From Kenny Carmody ๐ ๐
โThe most radical act during COVID wasnโt refusing a mandate.
It was refusing to stop thinking for yourself.
Jung spent his life arguing that the deepest purpose of human existence is individuation, the process of becoming genuinely, distinctly, irreducibly yourself. Not the self constructed by family expectation, cultural pressure, or institutional demand. The actual self. The one that exists when all of that falls away.
It is the hardest work a human being can undertake.
And it is precisely what a mass psychological event is designed, consciously or not, to prevent.
The pandemic applied pressure toward what Jung would call de-individuation: the dissolution of the self back into the collective. Think what the group thinks. Fear what the group fears. Perform the groupโs rituals. Adopt the groupโs language. Define yourself by your membership in the group and your opposition to its designated enemies.
De-individuation feels like security. It offers the warmth of belonging, the comfort of certainty, and the relief of having someone else carry the weight of judgment.
It is, in Jungโs framework, a profound psychological regression.
And the system rewarded it at every level. Social media algorithms amplified group conformity. Institutions promoted the compliant and investigated the questioning. The language of public health was structured to make independent judgment sound like selfishness and collective compliance sound like maturity.
The people who questioned, who maintained their individual assessment of evidence, who refused to perform certainty they didnโt feel, who held the line between their own perception and the groupโs demand, were not better people.
They were further along in the work Jung described. They had built, through years of inner work or sheer stubbornness, a self that the collective couldnโt fully reach.
Individuation is not rebellion for its own sake. It is not contrarianism. It is not the performance of independence as a new form of conformity.
It is the quiet, daily, unglamorous commitment to knowing who you actually are, what you actually see, what you actually believe, what you actually value, independent of what the group requires you to say.
That kind of self cannot be easily possessed.
And a world that needs its individuals to think clearly, now more than ever, desperately needs more people willing to do that work.โ
#covid #plebchain
Interesting to see much of the unspoken history around disease coming to the surface in the United States and being more openly spoken about for example Polio and Measles.
This is happening not just because of a shift in government through Bobby Kennedy and MAHA but because of a more fundamental shift in the consciousness of ordinary Americans who want to seriously discuss the issue of chronic disease amongst their children and American society more broadly.
And nothing is off the table with now a major discussion happening about Big Pharma and its influence on public health as well as the harms of many of its products including vaccines which until recently was a sacred cow and couldnโt be questioned.
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#polio #plebchain
Regarding climate change this quote from H.L. Mencken is very relevant I feel:
"the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." ๐
#COP30 #plebchain