Carl vs. Karl

James P. Driscoll

Description

By drawing on Jung’s and Marx’s opposing ideas, James Driscoll’s Carl versus Karl: Jung and Marx, Two Icons for our Age develops fresh perspectives on urgent contemporary problems. Jung and Marx as thinkers, Driscoll contends, carry the projections of archetypal complexes that go back to the Biblical hostile brothers, Abel and Cain, and whose enduring tensions shape our postmodern era. 

Marxism, because it elevates the group over the individual, is made to order for bureaucrats and bureaucracy’s patron archetype Leviathan. Jungian individuation offers a corrective rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic’s affirmation of the ultimate value of free individuals. Although Marxism’s promise of justice gives it demagogic appeal, the party betrays that promise through opportunism and a primitive ethic of retribution. Marxism’s supplanting the Judeo-Christian ethic with bureaucracy’s “only following orders” Eichmann Code, Driscoll maintains, has created the moral paralysis of our time.  As Jung and writers like Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elias Canetti have warned us, the influence of our ever expanding bureaucracies is a grave threat to the survival of civilized humanity.

Among the primary issues Driscoll addresses are: the nature of justice and of the soul, individuation and freedom, and mankind’s responsibilities within the planetary ecology. Religion, ethics, economics, science, class divisions, immigration, financial fraud, abortion, and affirmative action are all illumined by his analysis of the powerful archetypes moving behind Jung and Marx.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Social Science
• PHILOSOPHY
• Sociology
• General officer
• Carl Jung
• Social sciences
• Psychology
• Economics
• General
• Carl Gustav Jung
• Karl Marx

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 14 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680536973
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

CARL VS KARL:
JUNG AND MARX, TWO ICONS FOR OUR AGE
BY JAMES P. DRISCOLL
ACADEMICA PRESS
WASHINGTON∼LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Driscoll, James P. (author)
Title: Carl vs karl : jung and marx, two icons for our age | Driscoll, James P.
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022939775 | ISBN 9781680536966 (hardcover) | 9781680536973 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 James P. Driscoll
Books By James P. Driscoll
IDENTITY IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA
THE UNFOLDING GOD OF JUNG AND MILTON
SHAKESPEARE & JUNG: THE GOD IN TIME
SHAKESPEARE ’ S IDENTITIES
JUNG ’ S CARTOGRAPHY OF THE PSYCHE
HOW AIDS ACTIVISTS CHALLENGED AMERICA, And Saved FDA from Itself.
THE DEVIL AND DR. FAUCI: The Many Faces of Bureaucratic Evil
CARL VERSUS KARL: Jung and Marx, Two Icons for our Age
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Archetypes & Icons Part I Theory Chapter 1 Carl Versus Karl: Justice & Injustice Chapter 2 Carl Versus Karl: Psychology of Religion A. The Individual or The Group? B. The State Displaces The Church C. Marxism’s Debt to The Church D. Jung and Marx, As Coincidentia Oppositorum Chapter 3 Carl Versus Karl: Individual versus Group Ethics 1. Affirmative Action—whose ethics? 2. Ethics and Psychic Structures Chapter 4 Carl Versus Karl: The Soul In The World Chapter 5 Carl Versus Karl: Economics Chapter 6 Carl Versus Karl: Science & Its Archetypes Chapter 7 Political Action: Opposing Classes And Archetypes Chapter 8 Bureaucracy As Leviathan Part II Praxis Chapter 1 LGBTs: Marginalized in Academia’s Ponzi Schemes 50 Years Ago: Gays At Very High Risk How Can Academia Reform? Chapter 2 Exploiting The Middle Class: Selective Enforcement, Enabler of Fraud Chapter 3 Immigration Dilemmas A. Immigration’s Archetypes B. Equal Opportunity Immigration Manifesto C. Conclusions Chapter 4 The Human Dilemma: We Can Neither Achieve Justice Nor Ignore Injustice Chapter 5 Can Humanity Survive The Age of Totalitarian Bureaucracy? A. Why We May Not Survive B. Why and How We Might Survive Epilogue Jesus As Archetypal Activist Endnotes Bibliography Index
Dedicated to William Arnold and Andrew J. H. Vogt, two irreplaceable friends who passed in 2021. Also dedicated to the multitudes who died unnecessarily due to the incompetence and malfeasance of the unaccountable bureaucrats managing Covid 19 and to all whose lives are being sacrificed or blighted by the fools and miscreants in high places who let the Ukraine war happen.
Acknowledgments
First let me thank Paul Du Quenoy for providing in Academica Press an increasingly important platform and necessary sanctuary for original, unconventional, and unpopular approaches to crucial issues in our time. Those to whom I am indebted for ideas are too numerous to mention, yet two dominate, my hero and villain-hero Carl Jung and Karl Marx. Throughout I felt a growing respect for Marx’s energy and passion, if not his soundness. To Jung I owe far more, especially the privilege of viewing the world from his lofty shoulders. For inspiration, my debt to Western Civilization and to life on this earth is incalculable. The values and wisdom of the former never fail; the latter is a jewel of infinite price we must never lose.
Introduction
Archetypes & Icons
The philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Karl Marx
We cannot change anything until we accept it.
Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
Carl Jung
Four iconic thinkers reign over the dark, tumultuous era initiated by the First World War and the rise of totalitarian ideologies backed by autarchic bureaucracies: These are Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, and Carl Jung. By “iconic” I mean culturally influential, charismatic, and highly recognizable. The term can also mean revered; yet of the four only Einstein is generally revered. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are iconic political figures, but more loathed than revered. Many would agree that Marx, Nietzsche, Einstein, and Jung are the most influential thinkers of our era. Others might hand the number four slot to Freud rather than Jung. I would counter that Jung went beyond Freud, even as Copernicus went beyond Tycho Brahe, to probe the unconscious more deeply and explore it more broadly. As a result, his long term influence will surpass Freud’s.
Archetypal, seminal, and paradigmatic are also rough synonyms for iconic. Seminal and paradigmatic apply to all four figures. However, archetypal applies more to Marx and Jung than to Nietzsche, Freud, or Einstein. “Archetypal” refers to a particular numinous energy, and cultural impact, arising from activation of specific archetypes or archetypal complexes associated with an iconic figure. Einstein’s ideas sparked the quantum revolution in physics that superseded Newton’s mechanistic worldview. He and Darwin are the most influential scientists since Newton. By contrast, Marx and Jung, almost like religious icons, have come to symbolize the archetypal energies powering their key ideas.
Those energies generate crucial values and behavior patterns that profoundly, if through indirection, impact modern lives. Indeed, people turning, consciously and unconsciously, to Marx and Jung for values and meaning have made them icons for two opposing archetypal complexes that shape the central dialectic of intellectual history in our era. As such they signify powers beyond each man’s intent or the direct influence of their key ideas, as great as that may be. A primary objective herein will be to explore the character of Marx’s and Jung’s associated archetypal complexes and the nature of their energies, impact, and dialectical interactions.
A word about Nietzsche. He manifests the archetypal complex associated with semi-mad seers, one might call it the Casandra complex. Going mad himself, he became the herald of the collective intellectual and moral insanities of our era. Like John the Baptist, Nietzsche prepared the way. In his case, he prepared the world for a great many trends, including the breakdown of traditional morality and religion, and the ideational polarities activated around Karl Marx and Carl Jung. 1
Throughout this work, I will treat Marx’s and Jung’s primary ideas, along with their cultural and political influences, as being fonts of archetypal energy as much as they are concepts. Major figures in intellectual history can take on the stature and character of the archetypes that energize them, thus functioning within the culture in ways analogous to autonomous complexes within individuals. They may personify an archetype, archetypal complex, or archetypal shift for the culture just as an individual’s personal mother may personify the mother archetype for him or her. Some iconic examples carrying archetypes are Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammad, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Newton, and more recently Nietzsche, Einstein, Marx, and Jung. Like Hellenic deities, they embody collective influences and energies highly active in the culture. In this way they resemble demigods, lesser versions of, or splinters from, the major collective autonomous complexes behind civilizational godheads, such as Yahweh, the Christian Trinity, and Allah.
Indeed, the Communist Party attempts in Marxist ruled societies to usurp the place traditionally given to God, therein it learned from precedents set by the Church. The party’s totalitarian regulation of personal life, however, more resembles the Islamic God than the Christian God or even the Church. Jung did not displace God for his followers; nonetheless, by embodying the wiseman archetype Jung lighted a path for many to commune with the numinous, including some who do not realize they are wanderers in Jung’s realm.
What are the most important archetypal ideas/patterns attached to Marx and Jung? They can be viewed in terms of four polarities. First is the ancient one of the active versus the contemplative life. While both men were intellectuals who spent much of their time reading and writing books, the archetypal complexes and patterns most prominent in their lives fall clearly into the active versus contemplative categories. The second closely related pattern, is the emphasis on justice and revolution with Marx contrasted against the conscious individuation toward wholeness that distinguishes Jung.
These two patterns are reinforced by a third pattern with crucial political implications: the open conflict between Marx’s view of individuals as defined primarily by their group identities and Jung’s belief that excessive group identification distracts from the deeper purpose of every human life which is individuation, the full development or flowering of the self. Jung warned that for modern mass man the group becomes a devouring mother, and identification with the group leads to ego inflation and loss of soul. Although group membership for Marx entails ego subordination to the social group that constitutes the party, identification with the party begets inflation. For Jung individuation requires ego to accept guidance from the self which requires prioritizing goals of the self over approval from the social group. This aligns Jung with the Christian tradition’s stress on individual character and free will. In Jung sin finds its equivalent in ego inflation. Jung identified the self, as distinct from ego, with the Christ archetype and vis versa. Thus, individuation becomes a quest for salvation from the inauthenticity of ego’s conformity with the group, a point stressed by Jesus if not his churchly followers.
In the intellectual history of the West, six iconic champions of the value of the free individual are, Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Carl Jung. The Western democratic political tradition, including Locke, Hume, Jefferson, and Lincoln, aligns with the Christian-Jungian stress on the free individual. Marx is more in line with authoritarian poli