Carl Jung (second from right) in North Africa, 1920.
1,142 words
The psychologist Carl Jung was a race realist even by the standards of his day, when a certain amount of race realism was seen as simple common sense. He was also a great man and, like all great men, he was ahead of his time in many ways. While he didn’t foresee the precise predicament white people now face, he nevertheless mentioned almost as an aside in one of his more popular essays the answer to the perplexing question of why some people fiercely resist the possibility of racial differences in intelligence, personality, or any other feature of consciousness.
That people deny this despite copious real-world and scientific evidence of such differences is the sort of thing we don’t frequently wonder about only because we have grown accustomed to it. We have thus allowed ourselves the easy out of chalking race denialism up to wishful thinking and soft-headedness. The problem of race denialism as Jung encountered it during his practice of psychology was confined to embarrassing instances of white Westerners adopting the trappings of Eastern or Indian philosophy. Jung saw these philosophies as the product of racially distinct minds. He believed that Europeans could never fully understand them and that every conversion of someone racially European to one of these foreign philosophies was partly an affectation. He could not have known that subsequent generations would inherit a world where race-denialism is inflexibly enforced in academia and by the media, and where all differences in outcome that don’t favor minorities are blamed on whites’ racism. Had he foreseen this, he may well have developed his insight into the origin of race denialism further. As it is, he has given us enough for a fleshed-out sketch of the psychological process that is responsible for this phenomenon.
Jung believed that the inability to accept “differences of a . . . general kind within the collective psyche itself, as for example differences in race” was characteristic of a mind arrested in the process of individuation.[1] He described the individuation process as one of self-realization and, more elaborately, as the process by which the self is divested “of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other.”[2] Jung labelled these primordial images archetypes, and defined their source as the collective unconscious, or that region of the unconscious that goes beyond the merely personal to encompass thought-forms common to all humanity.
You can buy Collin Cleary’s Summoning the Gods here.
Regardless, it is through the individuation process — which can involve everything from dream interpretation to automatic writing and talk therapy — that we gain the knowledge to consciously become ourselves and only ourselves. The process allows us to recognize and reject both the masks that we wear for others and our identification with those collective archetypes that are our inheritance as human beings, but which are not specific to us.
The dangers to the personality’s full development that arise when a person identifies too strongly with his constructed persona are of the sort that most reasonably intelligent people can anticipate. The consequences to a person who identifies with an archetype from the collective unconscious are much less obvious, though no less dire. Jung stressed that anything less than a “strict differentiation from the collective psyche” leads to a “melting away of the individual in the collective.”[3] Through his complete identification with a collective archetype, he forgets those individual differences by which one man’s medicine becomes another’s poison. He thus exhibits a tell-tale certainty that he has acquired the answer not just to his personal psychological predicament — which temporary identification with a collective archetype can provide –but to every psychological predicament. To the outside observer, the afflicted person appears psychologically inflated, sometimes to the point of grandiosity. Perhaps the most immediately recognizable character playing out this drama is the born-again Christian who, inflated by his identification with the archetype of the sacrificed and resurrected god, embarks on a mission to replicate his conversion in everyone else.
If we accept that wokeism is a Christian heresy, as some have maintained, then among its principal distinctions from its parent religion is the transformation of race denialism from an occasional byproduct of identification with a collective archetype to a central tenet. Christianity always had the potential to demand race denialism from its adherents. As it says in the Bible, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”[4] This simple passage succinctly describes how identification with an archetype of the collective unconscious — in this case, the Christ archetype — potentially invalidates distinctions of race, social status, and sex in the mind of the adherent. But for most of history, this potential went unrealized. The lived reality for centuries was one where Christianity and race realism coexisted in the minds of millions of whites.
Unlike with Christianity, which hinges on the archetype of the dying and resurrected god, there is no single, primary archetype from the collective unconscious driving spontaneous conversions to wokeism. This newly cobbled-together religion seems more focused on establishing an intersectional caste system and codifying it in the law and public policy, though it will appropriate the masses’ psychological response to archetypes to achieve this end. For example, it presently makes liberal use of what Jung called the Coniunctio Oppositorum. This archetype represents the union of opposites into a harmonious whole.[5] Wokeism encourages its adherents to express veneration of this principle through political advocacy on behalf of transgender individuals, who are its modern human embodiments.
Nevertheless, the fact that the woke may, from time to time, put racial issues on the back burner does not change the fact that race denialism is one of wokeism’s foundational precepts — as it was for its earlier incarnation, political correctness. Decades of scientific discoveries validating traditional notions of race have done little to dislodge race denialism as a requirement for participation in polite society. Still, the drive to know oneself is a fundamental and implacable part of who we are, and an explanation as to the true reasons why the idea of mankind’s cognitive uniformity feels so sacrosanct to race-denialists may bring at least some into the fold. In my admittedly limited experience, I’ve found that the casually-dropped statement that the great psychologist Carl Jung believed that the inability to accept racial differences in cognition was actually a sign or arrested psychological development can be enough to pique a person’s curiosity and begin a productive conversation aimed at promoting race realism.
Notes
[1] Carl G. Jung, The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, ed. Violet Staub De Laszlo (New York: Random House [Modern Library], 1959), 132.
[2] Jung, Basic Writings, 144.
[3] Jung, Basic Writings, 132.
[4] Galatians 3:28.
[5] Carl G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 31.
6 comments
I am convinced that the main problem today isn’t race denialism but race ignorance. In other words, probably 9 out of 10 white people honestly and truly believe that race is unimportant and is nothing more than skin color. There is no huge amount of cognitive dissonance here. This is what they have been taught in schools and in church and from consuming mainstream media programming. They have been told that believing this is what smart and modern and good people believe, and they simply haven’t given the subject much thought. People haven’t been taught the facts about racial group differences. If they were, then we’d be in a very different situation.
I’m not so sure of that. The thing is that racial consciousness is there, but most of them have sublimated it into their shadow selves, to riff on Jung. It’s basically doublethink, or cognitive dissonance, which sometimes they won’t even admit to themselves because of their programming. Conservatives usually know the truth but pretend they don’t, to avoid the usual sort of trouble from breaking the taboo. Liberals say they like diversity, but take it in small and innocuous doses. They’re no more likely to move to the ghetto than Klansmen, even despite the advantages of cheap rent and quick access to downtown.
Good points, and I believe what you’re saying describes a good amount of people, but I’ve met many who seem to sincerely believe that blacks underachieve as a group because of socioeconomic/situational factors or because they just haven’t been given enough opportunities yet. I think this belief is widespread, especially among people who never had to spend much time around blacks. And I have seen how friends and family have been able to see the light after viewing certain content.
How would people know for sure about average racial differences in intelligence or the heritability of intelligence? Group differences are easy to observe, but then it’s also easy for whites to believe that blacks can be brought up to white standards if given enough opportunities. Today we are taught that blacks, as a group, are just as smart as any other group and have the potential to achieve as much as anyone else. We are taught that racial differences are only skin deep.
What you’re saying about whites not wanting to move to black areas is correct, but the fact that they avoid such areas (consciously or not) doesn’t mean they understand that there are inherent, meaningful differences between the racial groups.
My thoughts are that some have little experience of diversity (as you noted), such as the usual liberals in lily-White parts of the country, like the far northeast. The few Blacks they do see tend to conform to White norms better than in areas where they’re more numerous and can let their true nature show.
Then there are others – “limousine leftists”, bourgeois bubble dwellers, certain sheltered college students, and the like – whose only contact with Blacks are among the top 10% who can fit in easily, such as in professional settings. Confirmation bias kicks in, giving them the idea that they’re pretty much all like us, or could be that way with enough education, social services spending, “antiracism” programs, etc. They don’t realize that trillions already have been dumped into social leveling schemes without making much of a dent.
Finally, there are White liberals who’ve observed enough to know the truth deep down, but suppress it, because acknowledging it will set off their guilt complexes and other programming. These are the ones who buy into convoluted, tautological explanations for differences, all boiling down to Whites being responsible for everyone else’s problems. I was one of them, a long time ago!
As for intelligence, it’s easy enough to figure out from observation, especially if the liberal blinders are off. Now that you mention it, though, IQ differences have been studied very extensively for a long time. The findings normally would be considered settled science, nearly as much as the law of gravity. However, leftist activists pretending to be scientists keep misrepresenting results (sometimes even faking data), coming up with disingenuous arguments to muddy the waters, and smearing everyone else who disagrees with them. It doesn’t help, of course, that the MSM and the social media censors side with the leftists.
Very well said!
I’m a big fan of Jared Taylor, and, as he says, when there’s an assumption that blacks and whites have the same average intelligence, then accusations of white racism become a popular explanation for the different levels of achievement between the groups. We would be better off if people accepted reality and didn’t view persistent differences in group achievement as our #1 problem that we must do anything, including restructuring our entire society, to solve. But before people can accept reality they have to be able to clearly see and know the reality.
And of course, IQ isn’t everything, and I wouldn’t want to be replaced by millions of Chinese and Koreans. As I’m sure others here do too, I believe culture is largely an expression of the inherent characteristics (including but not only the intelligence level) of our people; there is something unique inside white people, just as other groups are special and unique.
It would be great if more people appreciated their genetic heritage and felt a duty to safeguard it. I believe that one way to help people better appreciate their place in the civilizational chain is to do family history work and to learn as much as they can about their ancestors. From reading some of your work on here, I believe you might have once had some familiarity with a church that emphasizes family history work, though I could be wrong. I’ve seen how this kind of family history research changes how people think about themselves. It helps people view themselves as a part of a larger family and often leads them to feel a greater obligation to those who came before as well as to future generations. There’s something about seeing one’s huge family tree that changes one’s perspective about what matters, and I think doing such research and maybe framing and hanging a comprehensive family tree in the home is a practice that ought to be encouraged among nationalists. Say what you will about the church, and believe me I’ve said it all myself over the years, but darn it if they don’t get some things right.
The engine of ‘Wokeism’ is the same as that of ‘Christianity’ and ‘liberalism’: loyalty to abstract universal values.
The ‘tweak’ that makes ‘Wokeism’ unique in that lineage is it’s overt and covert hatred of Whites when they assert their particularity.
Wokies don’t hate Whites because they are White, Wokies hate Whites who assert their particularly as ‘White’.
Deep down, all of the ‘injustices’ the Wokies bemoan come down to a denial of White particularism.
Long ago, liberalism and Christianity made their accommodations with anti-Whiteism in the form of ‘anti-racism’ based upon the selective rejection of assertions of particularism by Whites while valorizing the assertion of non-White particularity.
The goal of liberalism, though, in the long run is to sweep away all ethnic particularities of all kinds leaving only the ruling class and those who serve them (this latter group will operate on the illusion of ‘choice’ while all important choices about how to live will be kept out of view).
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