From Kenny Carmody 🌅🙏
“The most radical act during COVID wasn’t 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 group’s rituals. Adopt the group’s 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 Jung’s 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 didn’t feel, who held the line between their own perception and the group’s 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 couldn’t 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.”
#covid #plebchain
