Armageddon Archetype
March 18, 2010Henry Baum No Comments »There’s an interesting piece on Disinfo that is also a bit too critical of its subject – Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short, and the concept that people in the financial sector were propelled by a kind of “mass delusion.” The poster’s argument is that this is a kind of insanity defense and absolves them too much of any conscious culpability, and criminal prosecution. I’m not so sure about that – because at its root it is still calling attention to how insane the world has become, which is an important step: admitting you have a problem.
As a media dissector and editor of Mediachannel, I have followed the reporting of this story closely with many detailed articles and in two books since, even before it became a story back to 2005 when I made my film In Debt We Trust only to be dismissed by some as a doom and gloomer for exposing the subprime mortgage fraud.
I was hoping that Rachel Maddow would challenge his mass delusion theory but she bought right into it also, in her interview. At one point Lewis opined that there was DECEPTION (i.e., lying by the investment world) but that too was not examined as Lewis himself counterpoised two explanations for the disaster, asking, “was it mass delusion or crime?”
Answer is: why not both? Interestingly, Disinfo’s post immediately following is called The Real 2012 Apocalypse, with the sunny information that even if the earth doesn’t come to an end in 2012, the financial crisis could be coming to a head at the very same time:
2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets….
The apocalyptic talk is not limited to perpetual bears and the rest of the doom-and-gloom crowd.
Even Moody’s, which is known for its sober public statements, is sounding the alarm.
“An avalanche is brewing in 2012 and beyond if companies don’t get out in front of this…”
What’s so interesting about talk about the apocalypse and prophecy is not if it’s real, but that the world seems to be acting out prophetic fantasies regardless. And this puts the concept of “delusion” into a different context. As if it’s not just blindness, but acting some kind of death wish that’s as core to human experience as belief.
To look at the financial crisis from a more-mystical bent, “mass delusion” can have larger implications - that they were being driven by something that maybe that didn’t understand and weren’t even conscious of – acting out a kind of archetype of corruption. Even – possibly – acting out the archetype of the end of the world. This isn’t totally insane thinking – because if you add together “mass delusion” and the financial crisis coming to a head in 2012, it’s a singularly weird juxtaposition. This is not to mention the parallels in the Book of Revelation and what’s happening in the Middle East. Even if insaniacs are trying to bring the Book of Revelation to life, who’s to say if the drive to make prophecy reality is not the prophecy itself. Put another way – we’re hard-wired to die, perhaps we’re wired to make the whole system die as well.
To take the Jungian view, the financial crisis is acting out the archetype of the apocalypse:
What Jung sees happening in our era is that the Self, the central archetype of order and meaning, has been activated in the collective unconscious. And when the Self becomes activated, it means a change in the collective cultural worldview. At the core of every cultural worldview is the God-image, whether it’s Christian, Moslem, Hindu or whatever. (Buddhists don’t subscribe to a God, but they believe in the Infinite, which, from a psychological standpoint, serves the same purpose.) But when the Self is constellated, then the process of “uncovering what has been hidden,” the Apocalypse, the “revelation of new truth,” begins. And this is a process that takes ages….
The “archetype of the Apocalypse” is the activation of the archetype of the Self–the central archetype of meaning–that is bringing with it some new worldview, a new God-image, a new relationship to the Divine, and a new stage of psychological maturation for the whole earth.
It’s a positive view of the apocalypse – because most would argue that what’s happening isn’t a result of our maturation but our immaturation (like that word, so I’m coining it). The conspiracy is not created by a shadow government, but the shadow self acting out darker impulses, which is happening more frequently. It doesn’t really have to be as complicated as that: as the world dissolves in a myriad different ways, it’s understandable if systems fall apart because corruption becomes more allowable.
Attributing the apocalypse to the collective unconscious is pretty dispiriting, because how do you fight something that’s the work of millions of brains working together without knowing it? It’s like trying to change fate – or change prophecy (yikes). At its core, it doesn’t really make a difference if the breakdown of the financial industry is delusion or crime/unconscious or conscious. The main diagnosis that matters is that it’s happening, and it’s very hard to get the collective unconscious to undergo therapy.
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