All through August as I saw what was happening at various town meetings around the country - people bringing guns to public meetings, signs linking Obama to Hitler and The Joker, and other equally alarming displays of rage and antipathy to change - I felt a lot of anxiety about what we were seeing.
Yesterday, in going over the reading for my Jung Study Group, the following stuck with me:
"...what is the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic changes in individuals?
So far as a neurosis is really only a private affair, having its roots exclusively in personal causes, archetypes play no role at all. But if it is a question of general incompatibility or an otherwise injurious condition productive of neuroses in large numbers of individuals, then we must assume the presence of constellated archetypes...The archetype corresponding to the situation is activated, and as a result those explosive and dangerous forces hidden in the archetype come into action, frequently with unpredictable consequences. There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to. (Jung, CW 9i, para. 98)
It bears repeating: There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to.