angstoic.com Astrologer, Ang Stoic
The creative adults of tomorrow are the children who survive today’s systematised social derangement.
“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.”
~ C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Jung is talking about the power of Pluto transits to possess and influence mass psychology. Pluto in Capricorn is the mania of corporatism and administrative materialism which, in the most extreme manifestation – as activated by the Saturn/Pluto conjunction and the eclipses on the Capricorn South Node in 2020 – erupted into the collective psyche as anxiety about death and extinction. Here, it is not one individual’s perception, but the prevailing consensus that experienced a split from a previously held perception of reality.
When the collective loses its mind, it breaks into a mass psychosis, ie. when the mental disorder becomes the norm rather than the exception in a society, we have a situation which Jung called a “psychic epidemic”.
Obvious examples of mass psychoses, where people literally “lost their minds” en masse are the witchhunts of the 16th and 17th centuries and the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century, where entire herds of people exhibited a split or detachment from reality and spiraled into such a descent of delusions and paranoia that the collective mindset permitted humans to execute the most abhorrent crimes upon their own kind…
It’s obvious now that man – nature’s foremost predator, – not some virus from bats, or a disease like cancer, or famine, earthquake, climate cooling or solar minimums – just man alone who is man’s greatest threat to the extinction of man, simply because (as history has shown) there’s no way of protecting ourselves against what Jung called these “psychic epidemics”.
Jung also said that when the individuals who make up the infected masses of society “become morally and spiritually inferior” they “sink unconsciously to an inferior intellectual state”, hence they become “more unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable,”. Worst of all, under the spell of mass hysteria, the individual is likely to commit crimes that he would otherwise find abhorrent.
This is why I get wary when I see the herd instinct, as influenced by the public projection of repressed shadow patterns endemic in the culture (like hatred, intolerance, greed, etc), taking hold. This is something that every now and again grips scientists and politicians alike as they collectively subscribe to the ‘status quo’ view of reality. My instinct, when I see any herd running one way, is to promptly march another way.
Astrology – like all quantum sciences – teaches us that there are many different perspectives, in fact, that there is no one absolute, objective reality. Everything depends on your subjective point of view, coloured by individual filters, perspexes of perception. Things only exist for you if you are able to bring them into your consciousness, and then again, your degree or angle of that perception is critical to what you will make of it. If, say, you cannot see the moon because it is a cloudy night or it is currently on the other side of the earth or near a new Moon, does it mean that the moon does not exist?
It’s like a tree falling in the forest. If there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?
What if I told you that the tree that fell in the forest made a loud crash? Would you believe me?
We have a situation where the herd/mass-mind/groupthink is telling us something that, due to observation and perception (or lack thereof) is prone to make us run in certain directions. In essence, at this stage, we don’t quite know the right direction. You have a choice in which way to run because your instincts are getting stronger. Herein – this awareness of your choices – lies the remedy and even cure against this mass psychosis; this wetiko madness; the Plutonian force that seeks to break you down, corrupt your mind and ruin your body, your spirit…
