
Do you want to look at this through the lens of psychology (like narcissism and groupthink)?
Are you interested in the historical definition of egregores in old philosophy and folklore?
Would you like to discuss how social media acts like an amplifier for these group mindsets?
Let me know which direction you would like to take!
AI responses may include mistakes.