Morality is not imposed from outside; we have it in ourselves from the start — not the law, but our moral nature without which the collective life of human society would be impossible.
— Jung
Carl Jung stated that man is by no means above instinct, nor past eras of history; that they are layered upon his unconscious and are ignored or repressed at peril. Jung sought not the elimination of instinct, but a balance. That was his concept of individuation; the integration of the self as a total being. Instincts are part of the unconscious along with archetypes, and these manifest as myths and religion in the collective unconscious of a people, as they do among individuals. They are essential for the psychic well-being of the individual and the group. They manifest as the primary ties that the Critical Theorists sought to eliminate as a primitive and childish barrier to the ‘progress’ of mankind towards the fully autonomous self.
Jung said of the ‘laws man created’ that they reflect an innate imperative that is necessary to manifest, not eliminate. The creative expression of these instincts Jung called psychisation; Friedrich Nietzsche’s sublimation. This will-to-order is the foundation of creativity; not, as Fromm et al. insisted, a suppression of it. For Wilhelm Reich, therefore, the way to self-actualisation is the unrestrained orgasm, while the post-Freudians agree in stating that the basic drives must be given free reign; as supposedly ‘free’ as the ‘noble savage’ of 18th century poetic imagination, or the ‘free love’ of the 1960s generation, or of Mead’s perception of Samoan adolescents.
For Nietzsche, one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted of philosophers, whose ideas were appropriated and skewered by Critical Theorists, despite his abhorrence for all things socialist, ‘a sexual impulse, for example could be channelled into a creative spiritual activity, instead of being fulfilled directly. Similarly the barbarian desire to torture his foe can be sublimated into the desire to defeat one’s rival, say, in the Olympic contests…’526 Critical Theorists elaborated on Nietzsche’s will-to-power as a precursor to the self-actualisation of humanistic psychology that became a fad during the 1960s, and found its infantile expression in the New Left, and most stridently in Charles Manson’s ‘Family’. Hence, Christine Swanton considers that ‘[s]everal key areas are at the heart of will-to-power as a developmental theory’, ‘developed by psychologists such as Fromm… In a way reminiscent of Nietzsche, Erich Fromm distinguished between “life furthering syndrome” and “life thwarting syndrome”. … As with Nietzsche, for Fromm alienation from self is destructive of life affirmation’…527 Nietzsche thus becomes, along with Fromm, Marcuse, and the hapless Adorno, the philosophical father of hippies, yippies, yuppies, and group-therapy patients. Swanton alludes to Fromm, stating that the regression to primal cruelty is ‘the unbearable frustration caused by social constraints’… ‘custom, respect, self-control’… ‘and the need for freedom from them’.528 If we suppose that Nietzsche’s self-overcoming means, like Fromm, Reich, and Marcuse, the rejection of restraint, custom and self-control, to become another type of ‘developmental theory’, then the profundity of this philosopher is reduced to the banality of the modern epoch. While Nietzsche distinguished between ‘slave morality’, and ‘master morality’, this is not defined by a hedonistic and petty rejection of morals and restraint in the quest for the inane ‘self-actualisation’ of pop therapy, but as the quest for higher man as a prelude to the far-off overman. That is as far removed as one can get from the indulgent hippie nirvana of post-Freudian ‘freedom’. Nietzsche’s regard for the Hindu Code of Manu, ‘a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea”’,529 for example, indicates that he was not on a mission to liberate man from restraint but to herald the return of a hard morality on the self. Nietzsche’s will-to-power, as Swanton herself states, is antithetical to the free reign of the ‘pleasure principle’, yet this is the premise of the post-Freudians. To such ‘modern ideas’ Nietzsche countered in writing of the Code of Manu,
The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct.530
As for Nietzsche’s regard for those who would reduce man to inanity in the name of ‘freedom’ from restraint: ‘Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists. …’.531
To such notions of man ‘freeing’ himself from the organic bonds that had been the substance of his being since times immemorial, Jung answered:
Moral law is nothing other than an outward manifestation of man’s innate urge to dominate and control himself. This impulse to domestication and civilization is lost in the dim, unfathomable depths of man’s evolutionary history and can never be conceived as the consequence of laws imposed from without, Man himself, obeying his instincts, created his laws.532
Morality was not brought down on tables of stone from Sinai and imposed on the people, but is a function of the human soul, as old as humanity itself. Morality is not imposed from outside; we have it in ourselves from the start — not the law, but our moral nature without which the collective life of human society would be impossible.533
This innate ‘moral nature’ is the basis of the unfolding of one’s being individually and collectively. Laws are a manifestation of it, not its origin. The Left seeks to replace this innate ‘moral nature’, which to them is only the reflection of the laws of social production.
Spirituality is also an innate imperative that the Freudians and Marxians consider as superstition and magic. Jung wrote of this, and indicated his Nietzschean influence:
The spiritual principle does not, strictly speaking, conflict with instinct as such but only with blind instinctuality, which really amounts to an unjustified preponderance of the instinctual nature over the spiritual. The spiritual appears in the psyche also as an instinct, indeed as a real passion, a ‘consuming fire’, as Nietzsche once expressed it. It is not derived from any other instinct, as the psychologists of instinct would have us believe, but is a principle siti generis, a specific and necessary form of instinctual power.534
The myth of the ‘noble savage’, unspoiled by civilisation, is an ideal that had inspired the dreams of the salon intelligentsia since the Age of the Enlightenment. On the basis of an imagined natural innocence, utopians believe they can recreate man in that primal image that has never actually existed, and that man can be ‘free’ and ‘spontaneous’. Although the hippies came close to the ideal in wallowing in their own filth and disease, Jung had no such illusions:
Man living in the state of nature is in no sense merely ‘natural’ like an animal, but sees, believes, fears, worships things whose meaning is not at all discoverable from the conditions of his natural environment. Their underlying meaning leads us in fact far away from all that is natural, obvious, and easily intelligible, and quite often contrasts most sharply with the natural instincts.535
Myth, and what Jung called the ‘religious instinct’, is an essential part of the development of man and the expression of his place in the universe; not ‘the opiate of the masses’, a weapon of the ruling class to maintain a servile population, or a childish superstition that is holding the individual back from unbounded spontaneous creativity. All peoples throughout all of history have had an inner impulsion to create religion and a conception of the Godhead; ‘the strongest inner compulsion, which can only be explained by the irrational force of instinct’. ‘One could almost say that if all the world’s traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation’.536 Rationalism is a severing of the primordial well-spring of thinking, art and religion. Jung stated that, ‘My whole endeavour has been to show that myth is something very real because it connects us with the instinctive bases of our existence’.537
Instinct is not an isolated thing, nor can it be isolated in practice. It always brings in its train archetypal contents of a spiritual nature, which are at once its foundation and its limitation. In other words, an instinct is always and inevitably coupled with something like a philosophy of life, however archaic, unclear, and hazy this may be. Instinct stimulates thought, and if a man does not think of his own free will, then you get compulsive thinking, for the two poles of the psyche, the physiological and the mental, are indissolubly connected. For this reason instinct cannot be freed without freeing the mind, just as mind divorced from instinct is condemned to futility.538
The scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, discussed the difference in outlooks between Jung and Freud, the Freudian outlook also being that of the Critical Theorists. For Freud, myths are public dreams, and dreams are private myths. ‘Both, in his opinion, are symptomatic of repression of infantile incest wishes, the only essential difference between a religion and neurosis being that the former is more public. … Civilisation itself in fact is a pathological surrogate for unconscious infantile disappointments. And thus Freud … judged the world of myth, magic and religion negatively, as errors to be refuted, surpassed, and supplanted finally be science’.539
With Freud the Critical Theorists are able to deconstruct and fracture ‘civilisation’ in ways more far-reaching than the class struggle of Marxism. They strike at the very root of man’s being, which is far more than simply the economic relations of Marxism. Jung had ‘an altogether different approach’, wrote Campbell, with myth and religion serving ‘positive, life-affirming ends’. Myths, when properly read, writes Campbell in reference to Jung, are the means by which the individual might reconnect with one’s ‘inward forces’, when obscured by mundane routine. Myths are the wisdom of millennia. ‘Thus, they have not been, and cannot be, displaced by the findings of science…’540 This was not a call for Western man, however, to regress into primal atavisms, as individuation requires balance:
However, there is a danger here as well; namely, of being drawn by one’s dreams and inherited myths away from the world of modern consciousness, fixed in patterns of archaic feeling and thought inappropriate to contemporary life. What is required, states Jung therefore, is a dialogue, not a fixture at either pole; a dialogue by way of symbolic forms put forth from the unconscious mind and recognized by the conscious in continuous interaction.541
Even in the subtle methods of the modern world, where secularism is promoted and religion disdained, the great yearning arises for a myth that can replace the gods that have been killed; albeit distorted into a fascination especially for the myths and religions of cultures not of one’s own. Jung warned of the injurious character of fetishizing the foreign, writing that because of the primordial differentiation among races psychologically, ‘we cannot transplant the spirit of a foreign race in globo into our own mentality without sensible injury to the latter, a fact which does not deter those of feeble instinct from attempting to do so’.542
In a repudiation of the notion of a universal humanity other than at the most primal level of existence, and the modernist dogma that races can adopt wholesale the lessons and outlooks of others, Jung stated:
We are in reality unable to borrow or absorb anything from outside, from the world, or from history. What is essential to us can only grow out of ourselves. When the white man is true to his instincts, he reacts defensively against any advice that one might give him. What he has already swallowed he is forced to reject again as if it were a foreign body, for his blood refuses to assimilate anything sprung from foreign soil.543
This is an unequivocal statement warning of multiculturalism and notions of ‘cultural enrichment’, by the conscious or unconscious, voluntary or imposed, adoption of what might be called ‘foreign bodies’ into the culture-organism.
Where the Freudo-Marxian sees repression of individual ‘freedom’ and the blocking of the road to ‘self-actualisation’, the organic thinker sees perennial foundations for all that truly self-actualises. Fromm, in aiming to sever these ‘ties’ sought to create new ones. Where is the anchorage in such a severance? One must return for any type of polity to the 18th century idea of individuals in contractual agreement to form a ‘society’, which is indeed the premise of our present-day notions of ‘civil society’. How one ‘contracts out’ of such a civil society, which has now become universal, is another matter as witnessed by the Jacobin ‘Reign of Terror’ in France or the destruction of so-called ‘rogue states’ by the U.N.O. and NATO. Rousseau, in formulating the doctrine of the ‘social contract’, predicated it on the abstraction of the ‘general will’, which, once established, could not be discarded by the individual ‘citizen’.
Jung perceived that the West’s modern epoch had been centuries in the making. Culture epochs do not arise as sudden and clearly delineated eras, any more than an individual’s old age, middle age and youth can be precisely demarcated; but there are signs. Jung saw that these modern doctrines had arisen in prior centuries, and pointed to the ‘Age of Reason’, and to ‘American psychologists’ as a product of this epoch: ‘Most of your [American] psychologists, as it looks to me, are still in the 18th century inasmuch as they believe that the human psyche is tabula rasa at birth, while all somewhat differentiated animals are born with specific instincts’.544
The citizen’s instinct of self-preservation should be safeguarded at all costs, for, once a man is cut off from the nourishing roots of instinct, he becomes the shuttlecock of every wind that blows. He is then no better than a sick animal, demoralized and degenerate, and nothing short of a catastrophe can bring him back to health.545
Cutting off from ‘the nourishing roots of instinct’ is precisely the aim of modernist doctrines. What are these ‘nourishing roots’ if not the ‘primary ties’ condemned as repressive by the Critical Theorists’, and scoring high on the ‘F scale’? Further: ‘As no animal is born without its instinctual patterns, there is no reason whatever to believe that man should be born without his specific forms of physiological and psychological reactions’.546 But for Fromm et al., what one is ‘born with’ is something that is to be eliminated as a burden.
For the Critical Theorists, once the ‘primary ties’ were broken, they could never be restored; the danger was that man would not choose this ‘freedom’ to become ‘spontaneous’ through ‘love’ but would run back to the paternal-like security of authority.
Fromm denounced Jung as a ‘reactionary’. Defence of the ‘primary ties’ showed ‘Jung’s lack of commitment to authenticity’, according to Fromm, with Jung’s ‘blend of outmoded superstition, indeterminate heathen idol worship, and vague talk about God, and with the allegation that he is building a bridge between religion and psychology…’547